The Gargle is BACK!

0:00Alison Spittle: Hello, I am Andy Zaltzman, as you may know. The Bugle, as well as being the world's only ever longest-running and arguably best audio newspaper for a visual world, is one of the very few fully independent media empires remaining in this thus far very silly millennium. Our voluntary subscribing listeners have made this possible, and you, if you are not already one, can join them to keep our shows free, flourishing and independent for the rest of all eternity. Disclaimer, eternity may not be completely eternal. Get more of what you love, exclusive subscriber-only content, including the almost monthly Ask Andy show, in which I, Andy, answer your questions, plus fresh hits of Bugle merch.

0:39Alison Spittle: We just sent our premium subscribers a jigsaw with my face on it. If that doesn't sell it, nothing will. I and my wonderful cohort of co-hosts will continue to blast the Bugle's trademark cocktail of satire, insight, puns, disinsight and unashamed high-grade drivel into your ears and all over the planet. Here's to another 18 and a half years minimum. To become a true hero, or just to join the voluntary subscription scheme, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

1:23Alice Fraser: We're back! We're back! This is us. We are returned from the wilderness of not being a podcast. And we are now once more a podcast. Welcome to season two of The Gargle, the fortnightly tech and science pullout section of the Bugles audio newspaper for a visual world. Now available in a visual format via our YouTube channel, thereby directly contradicting the sub headline of the audio newspaper. To be fair, we're not the only newspaper going back on its tagline as the now orphaned Google's Don't Be Evil and the Washington Post's Democracy Dies in Darkness are reported to be looking for new homes.

1:58Alice Fraser: That's a joke. They're not being reported to be doing anything anymore. There's no such thing as journalism, just comedians doing meta-commentary on increasingly nested podcasts. Yes, the gargle is back. We're back and no longer doing none of the politics, all of the news, because it turns out it's impossible to do satire about tech and science news that does not touch on politics anymore because all the people doing science and technology newsworthy things are balls deep in fucking democracy. So it'll come up once in a while. We'll try to keep things accurate, but also light because democracy dies in darkness.

2:29Alice Fraser: Do you like my new tagline? I got it in an Amazon returns box. On to the news. But before that, I would like to welcome our guests, the grandson of Frankenstein Jr. and the godfather of alternative comedy. It's John Luke Roberts. Welcome.

2:43Alison Spittle: Hello, hello. Lovely to be here and lovely to have an introduction to the podcast made, I think, entirely of caveats. Yes.

2:52Alice Fraser: That's what I always say. Start on the back foot. Begin as you mean to have been going on.

2:58Alison Spittle: Mega quibble. And then we can start.

3:00Alice Fraser: And then we can begin. And welcoming back podcaster's extraordinaire, professor of the best of early 2000s entertainment culture, Alison Spittel. Pew, pew, pew, pew.

3:11John Luke Roberts: Hello. How are you doing? I'm very, very excited to be back. it's strange the gargle not existing for a while, do you know what I mean? It felt like it felt like I was another entity, you know, that was just a god and now the god has returned and it's seeking vengeance.

3:33Alice Fraser: That's us, we are Xena Warrior Princess forged in the heat of battle. Let's have a look at the front cover of this week's Glossy Magazine. The front cover of This week's science and technology glossy pullout is K-pop demon hunters phenomenon joining the fight against climate change. Trying to bring the hon moon by slaying pollutant big bosses with their catchy tunes. Smiling into the camera posed in cute proximity to one another. And the tagline is, let us show you how to recycle. Open brackets, classic story tropes for an uncritical child audience. And then the sub tagline, seriously don't underestimate the power of a tech savvy, ethically righteous youth fandom with spare money and time.

4:13Alice Fraser: to whom mortgages mean nothing. On the front cover as well, teasers for the inside that include Big Bang Cocaine Corn Flakes, Where to Put Your Penis This Spring, and Amazon's Secret Inner Emotional Battle Revealed! Does knowing you're hollowing out the book industry by fucking over authors make your golf swing better or worse? And Disney Plus has added a content warning on some episodes of The Muppet Show, and not because 90 % of the characters are being continuously fisted. Our satirical tattoo. Our satirical cartoon this week is titled Crypto Riches and it's a picture of Scrooge McDuck in his crypto vault diving into a huge pile of constantly fluctuating nothing.

4:57Top story this week, Pink Squirrels News.

5:01Alice Fraser: Alison Spittel, you are our Pink Squirrels correspondent. Can you tell us a little bit about this story?

5:08John Luke Roberts: Yeah, Alice, I have pink hair and also on oral contraception. So these squirrels are truly my spirit animal. Basically, I've been aware of this since I was a kid. There's been a kind of battle between the grey squirrel and the red squirrel. and the grey squirrel is the brash American cousin of the red squirrel and have been have been released into Britain and are taking over the place they are killing the red squirrels with a thing called squirrel pox and they're destroying trees as well they're really really efficient like Americans they're really efficient at destroying the natural environment so so there's been a bit of a pushback um and what i love is i think this is the nicest pushback this is they're basically uh putting humane traps in uh filling it with hazelnut um butter and uh and a and a red dye that turns their fur pink and uh hopefully in a couple of uh months uh they're going to fill that with uh contraception and they're going to do the cull that way which is quite nice because they They have tried coals other ways where they've had volunteers to come in and shoot the squirrels.

6:27John Luke Roberts: And what I would love to know is like, who are these volunteers? Do you know, like who's volunteering to go postal against sentient beings? And yeah, they're hoping that this will help the red squirrel population thrive again, because at the moment they are in danger. The grey squirrels have taken over. They've done a bit too much. I think it's maybe maybe red squirrels are like little incels and they think that the pink haired people have had too much power. And, you know, some people have shot them. But now they've decided to call them the contraceptive way, which is beautiful. I'm very in favor of that.

7:14Alice Fraser: It is it is a humane way to sort of, you know, the oral contraceptive way of keeping the numbers down. Although, as you say, in human societies, I think we know that the best way to keep a squirrel population down is to require two incomes to be able to purchase a house and give women the ability to read. That seems to be the double knock.

7:34John Luke Roberts: They should give the red squirrels like deodorant, you know, like I love the diary of a CEO guy. It's like, how do we how do we help these incels? And it's like by by making women, you know, have sex with them. And it's like, no, why don't you teach these men skills like, you know, washing under their armpits and eye contact? And maybe that would be helpful. Sorry, I was talking over here. No, it's OK.

7:59Alison Spittle: It's hard for red squirrels. I do want to defend the red squirrels a little bit. It's hard as a squirrel to wash under your armpits because your arms are so little that getting them over to the other side is is is difficult enough. but this isn't the the pink dyed oral contraceptives which i think the pink dye is there to let you know they've been uh been sterilized um it's not the first thing they've tried they did try before like just just going up to the squirrels and whispering about the eco apocalypse so that they would think i probably shouldn't have kids should bring up a world kids in a world like this and then there was then there was the condoms and the condoms i think was trickiest to get close enough to get them on.

8:40Alison Spittle: So this, in many ways, is an improvement over that.

8:45Alice Fraser: Well, certainly it was a worse list, the list of people who were volunteering to come in and put tiny condoms on squirrels than it was the list of people who were coming into massacre squirrels. You would think that you'd be more okay with the volunteers for the condom putting on, but that doesn't seem to have intuitively been the case. people seem to be morally more accepting of people who want to massacre squirrels and people who

9:12John Luke Roberts: who want to help them put a condom on yeah it's like when a great british break off a couple of years ago people on twitter r.i.p twitter um were very interested in the size of a squirrel's balls there was a squirrel used in like b-roll and it had massive massive balls and there was a whole like national debate about it.

9:35Alice Fraser: I mean, that is an interesting squirrel fact when they drop their testicles. That's how oak trees grow.

9:44John Luke Roberts: That's why their cheeks are so full as well. But I love the idea of like, in the article as well, they were talking about how different countries have dealt with different invading species. In Delhi, they tried the oral contraceptive method with macaque monkeys, but it didn't work because as we all know, macaque monkeys, they love the pull-out method. Pull-out macaque. Very good.

10:12John Luke Roberts: That's what you want to hear. That's what you want to hear from somebody. You're like, this dude, I really trust him to do that method if he's going to say that beforehand. This is a person I don't want fathering my children.

10:25Alison Spittle: Actually, the first thing you'd say at that point, I think, is, oh, my God, a talking monkey.

10:31Alice Fraser: I mean, and then also have an existential crisis about whether you indeed are a talking monkey. Because you'd better be, because otherwise, why are you f***ing a monkey?

10:45Alice Fraser: And that brings us to our monster stars news now. And this is where astronomers talking about things that happened billions of years ago make them sound exciting so that we care about them now. Astronomers analysing data from Webb have discovered evidence of gigantic stars that formed right after the Big Bang. These supermassive big holes, black holes that have existed. There were supermassive black holes that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. They couldn't hypothesise where they'd come from, but now they have hypothesised that pre-big holes that there was monster stars that were between 1 ,000 and 10 ,000 times that of our sun.

11:32Alice Fraser: John Luke Roberts, you're our supermassive holes correspondent. Can you tell us a bit more about this story?

11:38Alison Spittle: I've been losing weight. How dare you? No, that's a joke. As holes correspondent. Actually, I don't think it's quite fair for you to have a go at astronomers for trying to make us interested in things that happened billions of years ago because that's literally all they do.

11:52Alice Fraser: That's me encouraging them.

11:53Alison Spittle: Everything they tell us is old news. You know, get over it. I mean, it's incredible the amount of work they've done. So, yeah, so a supermassive black hole is like a massive black hole, but it's gone into a telephone box and spun around. And they couldn't exist with normal-sized stars, so they worked out, they didn't know how these things existed just a billion years after Big Bang, but they've tested the nitrogen levels, and you find out that there's an imbalance of nitrogen around because you find those little metal canisters just in the gutter by the pavement. And so the astronomers looked at them and worked out that actually monster stars, yes, monster stars, which is what we call a star that's done terrible things because we can't tolerate the idea that an ordinary star would be capable of such things because that would make us doubt our own sun's decency.

12:47Alison Spittle: Anyway, the monster stars, because they existed, that means that that's why supermassive black holes existed. And monster stars are 1 ,000 to 10 ,000 size, the size of our own star, of our sun, which actually makes me feel a bit like, oh, I thought we were special and actually we're just next to this dweeby little star who's nothing compared to these big old monster stars. And I guess that's good because we're not going to end up next to a supermassive black hole. But that's the story. that because something, scientists have gone, that seems weird that those things exist now. And then they've gone, oh, that's why, probably.

13:28Alice Fraser: Well, I mean, yes, apparently these mega stars were just sort of wrongly calibrated. They burned very brilliantly for a short time and then immediately collapsed, much like the modern stars of our celebrity firmament.

13:43John Luke Roberts: They say that like they burn bright for a quarter of a million years, which I think is the monster star equivalent of the 27 club um you know it's just the year where they're gone they're gone if you're if you're any kind of decent monster star quarter of a million is where you're out or if not you just grow old and become like a red dwarf isn't it a red dwarf what what does a star become after it after it's uh uh a civilian what's the what's the uh what's the word for a star in retirement I'm so bad with space like genuinely anytime I try and learn about space Brian Cox comes on the television and I'm like I don't feel special about my seasonal affective disorder anymore I don't want to know about how tiny I am in comparison to all these

14:31Alice Fraser: massive things well I mean the good thing about not being interested in space Alison is that we're all in space all the time so it's okay good that's it so when I'm watching heated rivalry

14:44John Luke Roberts: and I'm watching two hockey players live out their love, I could be like, that's space. They're just exchanging atoms. This is a beautiful space.

14:56Alice Fraser: Yeah, everything is science fiction.

14:59John Luke Roberts: Yeah, do you think it's science fiction that two hockey players who are rivals from different countries? Have you seen Heed Rivalry?

15:08Alice Fraser: I've not. I've only read the book because I'm a hipster like that.

15:12John Luke Roberts: I love this. You're like, yeah. Well, I've just recently relearned how to read. So I do need to get back at the heated rivalry. But the TV series was quite fun, quite fun to watch. Sorry, I'm taking this away from space. That's how little I want to speak about space. I'm like, have you seen the TV series where two men are riding each other?

15:38Alison Spittle: You just took it to personal space.

15:40Alice Fraser: Speaking of billionaires fondling space, there was a pro-billionaires march against a proposed new billionaires tax in San Francisco. A bunch of people came out in order to protest for the rights of billionaires, it being San Francisco. It was immediately met by an extraordinarily large counter-protest of people who were not so keen on people who were keen on billionaires. John Luke Roberts, you've got a moustache.

16:07Alison Spittle: can you unpack this story for us oh oh does that mean i'm super rich or that's good yes oh that's nice oh then i'm against this tax i'm coming out against it uh yeah it was a five percent tax that they're having voted through uh and somebody tried to organize a protest which was very small uh although i saw one of the signs which said billionaires build the future and that i think like i mean i don't think and it took me a while to work out that's pro-billionaire because I was thinking, what, this future? Thanks a bunch, billionaires. Didn't want this. No, but in their defence, because it was very small, it's just because a couple of people were hoarding all the placards and they were arguing that this would trickle down to the streets.

16:55Alison Spittle: But in the end, that didn't turn out to be the way things work.

16:59Alice Fraser: No, I mean, it is an interesting, they made some interesting arguments. of course they suggested that this tax would chase billionaires out of the state that the billionaires are wealth and job creators for all of those people who very much enjoy pissing into a plastic bottle at the end of their 13-hour shift uh important there i mean there are good jobs that billionaires provide as well but they come on the backs of the bad jobs and i guess we all have to come to terms in ourselves with whether we are willing to deal with slightly less convenience in our lives uh or whether we would rather flush our ethics down the toilet and get that thing right now that we really want.

17:37Alison Spittle: I prefer to put my ethics into a plastic bottle at the end of a 13-hour shift.

17:45Alice Fraser: The other argument at the end of the speechifying, at the end of the protest, somebody said, some people think that nobody should be billionaires. We believe that everybody should be billionaires, thereby proving he does not understand how money works. Totally. And making me feel sorry for him rather than angry with him about the whole March thing. Yeah, that's an argument for hyperinflation, isn't it? Yeah. One billion dollars for a Mars bar, please. I do feel like these people, they're doing this protest this month.

18:24John Luke Roberts: It feels like a very bad time to defend billionaires, especially this month with everything that's coming out in the news. It feels like starting a Gary Clitter fan club. after his trip to PC world and the rest. And they're like, well, we got to focus on how good the music is. Like this feels, it just feels, it just feels very pointed. And where are these, I love this kind of thing of like, we're afraid of the billionaires leaving the area. And it's like, it's like they, unless you live on a small Caribbean island, they're not living in your area. They're living in these tax havens or, well, they never live in Ireland.

19:03John Luke Roberts: They utilize all the kind of lax tax stuff in Ireland, but nobody ever chooses to live there. We're not like the Virgin Islands or, you know, any kind of beautiful place. No one is going to live in Navin. No billionaire is going to come to Navin. Sorry, Navin is for specifically Irish people. You know, I wouldn't live there and I have no house. So that's my view on it. Like, look, if you can see, this is a visual podcast. I'm living in what looks like a tenement. I've got my washing out behind me. You know, I've got my little yoga mat and my bit of art. And this is what I pay 650 quid a month for.

19:46John Luke Roberts: No sitting room. This is my life. I'm washing, I'm drying my clothes above my bed, probably getting a respiratory disease whilst doing it. But this is my life. I choose to be an artist.

19:59Alice Fraser: As do we all. Speaking of which, it is hard to afford a life in the arts. So it is now time for your ad section. Your ad section now. Because if we don't do ads, you have to pay directly for this. And let's be frank, I don't trust either of us to like me enough for that. Have you lost fitness due to laziness or the irresistibly oncoming onslaught of age? Are you worried that your new sedentary lifestyle has left you unfit for the real world with its stares and possibly incipient breakdown of civil order. Got some authoritarian goons to chase down the street in your dressing gown while you wave a menacing saucepan?

20:35Alice Fraser: Well, get right back to cardiovascular spectacular with the Miracle Instant Health Treadmill Solution. Have I got the product for you? Have I got the product for you? I have got the product for you. It's a secret surprise in nice wrapping paper and it's on the end of this stick and it's on a string and I've hung it off the front of this here treadmill. If you can reach the miracle solution, it's yours. Until then, or you figure out how to walk around a treadmill, you'll just have to keep running and reaching. Miracle instant health treadmill solution. You're nearly there. Spoiler alert, the secret surprise is half a glass of water.

21:16Alice Fraser: The great thing about getting older is that as you get more blotchy and worn, your eyes get worse. So you have a built-in beauty filter when you look in the mirror. The only problem is you can't be sure the rest of the world will look at you so kindly. Introducing the Blurtiful Acid Mist, an algorithmically intelligent decommissioned Russian chemical nanoweapon which will precede you into any room and mildly blind anyone with too piercingly perfect a perspective on your hideous face. The Blurtiful Acid, available online at... Ah, I can't read the website! And that brings us to more of our science and technology news.

21:54Alice Fraser: This is the news which apparently is new news and excitingly new scientific news about the fact that early morning inductions seem to shorten labour times and reduce the need for cesarean sections by aligning the process of labour with your circadian rhythms. People tend to naturally go into labour in the early hours of the morning and so it turns out that if you do the artificial induction in the early hours of the morning, similar to how your body would normally work if you were a person planning to give birth that morning, it would be easier and better for you and it is just so good to find this out now after we've been giving birth for hundreds of thousands of years.

22:35Alice Fraser: It's almost like we might have taken an interest before this. Alison Spittel, you're our early morning correspondent. Condent, can you tell us a little bit more about this story? Yeah.

22:46John Luke Roberts: So this is basically the circadian rhythms. I'm a bit of a morning person myself. I have a morning routine. And I'm sure to include this into my early morning routine by giving birth. I feel like I was what time were you born at? Like this feels like a very kind of as a woman, I know what time my friends were born at because they tell each other and ask me when they're trying to figure out their their horoscopes and stuff. I was born at like eight o 'clock in the morning. And I do feel like like I am more of a morning person. and uh it's it just once again is kind of showing that like uh medicine is not bothered to do kind of any research into women's health really and we all we're finding out so much so late in the day if you get me uh and and this is like uh it's about a third of labors in the uk and the us are now induced i mean they're brought on so so a third a third of all uh labor is uh in the uk and australia and the us is induced and um they're commonly recommended if the baby's overdue

24:07Alice Fraser: also uh i think it's like four out of five first pregnancies are more than a week overdue which means that they just tell you the wrong length for a pregnancy they've just been telling

24:16John Luke Roberts: Really? Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, because you are the only person, I think, that has given birth on the panel. Like, how did the news affect you? Which panel did you give birth on, Alice?

24:33Alison Spittle: Podcasting has gone too far.

24:35Alice Fraser: I should check that, given that this is a science podcast. I should check that fact. But somebody told it to me and I believed it.

24:41Alison Spittle: Well, when I read that they found out that you should induce childbirth in the morning, I did panic because I thought, Well, every morning. And I always find waking up hard enough without having to go through this as well.

24:51John Luke Roberts: I know. I have to floss my teeth and do vitamins without a tell of it. How do you find enough time in the morning to do all the things that we're supposed to do anyway?

25:01Alice Fraser: And that brings us to our penultimate story. This is the story that I'm entitling The Dogs of War, which sounds like it's a cute story, but it's actually a very sad story. Apparently, exposure to the conflict in Ukraine has very quickly transformed pet dogs into wild dogs. They behave in ways that are seen in wolves, coyotes or dingoes. So there was a survey done of a number of dogs surviving in the front lines of the battle front in Ukraine. John Luke Roberts, you like bones. Can you unpack this story for us?

25:38Alison Spittle: Yeah, it is a sad story. So I will try and make it unreasonably jolly. They've gone round to dogs and they've done a survey saying like, hello, would you mind spending a few minutes doing a survey? Well, I've done a survey for you, is what the dogs say. And then they say, do you feel that war has changed? You say, oh, yes, the horrors of war have changed me. That's the story. Basically, people have had to abandon their pet dogs. There's dogs who have ended up feral on the front line. Dogs, well, this is the problem. One of the ways of looking at it is these dogs are saying, well, now they have more dog-like features.

26:13Alison Spittle: They're like more of the dogs who were there have longer snouts and are kind of built like traditional wolf dog coyote, you know, the thing that they came from. But that's not because they've like evolved in some super quick way. It's because all the Dachshunds and all the French bulldogs have died off because they're not made for war and they're too easy to load into an artillery cannon.

26:35Alison Spittle: So it's just, it's quite a sad story about these dogs trying to get on, try not to hit the landmines and the doggier dogs are the better one at it so in my head I've just said it's a story about dogging on the front line um and that's funnier because it's really hard to dog on the front line because like how do you see in the tank you need a periscope yeah a little periscope one at a time comes along looks at the periscope the long way around sees what's going

26:57John Luke Roberts: on in there yeah there's a glory hole periscope as well that only a few people can use I was

27:03Alice Fraser: particularly impressed by this story's um oh she's taking it away from dog and she's taking it away from dog and she's taking it back to dogs to suggest that's professionalism that's what a host does i know it was it was it was very gently sort of suggested that these were not evolutionary pressures at play these were selection pressures at play and they managed to sort of get through almost the entire article without suggesting that any of the dogs were you know doing anything as sort of upsetting as dying, but they did not steer clear of the fact that the way that some of these dogs are surviving is by, quote, scavenging some of the bodies of the human hordes.

27:43Alice Fraser: I feel like whoever's written this story maybe has their priorities very slightly wrong in almost exactly the same way as the people who were more upset about the volunteers for putting on tiny squirrel condoms in this podcast.

27:58Alison Spittle: Oh, they're not tiny squirrel condoms. They're normal-sized condoms. you just put it over the whole squirrel so it looks like ppe gear or something it looks like

28:07John Luke Roberts: these little squares are involved in a crime scene or they're like trying to clean out a little squirrel crime scene um yeah that that is uh i i my family own a few different dogs and none of them are surviving war like uh they can't even survive being the breed that they are never mind surviving war they're very interbred little dogs who are slowly falling apart over an eight-year cycle no way are they dealing with Putin or anything like that fair play to these dogs

28:43Alice Fraser: fair play to them well done dogs and it does it does show an egregious lack of foresight in our breeding protocols over the last couple of hundred thousand years that we've been breeding dogs to be our companions and increasingly useless accessories. We were not thinking about how they would survive in a wartime situation. We were not building towards bomb-proof dogs. We were building towards ones that have the faces of squished-in bats. Exactly. I don't like some of the little dogs.

29:18Alison Spittle: Well, oh, so I guess you're in support of Putin's invasion of Ukraine then. Sounds like you are. Oh, he's finally seen off those French bulldogs. You people appall me, you podcast hosts.

29:35Alice Fraser: Are you looking for a poet who always has the last word? It's P.S. Eliot. Are you looking for a crime novelist who'll sell well at an auction? It's Agatha Christie's. Are you looking for an author who always swims upstream? it's Salmon Rushdie. That's, oh my gosh. P.S. The P.S. in P.S. Eliot is always anti-Semitism.

30:08Alice Fraser: Speaking of appalling, the patients who have more than one medical record are far more likely to experience serious harm after being admitted to hospital according to US Journal, BMJ Quality and Safety. Research that was published in the BMJ Quality and Safety Journal indicates that people who have mixed up records, duplicate records or their information being kept in a number of different places are more likely to die. 11 % of those who are inpatients die compared with 2.5 % of people whose records are all straight, which feels like an extremely significant, statistically significant number. They're not sure if it's causation or correlation, if you are more likely to have mixed up records, if you are less good at staying alive.

30:57Alice Fraser: I don't know what the causal link would be. But Alison Spittel, you are impatient indeed. So can you unpack this story for us?

31:07John Luke Roberts: Yeah, so it seems like people who move around a lot are going to get punished. And it's basically that it seems like if you stay in the one place, if you stay in the one place, you're less adventurous. So you probably have less reason to go into hospital. I feel like most of the people who go into A &E through accidents, through jumping out of a plane or something like that, will be people who go on a gap year or something. You know, you're not really going to if you're staying in your small town, you're not bungee jumping. You're not doing parkour. you probably have less reason to go to A &E so I'd like to see these stats uh properly but it it does feel like once again uh with health um you're kind of you're kind of being messed about if you if you do have to move around a lot people who have to move around a lot um are people who maybe go for economic reasons and stuff so I feel I don't know every time I read any of these news stories I feel like once again uh poorer people are getting fecked over really well so it's not

32:17Alice Fraser: just people who are moving around it's people who have sort of medical admin problems at various times they might have come in different times but not been put on the same record or had a number of files open for them or uh gotten in some confusing situation and been unable to wade through hospital admin to resolve it and then of course there is the 90 percent of people who go into hospital who are jack reacher and have no records at all um he does fine though he seems to does fine feel well i mean we don't know how many jack reachers there are that's the problem and maybe there are duplicate jack reachers but only one medical record uh john luke roberts yeah so

32:58Alison Spittle: it seems like the problem is you've got two sets of notes and one of them will say like oh and by the way their bones are dissolvable in water and the other one won't mention it and you get the wrong notes and then you you give them a bed bath and they sort of um dissolve that seems that's that's basically the problem it's it's not having it's not having one set of complete notes but having sort of oh this wasn't mentioned here and so this that's what would you would assume i mean as i say that we don't know if it's correlation or causation it's just statistics so i would like to see the data although i would say if i did see the data i wouldn't have a clue what to do with data so probably show it to another statistician it's probably the thing to do well at least they

33:39John Luke Roberts: don't have to rely on my mum I remember I went into hospital last year and uh the I had this um I was I was kind of I had sepsis so it was pretty serious and the doctors were saying to me that are you allergic to penicillin because we need to give you penicillin I was like I don't know I've never I don't think I've ever had penicillin before I'll ring my mum so I rang up my mum and I was like mum mom am I allergic to penicillin and she goes oh I don't know Alison it's either you or your sister either you or your sister so I rang up my sister and I said are you allergic to penicillin and she goes yeah yeah I am and so I sent in a doctor's like give me the penicillin it turns out both of us are allergic to penicillin and mom has multiple daughters I should have rang all of my sisters and I was I I look like bagpuss genuinely I look like the devil himself I was I was just expanded and read for about a week so like uh i you can't even rely on your mum to keep proper hospital notes and she loves you the most so how are you going to rely on the medical system well she either

34:41Alison Spittle: loves you or your sister the most it's hard to know yeah that's it's either me or my sister which one are you again you're the one who's allergic to love or the one who's allergic to

34:50John Luke Roberts: penicillin i wouldn't know i haven't had either i haven't had either both of them grow on moldy

34:59Alice Fraser: bread that brings us to the end of this week's returning season two episode one of the gargle with our wonderful wonderful returning friends of the podcast co-hosts allison spittle have you

35:14John Luke Roberts: got anything to plug i've got so much to plug i got a tour called big which is a bit about that sepsis that i had uh i'm hitting ireland uh at the end of february and then the uk uh in in march and then australia in april and then in june i'm at leicester square theater um so please come along to that i've got a new podcast called ignore that feeling with fern brady and the first episode is out this week and another podcast called Magazine Party with Poppy Hillstead. You can go on Instagram, find out everything about me and yeah and have a great day. Pew, pew, pew.

35:52Alice Fraser: Pew, pew, pew. John and Roberts, have you got anything to plug?

35:55Alison Spittle: I was listening to Magazine Party on a car trip recently and it's a lot of fun so I recommend Magazine Party.

36:01John Luke Roberts: Oh, that's great.

36:03Alison Spittle: What have I got to plug? Well, there's my podcast Soundteap um which you know but at the moment it's the um god there's no way there's no way of talking about this without sounding like an utter arsehole um it's the 30th anniversary of infinite jest the book being written and published and that there's a few things but basically i made a documentary about it a few years ago which i we made to sort of listen to to find out whether you'd like the book or not because you can't recommend the book without it being problematic and i wouldn't recommend the book necessarily but we made quite a fun podcast um in which i include the line about infinite jest it's a bit of an unread flag and because of that alone i think you should listen to it it's on bbc sounds um under the exploding library uh documentary series that is an excellent

36:51Alice Fraser: podcast i've listened to it i've uh also listened to magazine party so i can recommend both uh Magazine Party and SoundHeap Podcast and the Infinite Jess Podcast. So please seek them out if you're a podcast listener and you are. This, I, me, I am on patreon.com slash alicefraser. It's where I put all of my stuff because I don't trust the algorithms anymore. So basically it's a functionally a mailing list. You can subscribe there for free or for money. I won't object if you do it for money. If you do it for money, you can join my twice weekly writers meetings. Occasionally I do bonus writers meetings.

37:25Alice Fraser: like this week I'm doing a writer bugle with me on that. So if that sounds like up your alley, patreon.com slash Alice Fraser and join in the writers meetings if you're writing anything or if you want to be writing anything or if you don't want to be writing anything but feel you could be convinced to write something. I am on tour as well. I will be in Newcastle, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, London and Edinburgh. If you head over to alicefraser.com, there is a gigs page there which will tell you if I'm in your town or not. You won't know otherwise. I'll just be standing directly behind you. This is a Bugle podcast, an Alice Fraser production.

38:07Alice Fraser: Your editor is Harry Gordon. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week.