The Gargle - No fun | Crypto bibles | Twitter porn

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Tiff Stevenson and Josh Gondelman join host Alice Fraser for episode 90 of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast from The Bugle - with no politics!🥳 The right not to be fun📖 Crypto bibles🐦 Twitter porn spam🤑 Crypto collapse🌳 Plants vs animalsProduced by Ped Hunter and Chris Skinner. TEAM BUGLE PODCASTS 📯Catharsis (and Tiny Revolutions) with Tiff StevensonTop Stories!The BugleThe Last Post with Alice FraserThe Bugle Ashes UrncastBush's Board Game Thing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's producer Chris from The Bugle here. Did you know that I have a new series of my podcast, Richie Firth Travel Hacker, out now? It's the show where Richie Firth and I talk about how to make travel better in our very special way. In this series, we discuss line bikes, Teslas, the London overground, and a whole bunch of other random stuff that possibly involves wheels

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

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

Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. They walk among us, strangeness hidden beneath the skin. They may be your neighbour, your friend, your lover. Their arcane power lies dormant in everyday life, waiting for a signal to emerge, when chaos will bloom as the sun rises on a new age. But for now, you'd walk past them in the street,

never notice them in your office, ignore their gaze in the mirror. They're everywhere. They're inside you right now. They are The Gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the bugle's audio newspaper visual world. This is The Gargle. I'm your host, Alice Fraser,

bringing you all the news with none of the politics. And your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Josh Gondelman and Tiff Stevenson. Welcome back. Hello. Hello. That really set a tone for how I was going to sound. It's not how I sound. It's the spookiest gargle entry.

How are you both? Oh, I'm having a week. My dog is under the weather and has to go to a vet that's far from our home in a car which she'll hate and then my wife will stress out and then I'll stress out oh it's going to be bad the rest of today is going to be really bad

the vet is in a little house with chicken legs with it back to you and you have to approach the house and ask it to turn around and the house runs away if you make eye contact with its windows. There's something specific about somebody saying, I've had a week or, ah, it's been a day, where it's like, I mean, that's just a very factual statement. Of course you've had a week.

We've all had a week. Right, always true. A week. Unless you were born at the end of the week, you've had a week. Well, before we embrace one another and comfort each other in the cuddle that is this week's top stories, let's have a look at the front cover of this magazine. The front cover this week is The Liver King.

Do you know The Liver King? He's an online raw meat influencer whose abs screamed steroids while his mouth screamed, I get these abs from eating raw meat and sleeping on a plank. The Liver King has been exposed for using $12,000 worth of steroid injections a month, to which most people said, duh, and some people who are choking down raw liver for breakfast in the dream of those abs say, oh, my God,

I've been eating raw liver for so long, I'm not sure if I know how to go on. And the people who are waiting in line to scam you next with some deranged health bunkum say, live and let liver. The satirical cartoon this week is Elon Musk's bedside table laden with caffeine-free diet cokes, one 3D printed gun, one replica American Revolution gun, and a sign that says, when you own everything, the only thing left to own is yourself. Truly. And the libs. And the libs. What was that thing? Were you triggered by the bedside table, Josh Connellman?

Yeah, I was. It triggered me. I honestly feel like if I had posted that and been like my bedside table, it would have triggered a wellness check. Every person I know would have called like an ambulance to my apartment immediately. Not because I thought I was a danger to myself, just because they would have been like, oh, Josh has become a loser at a level we've never seen. That's the loseriest photograph in human history. You've missed a box of tissues. There's definitely a box of Kleenex. You can be a billionaire. You're still wanking yourself into oblivion. Yeah, missed a box of tissues. There's definitely a box of Kleenex. You can be a billionaire. You're still wanking yourself into oblivion.

Yeah, but that's the thing. When you're a billionaire, you can just wipe your hand on the sheets and someone will bring you new sheets. Yeah, his cleanup has the highest thread count of anyone in the world. Let's have a look at our stories for this week. Top story this week is the right

not to be fun news. This is the news of a man who was fired from a consultancy firm in 2015. Tiff, you enjoy consulting. Can you unpack this story? Yes, there was a man who won the legal right not to be fun at work after refusing to embrace excessive alcoholism and promiscuity now fun at work this reminds me of during lockdown when a snazzy background on zoom was the equivalent of a wacky tie so this man was fired from a consultancy firm in 2015 for not adhering to the company's fund values which included promiscuity excessive alcohol then you read on and you find out it's in France because of course,

they'll fire you if you eat lunch at your desk. The absolute indignity. So this ruling comes after a man referred to as Mr. T was fired from a Paris consultancy firm for refusing to join in and participate in after work drinks

and team building. And they said that made him, they fired him a year later for professional incompetence and refusing to adhere to fun because he was sober and you were drunk complaining at him. And you know, this isn't going to work

because you are, Mr. T, very judgmental. And you just said, you ain't getting on no plane full. And I wanted to talk, I wanted to talk about my marriage breaking up, probably because of all of these fun work strengths that I'm at. So basically he didn't join in with getting pissed and they were like, no, you're no fun.

You're not a good listener. You're fired. And it turns out you can't do that. It turns out you can't do that because some of the things that this company did sound like proper, proper hazing. Like you had to get into a bed with a colleague. You had to simulate sexual acts,

you were required to join in this like quote-unquote fun. Like I, fun fact, I hate fun, I love facts. This sounds like my nightmare. I mean, genuinely, when I started at a law firm, I accidentally had a flower behind my ear in my entry photo, in my staff photo. And when I showed up for my first day at work, the partner had printed out my staff photo and then the staff photos of like a series of like serious looking senior partners of

the firm. And he put it on the coffee table and he said, pick the odd one out. So that's corporate fun. Like it's horrendous. And the fact that this man didn't like subscribe to corporate values i like him the more for it and the fact that they then fired him this i mean the fact that it's france meant that he had to get this on appeal uh because the first court was like go f**k yourself man uh get nude in the courtroom uh josh have you ever been fired

for not being fun enough i mean from like parties and stuff never from a strictly professional thing if you can get fired from relationships or uh friendships i think this case is fascinating and i think it's it seems like the the right stance right that you can't be fired for refusing to be fun although i have to imagine that in france you can be fired for refusing to demonstrate a world-weary ennui and existential doubt about why we bother to toil at all when our life's work will inevitably be lost to the brutal and unyielding passage of time. That is still legal to fire someone for that. And it's like a really interesting thing, right? It's a freedom of expression case, frankly, which in America is kind of close to the First Amendment.

And it really goes to show how times have changed because 35 years after the Beastie Boys won their landmark case, people are now fighting for their right to not party, which I think is like, it shows just the progress. And it's not like, you know, when I say progress, it's not the biggest civil rights issue. But I do think it's good that people shouldn't have to participate in mandatory work fun, which is the least fun fun. Although it is a little ironic that it's the French government who decided people don't have to participate in a retreat. Sorry, France, had to say it, couldn't leave that money on the table. Now it's time for your ads, your ad section now,

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Half a glass of water Shaken, stirred and given to your dungeon prisoner Along with a dry piece of bread. Revenge. Get some today. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite.

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Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts. Everywhere. Acast.com And in two things I don't believe in news, crypto Bibles. Norwegian Museum is trying to sell crypto Bibles. Josh Gondelman, you crossed yourself recently. Can you unpack this story for us? Of course. So the Nordic Bible Museum, which is my favorite captain beefhart

album is now selling nfts of the bible to raise money to to fund the museum which seems like a match made in heaven no pun intended right churches and blockchain enthusiasts are two groups united by their hatred of paying taxes so like it is really the synergy is undeniable and their love for messing with the age limit for sex. Yeah, it is. There's so much that unites these two groups that might seem disparate, but the age of consent, the hatred of taxes, it's kind of a libertarian paradise, this Bible museum. But with the speed that history moves now, a business trying to monetize NFTs and stay afloat does seem so antiquated that it could have happened in the Old Testament. And the same logic, though, that would allow for Jesus to have multiplied loaves and fishes to feed a hungry population is exactly the logic that's required to have ever believed that cryptocurrency was going to continue to increase in value forever without coming back to Earth.

So again, there is the same kind of vibe at play. And in a way, NFTs are the ultimate religious objects because they only exist if you have faith in them. And if you don't have faith in them, you don't even want to hear other people talk about them. Well, I mean, really, Jesus not really doing very much after he came out of the cave is the ultimate rug pull. Kind of the Sam Bankman Freed of latter day religious icons. In his 30s, wunderkind, parents of Stanford professors. I don't know. Tiff, have you invested in a crypto Bible?

No, but I was in a hotel the other day and they had a Bible and a playbill for Book of Mormon, which I thought was very cute. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's all made up, isn't it? Crypto, the Ten Commandments. I think what they're saying, I think the main criticism of this is that NFTs are sort of being pushed out to the younger generation. And about 30 percent of people according to this survey haven't opened a bible so they're trying to sell the bible using you know i guess we always get into the new technology i mean if they could have gone tamagotchi bibles maybe we would have all got into them in the 90s i don't know but they're talking about having a holographic

jesus which was my favorite bit they were looking at the possibility of creating something with holograms like holographic jesus like dashboard my favorite bit. They were looking at the possibility of creating something with holograms, like holographic Jesus, like dashboard Jesus, but you can invite him to parties, dress code sandals, bring your own bottle of water. He'll turn it into wine. It's one of his things. I feel like the point of the Bible is that it is fungible.

Isn't that the whole mission of Gideon, the Gideon business was to have Bibles be interchangeable. You don't open the Gideon's Bible in each different hotel room and be like, ooh, this one's, you know, limited edition. They're not different. The point is that they ought to be as much the same as possible. Right. I mean, that's kind of what Gutenberg was about even going back that far,

right? Standardizing and making it the same for everybody. And I think it was very nice of Steve Gutenberg to do that for us. Is that why he disappeared from sitcoms? I think the printing is where it all went south. I want an age where we've got the Bibles and then you don't know what kind of weird thing the monk is going to do for you. Hey, is it a cat doing a wee?

I don't know. We should have one standard Bible, right? We don't need, as Tiff was describing, to each have our own personal Jesus. That's what Depeche Mode was warning us about. I mean, really, what you need is some sort of Google Docs Bible where everyone just gets to have a consensus Bible and everyone can contribute or take away from it. Essentially, Wikipedia. In America, I think the consensus Bible is guns somehow.

That's where we get to. Turn the other cheek and put an AR-15 against it. Isn't there a song called God and Guns? I'm sure there's a Lynyrd Skynyrd song called God and Guns is what this country was built upon. You might as well get up and run if you want to take my god and guns he refers to it as the peacemaker in the dresser drawer now is that the bible or is that the gun or is it nfts it's bitcoin i mean i wouldn't be surprised if hotels had nft bibles because everything else

has gone digital in a hotel room now to the point of insanity. Like I tried to order room service when I was in one the other day and they were like, no, you've got to. We gave you a little QR code when you checked in. So you've got to download that on your phone. And I was like, I can't get onto the Wi-Fi. I can't download the menu, please. For the love of God, could I just have a piece of paper I felt so old could I have a piece of paper in the room

that tells me what shitty overpriced sandwich you're going to send to my room and now there's a QR code for reading Q-O-R-I-N-T-H-I-A-N-S the peacemaker in the dresser drawer for Elon Musk would have been coasters apparently that was what people found most offensive.

Now it's time for your reviews. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Tiff, what have you brought in for us this week? A review of the culture war because Elon Musk, as we're talking about him, asked for advice on Twitter about the culture war. Elon Musk as we're talking about him asked for advice on twitter

about the culture war he said need advice what do you think about the culture war and I suggested he should dip his knob in yogurt and that should calm it down um you know so just my advice here is not a schlong in a fruit corner or a munch bunch you cannot nothing with sugar as that will encourage the candida albicans to overgrow which is what starts the problem in the first place so uh elon avoid hot baths lacy underwear and other irritants like kim kardashian and you'll be fine um so for the culture war i give it one out of five stars one out of five stars for the culture war there you want to talk about the the takeover of twitter a platform we

all enjoy so much i genuinely had a really nice time on twitter i was really ruthless about who i blocked and so i generally had a pleasant time but i just feel like one of the problems with the modern world is that people feel like that they need to express their political will by what they buy or don't buy or what they consume or not consume because they feel politically disenfranchised. If you could actually have an impact on the world around you, then it wouldn't matter so much what books you're reading or what TV shows you're watching or what Coke you're drinking. But I think it's different if you're the richest man in the world.

I feel like at that point what you choose to consume or not consume culture wars wars wise is irrelevant because you literally can put your thumb on the government like i feel like once you're that rich like once you have a billion dollars you should have to give me a thousand dollars every time i hear one of your opinions that's like a real belief i have like not just me like everyone like you should have to pay people to listen to you like it should be the the like you shouldn't get to just buy a newspaper that's that's not where the money should go you should have to give it directly like redistribute it directly to the people that have to hear your like dumb rich guy opinions if you're gonna have people working for

minimum wage in your factories like at least at least do what the Uber Eats used to do and build a fucking pyramid or a massive statue with your head on it or like, you know, something that blocks out the sun. Well, also they used to build towns, didn't they, and schools next to it. That was the philanthropy of the old days, wasn't it? We will build houses where people can live and we'll build a school near here. Now get down the mines. But at least there's a school. here. Now get down the mines. Right.

But at least there's a school. It's all company, no town anymore. Yes. Josh, what have you brought in for us to review? I've brought in a review of sitting in the second last row of Madison Square Garden to see Billy Joel play a concert. Yep. I'm jealous already.

Okay, here comes the review. and you're right to be jealous my wife and i recently went to see billy joel at madison square garden in new york city because it's nice to be the youngest people in the room sometimes and if you don't know once a month billy joel helicopters from his home on long island into manhattan like he's going to war there, and plays a concert once a month. We sat way at the top, second to last row of the stadium in the nosebleed seats as a tribute to his cocaine use in the 70s, which is fine because the only thing you miss

when you have obstructed view seats to a Billy Joel concert is Billy Joel. And we all know what he looks like. We know what Billy Joel looks like. He looks exactly like how you'd imagine the Samantha in Bernie Sanders' friend group. Bernie is the carry. You don't even want to be in the good seats. That's the secret.

You don't want to be in the good seats because it's a bunch of old, rich people who are standing, but they don't know how to dance. So they're just like upright at rigid attention like it's a firefighter's funeral. So second to last row at Madison Square Garden still lets you feel better than the people in the last row behind you. Five out of five stars. One for each song of the encore we missed when we left during We Didn't Start the Fire. Was that to beat the footfall on the way out? It absolutely was. So we went in thinking we were the youngest people, but spiritually we were the oldest. I'm going to get to the car park.

That's so embarrassing too because we didn't even drive. We just had to get to the subway. Yeah. That's so embarrassing too, because we didn't even drive. We just had to get to the subway. We were at a concert where people were like in the seated section and the front row just stood up and you're like, well,

that's the entire seated section now just standing. Yep. Right. It's just standing. Why did you buy a seat? It's like the wave, but it just stops once everybody stands. Speaking of the wave, the wave is rising uh if if by wave you mean wave of pornography on twitter this is the story that

twitter has been hit maybe due to the firing of some of its moderation team i'm not going to speculate but it's been hit with a wave of porn and spam being used by the Chinese government to obscure tweets about protests there. Josh Godelman, can you unpack this story for us? Yeah. So apparently on Twitter, when you search the name of many cities in China, it brings up a bunch of porn, obscuring news of these protests that are happening against Xi Jinping's government. Some have hypothesized that it's an intentional attack to obscure these protests. But also, like, that just seems like the right ratio, right? Most things you search online will bring up like a shitload of porn

in addition to whatever you're actually looking for, unless it's porn in case and then it is what you're looking for. The protests that I mentioned are an uprising against China's zero COVID strategy, which is so 2020, right? In America back then, I'm thinking nostalgically about it. We had our own wave of protests against our government's nearly unlimited COVID strategy, which was successful in getting the U.S. government to pivot to a completely unfettered COVID strategy.

So direct action works is the moral of the U.S. government to pivot to a completely unfettered COVID strategy. So direct action works is the moral of the story. So as Alice alluded to, right, until recently, this problem of porn spamming with these important political searches had been kept in check manually by the moderation team at Twitter. But Elon Musk has slashed the staffing for the team responsible for monitoring these kinds of messages. It's all part of his employee zero strategy, which on a long enough timeline will morph into a functionality zero strategy and finally a shareholder value zero strategy.

I think this is such a good strategy for dealing with everyday problems. If somebody is digging too deeply, asking too many questions, just flash them your tits. You know, if somebody questions a transaction that you've recently made get your dick out i don't understand why more people are not using this in everyday life just flooding flooding any kind of channel of inquiry like in real in the flesh irl yeah irl we could all get arrested for flashing someone's like why didn't you do the washing up you put your boob on their head.

It's just the way it has to be. They're not going to keep talking. I'm getting a sense of how you breastfeed now, Alice. We just need to get the children doing the washing up. That's what needs to happen. I mean, you say you had the problem with zero COVID as well. I think here as well, it was so far off the table, it wasn't even in the same house as the table.

Basically, my goal is to popularise the boob on the head just as a game. I think it's a fun game. If you've got a boob and you've got a head that it would be appropriate to put that boob on, just do it. Just gently walk up behind them and gently rest your boob on their head. Just a warm, comforting wait. It's not the same as a dick on a shoulder, which has been done quite a lot. No, that's unacceptable.

Very different. Unacceptable. Very different. Not comforting. Not comforting. And Binance news now in one of those sentences that you wouldn't have been able to say even a few years ago. now in one of those sentences that you wouldn't have been able to say even a few years ago.

Binance has pledged up to $2 billion to bail out distressed crypto firms as part of the ongoing FTX domino effect. Tiff Stevenson, you're our correspondence for Nonsense. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes, as you know, I'm well up on the crypto. I have a friend who's working at a company which is backed by crypto assets, so might actually lose his job. I'm well up on the crypto. I have a friend who's working at a company which is backed by crypto assets, so might actually lose his job. I'm only losing a thousand pound in SHIB. So this is less, I've got less skin in the game, should we say. Apparently Binance,

the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, is committing up to two billion to help support crypto firms facing financial hardships following the bankruptcy of rival exchange FTX. So basically, it's another bailout like the banks. And one of the main reasons that everyone was told to invest in crypto is because this wouldn't happen. Oh, it's safer than the banks. At least the public haven't personally bailed out the trading platform. But I don't really understand any of it. It's like if the FTSE itself collapsed. Josh, if you don't know what the FTSE is, the FTSE in the UK is when two bankers take off their shoes and flirt with each other under the table.

So there were some questions as to whether Binance deliberately tried to destabilize FTX because when it started to wobble, they offered to buy it. And then they withdrew the offer to buy it once it was revealed that it was absolutely garbage as an asset it tanked it's kind of like the coke and pepsi wars early doors when coke was going great guns and then pepsi was bankrupt and then coke offered to buy them and pepsi said no then a war happened and uh yeah yeah you know and billy joel couldn't take it anymore that i I remember from We Didn't Start the Fire. The FTSE is our top blue chip companies, which, and then blue chip itself comes from poker. That's why they're named blue chip

because it's the highest value. How many more ways do they need to tell you this is all just a big casino? Like you just need to know it's all gambling and you have the Dow Jones, which to my ear, whenever I hear the Dow Jones is down, I'm like, well, that's Welsh men, they're depressed anyway.

So I think what this teaches us, this whole crypto situation, is we should go back to Wemmick's advice from Great Expectations. I don't know if you've all read it, but Wemmick is a character in Great Expectations who advises young Pip to get involved in some portable property. Get yourself some portable property. Get yourself some portable property. So get some gold on your fingers and in your teeth and don't worry about it. I think that's great advice.

We're going to go back to the gold standard. Because with crypto, there's no standard, right? Like it's worth whatever the people that have the exchange say it's worth, essentially. And it's not backed by anything. So like, okay okay how about this binance i pledge five billion dollars do i have it sure i said i have it isn't that what crypto is potentially could the whole thing like just entirely collapse anyway if someone works out the encrypted coding for sending the in the blockchain yeah Yeah. Probably? I mean, I'm just enjoying hearing two people

that don't understand crypto explaining crypto. I think that's everyone who's ever talked about crypto. Like the people that understand it the most seem to be saying the least. Where like whenever someone who like really knows what it's about explains it, I'm like, so that's nothing, right? What you said is nothing i feel like the big red flag was when uh somebody suggested to sam

bankman freed that that ftx should have a board uh you know as a company board and he told them to go themselves and then they still invested with him. He just watched an episode of Succession and was like, I get how business is done. F*** off. Yeah. Now it's time for Plants Against Animals news. This is the news that the evolution of the roots of trees nearly ended life on Earth.

And I had to announce that very carefully because in Australia, to root means something very different to what it means in America. Did you enjoy it, Alice, when you came to London and you saw that there was a bus called the Rootmaster? I did. I enjoyed it. Too much, some would say. Too much. Josh, you've sat in a tree once and looked at the people going past wistfully with tears in your eyes. Can you unpack this story? Sure.

So apparently hundreds of millions of years ago, as plants evolved and grew more prevalent, they nearly killed off a bunch of species of animal, which does make vegetarianism feel like more of a fair fight, right? And I think if plants are going to become killing machines, you might as well eat animals, honestly. But first of all, before I really get into it, let's take this with a grain of salt because a lot of things might have happened in the past. We were just talking earlier about the Bible. But the way that it may have worked is that plants, as their root systems grew and became more complex, they kind of shook nutrients out of the soil and into the water, which sounds good in theory, right? Nutrients in the water, but it's actually, it sounds good, but it's actually terrible.

Much like planning to catch up on sleep during a long flight or turning a social media app into a quote unquote bastion of free speech. It's the public square, Josh. It's the public square. I don't like it. That's why I don't go out much. I prefer private squares. I like that my aggressive voice just gets more Australian. That mine gets more Bostonian. It's like, it's a public square guy. Are you kidding me, Ken? Dude.

Debate me, dude. The nutrients may have fed organisms like algae, right? These nutrients that end up in the water, which then may have choked out fish species. And if that's all it takes to kill off fish let them go they're weak the oceans belong to the algae now they've earned it eventually they'll kill off everything in the sea humans will kill off everything on the land and we'll have a humans versus algae face-off that we've always been building up to i didn't even know that devonian which was the time period this happened, was a time period. Because I only know the main ones, which is Triassic, Jurassic, Reebok Classic, a.k.a. the 90s.

So I thought Devonian was when you put jam first on the scone, which is such an English joke. But both of you still got it. So I'm very impressed that that translates to an American and an Aussie. But it's the age of fishes, isn't it? It's where we began. Primordial ooze to sexy, classy mermaids to club hop in Slutzer today. And I say slut lovingly because I was recently reminded, you know, and I think it was actually at my wedding that I was on the dance floor

and I should be doing a slut drop but I'm in my 40s now so I could only manage a flirty crouch I couldn't get all the way down for a slut drop um yeah what is a flirty crouch somewhere between slut drop and that marvel thing where they jump off a building and land maybe yeah there's a death there's a death drop in voguing uh and RuPaul's Drag Race and stuff like that like in as part of ballroom cop there's a like a death drop in voguing uh and rupaul's drag race and stuff like that like in as part of ballroom there's a like a death drop which is where you completely drop to the floor from standing which look it's actually an incredible gymnastic feat dance feat yeah especially done in heels and then there's a vagina drop which is where you go for a run too soon after giving birth yeah a prolapse we get a nicer way of saying prolapse but yeah i

can't do the slut drop anymore so um that's disappointing listen life goes on we get older we just can't we don't have it in us in the same way that we did how are you explaining how the the plants suffocated i think i've probably told this on on on maybe maybe the gargle before but i saw this happen in real life because on my 16th birthday i had two goldfish and they were in like a just a little goldfish like fish bowl tank thing and loads of my girlfriends came around and they got suffocated because we sprayed so much impulse body spray and jubilee perfume and hairspray for the the aerosols just like leaked into the water. When we came back, blackjack and fruit salad were just floating on top of the bowl.

That's a genuine tragedy. I mean, this is a long battle between animals and plants, between humans. I mean, I've gotten into a knockdown, drag out fight with a tree before. The tree won, but I got a few hits in. This is my favourite kind of news story because, A, it's not news because it happened in the long, distant past, and, B, it's purely speculative. Or they're sort of guessing from bits of dirt.

Please don't come at me, archaeologists. We know that plants can be bad though, right, Alice? Is that what you're saying? Well, they know that there were these massive die-offs uh five big mass extinctions during the devonian period and they're speculating that this might have been one of the causes of one of them uh but by the time all of these were done more than two-thirds of all species on the planet had been wiped out uh which i cannot help but thinking must have been the most fun reality tv show to watch survival of the fittest quite literally yeah we should know that plants are bad bastards ever

since that first snapdragon said feed me seymour we know we know have we seen day of the triffids i don't know why everyone's out there just thinking that plants are just this benign natural presence. I mean, apart from the fact I can't keep one alive in my house. You're helping us win that war. Yeah. By killing off houseplants one at a time. I will take the fight to them. Execution style.

Anyone who's ever had hay fever knows that plants are not benevolent. You've got to walk through your springtime going, Tree is f***ing my nose. that's a very stressful period of time oh yeah i've actually had horrific when i was a kid it was almost i couldn't go out during certain months so that's maybe where it stems from alex i've got a long standing uh they are my nemesis i think we got to team up with the fish against plants. That's our only solution. We've got to take land and water, and we've got to take on these plants because there's too many of them that are coming after us too hard.

Hay fever, poison ivy. Yeah, they're done. I'm going to start enlisting fish to be my allies as soon as this recording ends. Which fish would you go for first? Who naturally do you think would be good to get on board? That's a good question. I'm trying to think. Well, I'm going to find some voracious vegetarian fish

because that's, I think, who takes out the plants the hardest. So piranhas, they're lower down on the list because they're hard to convince and they eat too much meat. But I'm just going out to the the east river with some breadcrumbs just making friends and and doing some coalition building in this war against plants who are the algae is is it like starfish yeah you definitely don't want to um be talking to piranhas piranhas are the libertarians of the of the water you eat what you want to eat i'll eat what i want to. And what they want to eat happens to be your ankles. I'm on a liver tire. I'm on a liver tire. A starfish is a perfect

fish to start with, right? Because when you're going to war, you want someone that can like regrow a severed limb. So that is, yeah, that's where we go first. Starfish for sure. Yeah, starfish, the most boring wolverine. That's all the time we have for today's show tiff what have you got to plug i've got to plug my tour coming up next year for sexy brain i will be hopefully doing some shows in america and australia as well got those to announce but if you go to my instagram tiff stevenson comic yeah so just check out i've got lots of dates coming up and also my podcast i should have like catharsis yes i've got a podcast you may have been on it both of you catharsis yeah it was great i had so much fun so far we've had the two people that are on this podcast uh josh gonderman and

alice fraser uh we've had realina we've had Rialina. We've had Michael Odawale. We have coming up Janine Garofalo. We have coming up Alfie Brown. We have coming up Rosebud Baker. So we've got some fantastic guests coming up on the pod. We've also had Sindhu V. I think that's the one that's out at the moment. So yeah, go check them out.

There's probably about five, six episodes up at this point. More to come and the more you review it like and subscribe then even more to come so just make sure you do that no pressure but we really need your reviews and your ears josh what have you got to plug oh my gosh so i have a new newsletter that i send out weekly let's's say, called That's Marvelous. You can find it at joshgondelman.substack.com. And it's pep talks every week for readers and people in the news. It's a lot of fun. I'm having a really good time writing it.

And I'm still, I'm doing a lot of tour dates. It is so fun when gargle listeners come out. People come and say, they'll try to give me half a glass of water at a show. And it's really sweet. And all those tickets are available at joshgondelman.com. And I'm still at joshgondelman on Twitter, tweeting as the ship goes down, Instagram, TikTok now for some reason.

Yes, yes. I'll see you over there. But subscribe to the newsletter. Come see a live show. And I have a special called People Pleaser that you can see worldwide, I believe, on Vimeo. It's the best place to rent that outside the U.S. Thank you to our roving reporters. Our roving reporters.

You can be one of them if you would like. If you see a story that you'd like to see on the gargle, tweet us at HelloGogglers. This week, Miss Otis and James VT sent us the story of the right not to be fun at work. This week, Miss Otis and James VT sent us the story of the right not to be fun at work. Inek sent the story of the crypto bibles. And Sea Lips sent the story of plants against animals. Find me online at at alliterative on Twitter and Instagram. That's A-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-V-E.

I'm in it to the end, man. I reckon this is going to work. I reckon he's going to turn the ship around. I'm also on Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. That's one stop shop full of my stand-up specials podcasts and blogs as well as my weekly Tea with Alice salons and my weekly writers meetings, my show Kronos will be out there soon this is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser

production, your editor is Ped Hunter your executive producer is Chris Skinner I'll talk to you again next week you can listen to other programs from the Bugle including The Bugle, The Last Post Tiny Revolutions and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts. The world today is angry and not just about the important stuff. I'm Tiff Stevenson and I'm annoyed you're listening to this.

And I know something random has pissed you off already today. So this show is a safe space for me, you and a funny guest to relive, release, unload on all of those things that make modern life so, well, like this. She hated me. And that's the number one thing I don't like in a person, personally. I can take someone that I don't like, that's fine with me if I don't like you. But if you don't like me, that ruins me. No beef too old, no fear too irrational, no opinion too unpopular. First of all, it's not growing out of my brain. It's what are you talking about? I mean, if your hair manifested the internals of your brain,

there'd be a lot of people in mergers and acquisitions with tiny penises for hair. But it's just the worst Medusa ever. From the Bugle, this is Catharsis.