The Gargle - The DEATH of Reading!

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

On this week's issue of the glossy newspaper pullout The Gargle, Alice is joined by co-hosts Alison Spittle and Robin Clyfan, as the trio jump into this week's science and tech news from The decline in human literacy, Detective DNA solving a long-standing ancient mystery. Plus Sperm News and the 10 year anniversary of Pokemon GO! Alice Fraser: https://www.patreon.com/AliceFraserAlison Spittle: http://alisonspittle.com/Robin Clyfan: https://robinclyfan.com/Subscribe to Realms Unknown - a fantasy, sci-fi and speculative fiction podcast from Alice Fraser and The Bugle!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/news/realms-unknownYou fund what we do!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donateProduced by Harry Gordon, with Executive production from Chris Skinner Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, London! The Gargall is coming to London live on the 26th of June. I will be there. Our co-hosts for The Gargle Live will be Tom Neenan and Alison Spittle. It's going to be a delightful evening with some surprises. Head over to the buglepodcast.com slash live or check out the link in the description below. I will see you there. 26th of June, the Bill Murray. Yes, you're listening to The Gargle, the Science and Technology pull-out section of the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world. Let me welcome my guests for this episode, wrongfully convicted for murder in France in 1911 and brutally imprisoned in the penal economy of French Guyana. I would like to welcome to the podcast, Robin Clifford. Welcome. Hi there.

How was the escape? Yeah, really good. I managed to commandeer a boat, get a beret, get an elaborate mustache. But in the end, what made me stand out was that I look too French. And as a co-founder of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, our next guest designed solid rocket fuels, but also lived a bizarre double life in Pasadena, conducting occult magic rituals with Elron Hubbard and attempting to summon an alien goddess.

It's Alison Spittal. Hello, that does sound like me. What a rich and amazing backstory. Less grim than my actual own. So, yay. Hooray. Let's plunge into our news and technology Science and Technology News headlines for this week.

Major science and technology breakthroughs include a breakthrough in astronomy, where research has detected the first true sugar molecule in interstellar space. This was published in Nature astronomy. It was detailed by the Guardian. Astronomers have detected erythrolos, the first true sugar molecule in interstellar space. It's floating inside a molecular nebula near the center of the Milky Way, unlike previous space chemicals that just resembled sugar. It's a four-carbon keto sugar, and it has the exact complex architecture,

which could form the building blocks of biological life. That is such cool news and also so reliant on specialized equipment and the capacity to interpret the data from the specialized equipment that they could just be saying that, and I would believe them. I have no way to say that they don't have found sugar in space, but I am going to try and lick the stars. Also, researchers at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed an explainable AI framework that predicts cerebrovascular disease and stroke risk with 96.5% accuracy by analyzing your home data. Rather than scanning your brain, it monitors your small changes in your daily routines, irregular nighttime movement, lack of daytime to nighttime routine distinctions.

Apparently, there's a very big early warning signs. It's incredibly positive news for people who are heading inexorably towards old age, as are we all. it's only terrible news for people whose aging brains are not keen on the idea that everything in your house is tracking your every move and reporting back to a robot HQ. I don't know. I'm sure that technology is not going to be bad for people who don't have entirely regular lifestyles or habits. But those are our big scientific and technological breakthroughs of the week. I'm sorry, I can't read the first news because apparently it's the end of literacy. Robin, you've read a book.

before, I assume, can you unpack this? I've tried, but with diminishing success, you know, I think we've all noticed our attention spans atrophy and our mental faculties decline, not just due to old age, but the environment that we're in. So, yeah, this is about the decline of reading generally, and it's associated with our attention spans being fizzled by screens and particularly short-form video media.

And we can be as bold to say as it may well cause the end of political systems as we know. I think there are some big claims with it, But one of them is that perhaps democracy itself, which is, of course, very historically rare, has only existed in a few moments, perhaps in the fourth century, Athens, and then moments in the 20th century. And most societies now are not democracies. But there's an argument that they are perhaps dependent upon cognitive reasoning and some form of contemplative thinking. And that requires literacy, it requires a literate population.

And that is on the way out, thanks to our wonderful tech friends. and all of our addictions to our phones, which is causing a decline in attention spans that is perhaps, to be so bold, reflected in our very fast-paced political cycles. And, of course, in this country, we're about to have a new prime minister and the 10th prime minister in,

well, you know, the 7th prime minister in 10 years. So it's a very quick cycle. And that political carousel and our lack of attention may well be associated with rapid political turnovers and cognitive decline. Well, yeah. I mean, in the future, everyone will be Prime Minister for seven and a half minutes until people find your old tweets, I assume. Everyone's Prime Minister. Everyone gets cancelled. Yeah, it sounds like a kind of fun. It sounds entertaining and that's really what we're all after, isn't it? Well, apparently only 38% of people read a novel or a short story back in 2022 and has been fewer this year. And by reading, they include things like listening to an

audio book or reading an e-book or looking at magazines or newspapers. There are people who are not reading at all. And I mean, I feel so, I don't know, I feel on two sides about this, because really we've only had a very literate population for the last hundred years and in the West, you know, even until quite recently in some countries, there hasn't been a literate population. And the fact that it's going away feels very sad to me at the same time as somebody who is a big book nerd and is writing a book. I would like people to read it. But yeah, maybe I need to be writing it as a vertical drama to go out and TikTok instead.

I think our attention span is truly done. And as you said, like seven prime ministers in 10 years. I think the British public is used to this, though. They have prepared themselves for this type of turmoil because we have had the sugar babes and there are many, many changes in lineups that I feel like with the cabinet, we can get used to it. But like, my attention span has gone to rot,

like anecdotally, absolutely destroyed. I've come out of a very long-term relationship and realize that, like, I can't watch TV on my own. I'm that riddled of ADHD. I need a body double to watch a TV show. Like, that's how bad it is. But I've watched a full series of Euphoria on YouTube rules in YouTube Reels in 30 second increments. Like it is.

It is. My brain is right. But I also plan to write a book. So I have, I've got back into reading though. I think reading will make a comeback anecdotally. I think it's such a like it's such a pleasurable practice to do to kind of absorb yourself, you know, in a way that short form content doesn't do, that takes you into another world or puts you into a different brain space

or takes you through a different experience. I don't think you can do it with anything other really than a novel form. You can read an article about somebody's experience, and you're like, oh, that's interesting, but to actually be immersed in the process. I think it really does take a novel to do that, but maybe that's just me being romantic about novels. Apparently it's not just novels.

It's all forms of reading. Kindergarten teachers are saying that many of their students don't know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, which is so sad to me. How, I mean, I had a book of Russian fairy tales, which was so weird and upsetting that they've formed the rest of my life. I don't know. I mean, it is there in the data, right, in the studies that it does cause certain parts of your brain to open up when you read. So it is unlocking bits of white matter that otherwise remain dormant and sort of disappear. Well, yeah, certainly like abstractions and layers of abstraction where you can kind of build an entire framework of abstraction are really dependent on reading and particularly that kind of long form reading capacity.

So it will be interesting. It will be interesting. What the future is. I'm looking forward to being the sexiest, cleverest person left alive. Oh, yeah. You can be really clever, but there'll be no one left to appreciate it. And that's the problem. Everyone would just be trying to swipe you left, as you say, deeply profound things that go unnoticed.

I think it's sad that kids are going to know more about retinal than they will about rumple stiltskin. Like, you know, I feel like that's knowledge. Speaking, speaking of learning and knowledge, there is new breaking news about the murder of a Medici. Back in time, the murder of Medici was suspected to be of poisoning. It was a Grand Duke. Francesco de Medici, he got a fever back in 1587. And as people believed, he may have been murdered by poison.

Alison Spittle, you've heard poisonous things before. Can you tell us a bit more about this story? Yeah, this is very exciting. So the word on the street for years was that his little brother had killed him out of jealousy, like a poisoning. And it feels, do you know what this feels like? So it's been hundreds and hundreds of years. There's been some DNA testing,

and we have found out that it was malaria. This feels like a very, very slow, ag of a Christi story, where you wait hundreds and hundreds of years. He's pacing around the room for 100 and 100 years, and then he points. And he goes, but it was you. And then they look, and it's like, there's an empty corner.

And he goes, no, there's a mosquito in the corner. That was who murdered. That was who murdered this guy. I think it's extraordinary knowledge. we are now aware that somebody was cultivating mosquitoes to send them as assassins. It's like, wasn't there King Richard? I think it was King Richard who was found in Leicester in that car park. The rumor about him was that he ate two bottles of peaches and gave himself diarrhea so bad that he died.

I think it is. I'll Google it. Am I in the right ballpark there? I've got no idea. I'm just enjoying the story. Yeah, I don't know. I've wanted to kill people in car box before. It makes sense.

But it has put me off soft fruits. Like, anytime I see soft fruits, I do think, like, do I want to die of this? Like, this is how I want to go. But, yeah, it's great that scientists are putting their, it's great that they're putting their resources into finding out who killed a rich guy. When there's plenty, plenty of unsolved murders of normies that really need to get sorted as well. I feel like, I don't know, I feel like there's different tears of justice for the different stratas of wealth. Nepo baby murder investigations.

Exactly. It's not what they call killing in the family, Nipo murder. It's like it's not matricide anymore. Neposide. Yeah, Niposide. Google which king died of diarrhea? Apparently malaria takes out, in malaria is a kind of time traveling baddie apparently. It takes out a lot of people.

King Tutankarmoon was apparently killed of malaria. Wow. Oliver Cromwell, I think. Alexander was great. So, yeah, he's traveling through time and slaying the big boys. And do you know who survived malaria? Cheryl Cole from Girls Aloud. So she is a better person than Tudan.

It was King John. I googled it. But we've also had confirmation from the producers. It was King John that died of diarrhea. So he wasn't in a car park. There was a different king. I got them all mixed up. And we have witnessed.

This is exciting news. We have witnessed the ocean floor splitting apart and releasing lava. That's the first time we've witnessed it. By we, I mean scientists, and by witness, I mean, used measurements coming off an array of instruments to reserve a mid-ocean ridge widening in real-time,

several meters of deep sea floor motion and huge lava outflows. Apparently it released about 160 million cubic meters of lava onto the seafloor and shifted two sections of the oceanic crust apart by at least two meters in a matter of days, which, I mean, for geologic time where like a million years is a short period of time, it was described in Nature 1 today. It was apparently, quote, and I quote the study co-author, as a marine geophysicist at the French National Center of Scientific Research, he said it was a major surprise to see this.

And that is not reassuring to me. I don't like the idea that we're on something that can provide major surprises. Yeah, we're not a kinderick. I don't like living on a kinderick. It's like, I feel like geology is like cricket or kind of like French absurdist theatre, you know. Nothing happens.

It's transcendently boring and then something everything happens at once. I like that explosive tendency. You sit there for millions of years and then it all happens in two seconds. Yeah, terrifying, genuinely. I've seen some artist renderings of it, and it's deeply upsetting that things like the Earth can just be like, no, let's shift it up. I need to, you know, I've been in frenzies where I felt like I needed to redecorate my room, and I'm just hoping that the Earth doesn't get inspired. The Earth was one thing that we thought we could rely on, solid ground, and now that's falling apart. I mean, what's left?

I kind of read it as a positive story Like the headline to me Really read as like just someone having a nice summer You know They just got split in two They've just had no great time That brings us to our reviews section I love how much you enjoyed that joke yourself

That was really good I loved it They say you can't tickle yourself But they've never seen Alison Spittle on a podcast That's all I do baby Every week, our guest hosts bring in something to review out of five stars. Robin Cliffon, what have you brought in for us this week? I'd like to review falling asleep under a tree in Wales and being waken up by a woodpecker.

Not a euphemism. That was just really good. I almost was just sitting under a tree on a cushion, staring into the middle distance. It was really hot. I had some shade. I drifted asleep. And I think everyone, as they move through life, start to kind of experience the inevitability that they will at some point become a twitcher,

a bird watcher. Like it slowly creeps up on you and then you just have to kind of accept your fate. And then sooner rather than later, you're kind of in the bushes with binoculars staring at woodpeckers. But woodpeckers, I can say, are incredible to watch because boy, do they bang their heads against that word. I know that's not a weird thing to say, but I almost wanted to intervene and say, I think you're going to give yourself brain damage, mate. but it was really thumping that piece of wood.

And it was great to see. They hit it really hard to create like vibrations, which disturbed the larvae you probably know about this and then rip out big fat worms and other insects that are under the bark. But it was just a lovely, it was a kind of something that sounded like building work, nature's building work, but was actually relaxing and bucolic and taught me something about how sturdy the face of a woodpecker is. I think it's actually relatively, it's a relatively small part.

of our lives that we're not interested in birds, actually. I think about it because when you're a kid, oh, boy, my four-year-old is so into birds. You know, she can identify species. She can constantly on the lookout for a bird or basically any animal of any kind. But yeah, I think it's from about the ages of, let's say, 15 to 30. You don't give a fuck about birds. And then after that, you're really into them again. That's so true.

That's so true. Do you think teenagers just are scared that being into birds is not cool? Or what's the thing? I think if you're a teenager and you're still into birds, you're the purest person in the world. And that's beautiful. I think you can't as a teenager watch birds do sexy mating dancers and not suddenly become conscious of the ridiculousness

of all of the things that you're doing to try to get laid. Totally. Because the human mating dance when you're a 15-year-old is getting a friend to go up to a stranger. And for them to go, my friend wants to, well, in Ireland you go, my friend wants to shift you. And then that's the mating dance. And then they nod or they shake their head.

And when they shake their head, you turn around. You're like, I didn't want to shift you anyway. It's fine. And it's a beautiful mating dance there. What do you call it in England for kissing, Robin? Are you from Wales? I don't want to presume. My mum was from Wales, but I was, I'm from North Yorkshire, actually.

We'd say snog. Snog, that's nice. A good old snog. in Australia, Pasch. Pash, yeah. Pash is my favorite because it's like,

is it a shortened version of passion? Is that where? Yeah, yeah, making up passionately, yeah. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Passion of kissing. Yeah, very fun. Yeah.

The Irish word for kiss is shift, which sounds like just moving furniture or something like that, which I suppose, you know, you'd go, would you shift that over there? That means like, please move that wardrobe or something like that, not kiss and passionate.

that in reference to like dry humping someone so hard that they move across the bench? Do you know what? That could be that. That could be that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Out of five, Robin, the experience of having a nap and being woken up by a woodpecker in Wales. Oh, it's five out of five. It's the kind of thing that you can't plan. It's so spontaneously beautiful and bucolic that it's, it's nature's reminder that it's there and it's healing. And there are many birds in your future. Lovely. Alison, what have you brought in to review for us? I've reviewed having farts because I've had two farts and I thought I wanted to bring it to the lovely people that'll be a girl.

So first thought is, this is the fault I had this morning. It's probably not original. Please tell me if it isn't. But isn't having houseplants essentially like having pets? Like, isn't it? I know people have thought that before, but I fought it so hard today that I must tell someone. Because I was like, oh, like, But it's something that relies on you that could die within your care.

It's important to you to keep it alive and you'll spend money on it. And you also wanted to look pretty for aesthetic reasons. And the other fault I have is SPF. I love the I love the way SPF as a set of letters looks. You know, because it's like it protects your skin SPF. But if you don't, how would you say this, right? SPF makes this sound when you don't, when you don't, when you just try and say it as a word.

So it'd be like, spiff, spiff, right? Which is the sound it makes when it leaves, when it leaves the packet. You know when you squeeze it out? Just goes, spiff, spiff, spiff. So it's better written down. I know that. It's always going to be harder to do this in podcast form.

Find it literacy. Yeah, this is it. And try to bring literacy back. But I thought if any podcast, the audience would be able to visualize it would be the gargle people i just i just i just had these thoughts today i was like i gotta share it with the gargillers because like i love doing reviews i think that's my favorite part of this podcast of a monotivia and that's the thing that i talk to most garglers about if i get told to lick a battery again and again i love it and i want to and i felt under

pressure today i was like you gotta have something better than lick a battery and then i was like no just bring up your thoughts it'll be fine just bring your thoughts i mean three out five three of five, the experience of having thoughts. Underrated. Underrated. Well, yeah, I think that's a pretty good thing because three out of five is a good way to encompass the experience of having thoughts because sometimes you have really good thoughts and sometimes you have not such good thoughts.

And sometimes you have unpleasant thoughts, but it's good to have had them. I know. They're so annoying. Sometimes you have pleasurably deludeable, diluted thoughts, but those are like one-star thoughts because they lead you astray. So I think that's an excellent review, Alison, of the process of having thoughts. I've really kind of nuanced summation of the complexity of the human mind, I think. I like the plants thing as well.

Yeah. Take your plants for a walk or occasionally, like your pets kind of cut off one of their limbs and stick them in a piece of earth. And then grow again. But then you talk to them and people think you're mad. But you're like, well, it's mine and I can talk to it. I know it can't answer back, but yeah. Yeah, I have a joke in this year's show about, you know, how they had the,

you know, there was that thing where you could turn a pet into a diamond. You could cremate your pet and turn it into a diamond. And I talk about how that's like a beautiful mixing of gender stereotypes because you can, you can have your dog die and then turn it into a beautiful diamond so you can take man's best friend and turn it into a girl's best friend. That's a beautiful joke, I was. Thank you. That is.

Like, genuinely, any time I spend an hour around you, I'm like, I just walk away and she's such a fucking good joke writer. Sorry to swear, but yeah. It's great, Ryan. I'm going to take that and use the testimonials fiddles. And that brings us to your ad section, your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy. Stop scrubbing, start trembling.

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Juvenessence jellyfish jelly. available now from all Sephora's. And that's your ad section for today. Sperm news now. Spanish sperm news, news out of Spain. Apparently they can assess sperm biomarkers for internal fertility, which is a new thing. Previously, they would sort of guesstimate

about your ability to impregnate your beloved by doing things like counting the sperm or checking the density and like zazziness of the sperm. Zaziness. As is so many things, we've privileged metrics that are easily measurable over things that are actually maybe important because you can say,

oh, we have this many sperm and they're like zipping around like anything, but that doesn't actually tell you whether they're going to work to do the job or not. And now, apparently they can look under the hood, working out of the University of Basque, they can look under the hood of the sperm. assuming that they, I mean, they don't have, you can't circumcise sperm, so all sperm have hoods.

By looking at their biomarkers, there's sort of signatures that turn up when cellular processes are not working as they should. But apparently this will or should lead us down useful pathways for improving fertility for men. Robin Cliffon, you've made a sperm, before. Can you unpack this story for us? Just a one. Let's go for it. Yeah, completely nuts this story, of course. But what am I trying to get to here. I mean, what I was actually shocked by, I mean, the message I'm taking away is that it's about the quality, not just the quantity of your sperm. I think maybe it's a... Just one jacked sperm. Just walking straight to fertility town. I think men, especially me,

are largely quite ignorant about their own sperm for a long time. I was today years old when I realized that you have 200 million sperm in a typical ejaculation, which is an unbelievable amount of sperm, and amplifies even more to the point the kind of rare miracle it is that we were all born with that particular sperm and egg. But yeah, 200 million was the shocking big figure. And then how they're trying to get into it, apparently sperm are very hard to dissect, they're very hard to get into. and those biomarkers

because they're so hench and fragile. Are they hench? Are they fragile? I can't talk about this without going into some kind of allegory for modern masculinity based. Please do. Yeah, it's a micro-reflection to, you know, it's a metonym

for the masculine fragility slash two, yeah, 200 million per millilator of ejaculate. Yeah. Wow. There's so many sperm. Such so inefficient. So, such a kind of litch, throw it at the wall and see approach, isn't it?

You think we'd be more refined by this stage. Do you think it's also maybe part of a longer journey in turning the fertility focus back onto men as also having culpability rather than a long historic arc that did the opposite? We see, this is the thing about like not to be, I think men want as little culpability as possible when it comes into the conception process. It's very much like, I like this kind of marker system, though. I feel like we'll see this probably on dating sites where men add in their height and said, I hear this matters and also of good quality sperm.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, people talk about penis metrics all the time, the size and the width and the length and the weight, I assume. Yeah, it's very sex in the city. Yeah, no one talks about, you know, penis quality, which is, you know, things like availability, appropriateness of erections, you can perfectly proportioned penis and if it's getting harder to co-workers funeral, that is a bad quality penis. Absolutely.

Not to kinkshame. But, Jen, it was lovely. Do you think that's what HR is, essentially kinkshamers? Yeah. I do like the idea that we become so like sex-positive society that HR can call you in for like bad performance. And you have to say something like, I'm sorry, I get erect when I do bad customer service. It's just my thing. And they have to say, not to kinkshame you, but you do need to provide better customer service.

That's a great sentence, not to kinkshame you. I'm going to start all of my performance reviews. No king-shaming here. But yeah. Your numbers are terrible. Works for so many things. Google reviews. Yes.

Yeah, wouldn't that be amazing if like, yeah. Actually, any time I'm going to Google review a restaurant now, I'm going to be like not to kinkshame because I don't know whether they get off on giving me food poisoning or not. But I was not happy. I was not happy at all. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Not a king shame, but that was too damn long. He's like the edging of directness.

The transcendentally boring mumblecore, and then something happens out of nowhere. It's just like the geological plates, I think. Yeah. It's a tectonic approach to cinema. Yeah. And moving on. Contravarcy news now.

Did you hear how I said that with VAR, VARF? It's about the video recording technology that they're using to question the decisions of referees in the World Cup. Robin Cliffon, you use your feet when you could be using your hands. Can you unpack this story for us? It's so true. I actually went to a stinousel co-can actually.

By age 12, I couldn't read or write, but I could paint nine of the kind of Norse gods in watercolor with my feet. so I am able to do a lot with my feet. Yeah, VAR, it's the video technology that's used to go over and test the accuracy of decisions during the World Cup, which is raging at the moment. And I think what's interesting about this, it's kind of based on a lie, really. And the lie is, just to your point earlier, that the more metrics you have, the more technology you have, you can reach an objective judgment. And I think you can't really reach an objective judgment in these circumstances.

is what matters really. It's good human judgment, which requires kind of transparency, accountability, and authority as well. And what's going on here is minor decisions will be pulled up by the fourth referee. So there are gangs of refs, like three or four of them, other than the one that's on the pitch,

watching screens. And the players know that they can appeal to not only the ref on the pitch, but also these other people in a room somewhere watching things in slow motion. And I'd also argue that kind of slow motion is a form of sort of unreality. actually slowing things down doesn't necessarily make them look more accurate or give them more

truthful representation. It can actually distort them and you can lose the spirit of what's happening on the pitch. And a lot of the controversy around this is that FIFA, a obviously renowned, reputable organization that is definitely not corrupt despite the fact that they overturned an American red card from a call from Donald Trump. In 2015, loads of their officials who were arrested in their underpants in Zurich in a luxury hotel, raided by the FBI. and there's been loads of accusations of bribery. Not to kink shame. Not to that.

We can't kink shame FIFA. Exactly. And as they were arrested, it turned out, unfortunately, that that was their exact kink to be arrested in their underpice and then they're not even more. And that was the last thing that everybody wanted. Just hundreds of billions of sperm. Yeah. Unknown quality.

Yeah. So that's the problem. there's a vagueness in the rules and there's lots of different refs that you can appeal to. And there's an accusation that in this ambiguity, there's an unconscious bias perhaps creeping in for certain teams, particularly Argentina, who FIFA perhaps want to keep in the competition for longer because they have the arguably the best player of all time messy. And, you know, some teams have been so, I mean, the decisions against them have been, have seemed outrageous. And it has seemed like a lot of punching down. The teams who've been particularly a victim of this have been Egypt and Iran as well. So there's a lot of controversy around it.

But I think it's at that central lie where you measure things more and you have unclear authority and a lack of transparency about the rules. And that's where problems creep in. Yeah, I feel like the inevitable outcome of this is going to be, you know, this fourth ref, which will be AI. And the way in which AI sort of. muddies its own provenance. So you're just being produced with the result of its quote-unquote reasoning rather than being able to check. What is it looking at? What's it going on? What are

the elements that are making up the decision are not going to be probed and you'll just be presented with this fait accompli where the decision-making process has become opaque. And it is sort of more of an averaging out of opinions, which is not necessarily true. Sometimes everyone is wrong. And there's one or two people who are more right than everyone. So doing data by quantity rather than by quality, I think, is a dangerous path. Exactly. Yeah. So agree with that.

And also just, you know, we are still animals and we require human judgment and human judgment with authority and clarity and transparency. And accountability is what makes us trust something. It's not more complicated opaque systems that we don't understand. So I think it's a really great allegory for AI and why we need to keep human judgment very visibly in the loop and accountable as well. It's also a vital part of the heart of the game as far as I understand it is that you have to be able to go, you're fucking blind, ref. Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. It's like an animated dad screams at you from the touchline. And it's all just a kind of another great outlet outlet for men's low sperm pouts. I think it's not a coincidence that VAR has gone against Iran and Egypt, who I've been informed by three other people who have the best-looking teams in the World Cup. They are the most handsomest of men, not to be, not to be like a, I've been very bad with the World Cup this year. As a fan of Ireland, I went to an England, I went to a pub to watch the England match with my friend. We're having a bit of a catch-up, and I was yapping a way.

way and the security guard came over and told me to be quiet during God Save the King. And I was wearing an Ireland t-shirt and I just showed it to him and went, no, and continue talking to my friends. I felt very bad. Yeah. But yeah, the VAR thing, I think it turns footballers into reality TV stars in a way. Because you can see them almost looking at the camera and being like, I have been done. Is there like specialist trainers for footballers with?

acting do you think now there should be like an intimacy coordinator but for tackles or they should go to like golié like clown school so they can really like own their vulnerability and when they fall it looks genuine and sympathetic to the ref yeah and they probably shag as much as people who went to galilee I feel like I feel like footballers and galier people have that in common I'm not sure if I know anyone who's come out of Goliere clown school believing in monogamy. No, exactly. I think that's what they get taught.

Ethical non-monogamy is the first thing. They get taught in clown school. They just go around on ha-ee-hahi. But yeah, with a suspiciously strong emphasis on the ethical, yeah. Ironic. Sorry, that's good. And that brings us. to our celebration today, 10 years of Pokemon Go.

The millions of people since in the decade, I mean, 10 years since Brexit, 10 years since Pokemon Go, we live in such fascinating times. There are people who have spent three decades trying to catch them all, and now we have the live action, hunting them in real life, trying to catch all of the Pokemon exercise. of course these things are beautiful community building.

I remember people being extremely passionate during COVID about being able to get outside and hunt their Pokemon in community with other people. And of course, the way in which the people using their phones to scan the areas to find the Pokemon's has been used to sell the data for military application. Alison Spittle, you've caught some stuff in your time. Can you tell us more about this story? So this is, this is a, Pokemon Go has been going, is it for 10 years it's been going for it there? Yes.

Yes. And I have friends that are still doing Pokemon Go. So I'm very happy for them. People have been saying that, what was it? I know comedians that are still in a WhatsApp group that do Pokemon Go regularly. And I feel like they're just indoor twitchers in a way. And I never got into Pokemon Go, but I did love it. for people because it got people outside.

But it did get people into dangerous situations, didn't it? Where people go into parks and stuff like that late at night to catch like a rare Pikachu. But then they'd get mugged, you know? It would be like, you don't really see that in episodes of Pokemon. But yeah, it's very cool. I was a massive fan of Pokemon when I was a kid when there was about 150 of them.

But now there's so many of them now that I've, I just don't bother catching up with them. And they become so niche as well. It kind of was like Pokemon back in the day. You had your fire, electricity. Bulbazar was my favorite. Because I liked Bulbazar because they had a little gravelly voice and I took that as depression.

So I was like, oh, this Pokemon is depressed. I like this Pokemon the best. But it just had a gravelly voice. But now they have Pokemon's that are so, so niche. It could be like, I'm going to make up a Pokemon for the sake of it. Light bulbosaur, an LED Pokemon. Sorry, I just literally looked in the corner and there was a light bulb. And I was like, right, think of a Pokemon involved in that.

Or like, what else do we have? British politics for dummies Bookazore. There's another one in the corner. I feel like on one hand, I think it's very nice that people are doing something in community, it seems like one of the few expressions of technology in recent years that has been conducive to people coming together rather than tearing people apart, you know, even more effectively, effective at bringing people together than, for example, dating apps, which seem to be making people hate one another more and more and more. I think the, on the other hand,

selling data for military applications does feel a little bit uncomfortable. Absolutely. I think it's a really good example of you just, something that seems playful and innocent, you really not knowing how that data is going to be used. And a wider kind of gamification of war, which seems sort of terrifying, like drone warfare, people being recruited who are really good at the Xbox, and a sort of unreality of stuff and a gamification of stuff that's actually quite violent and those two leading into each other.

I mean, I almost felt like Donald Trump's description of the war with Iran as Operation Epic Fury, you know, that's gamified language, that's action movie language. And I think it's a problem that we think of war and very serious, violent things like that as a game rather than something that's kind of darkly real. And maybe that's one of the reasons we're in,

some of the problems that we're having right now are due to that, I think, trivialisation of it. But yeah, particularly when it comes, I mean, not that this is a non, Harry, ring the politics bell. But when you're looking at politicians, not by what their policies are,

but for what side they are playing and what side you're affiliated with, that seems a little bit, a bit worrying. Things like saying blue, no matter who, or that kind of thing is like, and the terrible moral dilemma that we're just in the moral world,

we can't even play Pokemon Go without being culpable for war. It's like, we're just trying to play a game, guys. The next time I see jiggly puff, I'm just going to think of genocide now. This is really bumming me out. Genocide puff. Oh, no. Oh, no. I think this is why I recommend sitting under a tree with a woodpecker.

Yeah. That woodpecker was retrospectively unleashing quite a violent war onto the larvae under that bark. So even that is now tarnished. Yeah, Pokemon. like, poke a man with a sword until his blood comes out and he dies. Yeah. Fakes, I've just looked it up. There's a woodpecker Pokemon.

Oh, my God. It's called Pipeck. Picky Peck. That's what it called. And what does it do? Oh, it just puts wood. Yeah. Yeah, imagine if Picky Pek is like, so Piquip is the woodpecker Pokemon, and it sends drones to kill those

those other Pokemon. Oh. And that brings us to the woodpeck is. the end of this week's episode of the gargle. Where can people find and support your work, Robin? I'm doing a ambient comedy show called Rogers Velvet Rendezoo. It's available wherever you get your podcasts and also a show called Thinking Deeply, which is a conversation series about AI and attention and all those kind of things as well. Fun times. Alison Spittle, where can people find and support your work? So I'm going to be at the Edinburgh Fringe for the last week of the Edinburgh Fringe,

at like 1120 during the day. It's called finger guns. It's a work-in-progress show. And I'm also going to be doing. Daniel Kitsen has curated a work-in-progress weekend for the last weekend of July, somewhere in South London. And I'm going to be doing that on the Sunday,

come along to that. I have a podcast called, I have a podcast called Ignore That Feeling, and we got a Patreon. And we're making really good episodes. We're dressing up as a nun, not me and Fern together as one nun, two separate nuns. And we're going to be,

do some episodes for Patreon and stuff like that. So I'm actually excited about life. Life is good. I'm making good stuff. I've got no jokes yet, but I've led a massive weird life in the past two months that I really want to talk about in my whip. So if you want to know my secrets with none of the jokes, come to me in the next two months before I actually get this medication correct

and decide to have boundaries and write jokes. I will also be around the place. doing my work in progress. I'll be doing it on the 19th of July in Cardiff, both A Passion for Passion, my old show and, Oh man, which is my new work in progress show. Please come along to both of those. I think it's 2 and 4 p.m. at the canopy in Cardiff. I'm also going to be in Oslo on the 31st of July doing a Passion for Passion. Oslo at the new theatre. I've also got on the 21st of July at the King's Head in Crouch end a work in progress and in Horn Church at the Queen's Head, Queens Theatre. I don't know, I know it goes Kings and then Queens on the 23rd of July.

Then thereafter I will be in Edinburgh for the whole month at 8.40pm at the Tron doing, oh man, and you can listen to my podcast, AI and the Creative Professional or Tea with Alice. Those are both available via patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. This is a bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Harry Gordon. executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next time.