The Gargle - Sentient bees | Crying plants | River sewage

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Alison Spittle and Tiff Stevenson join host Alice Fraser for episode 107 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world. All of the news, none of the politics. This week:🐝 Sentient bees🪴 Crying plants💩 River sewage🫀 AI heart health🍿 ReviewsProduced by Ped Hunter and Chris Skinner. 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. April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Stberg Osee with a shower of rain. We stopped in the colonnade and went on in sunlight into the Hofgarten and listened to

The Gargle, the glossy magazine, the Google's audio newspaper for a digital world. This is The Gargle. I am your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Alison Spittel and Tiff Stevenson. Welcome. Hello. In the garden. Yeah, I was really getting into that. I figured with this couple

we should start classy. And watch it go downhill very fast. I don't know if you know, but in what I laughingly call our fan base, the combination of Alison Spittel and Tim Stevenson is renowned. Filth. Are you going to say filth? Yeah.

Yes. I was going to say filth. We will get dirty together in the mud bucket that is this week's top stories. But first, let's have a look at the front page. The front cover this week is mario of mario brothers fame entering his pretentious artist on a podcast acting choices he's in a turtleneck and beret clutching his forehead going it's a me, Mario, or is it? The satirical cartoon this week is an image of Elon Musk telling the BBC that owning Twitter has been quite emotionally painful, blown up on a wall in front of a party of anti-capitalist meme artists with a hanging banner, mission accomplished. And our top story this week is

BTSD news. Bee scientists have discovered evidence that suggests the insects have emotions, dreams and even PTSD, raising complex ethical questions about how far you can emotionally push a bee. Alison Spittel,

you've bumbled in the past. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, this was an exciting story. So basically, this guy has been studying bees for ages, for like decades. And the size of a bee's brain is about the size of a poppy seed. So before, we didn't know much about bees. But apparently, the more he studied it, the more kinder he's been to bees

because he realizes that bees have emotions. Bees get stressed. And I always thought that was the case. Bees seem like the most stressed of all animals. I mean, on a scale of sloth to bee, bee is at the top. Sl great time and then yeah so so um he's trying to uh become a bit more kinder to bees because bees are used in the agricultural industry um and they're treated quite badly so uh almonds are produced in California. Normally, you'd need a lot of pollination for almonds

to grow at the rate that you need them to grow to sustain the demand that they have. And normally, there would be flowers at the bottom of these almond plants and the bees would kind of crisscross between the two and pollinate and go back and uh but now um because of the agricultural industry it's just plastic underneath the trees so the almonds are dropped on the plastic and and it's just a harder job for the bee so this dude has

been very very nice um and it's suggesting that we're a bit kinder to bees and it just never it never occurred to me that insects have personalities and it's now made me more afraid of wasps because before with wasps i thought they were not evil just doing what they do but now i have a childhood memory of a wasp stinging me under my eye and I remember looking at him like this little arse going up and I knew the pain was going to be into my eye and now I remember it with a frisson of like emotional uh PTSD as well because I thought as a kid it was laughing at me and now I know it definitely was laughing at me wasps are Tories with a thorax Yes they are Very much so Yeah

Part of the evidence they're using for this Is these mass bee die-offs Which I believe now are a result of Stress, not just environmental stress But emotional stress For the bees coming from things like Mobile phone signals, coming from things like Pesticides and agricultural changes

Where the things that they're normally used to eating and pollinating are getting mixed up on them. So just imagine being that much of a drama queen where you're like, where's my dinner? It's not where it used to be. Just mass die off. It is quite the statement, isn't it, as a species to go like, you know what, we're all going to die off and see how you are then

because we do rely on bees for our life. And there's drama and then there's threatening the whole ecosystem, which bees do. Harden up, bees. Harden up. Harden up. So what the research suggested is bees, they listen, they recognise you, they recognise faces, they take on most of the

domestic labor pollinating a third of the world's food with no thanks from us so bees are women that's what i'm hearing bees are women that and then just more and more evidence right so this lab set out to determine if bees could learn to avoid predators as an adaptive response and they put a robotic crab spider why are they female comedians yeah yeah they've all they put this spider in and uh in in flowers and then they grabbed a bee and then they released it unharmed this is very traumatic and then after that negative experience the bees learned to scan the laboratory's flowers to make sure they were spider free um the bees not only showed predator avoidance they also

showed false alarm behavior like why are you stressing the bees out that's just the bees are women you're gonna have them flying around with keys between their mandibles like the more i understand that bees are women and it just uh they also like shop around for their food as well, which is fascinating. They get choice paralysis like us. They like try and look at all the flowers and then decide what the best one is. It's a risky ethical business being a scientist who's trying to discover something sentient

because you do an experiment and then the result of the experiment is that the experiment was unethical to do. Yes. Oh, I've just proven that I've been being an arsehole for years i've always suspected it was stressful to be a bee though like imagine you're in your house and then a man in a mask just pulls you out with a glove like a half of your house with a glove and put smoke inside of you like i feel like um i feel like i feel like I've always fed bees, if I saw an

exhausted bee, have you ever seen an exhausted bee? Yes! But this is why I think it's stressful to be a bee because they're so big around and their little wings are so teeny. The toddlers of the sky, you shouldn't be holding up right now. You don't seem like this, the physics is on your side but somehow they stay up. Now when I feed it like a little teaspoon of sugary water i'm not just doing it for energy there's also that emotional kind of thing you know when you're stressed and you eat chocolates like i'm just i'm just letting the bee stress eat now you know to survive the bees are pre-menstrual the breeze are pre-menstrual yeah put it down with a box set of buffy and give

it all the chocolate that it needs yeah all the sugary water i have to say i'm always kind to bees like he was like i try and trap a bee and then let it go and i'm like who's out here killing bees i'm not swatting a bee i have taken out a wasp i'm not gonna lie i've taken out wasps i always assess the arse size of an of an insect you know a big arse is a bee and a small arse is a wasp and they are getting a swat if you've got a small arse you're getting a swat off me sorry they're gonna be wasps getting brazilian butt lips just so they can avoid getting taken out by Alison. Do you mean the BBL? Your ad section now.

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Now it's when plants cry news. Apparently plants scream when they want you to water them. I assume it sounds a little bit like when I want someone to give me a drink, which is... But apparently humans can't hear them. So Tiff, you've met a leaf. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes. Apparently they make high pitch sounds when they are thirsty, similar to popping. And I just think, great, great. Plants make sounds today. How long before they start their

own podcast? We all know that's coming, you know, 15 hours of yucka content on YouTube where they smoke cigars and discuss UFC. Actually, scratch that. It's too high pitch for humans to hear, so it would be a female podcast. I've, I've heard these stories in my head now. So I'm thinking of like quite emotionally traumatized bees being screamed at by plants. Yeah. It's a really true. It's really emotional landscape now.

It's made me upset because we had a house plant and we did not water it enough. And I just think now that's another layer of stress that I don't want to think about it. Like if I want something that's screaming at me for months at a time, whilst everyone around me, I'm going to have a baby like why have a plant I already feel like I'm failing in so many areas now I feel like my plants are judging me as well this is just another

stress I don't need Alice it makes me feel extra guilty because sometimes when I'm angry, I know like King Charles, oh, I forgot my manners there. King Charles, he speaks to plants and apparently encourages them to grow and it helps. And I have been speaking very derogatory, like very horrible to my plants when I'm in a bad mood. And they are dead, they are behind me, but that's due to like definite bad practice of watering rather than me saying oh you think you look so special i'm quite emotionally abusive

to my plants and now i feel guilty have you been roasting roasting your succulents i have yes both psychologically and uh actually uh and actually by not feeding them water. Succulents are supposed to be hardy, but I keep destroying them. I don't know how I do it. I really do want these plants to live, but I'm having a very hard time at the moment. I've probably told you this before. I've tried to grow potatoes on my balcony. I've probably told you this before.

I've tried to grow potatoes on my balcony. And last year, the crop didn't come to harvest. And, you know, I'm Irish and we've learned about the potato famine and other kind of genocidal practices of the British Empire. I know. You should look it up. But, um... Pause this podcast. I know you should look it up but um quick wikipedia quick wikipedia and uh and I pulled out the potatoes and they went to mushing my hands and genuinely I I felt very attached to my own history I was like this this famine was so inconvenient as well as a thing that killed a lot of people,

but I felt emotionally very attached to it. I mean, on your balcony was the first mistake, because you don't know this, but new research has come out that potatoes are afraid of heights. But also, they don't like emotional abuse, evidently. The potatoes actually enjoy being roasted yeah hey what do you think of like it said they make popping sounds which uh that the human ear can't hear and i'm thinking are rice krispies trying to communicate with us? Like, what are they saying?

Rice Krispies and plants are talking about us behind our backs. They're absolutely roasting us. They're like those humans. Stressing out the bees. Yeah, and extra worse if you put almond milk in your Rice Krispies. Oh, that, yeah. That's ecocide the tears of a bee

yeah trifecta of evil now it's time for your reviews as you know each week we ask our guest editors to bring

in something out of five stars to review Tiff Stevenson what have you brought in for us to review this week um

Oxford oh look yeah I like it as a place it's got castles it's got libraries Steve Stevenson, what have you brought in for us to review this week? Oxford. Oh. Yeah, I like it as a place. It's got castles. It's got libraries. It's got museum. It's got museums, plural.

It's got a bridge of size. It's got a bridge of size. But what it doesn't have is enough people who want to come to my tour show. What? And it's annoying because I fancy myself as scholarly and interesting but I am competing with a lot of cool shit every bridge is a bridge of size if you're sad enough on a bridge come on exactly I'll put some steps on the stage and I'll just sigh yeah and then we can replicate that during my show and so I just do you know what is is cambridge a lot of people in cambridge are coming

to my show cambridge seemed keener so i guess what i'm saying is oxford are you gonna let cambridge consider this your boat race consider this your university challenge oxford the place three stars try harder please what i'm gonna review this week is a serious review well as in i'm not putting batteries in my mouth it was actually a thing that i watched and i was like i actually want to recommend it to the gargle listeners and it's a film called asbestos or the beasts and it's a it's a french and spanish film and galician i think it's the is the language as well galician it was the best film I've seen in ages it's very if you've grown up

in a rural environment it's the most Irish film that's never been made and it's about it's about two people that move to a village they're into

they're into farming and the organic way of farming and they're not into wind farms the village are going to get

a wind farm but they need them to sign off on it. And it's about bullying. It's an amazing film. And it's on in cinemas. Well, I saw it this weekend. So I think it'll probably be in cinemas for a weekend or two.

And then it'll probably be somewhere online. But I fully recommend watching it. It's amazing. Five stars. It's so good. It's got like a... It's got like a... There's a French couple in it

and they love each other and the man isn't having an affair, which is refreshing in a French film. It has it all. It really does. Well, I would like to review, this week,

I would like to review reviews because I'm at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival at the moment and people's reviews are coming out and everyone's miserable about their reviews even though, see I quite like

a review, I occasionally like a review, I quite like reading a bad review of an act I like because it reminds me that reviewers are just f***heads with an opinion and if I don't agree with them then I feel less bad when I read a bad review of myself reviews, three and a half. Three and a half stars.

Reads like a four? Reads like a two and a half. Now it's time for Shit Creek News and this is the news that every river in the UK is undrinkably unpleasant. This is an announcement made by David Attenborough

in a recent program that was aired in the UK, basically chronicling the degradation of your waterways. Alison Spittel, I've seen you drink unusual things. Can you unpack this story for us? So this is a long-running story. The way it came to prominence for me was I followed the former lead singer

of the Undertones and solo singer of a good heart these days it's hard to find Fergal Sharkey which I think Sharkey is a great name for someone who is trying to protect Britain's waterways but Britain's waterways

because companies are privatized it's more profitable for companies to take a fine for um dumping raw sewage into rivers lakes and the sea and they've been doing it for a while because capitalism that now um you know places are unbavable um there's places where it's bad to swim i'll give you an example i went to kent with my friend to eat oysters because she loves oysters and we went to whitstable had an amazing time i said and one of my favorite things to do is when i go to a place i like to look up the local news um and i forgot to do that on the way there but i thought i'll do it on the way back and it said uh massive warnings do not eat uh food from the sea because raw sewage has been put out there so it's just it's just uh do you know what it is it's britain

around and finding out once again uh but this time with uh rivers and seas and lakes tiff yeah I think it was something like they were saying that water companies have released raw sewage into the rivers and seas for more than 1.75 million hours last year. Just slightly

short of the amount of shit that Boris Johnson's mouth released during his meeting with the Privileges Committee. Ring the politics bill, Pish. Well, I hate to break it to you, Alice, but you've picked a story that has MPs quoted throughout it thoroughly because this is a political story, isn't it? You know, 185 sewage spills into the waterways per day. And that is down 19% on the previous year. Woohoo!

Less shit. Is this now a good news story? You know, swim our rivers and lakes now with 19% less faecal matter. Get it on Visit Britain. I don't know what we're supposed to... You know, it's just bleak, isn't it? Yeah, are we spinning skin-melting badness as exfoliating treatment now?

Is that...? Yeah, well, imagine if shit was bath bombs skin melting badness as exfoliating treatment now is that yeah well imagine if shit was bath bombs and they were releasing that amount of bath bombs into the sea you'd be like that's too many bath bombs man it's overwhelming it's very lavendery I'm a bit irritated

but they're doing that with actual human shit do you often imagine your shit is bath bombs well it does emit you know what I mean it does rose petals drift out of it some poor student in lush had to sell it to me

this is your own shit if you bring the tub back we will give you a 20% discount on your next purchase what's Jillian McKeith is this like shitting in a lunchbox and then it's disgusting.

And it makes me very mad. But if you're disgusted by this as a listener, just think about what's in the rivers and the seas and the lakes. I feel like they gave a lot of stats in the article, but I feel like it would have been better served by Zaltzman doing them like cricket stats. You know, Blackpool Sands in Devon had sewage spills over a total of 1,014 hours, beating out Torquay who faced

79 instances of sewage dumping lasting for 946 hours. You know, you just need to put something about the crease in there and runs and it would be cricket stats. I mean, it's not great for Torquay either. Why are they going to put under sign? Slightly less shit. You know, it's still shit. Brighton, not as bad as Torquay. Marginally, statistically less likely to swim into a whole human turd

face first i'm just imagining a really horrible version of the little mermaid where she's just surrounded by shits all the fish have died and it's just her trying and a couple of turds under the sea everything's bitter down where it's shit her, Triton, and a couple of turds. Under the sea, everything's bitter. Down where it's shit, I'll take it from me. She has to kiss a turd in order to be able to sing. Yeah, and she wears a load of discarded face wipes as a bridal veil. This is a horrible, shitty wedding. swipes as like a bridal veil this is a horrible shitty wedding beautiful spirals of microplastics rising up around her

while a fatberg just goes towards her that's the wedding cake i don't know what this ocean pollution is going to do for our idioms isn't one of the euphemisms we're going to do a poo dropping a couple of kids off at the pool now it's going to be just sorry i'm dropping a couple of kids off in in the feces i shouldn't you'll be like if you if you're if you're having a particularly bad crap you'll be like oh i'm just doing a sovereign water onto the natural lakes you know of the toilet bowl and also maybe i'll change if you're looking for someone to date

again after breaking up with someone someone can reassure you by going oh there's plenty of shits plenty of shits.com sign up now and unlike with fish where it's getting depressingly less true this is getting more true

so helpful And unlike with fish where it's getting depressingly less true, this is getting more true. So helpful. Yeah. If you believe in homeopathy, the less clean water there is, the more clean water there is. So that's nice. That's true. Maybe that's what these water companies are doing. They're actually doing us a favour.

The more you dilute the clean water with shit, the more powerful dilute the clean water with shit the more powerful it becomes I tell you water fights are going to be a lot more dangerous now

someone just blasting a lot of humid humid sewage you know it's going to give you cholera it's really going to

knock you out hot news now You know, it's going to give you cholera. It's really going to knock you out. Heart news now, and this is the news that AI is better at analysing cardiac function when compared with humans, which is exciting. They finally made AI that's better than doctors at figuring out if you're having a heart attack. Tiff, would you trust an AI doctor to touch your chest? Would I rather get felt up by a machine?

Maybe. Machines are better than us. Actually, I don't believe that's true. I'm a romantic, so I think I can diagnose what the heart wants better than any machine. Just point me at the person, I'll tell you. Give me a famous person, I'll tell you what their heart wants. Leonardo Di machine you know just point me at the person i'll tell you give me a famous person i'll tell you what their heart wants leonardo dicaprio to recapture his youth give me other ones i will tell you i think i'm the best person to judge what's wrong with someone's heart not a machine elon musk what what does his heart want yeah genuinely his heart wants adoration

and respect and he's gone all the wrong ways about it to be honest yeah how could have elon like gained respect in a in a way that's not cringe because he seems to lean into the cringe he's very into rick and morty and in memes that were out seven years ago like how does for a man that's so rich his access to fresh memes is so uh he could have a whole meme factory underneath him people just shit posting um like like monkeys on a typewriter i mean that is essentially what shit posting is and you know, all of them are very unfresh. The memes are unfresh. So, okay, that's good.

So he wants adoration. That's interesting. I think he wants recognition maybe for the stuff he's doing because, you know, there may have been exciting innovations. And I think maybe he took on a job with Twitter that he was not prepared for. We've all done an Edinburgh when we haven't written a show. What's happened with Elon Musk and Twitter he's just gone oh I'll have this ready by the time

August comes around and it wasn't well I mean this is one of the one of the one of the central tenets of the software kind of boom is this fail fast and iterate quickly and and move fast and break things and you know shake things up and turn them upside down and fire quickly and move fast and break things and, you know, shake things up and turn them upside down and fire everyone and like disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. The problem is that that doesn't work as well as you would like if the thing that you're experimenting on and shaking up and turning upside down and disrupting is full of people, which social media is and also cars. So two of his favorite things um have people in them so it's very hard

to have a kind of a high failure rate which is kind of part of the of the ethos of the whole thing if it's making uh making people's lives significantly shitter while you do that the thing about this ai thing is interesting that they're when when someone will do an experiment to see whether your job would be done better than ai i don't like that that seems threatening do you know what i mean like they should do that with elon musk see if i think ai uh algorithm would be better doing their job than elon musk like they'd get it wrong sometimes but um like they should they should they should test whether billionaires could keep their jobs against AI. Because heart doctors, that's the job that you have to study for 15 years at least.

And I don't like these vibes of taking jobs off humans. These machines coming over here, taking our jobs. They can't do comedy. Like that's a thing ai cannot do yet they will eventually but at the moment like i've tried i've tried to get ai to write jokes i've done it for the gargle before and it's not possible and i felt a bit safer but uh it's scary what what other aspects of jobs are going going into. Just chat GP. Can that try and do stand up?

Well, I've asked chat GP to write me a blurb for my Edinburgh show because I was not arsed doing it. And it didn't... Do you know what it did? It said like... I think it's chat GPT. Unless you're using a knock-off version. No, no, no. mine's chat gp i phone

my doctor he tells me what to say i write it down i think like it was saying that like uh she's a female comedian and we'll talk about periods and it was very sorry i shouldn't laugh so much i was like who's feeding you disinformation and then I was like I probably will I felt read to filth by chat GPT isn't that what it is I'm so not worried about AI

achieving sentience and taking over the world I'm worried about that AI will not achieve sentience and we will continue to pour our liquid brains into the algorithm forever in return for these weird little monkey brain dopamine hits just like rewards for little pieces of what seem like information that some part of our hindbrain is going

this will keep me alive but now it's just like pseudo-scientific nonsense that sounds like a fact and we can't check it because all of our tools to check things are now run by AI and it's completely untrustworthy that's what I'm afraid of. Do you think we'd be better off as bees? Like, I felt sorry for the bees.

But now I'm like, that's quite a nice life. That brings us to the end of this week's episode slash edition of The Gargle. I'm flipping through the ads at the back. Tiff, have you got anything to plug? I'm plugging my tour. It starts in May. It's all over the uk for my show sexy brain um you can get the dates off my website which they're all listed there now tiff stevenson.co.uk but the website itself sort of hasn't been updated since brexit so just bear that in mind it really needs an update but i would love

you to come to the shows or come and find me on instagram or twitter all the usual places tiff stevenson comic go see sexy brain i have seen it it is very good and you should also uh listen to my podcast on the bugle network catharsis both of you have been guests on it it's a good podcast um yes i loved it so we've got some cool upcoming episodes so check that out give us a rating love us Alison have you got anything to plug so I have about two shows left on my tour they're both in June one is in Cardiff one is in Southampton

I'm doing a show on May 10th in Soho Theatre it's called Wet and it's probably I think it is going to be the last time that I do this show in London. And I'm going to be doing a new show called Soup. And that's on in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. You can get tickets now in Monkey Barrel.

It's going to be at 1.25pm I think. And I'm just doing some work in progress around London. I have podcasts and all that stuff as well. Go to Instagram. There's a little link tree there. And that's way better than my website because I have podcasts and all that stuff as well. Go to Instagram. There's a little link tree there and that's way better than my website because I have not updated it. Yeah, go see it and have a lovely day.

Thank you. Genuinely, I have to say Alice, and instead Tiff will back me up on this, the listeners they're amazing gig goers and really I'm thankful for being on this podcast because it's got people in to watch and yeah thank you well thank you

all of the listeners for coming out and supporting all of our magnificent guest editors I'd also like to say thank you to our contributing editors which is to say our roving reporters who sent in both the sentient bees and crying plants stories this week is our MVP

so if you'd like to tweet us any stories you think you'd like to see on the gargle, tweet us at HelloGarglers. You can find me online at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser where I do my weekly writers meetings and workshops as well as my weekly Tea with Alice salons. 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