The Gargle - New tech | Tractors | Boners

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

John-Luke Roberts and Tom Neenan join host Alice Fraser for episode 95 of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast from The Bugle - with no politics!👨‍💻 CES tech roundup🍏 Tech sector shrinking🚜 Fix-your-own tractors💍 Engagement boners🧂 ReviewsProduced by Ped Hunter and Chris Skinner. TEAM BUGLE PODCASTS 📯Catharsis (and Tiny Revolutions) with Tiff StevensonTop Stories!The BugleThe Last Post with Alice FraserThe Bugle Ashes UrncastBush's Board Game Thing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's producer Chris from The Bugle here. Did you know that I have a new series of my podcast, Richie Firth Travel Hacker, out now? It's the show where Richie Firth and I talk about how to make travel better in our very special way. In this series, we discuss line bikes, Teslas, the London overground, and a whole bunch of other random stuff that possibly involves wheels

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Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. Children of the new sun, we who survived the wreckage of old Earth and now exist in this half-life aboard the spaceship that carries our species to a new world. We who were born aboard ship who will not live to see the fruition of the new world but will shepherd into this life the next generation. Those who will breathe the air of a distant planet and bang each other on virgin soil. We, the caretaker generation, pale of skin, weak of bone in the artificial light and gravity of our moving home in the stars, we must comfort ourselves with the small joys of shipboard life.

Wet wipes, warm food rations, the adults only section on the holodeck. Wet wipes again. The gargle. This is the gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the bugle's audio newspaper for visual world I'm your host Alice Fraser and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are John Luke Roberts and Tom Neenan Welcome Hello Hello Alice, shouldn't it be half a wet wipe?

No Okay I mean that implies that one wet wipe contains an entire glass of water. They are wet, is in the name. They are. Those are very wet wipes that you're thinking of. Drenched wipes. I mean, I'm living with a wet wipe life now as the mother of, what is it, a burgeoning toddler.

I mean, it's a very wet life, the toddler life. I didn't realise that I would ever have to use the phrase, someone just handed me a bottle of wet milk in my life. I don't even know how that works. It's that thing where someone has a bottle of milk and then they drool all over it and then they give it to you. Oh, I see. It does raise the question, like, a normal bottle of milk,

which is dry on the outside but contains milk, is that wet? Is a bottle of liquid wet? It's Schrodinger's moist. Before we line up politely and take turns on the playground swings that are this week's premium news stories, let's have a look at the front cover. The front cover of The Gargle this week is Jennifer Coolidge and Michelle Yeoh together,

winning their first Golden Globes at 60 and 61, respectively. Offered our front cover is someone I'm making fun of, but I'm just genuinely pleased for both of them. Took them a long time to get good. Let's... Good enough for comedy. So pleased for them. Did you see everything everywhere all at once

i did and i saw the film and uh i am delighted what an inventive yeah it's just so nice seeing something that strange doing so well it was gratifying our satirical cartoon this week is andrew tate in court being made to listen to his own podcasts. The worst punishment. Now, in the brief time remaining to us on the internet before it is completely filled with bots commenting on AI art prompted by bots and trying to spread vaccine misinformation to each other, let's do the podcast. Our top story this week is our CES Roundup. This is the launch of exciting new technology

that's got us talking this week. John Luke Roberts, you've made terrible things happen with artificial intelligence. Can you unpack this story for us? Shh, nobody knows. Yeah, so CES, it's a big old thing. It stands for Computers, Electronics and Stuff.

And different tech companies and tech is short for um technique different uh tech companies come along and they use their techniques to make things which will never hit the market and show them off and then a few things which will hit the market and the things that won't hit the market are impossible things like cars which go underwater and change color and fly and the things which will hit the market are tvs with slightly better specs than current tvs yes and how they choose between the things that are going to get made and the things that aren't going to get made is the oometer which is where people stand in front of the things and go oh and if they go oh then they make them so if you went along and you just had a big like hand-painted cardboard sign which said

oh on it like a fair number of people would stand in front of them and just go ooh and then is that enough then you could make the sign yeah yeah you could sell the sign for a lot of money for the for the it's why ghosts aren't allowed to go because they would just endorse everything and then the whole market would go mad yeah you've just got to like close your ears for the book yeah so i've never really understood the whole thing with ghosts and unfinished business does it like does a poo count as unfinished business actually I think the body often expels that anyway so it might do because most of the time

the dead body will get that out I think I've heard that I've heard as you're dying you um submit your final tax form and you soil yourself that's all your unfinished business done yeah like a half drunk cup of. That's all your unfinished business done. Yeah, like a half-drunk cup of tea. That's what I've always done. Just left it somewhere in the house. Is that going to... Haunt it forever. Yeah, yeah. For an eternity.

Until somebody... I don't know, do they have to bury the tea with you? Is that enough? Yes, or a half-watched porn clip or something. Alice, I think most porn clips are half-watched. Very few people get to the game. It's just desperately trying to make some teenager somewhere finish your business for you. Anyway, there's a tech conference

and Elon Musk has humiliated himself again. That's part of the news. Because a few years, 2016, he put the video out, something called the Vegas Loop, which was the future of transport um which was like a really futuristic looking like half golf trolley half bus thing which you would board at a land level and they would go subterranean and like move very very quickly and merge with other cut and move around like driverless things and then the vegas loop has been shown at ces and you go downstairs you get in a car and you're driven through a concrete tunnel which has rainbow lights seems to be but and there's a driver there is a driver

driving the uh it's uh it's just it's it's wonderful it's just it's awful it's, it's wonderful. It's just, it's awful. And it takes you a distance you could easily walk. And it seems like the queue to get in the car is longer than it would take to walk the 15 minute drive it's going to take you on. Do you think he's sort of hooking some cars together and maybe putting them on, I don't know, rails or something? Oh, that's a good idea. It's a nice idea, yeah.

I wonder why. I think the one that's making the most news is the artificially intelligent stroller, the smart stroller, which helps you go up hills and apparently, allegedly, does not drive when you don't have your hands on it. It doesn't drive your child away.

That's very clear to say that it will not drive unless it has an adult's hands on the sensors and i think it's going to like knowing how much i need sleep sometimes it will take five minutes before like you've seen how people jack their way around technology it is you know it's like uh it took tom cruise five minutes to figure out that you just needed to pull someone's eyeball out to get tweak the scanner. I give it maybe 15 before the first parent saws their own hand off and sends the pram for a walk.

Isn't it the kind of thing you just end up gaffer taping like hot dogs to the stroller and just let it go around the corner? I mean, if I weren't tired, I would have thought of the hot dog solution before I chopped my own hand off. It's too late now. It's too late. My favourite Bs. I've got some. I was having a look off. It's too late now. It's too late. My favourite bees. I've got some. I was having a look through, seeing what's offered. I like the E-Connect BD bike desk.

It's one that I was excited about, which was, it's like an exercise bike that powers your laptop as you're using it. And I suggested that they could say, for those who like to sweat over their work, literally and metaphorically thank

you oh that's very nice but it would also look i think like um if you're on a zoom call that you were constantly masturbating so that is a downside i'd say for these or it gives you plausible deniability that is true that is true i'm on my i'm on my bike um and the other one is the sony honda afila car so-called because um i feel an idiot if i got hit but they all look very nice there's a flying car well does it does it look nice or does it look like a hepa filter can of sardines it's not aesthetically pleasing it's not like a 1930s mg like no no it's they've all got that sleek kind of um ps5 slight look haven't they that's uh that's i guess trendy now because it's like the future i just feel like so much of this is telling us technology that we don't need it's trying to create a need like the smart fridge which is just

not a thing i never think about my fridge when i'm not in my home stop trying to make fridge happen is that what you're saying yeah stop trying to make fridge happen because they just want to collect your consumer data and therefore they're trying to sneak their robot into your home but they're trying to make you want the robot but no one wants the robot to passive aggressively tell them that they're not eating their vegetables i'd like to just let everyone listening to this know that in the background of alice's zoom video we can see her fridge weeping at this news. Is that just because there's a power cut? It might be. She never thinks about it. That poor, poor fridge.

I don't even own a fridge. I'm a millennial. You don't own a fridge? I don't own a fridge, no. But you're in Australia. Do you have a fridge? I have access own a fridge. I don't own a fridge, no. But you're in Australia. Do you have a fridge? I have access to a fridge. Okay. Oh, right.

I thought that was like a millennial trope that I wasn't aware of. But like, who owns a fridge nowadays? Hey, if it can't stay in my cupboard, I'm not having it. Yeah. Like in the time of Henry VIII, they um they would have a like a very narrow outside corridor so that the sunlight wouldn't get in and that's where they keep the food that needed to be kept cold so maybe the millennials will take that up again yeah I just treat my food with freezing contempt uh did anyone see the privacy microphone it looked like a sort sort of a Hoover attachment that goes over the mouth.

So this is like the feed bag, isn't it? This is the feed bag that you wear and it collects all your jokes in it. And then you can sell them elsewhere later. Yeah, it's sort of a scream tube. It sort of goes over your lips like... Do you remember that? There was that trend for big puffy lips and people were sucking cups and shot glasses and things to make their lips explode. It's sort of like that, but technology.

So when you're playing a virtual reality game, you put this thing over your mouth so that you can speak to the people in the game, but not the people in the real world. Scream racial abuse at 13-year-olds without them hearing. Yeah, which is like over engineering a pillow basically we have this technology already we sorted this, we have a mechanical solution

that's what they said about the flashlight and look how that swept the world does anyone, how are they still making I've never looked into the business model of flashlights or how successful flashlights are. Don't look into them.

You know what you're going to see. It is a mouth flashlight, I guess, in a way, in terms of what it collects and what it... If there was a little bit that caught all the homophobic slurs before they hit the teenager you're playing against in Korea or something. It also censors for the other... That would be a good... That would be a useful device, actually. That would be a useful device. A self-censorship thing

to make sure that you never get cancelled. Because the bloody Zoomers, they just want to cancel everyone nowadays. You can't say anything. You can't say the things I'm not going to say. That's what you can't say anymore. I think it's disgusting. Your ad section now

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Brought to you by that scene at the end where one of them's going to become prom queen and the other one falls foul of half a glass of water. You've heard of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence search engine. Well, we're about to introduce you to the bot that puts the can- do into uncanny valley doing something even worse introducing chat meepity like chat gpt it's a wiki generating bot that talks to you like you're a person which you are but it talks to you like it's a person

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More tech news now. This is the news that the tech sector is falling apart. Oh no. Yeah. Tom Neenan, you've fallen apart. Can you unpack this story for us? I'll do my best. My goodness.

Yeah. If only there was some linking factor between the fact that, you know, that we've seen that Twitter is laying off people left, right and centre. Primarily, it seems, in their divisions such as the Don't Be a Nazi division and the Get Rid of Illegal Pornography division. Those are the ones that really, they're like, the don't be a nazi division and the get rid of illegal pornography division those are the ones that really they're like we don't need you guys uh please leave um and also the fact that you know tesla's stock is plummeting as well if only there was some something that connected those two um also we've seen i think that amazon are laying off employees

as well because now they can replace them with um with those little trolleys that uh that drive themselves around and deliver things um which is really handy and also they uh they can also urinate in their own bottles um so who needs employees anymore yeah it turns out that um you know during the pandemic when everyone uh was using their using technology loads people thought like this like very clever people like this will last forever and we should just uh we should enjoy it in the same way do you remember there's that episode of the simpsons where homer simpson thinks that pumpkin sales are going to peak around december like oh during the pandemic everyone started using technology loads more and as soon as the pandemic ends that's that's only going to increase exponentially apparently it hasn't and i who knows why it's because the technology's moderation factors

were not sufficient to convince people that the pandemic is still ongoing yeah i mean it's sort of poetic justice that they hosted the misinformation that has allowed people to gaily abandon their mask wearing protocols and avoid any kind of you know clean air technology that might actually help. Yeah, it's terrifying and quite disappointing and a reminder that billionaires are not clever people, so don't fall for it. They do make nice shortbread

though. Stick to the shortbread musk! Do they make the shortbread or do they just enjoy the shortbread? I always thought the implication there was that this shortbread is so indulgent, only billionaires can enjoy it. I thought it was millionaires.

No, no, there's a billionaire shortbread. Billionaire shortbread has like something else on it. So like little crispy bits on top. Just a millionaire shortbread with a musk stick on top. Just a millionaire shortbread with a musk stick on top. It's like clean edges and polished chrome on the billionaire shortbread. For me, I thought that they had made their millions or billions making, inventing this thing. But it does also make sense that this would be the only shortbread they could stomach because anything less was too austere

for them. Yeah, too basic. Too no frills for billionaires. Frillionaires! Oh, can we get frillionaires? I love frillionaires. Would that be a billionaire who's made their money from frills or would that be someone who has who is just very, very frilly? Yeah, sounds very French. Sounds like

Versailles or something would be for the frillionaires. Yeah, with lots of cups. all these lacy cups everywhere. I like dividing my millionaire shortbread into a thousand tiny pieces and having just a wealthy man's shortbread. That's what I enjoy. Now it's time for your reviews. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars.

John Luke, what have you brought in for us today i have brought in to review um the condiments or seasonings uh known as salt and pepper not the band not the um not the hair coloring but but the seasonings of the salt and pepper they're food modifiers we're used to them on most tables um in our lives. They offer very little choice. They offer the choice of having the food be saltier or more peppery. Neither of them offer the ability to make it less salty. I think that's a problem. What you really want is a kind of desalter to sprinkle on top,

which takes away the salt. But they're presented as some kind of double act, like they balance each other out, like there's a yin to a yang, or there's a masculine to a feminine. And I think when we get down to it, salt and pepper show the problem with binary thinking. They're presented as a binary. But I checked on my prepackaged pepper grinder I got from Waitrose, my pre-packaged pepper grinder I got from Waitrose.

And in the nutritional information for the peppercorns, peppercorns contain 4.4 milligrams of salt per 100 grams. Yeah, blown that wide open. So I give salt and pepper two out of five. Because I'm still using it. I'm still using them. I do. Also, why doesn't salt make you sneeze? That's a question for next time.

Tom Neenan, what have you brought in for us? Did you see the Virgin Orbit Boeing 747 story about how it was Britain's big space race kind of thing and it didn't work I see a positive in that I don't know if there's any chance we could put some kind of rousing music under this for my review of Britain's

failure to join the space race effectively Here we go For centuries man has stared at the stars and wondered how it would feel to walk among them Not Britain. The nation of staying off the grass keeps its respectful distance, looking at the stars from the best vantage point on earth, Britain, because it's only right. While other countries may search to touch the face of God, we in the UK are content to simply paw listlessly at the knees of God, looking up at God and asking them to save

our king, even though they did such a rotten job doing it to the queen. Other countries may break the shackles of this earth and defy the laws of gravity itself, but in Britain we respect laws, we abide by them and when the law says, nope, you're not going into space, we bow our heads respectfully and say, so be it.

We're sorry for being so arrogant. Britain doesn't need space. It has this sceptic isle itself that, like space, has very little atmosphere, conditions are barely livable, and it's really expensive to travel here. So well done, Saxford Spaceport UK,

for reminding us that all we need is British soil and British air. Five stars. Now, you know what? No stars. Because that's the way we like it.

I found that quite moving. That's the first time I've been proud to be British in God knows how many years. Because we're so bad at space. Yeah. I don't normally bring in a review, but of course a world-changing book has come out. It's Spare byry the the other prince and i i want to say that i do not care like i just so i so don't care i just

like i don't care about what some actor from a show that I don't watch that he he married Meghan Markle like I don't at all I just feel like you know he's not going to be the king I don't care what a guy who's not going to be the king thinks about anything so many people are not going to be the king I'm not going to be the king and you don't listen to me I mean this is my podcast so yes you do listen to me you're listening to me right now damn it my joke has eaten itself i'm gonna get joke indigestion which is like normal indigestion but it sounds like this ped can you insert a comical farting noise with like a honk honk sound at the end here but don't cut me asking for it i think the audience likes to hear behind the curtain. And there are two more Amazon reviews

that I'm going to read. This is not a book about bowling. Two stars. And I hated this book so much I didn't read it. Tell Megan she was such a bad bride she ruined the concept of monarchy for my children. When they ask me if royalty is real I'll tell them no, royalty is just a communal fiction

seated in an outdated combination of feudal and religious hierarchy and all because Megan was a horrible hussy who stole harry from me sandra the rightful heir to the throne of diana four stars now it's time for farming news and this is a serious story because for years there's been this incredible injustice uh in the john deere tractor farming industry agricultural technology industry. I don't really know what it's called. Tractor farming sounds like there's somewhere where they're planting little seeds of tractors and the tractors are growing and then they're reaped.

But it is that, and it's worse than that. It's that John Deere sells you tractors, but then they don't let you repair the tractors. They make you order John Deere repair people and John Deere parts and they make you reliant uh suckle on the John Deere teat of the of the market and uh finally at last justice for the people um justice for the tinkerers John Deere has finally agreed to give its US customers the right to fix their own equipment John Luke you fixed your own equipment before can you unpack this story I mean I can't you've you've basically summed up the story as much as uh I've personally been very angry about with John Deere for this for years um I've written various um dear John letters about it

to complain and I used to be such a I loved tractors for so long and now because of because of their behavior i became an ex-tractor fan and now you're now if you have a tractor allowed to fix your own tractor um rather than having to go back to john deere and say hello can you fix my tractor for me and it's very hard because of course to drive to the john deere head office with your tractor because they're so slow and it's a statewide journey. So it's much better. You could do it yourself. And it's part of a mass change that the EU

also bringing in laws about being allowed to fix your iPhones and stuff like that. And that's what this story is about. Thank you very much, Alice. It's a very good story. It addresses what the BBC is calling a long running issue. But I think we can all agree the issue was not long-running enough. Tom?

A victory for farmers is also a victory for, I'm guessing, the finger severance industry. A lot of ill-equipped farmers go about trying to mend their very dangerous equipment, but good for them. The problem is that they've now separated themselves with this John Deere policy. They've separated themselves from their ancestral knowledge. so it's a very steep learning curve now because the cdc in america of course you don't have the right to fix your own finger so hopefully

i don't know if you had this in australia there was a band called the wurzels in the uk and they sang a song which was a version of i've I've got a brand new pair of roller skates which was their own version called I've got a brand new combine harvester did you ever hear that song I've got a brand new combine harvester and I'll give you the key that one yeah exactly obviously this is now going against that incredibly unsustainable thing which is that the Wurzels were like you know really crowing about the fact that they had a brand new combine harvester but actually what they should have been doing is saying i've got a brand i have updated my old combine harvester with new equipment to make it more sustainable that's what they should have said

and that would have moved that they're they're intended i think a lot more effectively well it is part of this uh you know almost too little too late movement of trying to get people to, companies to jump off the planned obsolescence bandwagon, which is where they build something that isn't going to last very long. And then they make you go back to them to either buy a new one or to fix it expensively with their stuff. But of course, you know, this lines up very neatly with the NHS going on strike because it's desperately underfunded. And the fact that you're now not allowed to call 999 unless you are about to die literally you're not allowed to call an ambulance unless you really seriously are dead so i think it's a great thing that we're all going to have to learn how to fix

our own stuff is that the planned obsolescence of people then is that yes we're looking all right God has a plan. Romance news now. And this is the news that engagement boners are indeed a real thing. My favourite excitement boner was when an Australian rowing team won an Olympic race and they were given medals by, I think, the Queen. And they got boners. Well, multiple of them. Wait, more than just one of them? Yeah, more than just one of them.

It was like the whole team. Were they in sync with each other? With just the cocks there going, oh, the cocks, there's a joke there as well. You see how it works, a glimpse by the cove. Tom Neenan you've had an inappropriate boner in front of the Queen before

can you unpack this story for us of course I mean you know after queuing up that long to see her by mistake that's right she said

not the only stiff in the room and I was escorted out for that, this country. We used to be a country. She said, that's right. Men get erections when they propose, hence why they get down on one knee to hide it. Hey, hey. on one knee to hide it um hey hey okay i'm gonna put on my uh my 70s uh my 70s jacket here and go are we sure that they're aroused that their patrol just said yes or are they just happy

their partner has made a decision quickly am i right guys hey all right hey but i think it's obviously it's not all men but i'm. But I think this is very dangerous news. And I think journalists have a responsibility when they publish the news, not just that it should be true, but that it should be responsible for society, for its impact that it's going to have on society. You're not going to publish an article that says fire in a crowded theater. And in this instance, you're not going to say that men get engagement bonus because what if it means that people think if you don't have an engagement boner,

you don't really love them? Oh my goodness. That is dangerous. Similarly, I don't know why it's necessarily news that when somebody sticks their finger in your ring, you get an engagement boner. Only the two men have been shy about admitting that putting their ring on a finger is arousing to them. I certainly don't think any of these people should be too hard on themselves.

Some celebrity posted an engagement video online of herself being proposed to and everyone didn't wrap it up. Oh my God, congratulations, they're great. Am I going, he's got a boner! And then the scientists had to rush to his defence. That seems to be the general arc of this. It's

normal and natural. This is what men do. You have a penis, it will go like this, yes. Is it good enough to be a cure for impotence? Like instead of Viagra, just propose. See if that does the trick. That will be what doctors prescribe. The premise is that your brain gets flooded with sort of dopamine and adrenaline.

It's confusing to your brain. It doesn't know what's happening. It thinks something very exciting is happening. And so it just turns your boner on just in case the exciting thing happens to be sex. I think that is the worst programming of anything. Turning a boner on just in case. Terrible. That's why we've got into this mess.

Yeah. It's an emergency boner, you know. Paul Ripcord in case of emergency. Well, if she doesn't say yes, you're going to have to release the tension somehow. So one on hand, as it were. Look, I won't marry you, but sure. Well, I'll do.

I'll sort this out. Oh, you think they would help you out? Yeah. Oh, well, just as a kind of like as a halfway point of like, look, I won't do that. But let's compromise. As a farewell. Letting you down gently or roughly. I don't know how you like it.

And that's all the time we have for the show today i'm flipping through the ad section at the back uh tom neenan have you got anything to plug uh follow me on twitter at t neenan on twitter i did some work on um prince andrew the musical which is i think still available on uh is it called channel four now not four on demand i forget what uh what that's called but that's where we're seeing and i think still available on uh is it called channel four now not four on demand i forget what uh what that's called but that's where we're seeing and i think i've got a um i don't know when they're coming out i think i'm allowed to say i've got a sky there's a sky shorts that's coming out i think in january there's the plan for that it's called silos and check that out i think that's coming it's going to be on sky and on youtube as well so if you get a chance look at that I will John Luke

have you got anything to plug? Yes I'm touring my show well just like our own butt around the UK

a bit in the Soho Theatre in February and Leicester and Bristol and then taking to the Adelaide Fringe in Australia

and I've made a documentary on BBC Radio about Infinite Jest under a it's a show called The Exploding Library and it's about Infinite Jest and about whether or not you should read Infinite Jest and I think it's quite fun

and if you haven't read the book it's quite a good thing to listen to you'll enjoy it and then you'll find out whether you have any interest in reading the book, which I honestly can neither recommend nor not recommend. You have to work it out for yourself. I get to describe it as a bit of an unread flag, which I'm very proud of. I have both seen that show and listened to at least part of the podcast

and I enjoy both of them very much. So I can double recommend. I have just launched season 2 of Tea with Alice, which is my long-running podcast that I did 298 episodes of and then took a year off when I had a baby. So that is launching now after nearly 300 episodes with Season 2. So we've got some really good guests if you're interested in that. Find me online at patreon.com

slash alicefraser it's a one-stop shop you can get all of my startup specials there for free and i do weekly salons where we have a chat and weekly writers meetings where we have a right together if you like that a big thank you to our roving reporters for this week uh bz who sent in the tesla loop story sea lips who sent in the privacy microphone story and danny blay who sent in the self-driving stroller story if you would like to be a roving reporter for The Gargle, tweet us at HelloGarglers on Twitter. This is a Bugle podcast, an Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Ped Hunter.

Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from The Bugle, including The Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.