The DEATH of Reading!

0:00Alice Fraser: Hello, London! The Gargle 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 thebuglepodcast.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 pullout section of the bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world let me welcome my guests for this episode uh wrongfully convicted for murder in france in 1911 and brutally imprisoned in the penal economy of french guayana i would like to welcome to the podcast robin cliffhan welcome hi there uh how was the escape?

0:48Yeah, really good. I managed to commandeer a boat, get a beret, get an elaborate moustache. But in the end, what made me stand out was that I looked too French.

0:58Alice Fraser: 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 L. Ron Hubbard and attempting to summon an alien goddess. It's Alison Spittel. 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 researchers detected the first true sugar molecule in interstellar space.

1:40Alice Fraser: This was published in Nature Astronomy. It was detailed by The Guardian. Astronomers have detected erythrolose, the first true sugar molecule in interstellar space. It's floating inside a molecular nebula near the centre 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 specialised equipment and the capacity to interpret the data from the specialized equipment, that they could just be saying that and I would believe them.

2:15Alice Fraser: 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.

2:54Alice Fraser: And 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.

3:24Alice Fraser: 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 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 perhaps to be so bold, reflected in our very fast-paced political cycles.

4:38And 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.

4:54Alice Fraser: 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 feminist there. 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 it's 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. papers, 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 100 years.

5:42Alice Fraser: And in the West, you know, even, 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 i think our attention span is truly done um and uh as you said like seven prime ministers in 10 years i think the british public uh is used to this though they have prepared themselves for this type of turmoil because um we have had the sugar babes and there are many many changes in lineups uh that i feel like uh with with the cabinet uh we can get used to it but like um my my attention span has gone to rot like anecdotally absolutely destroyed um i've i've come out of a very long-term relationship and realized that like um i can't watch tv on my own i'm that riddled with adhd i need a body double to to watch a tv show like that's how bad it is But I've watched a full series of Euphoria on YouTube Reels in 30-second increments.

6:59Like, it is. It is. My brain is rotted. But I also plan to write a book. So I've got back into reading, though. I think reading will make a comeback, anecdotally.

7:12Alice Fraser: I think it's such a pleasurable practice to do to kind of absorb yourself, you know, and in a way that short form content doesn't do that, that takes you into another world or puts you into a different brain space or takes you through a different experience. Uh, 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 like 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.

7:45Alice Fraser: 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 yeah they've formed the rest of my life uh I don't know but it is I mean it is there in the uh in the data right in the in the studies that it does cause certain parts of your brain to open up when you read so it is is unlocking bits of white matter that otherwise remain dormant and sort of disappear. Well, yes, 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.

8:30Alice Fraser: So it will be interesting to see 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 will 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 retinol than they will about Rumpelstiltskin. Like, you know, I feel like that's knowledge. Speaking of learning and knowledge, there is new breaking news about the murder of a Medici. Back in time, the murder of a Medici was suspected to be of poisoning.

9:14Alice Fraser: It was the Grand Duke Francesco de' Medici who got a fever back in 1587. And as people believed, he may have been murdered by poison. Alison Spittel, 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 Agatha Christie story where you wait hundreds and hundreds of years he's pacing around the room for a hundred and hundred 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 you go no there's a mosquito in the corner that was who murdered that was who murdered this guy.

10:13I think it's extraordinary knowledge.

10:15Alice Fraser: 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 bushels 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 parks before. It makes sense. But it has put me off soft fruits. Anytime I see soft fruits, I do think, do I want to die of this? Is this how I want to go?

10:57But 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 tiers of justice for the different stratas of wealth. Depending, Nepo baby murder investigations. Exactly. Isn't that what they call killing in the family? Nepo murder. It's not matricide anymore. Nepo side. Yeah, Nepo side. 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 i think king tutankhamun was apparently killed of malaria wow oliver cromwell i think alexander the great so um yeah he's traveling through time and slaying the big boys and you know who survived malaria cheryl cole uh from girls allowed so she is a better person than Timmy Camp.

12:01Alice Fraser: 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. And by we, I mean scientists. And by witnessed, I mean used measurements coming off an array of instruments to observe a mid-ocean ridge widening in real time several metres of deep sea floor motion and huge lava outflows. Apparently it released about 160 million cubic metres of lava onto the sea floor and shifted two sections of the oceanic crust apart by at least two metres 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 One today.

13:02Alice Fraser: It was apparently a quote, and I quote the study co-author, as a marine geophysicist at the French National Centre for 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 kinder egg. I don't like living on a kinder egg. it's like i feel like geology is like um cricket or kind of like french absurdist theater you know nothing happens it's transcendentally 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 uh i've seen some um artist renderings of it and it's you know it's deeply upsetting that that's that things like the earth can just be like no let's 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 uh 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 uh really read as like just someone having a nice summer.

14:18You know, they just got split in two.

14:21Alice Fraser: They've just had a great time.

14:26Alice Fraser: 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 Clifford, 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 was just sitting under a tree on a cushion, staring into the middle distance. It was really hot.

15:07I had some shade. I drifted asleep. sleep and um i think everyone as they move through life um start to kind of experience the 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 um sooner rather than later you're kind of in the bushes with binoculars staring at woodpeckers um but woodpeckers i can say are incredible to watch because boy do they bang their heads against that wood i know i know that's an obvious 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 um and it was great to see they hit it really hard to create like vibrations which disturb the larvae you probably know about this and then rip out big fat worms and other insects that are under the bark um 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.

16:07Alice Fraser: I think it's actually relatively, it's a relatively small part of our lives that we're not interested in birds, actually, if you 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, you know, she's 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 f*** 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?

16:45Or 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.

16:53Alice Fraser: I think you can't as a teenager watch birds do sexy mating dances and not suddenly become conscious of the ridiculousness of all of the things that you're doing to try to get laid. Totally. Cause the human mate and 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 mate and dance. And then they nod or they, or they, or they, or they shake their head. And when they shake their head, you turn around and you're like, I didn't want to shift you anyway. It's fine.

17:26And it's a beautiful mate in Damster. 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'm from North Yorkshire actually. We'd say snog. Snog, that's nice. Good old snog. In Australia, Pash. Pash, yeah. Pash is my favourite because it's like, is it a shortened version of passion? Is that what it is? Yeah, yeah, making out passionately, yeah. That's beautiful. Passion and 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 it you know you'd go would you shift that over there that means like please move that wardrobe or something like that not kiss is that in reference

18:11Alice Fraser: 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 oh it's five out of five it's the kind of thing that you you can't plan it's so spontaneously beautiful and bucolic that it's uh it's nature's reminder that it's there and it's healing and there are many birds in your future lovely uh allison what have you brought in to review for us i've reviewed having farts because i've had two farts and i thought i want to bring it to the lovely people that bugle so first thought is uh this is what this is what i had this morning it's probably not original and please tell me if it isn't but isn't having house plants essentially like having pets like isn't it like i know people have thought that before but i thought it's so hard today that i must tell someone because i was like oh like it's 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 want it to look pretty for aesthetic reasons.

19:21And the other thought I have is SPF. I love the, I love the way SPF as a, as a, as a set of letters looks, you know, cause it's, it's like, it protects your skin SPF, but if you, but if you don't, if you, 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 the packet. You know, when you squeeze it out, it 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 literacy.

20:02Yeah, this is it. I'm trying to bring literacy back. But I thought if any podcast audience would be able to visualize it, it would be the gargle people. I just had these thoughts today. I was like, I've got to share it with the garglers. Because I love doing reviews. I think that's my favorite part of this podcast, if I'm honest with you, 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 it, and I felt under pressure today. I was like, you've got to have something better than lick a battery. And then I was like, no, just bring up your thoughts.

20:34It'll be fine.

20:35Alice Fraser: Just bring your thoughts. Three out of five. Three out of five, the experience of having thoughts.

20:43underrated.

20:45Alice Fraser: Underrated. Well, yeah, I think that's a pretty good thing because a 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 though. Sometimes you have pleasurably deluded thoughts, but those are like one-star thoughts because they they lead you astray so i think that's an excellent uh review allison of of the process of a really kind of nuanced summation of the complexity of the human mind i think actually i like the plants thing as well yeah it's great 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

21:30but then you talk to them and people think you're mad but you're like well it's mine and i could

21:36Alice Fraser: talk to it i know it can't answer back but yeah yeah do i i have a joke in this year's show uh about you they you know how they had the um you know there was that thing where you could turn a pet into a 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, Alice. Thank you. That is. Thank you. Like, genuinely, any time I spend an hour around you, I'm like, I just walk away going, she's such a f***ing good joke writer.

22:13Sorry to swear, but yeah. It's great writing.

22:16Alice Fraser: I'm going to take that and use the testimonials fiddle. 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. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by the ToothSonic 5000. This sonic toothbrush doesn't just brush, it generates targeted subsonic tremors that fracture plaque at a molecular level and also possibly your teeth. Side effects include a 4.2 magnitude event during flossing. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by the Void-O-Matic 3D Printer, a 3D printer that prints objects, specifically the empty space around them.

23:00Alice Fraser: Want a coffee mug? This will give you everything but the Voidomatic 3D printer. It's already done its job. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Juvenessence Jellyfish Jelly. This tropical, topical cream reverts your skin to a plush, infantile softness as long as you remain suspended in the lush waters of tropic. The catch, your internal skeleton, retains its current brittle status. You will look like a Cherubic Renaissance painting but move like a rusted iron gate. Juvenessence jellyfish jelly. Available now from all Sephoras. And that's your ad section for today. Sperm news now!

23:44Alice Fraser: Yes! 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. Zazziness. As in 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.

24:25Alice Fraser: 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. I mean, you can't circumcise sperm. 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 Clifford, you've met 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?

25:14I 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...

25:23Alice Fraser: Just one jacked sperm. Just like walking straight to a 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 there's biomarkers because they're so hench and fragile.

26:06Are they hench? Are they fragile? I can't talk about this without going into some kind of allegory for modern masculinity basically please do yeah it's a micro reflection you know it's a what a

26:18Alice Fraser: a metonym for the masculine fragility slash uh two yeah two million 200 million per milliliter of ejaculate yeah wow there's so many sperms such so inefficient so such a kind of uh let's throw it at the wall and see approach isn't it you think we'd be more refined by this stage or maybe it's so 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 the thing about like not to be uh i think men want as little culpability as possible when it comes into the conception process it's a very much like uh i i I like this kind of a marker system though.

27:11I feel like we'll see this probably on dating sites where men add in their height and said, I hear this matters. And also I've good quality sperm.

27:19Alice Fraser: 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, you know, no one talks about, yeah, no one talks about, you know, penis quality, which is yeah things like availability uh frequent you know appropriateness of erections you could you can perfectly proportion penis and if it's getting harder to co-workers funeral that is a bad quality penis absolutely absolutely not to kink shame but Janet was lovely um do you think that's what HR is essentially kink shavers I do like the idea that we become so like sex positive in 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 kink shame you but you do need to provide better customer service that's a great sentence not to kink shame you.

28:24Alice Fraser: I'm going to start all of my performance reviews. No kink shaming here. Yeah. Your numbers are terrible.

28:37Alice Fraser: It works for so many things. Google reviews. Um, yeah. Yeah. Wouldn't that be amazing? It's like, um, yeah. Uh, actually, actually anytime I'm going to Google review a restaurant now, I'm going to be like, not to kink shame, 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 to kink shame, but that was too damn long. He's like the edging of directors.

29:14The transcendentally boring mumblecore and then something happens out of nowhere. It's just like the geological plates, I think.

29:20Alice Fraser: Yeah. Tectonic approach to cinema. Yeah.

29:26Alice Fraser: And moving on, controversy news now. Did you hear how I said that with VAR? It's about the video recording technology that they're using to question the decisions of referees in the World Cup. Robin Clifford, 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 steinousel co-ocan 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.

30:08And 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. What matters really is 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.

30:42And 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.

31:17Loads of their officials were arrested in their underpants in Zurich in a luxury hotel raided by the FBI. And there's been loads of accusations of bribery.

31:26Alice Fraser: Not to kink shame. 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 underpants. And that was the last thing that everybody wanted. Just hundreds of billions of sperm. Of unknown quality.

31:52So 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 arguably the best player of all time, Messi. And, you know, some teams have been so, I mean, the decisions against them 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.

32:28So 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.

32:41Alice Fraser: 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.

33:20Alice Fraser: 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 I 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.

34:05Yeah.

34:09Exactly. It's like an animated dad screams at you from the touchline and it's all just a kind of another great outlet for men's low sperm pounce. 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, that they are the most handsomest of men. 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 were having a bit of a catch up and I was yapping away 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

34:58Alice Fraser: and continued 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 i is there like specialist um trainers for footballers with um acting do you think now there should be like an intimacy coordinator but for tackles or they should go to like gollier like crown 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 gallier i feel like i feel like footballers and gallier people have that in common yeah i'm not sure if i know anyone who's coming out come out of gallier 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

36:02but yeah with a suspiciously strong emphasis on the ethical yeah ironic

36:11Alice Fraser: sorry that's good and that brings us to our celebration today 10 years of pokemon go uh 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, you know, 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.

36:56Alice Fraser: And of course, the way in which the people using their phones to scan the areas to find the Pokemons has been used to sell the data for military application. Alison Spittel, 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 forward there yes yes and i have friends that are still doing pokemon go um so i'm very happy for them people have been saying that um what was it i know a friend comedians that are still in a whatsapp group that do pokemon go regularly and uh i i feel like they're just indoor twitchers in a way and uh i 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 um but um yeah it's uh yeah it's very cool um I 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 uh now that I just I just don't bother catching up with them and they and they become so um niche as well it kind of was like Pokemon back in the day you had your fire electricity or Bulbazaar was my favorite um because I liked Bulbazaar because it 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 um but now they have Pokemons that are so so niche it could be like um I'm gonna make up a Pokemon for the sake of it uh like light bulbasaur um an LED Pokemon uh sorry this is I just literally looked in the corner and there was a light bulb and I was like right think of a Pokemon involving that or like uh what else do we have uh british politics for dummies bookazor uh there's another i feel like on one hand i think it's very nice that people are doing something in community it's one of the 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 uh you know even more effective at bringing people together than, for example, dating apps, which seem to be making people hate one another more and more and more.

39:34Alice Fraser: I think, 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 something that seems playful and innocent, you really not knowing what's going to, you know, 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.

40:18and I think it's a problem that we think of war and very serious violent things like that as a 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

40:34Alice Fraser: trivialization 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 um a bit worrying all the things things like saying blue no matter who or that kind of thing is like and the terrible moral dilemma that we're just in 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 jigglypuff i'm just going to think of genocide now this is really bumming me out genocide puff that's the 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 more like poke a man with a sword until his blood comes out and he dies.

41:39Yeah. I've just looked it up. There's a woodpecker Pokemon. Oh, my God. It's called Pipek. Pikipek. That's what it's called. And what does it do? Oh, it just pops wood. Yeah, imagine if Pikipek is like, so Pikipek is the woodpecker Pokemon and it sends drones to kill those woodpeckers.

42:03Alice Fraser: and that brings us to the end of this week's episode of the gargle where can people find and support your work robin um i'm doing a ambient comedy show called roger's velvet rendezvous 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 allison Spiddle where can people find and support your work so I'm going to be at the Edinburgh Fringe for uh for the last week of the Edinburgh Fringe at like 11 20 during the day it's called uh it's called Finger Guns it's a work in progress show um and uh I'm also going to be doing Daniel Kitson has um 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 a Sunday come along to that I have a podcast called uh I have a podcast God ignore that feeling and we got a Patreon and we're making really good episodes.

42:56We're dressing up as a nun, not me and Fern together as one nun, two separate nuns and we're going to 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.

43:29Alice Fraser: 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, Queen's Theatre. I don't know. I know it goes Kings and then Queens on the 23rd of July.

44:10Alice Fraser: Then thereafter, I'll 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, an Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Harry Gordon. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next time.