The Gargle - Rat imagination | Invasive hippos | Space burial

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Guest editors Joz Norris and Kai Samra join host Alice Fraser for episode 137 of The Gargle - the sonic glossy magazine to The Bugle, with one rule: no politics!🐀 Rat imagination🦛 Invasive hippos👨🏻‍⚕️ Amazon healthcare 🚀 Space burial🚪 ReviewsStory 1: https://www.sciencealert.com/incredible-experiment-reveals-how-rats-use-their-imaginationStory 2: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03516-2Story 3: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saibala/2023/11/08/amazon-announces-new-benefit-for-prime-members-primary-care-services-for-9-per-month/Story 4: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/magazine/space-burial.htmlHOW TO SUPPORT THE GARGLE- Keep The Gargle alive and well by joining Team Bugle with a one-off payment, or become a Team Bugler or Super Bugler to receive extra bonus treats!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donateCONTENTS00:00 Start01:55 Front cover02:18 Satirical cartoon03:06 Story 1: Incredible experiment reveals how rats use their imagination07:23 Ads10:53 Story 2: Colombia begins sterilising its invasive hippos16:57 Reviews21:47 Story 3: Amazon announces primary care services for Prime members29:11 Story 4: Space burials for rich people34:54 Bye / Anything to plug? 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

or tracks or engines of some variety. God, what a hot sell this is. I mean, you must be so excited. Listen now. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite.

Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has... Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance-enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate, available now. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. an age yet to come, an age long past, a wind rose in the mountains of mist. The wind was not the beginning, there are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the wheel of time, but it was a beginning. Born below the ever-cloud-capped peaks that gave the mountains their name, the wind blew east, out across the sand hills, once the shore of a great ocean, before the breaking of the world. Down it flailed into the two rivers, into the tangled forest called the Westwood, and beat at two men walking with a cart and horse down the rock-strewn track called the Quarry Road.

For all that spring should have come a good month since, the wind carried an icy chill, as if it would rather bear the gargle. This is The Gargle. Welcome, the sonic, glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper. For a visual world, all of the news, none of the politics. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Jaws Norris.

Hello. That was beautiful. Oh, thank you. It's not my writing. Is it not? Who is that? No. Usually I write them myself,

but this was The Wheel of Time, the beginning of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Got it. It was really beautiful. I'm going to read it now. I mean, it's a commitment. Yeah, I should have. I feel like if I take credit

for the ones that are my own, I should definitely reject credit for the ones that aren't my own. And Kai Samra, welcome! Hello! That was my own writing, that introduction. That was almost as beautiful. Thank you.

Before we load up the mule-pulled wooden cart that is this week's top stories and set off on our epic adventure, let's have a look at the front cover. The front cover this week is Taylor Swift doing a public smooch with Travis Kelsey and a thousand men who like sports getting very upset that girls are going to come and watch football now, but for the wrong reasons. You should come to sport to watch the melodrama of the human body and spirit pushed to its absolute limits,

not the melodrama of two extremely rich and beautiful people falling in love. Wrong melodrama, teen girls. And the satirical cartoon is the currently trending debate in american politics this is a real currently trending debate of whether given the choice between two parties one of 99 hitler and one of 100 hitler you would have the moral obligation to vote for 99 hitler that's a real debate that's happening right now It manages to hit about three of my pet peeves, including quantifying Hitler, being imprecise with language, and

mathematics. I agree, just mathematics. Which party is 99% Hitler? It depends on which party you support, I imagine. Also, didn't Hitler miss a ball? So isn't technically Hitler still 99% Hitler? Maybe he's still missing that small part of himself.

I'm not sure. And now it's time for our top story. Top story this week is an incredible experiment news. If you've ever imagined a rat, you might not be alone imagining a rat into a void. The rat might be imagining you too. As Philip K. Dick asked whether androids dream of electric sheep, one must ask whether rats could dream of rat sheep, presumably a sort of fuzzy cockroach situation. To imagine our way out of this story, Kai, you've followed a pied piper before. Can you unpack the science here?

So this is the story of how rats have been found to use their imagination similar to humans according to this new study um apparently this means their thoughts aren't always fixed on what's immediately in front of them but their thoughts can also travel in space and time which is i'm going to be honest as someone who spent their entire childhood watching films like ratatouille and cartoons like pink in the brain i kind of always assumed this was the case um but my favorite part of the article is um how the experiments happened because apparently the researchers fitted this like custom brain machine to the rats and like mapped them through this virtual reality environment which i just want to say is probably the best job in the world i would say if there was any an option for me to do that just like going home your girlfriend asking you what you've been up to today just like i'd rather not say um but it was

kind of triggering because i had um i don't know about you guys i had i didn't have a pair of rats i'd like a couple of gerbils when i was younger um called phil and lil after the rugrats and uh one of my most traumatic memories has been five years old. I picked one of them up by the tail, which I don't think you're meant to do. And the tail came off, blood went all over me. Genuinely, like, it looked like a scene from Platoon or something. My mum heard the commotion, came up,

and I was, like, desperately trying to scrub the gerbil blood off my five-year-old hands, like I was some, like, weird Lady Macbeth person. And it traumatised me. And then, good ending, like the fill, the gerbil came back. But it never forgave me. My mum always used to say, oh, it won't remember, it's just a gerbil. Now, after this research, it probably did remember.

Now you know. So it's pretty triggering, this arc, I have to say. Did the tail grow back, like a lizard? Yeah, I think so. I can't remember. It ran off, and arc, I have to say. Did the tail grow back like a lizard? Yeah, I think so. I can't remember. It ran off and then I swear it came back like a month later or something. But yeah, properly traumatic memory. The tail responding to a different name.

Yeah. It was just a wanton rat I just picked up. Yeah. I mean, this opens dystopian landscapes that i've never before uh turned my mind to imagine being a rat with no imagination imagine just being a boring office rat jaws i'm with you on the thing of like i i would have assumed this was the case anyway yeah and i i find it odd that like so many of these sort of scientific studies on animals take as their baseline assumption at the start that animals are thick as shit and then at the

end of the study having spent like millions on putting like a little oculus rift on a rat or whatever it like it was some kind of vr machine that they used to like help the rat imagine space and then they took the machine away and they found that the rat could still imagine space or something so and then the conclusion of that is like oh they're not thick as shit but like we should credit them with more intelligence than that anyway Yeah I mean they're sentient beings it's like that's the baseline

level of what you should be able to do Because the thing they concluded was that like it's possible for a rat to think about the idea of going somewhere to get some water like that's a thought that they managed to find in the rat's like brain map or whatever. But if you think that doesn't happen, then you assume that rats just kind of wander around

like amorphous blobs in an ambient space. And if they find some food or some water, they go, oh, that was great. I hope I find some more of that again one day. But they have no ability to like plan or think. I just think it's quite rude. Well, it's also, it feels like it limits the science that can be done. You know, if you began with the assumption that rats had an imagination,

you could end by, for example, if you're a Hollywood executive firing all your writers and employing only rats. Yeah. Using a translation service called Rat GPpt to generate all of your studio ideas your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy and this episode of the podcast is brought to you by sausage rolls what if a sausage literally a croissant i don't know but try a sausage roll comes in meat assorted meat controversially vegan and fun size, though the fun seems to be contained in the concept that there's less sausage roll.

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Red mushrooms with white spots on them. A mystical forest glade. Time that isn't the same on the inside as on the outside. Animals that talk. A mythic quest to become the king you always knew you could be. This podcast brought to you by something that is either a children's classic or an evening of young adult psychopharmaceutical experimentation. You find out. And this is not an ad. This is just a little piece of experience that I had in the small coastal Queensland town that I have moved to

in order to safely spawn. I was walking past a crystal shop because that's what happens in small coastal Queensland town. And there were two ladies talking and one of them said, witchcraft is more of an art than a science. and one of them said, witchcraft is more of an art than a science. And I had to seriously resist the urge to say,

it's a craft, ladies. It's a craft. It's in the name. I actually went to an Airbnb, a little holiday place in Glastonbury, and we went past a witchcraft shop, and it basically had this sign, which was like deterring burglars, because apparently people go into witchcraft shops and burgle places and we're like we don't

call the police but we do witchcraft so get the hint i was like this is the most nice i know it's the most sinister sign i've ever seen in my entire life well i'm obsessed with this crystal shop because the last time i passed it before the witch ladies um situation there was a man saying that this crystal is 1000 times stronger than the other crystal um which raises the question of doing what i don't know what you mean and also what are they why'd they even stock the 1000th strength crystal in the first place i got a a tarot deck for my birthday and i've been getting dangerously into it because initially it's just sort of fun and you go, oh, this is sort of weird and silly. And then the more you do

it, the more you start to think, oh, actually, this is a way of life. And I can kind of see my future panning out and I think I will end up doing tarot readings on Zoom for just like little scraps of money here and there. And it makes me quite sad that I know that's where I'll end up now. But I'm having a lovely

time. It's the saddest way to be able to tell the future is to be like the fortune teller that only knows your own future is to be a fortune teller. I remember the start of Edinburgh, last Edinburgh, a person who did my PR, like we just met before, like before Edinburgh. And she was just like,

I do tarot reading. Do you want me to do your cards? And I was like, just before Edinburgh, absolutely not. Like that's the last thing I wantot reading do you want me to do your cards and I was like just before Edinburgh absolutely not like that's the last thing I want no I want you to do my PR lady yeah

yeah ACAST powers the world's best podcasts here's a show that we recommend every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite. Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has...

Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance-enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate. Available now. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts. Everywhere. Podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. And in returning story news, I bet you listeners thought you'd heard the last of the very specific Colombian wildlife problem caused by Pablo Escobar's escaped hippo population. But you haven't, because that's what this next story is about.

Joss Norris you have run an ill-fated drug cartels overblown menagerie dreams before can you unpack this story for us? Yeah I regret that that was one of my worst business ideas I'd ever put together not my worst but it was it was not good. So yeah this is the story that they are now considering a three-part solution to the invasive hippo problem in Colombia. One of the plans is to anesthetize and sterilize hippos and then either release them back into the wild or sell them abroad. The second option is just to sell them abroad full stop. And the third option is to cull them, is to kill all of them.

I didn't realize that there was an invasive species problem with hippos in Colombia. So the thing I was thinking about with this was I was trying to work out like what comparable experience I've had in my life that I could bring to empathize with the situation. And the only kind of analogous thing I could get in my head was, do you remember when there was a worry that there might be like dangerous spiders in the bananas that were coming over they were there was going to be like um spider eggs and uh you had to be very careful with what bananas you were buying and you had to check before you ate them and that's the only memory i have of there of us having like an invasive species problem in the uk and first i thought this sort of puts our problems into perspective that like all we had to deal with was spiders and they're having to deal

with hippos but actually i think you sort of know where you stand with a hippo and you know where the hippo is. So I think there's much more kind of like paranoia in our invasive species problems because you're never going to go to the shop and buy a sandwich and then open it and a hippo leaps out and eats your head. Like you're going to be able to see it and go, oh, I'll keep my distance. So I actually think our problems are worse.

I mean, hippos are more deadly though you're right yeah i also always have a banana pre-gig 20 minutes before i perform i have a banana so now my anxiety is gonna be through the level through the roof so i think it was a long time ago the spider's eggs but maybe they're still out there i don't know yeah there's also a bit in this article where they say that they have secured a couple of buyers because they're trying. I think there's something like 500 hippos at the moment that they're trying to get rid of. And it could number. Oh, no, there's about 215 at the moment. But there might be more than a thousand by 2050 if they don't do something. And so far they have two buyers. One of them is a guy in India who has agreed to take 60 of the hippos.

And then that's not mentioned again in the rest of the article. That's just there is like, yeah, so he'll have that. But I was thinking, who's who's that? What's that? Because that sounds like too many hippos for a zoo. Because first I thought maybe he runs a zoo or like a wildlife park or something. But 60 hippos is a lot for one zoo or wildlife park. So who's this guy? So I think this is also the origin story for like a new Bond villain. And if somebody emerges in like 10 years time and they've got like an army of genetically engineered hippos

and then they hold the world to ransom, I'm going to feel smug about it because I'm calling it now. I think that's what's going on. Or a new series like Tiger King, but Hippo King. He's the man who just has loads and loads of hippos. Yeah, I have to get all of them.

Yeah, I was similar to you. I didn't realise that there was a hippo problem in Colombia as well. Like you said, it was Pablo Escobar just imported like four hippos and then they just flourished

after he died. And it's like, I watched the whole series of Narcos on Netflix and there was not one mention of that. I was like, if I was writing that series, you know,

Pedro Pascal trying to sort out the hippo carnage. At least one hippo episode. A whole series, surely, would be incredible for that. They're surprisingly deadly for how cute they look. I think they're deadlier than lions and tigers in terms of...

They're the deadliest animal in the world, right? Or that can't be true. That's probably like mosquitoes or something. Look, I don't know if they're the deadliest but i know that they're like definitely more deadly than the the animals that you think of as deadly because they just smile at you with their little gappy teeth and then they bite you in half yeah i wonder if they got the blame for a lot of like pablo escobar's drug cartel murders like maybe that ramps up the numbers if they were like still part of the crew yeah it might have been a cover thing for him to be like oh no i'm not doing anything

yeah i just blamed it on the hippos and their numbers went through the roof well it's because they look like they're smiling you can't you know they haven't got bad pr you can't like you can't convincingly dangle james bond over a pit of hippos it just doesn't have the same kind of yeah i always think that with animals. It's just about PR, isn't it? Sharks after Jaws. Yeah, if there was a gangster hippo series come out, I think they would be the new Jaws.

Yeah, I mean, speaking of PR, what they need is your PR agent to go and read the tarot of the hippos and tell them. If it comes up hanged man then they're all getting cold i saw a hippo fighter squirrel once in the zoo there was a squirrel got into the hippo enclosure and this hippo just chased it around and around and it was hilarious i absolutely loved it i think they're silly animals the squirrel was probably scared out of his life because they're massive but i was having a great time and i think that's because do you remember the hippo who sold you a

mattress he was like in his pajamas and he he was a mascot for a tv campaign he wasn't no see i was not allowed to watch television as a child so if you ever ask me if i remember like i don't know what advertisements are as should be clearly evidenced by the ad section of this show i don't know what they're meant to look like well he was adorable this guy he had like a wee willy winky cap and some stripy pajamas and he'd yawn and then he'd get on his mattress and he'd be like, wow, this mattress is great, you should buy it. And I just had him in my head watching this hippo run around. I think they're cute.

I'd love to have an invasive species problem of hippos. In Australia, that role was played by an extremely left-wing comedian called Rod Quantock who happened to get a contract to be Captain Snooze at the same time as like railing against capitalism that mattress money you can't turn it down you got to eat and now it's time for your reviews your reviews section now because as you know each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Kai, what have you brought in for us this week?

So I am going to be reviewing the act of re-watching your favourite childhood films as an adult in 2023. So I did this last Saturday. I just had a bit of a film marathon and I was like, you know, I'm just going to watch all the films I haven't seen in forever. But like through the eyes of me now. And it's very weird. I'm just going to watch all the films I haven't seen in forever. But like through the eyes of me now. And it's very weird. I'm just going to put that out there. Like I watched Jurassic Park. Also, that could be another film with bad animal PR.

Because I don't know how a dinosaur is bad. I don't know. But I feel like it still stands up. Because they're just sentient, normal. I don't know why they've... Steven Spielberg has got a lot to answer for, actually, about bad animal PR. Sharks, Velociraptor, like T-R, normal. I don't know why they've, Steven Spielberg has got a lot to answer for actually about bad animal PR. Sharks, Velociraptor, like T-Rexes, I don't know.

But it's a good film. The special effects still stand up. But you notice it's a very male dominated film. And I really feel like they noticed this after they did the casting because there's a bit in it where the male scientist is like, oh, by the way, all the dinosaurs in the park are female. And I don't think that's the gender diversity anybody was asking for.

Like, I feel like if two female velociraptors communicate with each other, like, does that pass the Bechdel test? I don't know. And then I watched, what else did I watch? I watched The Lion King, which also stands up. Depends if they're roaring about a man or not, Kai. Also, The Lion King has bad hyena PR. They're kind of the same.

But I realised watching that, it's kind of weird, because the animators must have drawn Mufasa, like that's fine, then drawn Simba, and then we were like, oh, how can we depict that Scar's the villain? Let's just make him unrealistically brown. I don't know why he's that brown. Like, I've never seen a lion with that much melanin in my life. And also he's meant to be Mufasa's brother.

Like, if that's the case, then Mother has got a lot to answer for. But it's never the same. So I'm going to give that two out of five stars. Watching childhood films. Never go back. Never go back. Can't cross the same river twice yeah because you've burned all your bridges jaws what have you brought in for us i wanted to review the experience of opening an unusual door um because this week i was doing some work in the

in the study area of a big library and i went to the toilet at one point and there was a door in the toilet that had keep locked shut written on the door and it'd been left ajar and i thought oh this is like an opportunity to go on an adventure and i don't normally get that like i'm quite a kind of stay at home unimaginative person and i'm very very scared i don't know if listeners will feel the same but i'm very scared of the question uh what have you been up to lately or any of that kind of thing where i have to sift through my life and go oh shit what has happened and i usually land on something that happened like three years ago like i'll mention the last time i got excited about a new thing and i'll be like oh i'm really into needle felting at the moment and then i'll remember oh no that was three christmases ago i can't i just i lose track of time a lot so when i when i saw this door

i was like this is a really good opportunity to like find out what it's like to surrender to unusual stuff and just like go with the flow. And I thought maybe the most that will be behind it is like a cleaners cupboard or something with some equipment. But I opened it and behind it was a second door. And I thought, oh my God, this is a metaphor for life. Life is a series of doors. And I went through the second one.

And then behind that one was like a really spooky bunker like a windowless brick bunker and then i started getting a bit scared because i had to like go beyond the toilet and let the other door close and i wasn't sure if i'd ever get back but i thought i've started now and i'm becoming a person who does things so i have to keep going and then on the other side of this bunker was another like big metal door and that door said danger deep void and it felt again like a kind of an analogy for something and I was like I have to become this guy I have to find out what it's like to keep going and then I went through that door and then it was very odd there was like a kind of a blinding flash and then all my flesh sort of like fell off my bones and then my skeleton crumbled to dust.

And then I was sort of snapped back several billion years and I came back as like a single celled organism. And I had to live through billions of years of life again until I was eventually born into my human body. And then I had to sort of endure 34 more years of just being quite a kind of boring, unimaginative guy. And then finally, it was time to come on this podcast this morning. So my review of the experience is that it's not worth doing don't don't go through doors that you don't know where they lead to it's better to just kind of stay at home and do the things you like it's not worth the hassle and i give it one star at a terrible time one star one star out of five for staring into into the void. Yeah, don't do it. It won't look back.

And in dystopian news news now, Amazon, the company who's expanding at about the rate its jungle namesake is shrinking, which is to say exponentially, is promising to deliver cheap health care with an abs worth level of small print terms and conditions. Kai, you don't want your health care delivered by an underpaid gig economy worker in a clapped out Corolla who's being forced to piss into a bottle

while being watched by robots to keep his productivity up. Can you unpack this story for us? So this is the second story about Amazon. Kind of careful what I say, I've got a comedy special on Amazon. So I'm going to absolutely slam them now. But apart from that, they're comedy.

High five. But they're comedy toast. So basically, like you said, yeah, so over the years, Amazon has slowly continued to add

sort of offerings for its Amazon Prime members from like rapid delivery to access to sort of curated services. However, today, the company announced

the latest addition to Amazon Prime, which is access to primary healthcare services through its one medical platform for nine dollars a month um and this is basically where they provide like 24 7 virtual care for common concerns such as cold symptoms and skin issues um and yeah i think this is too much also i wouldn't trust amazon uh with my health especially with their i don't know if you guys look at your Amazon recommendation lists, because they, I don't know what the algorithm is, but because I went to, I remember I went to a fancy dress party a few years ago. And as a brown man, it's quite difficult

to know what to go as a fancy dress costume, because there's not a lot of famous Asian people. So I went as the baddie in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And my mate went as Indiana Jones. I got a toy whip for him off Amazon. And for about three months, I got nothing but kink and S&M stuff recommended to me. And yeah. And also, I think the idea of just going on Google for like medical concerns is like just the worst. Like I've been feeling like tired recently and I just Googled it.

And the first thing that came up was like, you might get bleeding of the brain. I was like, I do not want Amazon to just, you know, kind of kind of just, I don't know, the same thing to happen where I just want like an antihistamine and they end up giving me like a year supply of morphine or something. So, yeah, I don't trust them. Well, every experience ordering anything off amazon is like a terrifying gamble desperately scrabbling through the reviews and trying to tell if they've been like bought and paid for or if they're genuine human people and you know taking

your chances throwing your money into the void and hoping that a package will arrive that doesn't smell like you know a chemical spill in a factory somewhere you'd rather not be um yeah but i like i don't know that you want to transfer that kind of brand vibe to yeah to healthcare even if it is like severely limited healthcare options at least so far yeah the only way i think is if they do it like other apps do where they kind of just have an app you know but then they kind of design it to kind of hit your endorphin levels, you know, so like a Tinder app for your health. They're like COVID, no. Oh, bronchitis. I've just got a match with bronchitis. That's why some sort of entertainment value in that. I think that could work. But apart from

that, I see no future in this. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the obvious next step, right? Is that Amazon then gamifies your own healthcare to the point where you diagnose yourself and get like a free 10 cents off your next Band-Aid for successfully being your own primary care provider. It just doesn't seem like it's ending up anywhere good. Joss, would you buy your health care off Amazon? I don't think I would. amazon i don't think i would i read this story like in the same week that i saw the new uber advert which is the uber does trains now and the advert is people like getting on their train and thinking it's an uber just for them it's quite a good advert but it did make me think like we've we're kind of getting away from the idea anymore of there being like things that do things and

instead we're sort of replacing all the things with like a couple of everything's that do everything and i it reminded me do you remember in um again i'm just like constantly remembering things um that you may well have no reference for but uh for a while in wh smith if you bought anything they'd go oh if you buy a newspaper you can get a bar of chocolate for a pound and but you hadn't gone in for either you'd gone in for like a pencil case or something and then they go what about a newspaper and a bar of chocolate and i was like i don't need i don't want either of them with with this purchase and i'd sort of feel like we're getting to that point where it's now everything does more

than it needs to and i think we need to redesign the way we think about like society because i think kids learn it through happy families you have that card game where you'd get like oh this is mr bun the baker he makes bread and this is mr flames the fireman he puts out fires and these days i think if you were to design a game that kind of represents society as it is you basically have maybe like three cards and one would be this is jeff bezos he does everything now he gives you all your stuff and then he'll look after you when you die and then maybe there's two others like this is mark zuckerberg he sort of sorts out what people think of you and what you look like from the

outside and stuff and then i don't know then there's probably just disney and they're just sort of pumping you with like a corporate ip until you can't really think or move and the only thing you can think to do with your life is to buy some more stuff from Amazon and then be looked after in your Amazon care beds. I found the whole story to be very depressing. I mean, it is enormously depressing. And I mean, this is the tech dream. This is the tech utopian dream that Silicon Valley has somehow circle jerked itself into buying into, which is that a thing is not sufficiently good if it just does the thing it's meant to do well. It has to 10x or 100x the original offering.

And, you know, you can't just have a business that does the thing that the business is meant to do. It needs to get VC funding of billions of dollars and put everyone else out of business until you become the everything app, which means that you give people the money to buy the things that you're selling the people and then you can sell them their own happiness in a jar and then they can sell the jar back to you for a 10 cent refund and buy a new bigger jar

to put their happiness in. Like it's just so heartbreakingly depressing. And the problem is that the most depressing thing about this, sorry to rant, the most depressing thing about it is that they think this is utopia. They genuinely think this is taking us towards the epitome of human achievement and that is the most upsetting thing about it of all to me that they can't see that this is like sliding into a hellscape yeah it's the isn't it the plot of the

last season of succession isn't this the thing that like kendall ends up coming up with they sell like a life plus thing or something and it's the idea that like Kendall ends up coming up with? They sell like a life plus thing or something. And it's the idea that like you get a healthcare package and like you get your entire life is kind of mandated by this media company. So we keep now living through a thing where like the actual tech billionaires are just slightly six months behind the satire that's trying to make them look as thick as possible. And then they go, oh, actually, we should do that. Let's actually do that. Yeah, I always think that like what comes first first is it like the entertainment or the tech people yeah with ai i'm like this is just an 80s sci-fi film like you are just copying that i'm thinking would they even have come up with that idea yeah that film hadn't even been made yeah but yeah i love the idea of

jeff bezos copying kendall kendall roy though. I like that guy. That's the guy. He's my favourite. Now it is time for your space funeral news. What do you do when you're a very rich person after you die? Do you go back to Earth and enrich the soil with your decomposing corpse, grow the grass and become the trees that will shade your children's futures. No, you f***ing fire yourself at the moon in a rocket. Jos Norris, Kai Samra, what the f*** is going on with rich people right now? I thought this was quite a sweet piece in a way.

Obviously, if you kind of remove the fact that all these people are clearly mad, it's just a study of a bunch of different people who want this to happen to them after they die uh and some of them actually their justifications are really nice there's this guy here who said that um for his wife became ill and for over a year he never left her bedside for more than 90 minutes and what they would do is they would sort of sit together and look at the stars. And they promised each other that when they died, they would mix their ashes together and shoot themselves into space. And I thought that's kind of lovely.

And then a lot of the other ones are kind of about curiosity and trying to kind of like answer the mysteries that you can't answer. But then there are a couple of weird ones when people talk about their reasons. One of them, it's a guy who spent his entire life amassing a fortune by by drilling uh he sort of built wells oil wells and made his money that way and then eventually

realized he'd been going the wrong way he said and that he wanted to reverse the the effort that he'd been putting to go down into the dick yeah he was like i want to go up because i've been i've been looking in the wrong direction which i found very funny and then the maddest one is there's this guy called ken who says that when he dies he wants some dna of his to be put on the moon on the south pole of the moon so that his descendants might look up there and go oh there's a little piece of ken up there and that's kind of sweet but then as almost as an aside or as an afterthought at the end he says also i'd like to stay up there until they've worked out uh how to do cloning from people's DNA. And then I want to swarm across the universe

as an army of Kens. And I think if this is going to be a service that they offer people, you can shoot your DNA up into space. I think your reasoning has to be part of the application process. And I think it ought to be possible for them to come back and go,

oh, you're insane. You're completely insane. It ought to be part of the application process and i think it ought to be possible for them to come back and go oh you're you're insane you're completely insane it ought to be like an arts council bid where they're like we liked your application um you might want to rework this thing where you talked about why you want to do it because you said you want to turn into an army of kens and swarm across the universe and we don't feel comfortable spending this money on you but like try again and then maybe come back with something nice about your wife. And then maybe we'll we'll let you do it. Look, I've got to confess, I'm a bit of a I think I'm a bit of a eugenicist when it comes to space DNA. I think if you want to launch your DNA into space, you've got to give yourself the most epic case of blue balls and do it manually. And if it reaches orbit, then you then you get to populate the stars. and if it reaches orbit then you then you get to populate the stars unless you're literally strong enough to power your jizz into space through the force of your own sexual frustration

not not permitted to colonize the universe but if you can f**k the moon go ahead yeah do it yeah i don't understand this fascination with space it just seems just like a dark cold miserable place it's like i live in england i don't need any more of that but i i don't understand this fascination because it's always the same demographic it's just people who've got far too much money than sense and it's like they just can't stop like gentrifying places like if it's not brixton it's the moon it's just like don't go to where you're not wanted i don don't understand it. But I've no one. If you got an offer to go to the moon and it was free,

or like to go into space, would you guys go? Because I don't think I would. Nah. Yeah, I definitely wouldn't. It looks rubbish. It would depend how embarrassed I was at whatever recent mistake I'd made. Yeah. Because I want to get as far away from whatever the mistake

I've most recently made is. So if you got me at the right time, I'd be yeah shoot me to venus do it just yeah also to be fair if i got cremated in my family without my wishes just sent me to outer space i would kind of get the hint like i wouldn't take that as a as a something to be proud of okay guys i get it yeah your christmas presents are you know a stick of deodorant, a nice set of bath and cleansing products, and a ticket to outer space. You're like, I get it, Thijs. I get it. I smell.

It made me wonder whether I'd do anything weird with my roommate. I don't think I'd go to space. But the other day I was walking through Battersea after a fireworks display. So there were a few, like of like circus type things going around. And then a van went past a kind of fun party van that had a bubble machine on the top. So it was kind of streaming bubbles in its wake as it went. And I thought that would be a nice way to go to scatter like not your ashes, but your bubbles.

And then to have them just kind of like strewn across the city centre. So I might do that. I might find a way. What a depressing thought. I love the thought you went to a circus and saw that and went, that is how I'd like to die. I hadn't thought about it until I read this article because then I thought, what would I do?

Because I wouldn't go to space. And then I remembered the bubble machine and I thought, I'd go in a bubble machine. Yeah, you can make soap out of animal fat. So I think we're only a few steps away from bubble machine funerals. They've just invented like boil in the bag funerals. It's the first time they've like officially launched a new way of disposal in like 100 years.

But they can now put you in like a polythene bag and then boil you into a mush. I wouldn't want that. Sous vide to the void. Yeah. A basmati burial burial it's not for me put me in the bubble machine that brings us to the end of the magazine i'm flipping through the ad section at the back kai have you got anything to plug um i'm doing a show in new york in january So in Union Hall. And I don't know anybody in New York and no one's buying tickets.

So if anybody has anybody in New York, yeah, you can go on my website, kaisamra.com. Excellent. Go to kaisamra.com and buy tickets. All my New York friends and enemies. Jaws Norris, what have you got to plug? I am organising a film screening night on December the 8th at King's Place in London.

I'm premiering a short film that I made earlier this year and we're combining short films and script readings. So there's going to be some amazing actors doing some readings of comedy scripts by great writers. Me, Miranda Holmes, Nat Lertzema, and I've curated a bunch of short films by the kind of comedy film community. There's some stuff by Jazzy Mew and Sam Campbell

and people like that. It should be really, really fun. So there's tickets on my website on josnorris.co.uk if people want to come along. Love to see you there. That sounds magnificent. You can find me online at patreon.com slash alicefraser. It's a one-stop shop full of my stand-up specials,

my podcasts and my blogs, as well as my weekly salons. We do a weekly salon and we do two writers meetings a week. You get access to all of that for at the moment a dollar a month. So please jump on board before I get the logistical power together to make that financially viable for myself. Patreon.com slash alicefraser. There is also a book available on unbound.com called The Dancy Lagarde Reader, if you want that for your friends for Christmas. And this is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. I'm your host, Alice Fraser.

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, including The Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.