

Gene editing of human embryos and its ethics/risks; a newly discovered Peruvian Andes lizard; “Schrödinger’s cart” fake online shopping in South Korea; AI “ghosts” (hallucinated citations/experts) contaminating science; bogong moth resurgence in Australia.
Robin Clifford (comedian/host persona; “facts factory” style; also runs an ambient comedy podcast and an Oxford-linked humanities/tech podcast). Josh Gondelman (comedian; known for puns and tech/consumer-psychology commentary; has a YouTube special and newsletter).
Embryo gene editing is being marketed as disease eradication but may be driven by profit and long-term eugenics/tech-lord control; edits are hard to monitor across decades. AI models fabricate experts/citations that then get repeated as real. Fake shopping provides dopamine without purchase, creating a shopping/non-shopping paradox.
Kathy Tai/Origin Genomics (Biotech Barbie; prior Manhattan Genomics; brief marriage to China’s 2015 embryo gene-editing doctor); new 4,800m Peruvian lizard with sex-based color/spot patterns; “Schrödinger’s cart” websites; Claude hallucinated “volcanic experts”; bogong moths returning, tracked via blue dots.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
A discussion on current science and technology headlines.
“a big apple with insomnia, It's the Earl of Punctuality, the Prince of Punchlines, the man who, when his agent told him to go viral on TikTok, deliberately caught an STD from a cuckoo clock.”
Exploring a biotech founder's moral case for gene editing.
“Robin Clifford, you sleep in the fetal position.”
Delving into the past and implications of controversial gene editing practices.
“She has also attempted to genetically create a unicorn out of a horse.”
Discussion on potential risks of gene editing and societal implications.
“That's one of the things that we have not yet cracked is a subscription to your own baby.”
Exploring a new trend in South Korea where users can shop without buying.
“And for anyone who has ever just felt like they wanted to buy something but not actually buy it, South Korea has gone crazy.”
Explore whether shopping is merely browsing or requires a transaction.
“Does shopping begin once merchandise is perused or does it not count unless money is transacted?”
Discuss the implications of AI taking over shopping tasks and its effects on consumer behavior.
“I think it reminds me of like, you know, as AI takes over and we kind of become passive, atrophied lumps of fat and carbon, we can just, other things become a leisure activity.”
Examine the pros and cons of showering before hosting a friend.
“But yeah, I mean, this is a real question.”
Relate personal experiences of cycling and meeting horses in nature.
“upon arriving at your home or soon thereafter, you are welcoming them into, at best, an Everglades-like humidity trap, or at worst, the setting from a 90s erotic thriller, steamy mirrors, perspiration unavoidable.”
Delve into the issues of AI generating false information and its implications.
“Apparently, the scientific literature is being polluted by the ghosts of AI models that have left detritus all through our beautiful scientific knowledge, making it almost impossible to get a clean idea of reality.”
Discuss the resurgence of bogong moths and their nostalgic significance.
“And different, and I don't know if you saw this story, Josh, but different AI models have been hallucinating different things or have been haunted by different things.”
Learn about the fascinating tracking of moths and the community's involvement.
“Everyone's quite excited to track the moths and find them in their underpants and all of the joyful things that we used to do as children.”
Discover how climate change is positively affecting moth populations in Australia.
“that people actually thought it was a weather cloud approaching?”
Explore the humorous notion of being popular with the moth community.

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On The Gargle, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
0:01Alice Fraser: In a universe expanding at a rate only slightly discounted by the fact it's doing mates rates with quantum physics, only one podcast is this podcast, probably, depending on where you sit on multiverse theory, bringing you all of the satire that'll fit into a podcast of reasonable length about all of the science and technology news we have personally been able to find and understand. And it's the gargle. I'm your host, Alice Fraser. And welcoming our guests for today, Baron of the Bunsen burner, most fabulous factotum of the facts factory, the man who puts the abs into labs coat, it's Robin Clifford.
0:32Alice Fraser: Hello. Hey, how are you doing? I like the abs compliment there. I have been looking. Thank you. Thank you for coming and being on the show. And from the city that's full of doctors, despite allegedly being a big apple, a big apple with insomnia, It's the Earl of Punctuality, the Prince of Punchlines, the man who, when his agent told him to go viral on TikTok, deliberately caught an STD from a cuckoo clock. It's Josh Gondelman. Hello. Thank you for not erroneously saying that I have been working on apps. But we, I mean, we're going to go into all of the science and technology news that we have personally found interesting this week.
1:12Alice Fraser: But before we get into the top stories, let's have a quick look at some headlines. Apparently Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot performed full football goal celebrations at the 2026 World Cup. Scientists are eager to study how it is that the sinister implications of a robot's capacity of the human-like movement are so overshadowed by the corrupt financial practices of the football industry as a whole that we're not sure who's less human. Remember all the slaves who died of heat stroke and heart attacks building the stadiums in Qatar? Neither does the robot, but it wasn't active then, so it has an excuse.
1:43Alice Fraser: China's secretive Shenlong space plane has released yet another mystery object into orbit. At this point, it is less a spacecraft and more a zero-g vending machine for potentious science fiction plots. And Meta has announced this week it's laying off thousands of workers while going, quote, all in on AI. Zuckerberg called it streamlining, less streaming, more lying. And top story this week is Gene Editing. A biotech founder has made the case a moral positive case for gene editing human embryos. Robin Clifford, you sleep in the fetal position. Can you tell us a bit more about this story? Yes, the classic fetal position, sucking my thumb and just jive talking.
2:25That's what I do in my sleep and waiting for the nightmares to come. Yes, this isn't just any story about gene editing and biohacking. It's from someone called Kathy Tai, who has history in this area. She's called the Biotech Barbie. She's just launched a company called Origin Genomics. Obviously, it's about gene editing in the embryo. And her pitch, her moralizing pitch, is to try and eradicate all disease and tackle hereditary problems and conditions. The reason this is interesting is firstly because she's been here before with something she actually called historically a Manhattan genomics.
3:10And that was launched in 2023 around the launch of the Oppenheimer film, hence why she also called herself the biotech Barbie. She's trying to dovetail on those two pieces of intellectual property. But she's a fascinating person. She left university in Toronto. She's a Chinese-Canadian to take a scholarship from the Peter Thiel scholarship, which gives people$100 ,000 to leave university and pursue a scientific avenue. Her previous company was named Manhattan Geonomics after the nuclear project that obviously was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people. So that's already quite ominous.
3:54and that one was liquidated and now she started a new one. And she's also, she's called the biotech Barbie. She was also married very briefly for three months to someone called China's Frankenstein, who was a doctor in China who did the first ever gene editing of embryos back in 2015. So there's a huge lot to unpack there.
4:15Alice Fraser: To be fair, I mean, a three-month marriage with two biotech embryo fiddlers is enough to have at least a thousand babies together. Exactly. If you play your embryo cells right. She has also attempted to genetically create a unicorn out of a horse. Yes. But that doesn't seem to have led anywhere, presumably, either because the results were unsuccessful or because they were terrifyingly successful. But there's not enough scientists who are also virgins. High five, high five, high five, high five, high five. Yeah, not a unicorn in the kind of polyamorous sense, but a literal horse with a fat horn on its head.
4:57And she also had a, I think it was called LA something. That startup tried to genetically engineer pets. She also tried to create a glow in the dark bunny as well. Again, not a euphemism, but a real actual thing she tried to do. And dragons, I think.
5:11Alice Fraser: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like she's an ideas girl, really. Not necessarily a follow through gal. Can we go back just one second? because as terrifying as this is, I do have to give the nicknamers full marks for calling him, her ex-husband, the Frankenstein of biogenetics because he was a potentially unethical doctor and scientist, not because he was a monster assembled from the parts of other people. That would be Chinese Frankenstein's monster. Indeed, at least it's a literarily well-observed nickname. It's like a little weird to see someone making an ethical case, right? They're going, well, it's ethical to genetically engineer and gene edit for embryos when they also stand to profit directly from that.
6:02And the last person in China, right, who attempted this went to jail. It's not legal. Yeah, Frankenstein. Frankenstein himself. And so it's not legal to do. but and now she's doing it and getting all this attention which is like uh it's like how pete rose must feel about all the today's modern athletes being partners with gambling companies he must be rolling over in his grave or rolling dice in his grave i think it's also one of those things where it seems like you can make a lot of money quite quickly because it obviously dovetails with all these um live forever eugenicist tendencies of silicon valley and this desire to um gene edit And the palatable end of that, I think, is to say we're trying to eradicate disease.
6:47But perhaps the real intention is to biotech their own life expectancy so that we can be ruled by tech lords ad infinitum, which is what we all want, really, isn't it? A powerful tech master to tell us what to do while we eat bug slurry in 2036. It's also like it's so tough because I totally agree with you. I think that so much of this is being pushed for the benefit of the tech overlords and not for the actual, you know, any actual societal benefits of the science. And this specifically, this technology is extremely risky because we don't know what kind of effect these gene edits could have. You could eliminate the gene for hereditary cancer or you could create a new kind of baby whose fingers are teeth and teeth are fingers, which would also be cool.
7:35but mostly because Tim Burton's in kind of a rut and he needs some inspiration for a new movie. And you never know, right? I mean, that's the thing with some of this playing around with genes in an embryonic form. It could have an impact 30 years later, so it's very hard to monitor. And then maybe you just have to have a subscription to Origin Genomics and they'll currently help deal with your ongoing third limb and sixth eye and unicorn horn if you pay them enough money.
8:01Alice Fraser: Well, yeah, I mean, this is the thing. That's one of the things that we have not yet cracked is a subscription to your own baby. Capitalism should do something about that. O-A-A-S, offspring as a service. Speaking of new species, there's a new species that's come around the old-fashioned way, which is that scientists have discovered a new species of lizard in the Peruvian Andes, completely un-biohacked. Just a straight-up new lizard has dropped. It measures between six and eight centimetres, and apparently it's got quite a lot of sexual dimorphism. It changes its colours. The females have square-shaped squares on their backs.
8:41Alice Fraser: It keeps saying square-shaped spots on their backs, but we all know spots are not squares. And the men have oblique spots. Oblique spots, not oblique spots. Oblique spots and white scales. So this is cool. I'm keen for there to be new lizards. I was getting bored of the number of lizards that there were. Josh Gondelman, you sleep when it's cold. Can you tell us more about this? Yeah, this is really exciting. The scientists discovered this new species of lizard in Peru, which is the most exciting development for biodiversity coming out of Peru since they discovered a talking bear in a red hat. And the species was discovered up high in the mountains at an altitude of 4 ,800 meters, or for US listeners who refuse to learn metric, over 15 ,000 feet.
9:31up at altitude. And it had gone previously undiscovered because searching for new life at that altitude is, to quote scientists directly, a real pain in the fucking ass and you get all sweaty. So they didn't want to do it previously. The lizards were hard to spot because they were spotted, right? To blend in with the environment. A little piece of wordplay I included for the benefit of anyone listening to the gargoyle super duper high and six to eight centimeters long. And again, for American listeners who refuse to learn division, that's only two and a half to three and a half inches. And now I understand a little better why the rest of the world measures length in centimeters.
10:10Alice Fraser: Well, I mean, this is the thing. People, when these new species are discovered, there's a lot of kind of, oh, why didn't they discover these before? Obviously, these species have been around for ages and people have been in this area. Surely they would have noticed it. And the thing is that it's not about the number of people. It's that you have to have a very specific circumstance where somebody in that area happens to be an expert on the kinds of lizards you would normally find there and have a sort of an encyclopedic lizard cataloging capacity to while up a mountain be like, ah, that one. So unless you're specifically looking for a new lizard, then you might not find it.
10:45Alice Fraser: You might have seen a new lizard. You might have seen a new lizard today and you would never know. So we could be seeing all kinds of unidentified animals, but just because we're such stupid lay people, I've got no, I've not, I might be seeing that dog that I see every day on my neighbor's porch could be a rare new species. Totally. And you would be like, oh, that's not a new lizard. That's just a baby iguana with a ton of swag.
11:10Alice Fraser: And that brings us to your ad section. Your ad section now, because you can't be what you can't buy. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Ancestry.bomb. Sick of blaming all of your problems on your parents in therapy? Try blaming your genetic heritage with Ancestry.bomb. A proprietary AI-enhanced genetic tracking device will guesstimate your family's mental health and trauma patterns back to the seventh generation. Problems with commitment? Your great-great-great uncle was a c**t, but it was because he got hit as a child. They all were. That's probably why. Ancestry.bomb. Drop that on the dinner table for an epigenetic-level impact on your next argument.
11:49Alice Fraser: And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Vitalize Longevity Concierge for personalized health span care that will help you live far longer than you can possibly afford. Be worried about your bills well into your 120s with Vitalize. Wake with heart-pounding anxiety about the sustainability of your online business only to be told by our proprietary health alert system that you need to calm down before your biomarkers automatically trigger a new expensive prescription to be sent right to your door. the Vitalize Longevity Concierge, your partner in health forever or for the life of your subscription.
12:23Alice Fraser: And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Citizen Science. Yes, the Science and Technology podcast is sponsored by the Science of the People, asking you to actually learn how to actually do your actual research and do some bloody science. For starters, try making invisible ink out of an invisible octopus or a volcano out of the absolute basics of some kitchen supplies and a nearby volcano. So that's your ad section for today. More stories. More stories. We are living in a terrible time in which it is very difficult to escape the dopamine rat wheel, the things that are set up for us to enjoy ourselves without satisfying our essential needs, to fill our mouths without filling our bellies.
13:06Alice Fraser: And for anyone who has ever just felt like they wanted to buy something but not actually buy it, South Korea has gone crazy. For the latest trend, Josh Gondelman, you're cool. Tell us about the cool new thing not to buy. Thank you. Huge for me. Websites in South Korea are allowing users the experience of online shopping and delivery ordering without actually spending money or receiving goods and services. This version of electronic blue balls is designed to allow users to receive the dopamine hit of browsing the Internet without the hit to their bank account of actually purchasing things. And it's all fun and games until you remember that you've wasted half an hour discussing with your partner what you wanted to order for dinner without realizing you still have to cook.
13:52These websites provide a service, but they also present a philosophical paradox. If a woman, for example, browses an online retailer that doesn't let her make a purchase, do she still be shopping? Does shopping begin once merchandise is perused or does it not count unless money is transacted? Is shopping an exchange of cash for goods and services or merely the review of possible goods and services? What if you visit a shop fully intending to make a purchase, but ultimately are unwilling to do so or unable? Is that still shopping? Theoretical physicists have hypothesized that these websites create conditions for both shopping and non-shopping to occur simultaneously, a paradox they are calling Schrodinger's cart.
14:37Thank you. Thank you so much. I will be accepting my Nobel Prize for puns next year when they announce it.
14:43Alice Fraser: This is the thing. If you go to a shop and do not intend to buy anything and don't buy anything, is that the same as going to an art gallery? You've had a similar experience, possibly. What about a fashion art gallery? Yeah, I'd say perusing is definitely within shopping adjacent. I like your comparison there to blue balls. Do you think it's assertive? I mean, not to get so horrendously misogynistic on this podcast here, Do you think you don't get any cathartic release at the end, but you do get to click the car? Is that right, Josh? Yeah, you get to the point of, you know, hopefully you get that biological feeling of release, though.
15:24You just don't get the tangible benefits and losses. You know, your ledger stays even, but chemically your body releases that dopamine.
15:33Alice Fraser: As though you had bought the satisfaction of a luxury purchase, much fabled satisfaction of a luxury purchase. I understand this, even though I tend to wear the same stuff every day, just out of a pure lack of imagination. But this is the real question, because we have these two massive trends in sort of consumer psychology happening at the moment. Number one is like your agentic AI. It will do all of your online shopping for you. You never need scroll or browse again. You can just tell it to do. So are we now going to outsource our fake shopping to AIs who can browse and not buy things on your behalf?
16:09Well, here's the thing. If you want the release of dopamine, you have to do the shopping yourself. So if you outsource that to AI agents, what you're really doing is freeing up all of your time so that you can gain pleasure by simply spending your days doing heroin. Yeah, and preferably becoming really good at jazz in the process of doing all that sweet, sweet brown. I think it reminds me of like, you know, as AI takes over and we kind of become passive, atrophied lumps of fat and carbon, we can just, other things become a leisure activity. So we no longer need to shop, but we can just do it for a laugh because it gives us meaning of perusing cheese.
16:51And so everything kind of becomes a strange piece of immersive theater. and it reminds me, I don't know if anyone and you guys ever been to Yorkshire where I grew up but apart from all the stone walls and gravy and rhubarb thrashing, there's an incredible place called Eureka which is a science museum in Halifax and you can go there as a kid and it's the most wonderful thing because it's just got an entirely fake supermarket and so I think maybe we should extend that for just to kind of adults performatively shopping IRL whilst our AI agents do it all for us.
17:23Alice Fraser: Andrew Young posted virally on Twitter that as artificial intelligence takes over, knowledge work, society will need a gym for our brain in the same way as we have needed gyms for our bodies since having given up physical labor in order to get the calories that we need. We've been required to invent the gym. And I think I saw about 1 ,000 people saying, did he just invent books? Well, you know, thinking. But yeah, I mean, this is a real question. This is a real question. How do you make your brain jump through these hoops? Fake shopping on fake websites. It does feel like kind of step one to like six years from now, we're all in the goo pods from the Matrix.
18:12Alice Fraser: Speaking of the goo pods for the Matrix, now it's time for your reviews. As you know, each week our guest editors bring in something to review out of five stars. Josh, what have you brought in for us today? to review today. I brought in showering right before a friend comes over. When welcoming a friend into my living space, I always feel best when not only is my apartment tidy, but my human body has been recently scrubbed as well. And I still do that manually. I don't have AI agents to clean me. So the best way to accomplish that in my experience is by taking a shower, which is like a bath that does not signify you're experiencing a massive depression.
18:48For those reasons, a shower before a friend comes over simply can't be beat. However, in the extraordinarily likely event that your friend has to use your bathroom upon arriving at your home or soon thereafter, you are welcoming them into, at best, an Everglades-like humidity trap, or at worst, the setting from a 90s erotic thriller, steamy mirrors, perspiration unavoidable. It's too sensual a welcome to game night. It's not even suggestive, really, right? There's no innuendo there. It's just excessively bodily and visceral. It's like turning on your stereo while your friend is over and having it play exclusively a soundtrack of tennis players mid-match grunts.
19:27And also sometimes the floor gets slippery after a shower. So for these reasons, it's kind of a mixed bag. I have to give showering right before a friend comes over two and a half stars out of five.
19:37Alice Fraser: Yeah. And if you get caught up in the shower and they arrive too early, you have the terrible possibility of embracing them as they enter and you be faintly steaming. which is disconcerting. I do think it really does depend on how wet you are when you answer the door. For sure. Yeah, and I agree as well that a bath before someone arrives does look like a cry for help. Yeah, you can't let them know that you've been bathing like that right before. It's like an aggressive commitment to self-care that is verging on the problem, yeah. But I like that though. I feel kind of fresh just thinking about that actually, Josh.
20:12Yeah, I do like a shower right before a friend comes over. It makes me feel energized and like I'm meeting them at my best and they don't know how slovenly I was. Like they don't know that I just took off the T-shirt that I slept in and wore for the entire day until the shower 15 minutes before.
20:29Alice Fraser: Yeah, I think it's a great idea. And I do think that the bath before a friend comes over is a too relaxing and be potentially if they then use the bathroom, an implicit criticism of how stressful you think they're about to be. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It's like getting a massage right after they leave. Oh, fuck, he lit candles to prep for me. I feel really bad now. Robin, what have you brought in to review for us? Well, I was actually going to review meeting a horse on a bike, but that would be me on the bike rather than the horse, which would have been really quite remarkable. I went on a cycling holiday in the New Forest, which is a very beautiful piece of Greenland down in the south of the UK.
21:13And I feel like, you know, as you move through life, I think last time we talked about the inevitability of becoming a twitcher, a bird watcher as you get older. I think also the inevitability of becoming a lycra-clad cyclist. It just dawns upon you that that's who you will eventually become. And resistance is futile. So I met a horse, which was incredibly bucolic and relaxing, and the horse was very friendly. Although I did have a lot of, you know, warnings from the 90s from my childhood about how not to approach a horse from behind so you don't get kicked in the dick or face. So I approached it with care.
21:44But it's incredibly relaxing going cycling on a holiday and then also the most stressful thing you've ever done because you're in this beautiful nature reserve and then you go onto an A-road and have cars coming past you at 65 miles an hour and you start frantically questioning your own life choices and mortality. So I think it's an extreme thing to do.
22:04Alice Fraser: Meeting a horse on a bike, speaking of implicit criticism, does the horse look at you like you are subpar or like you're the next leap forward? Yeah, I think the horse is really quite impressed. It's like, oh, you're faster than me. You've got, you're kind of on fours, but in a different, you've got two things going on, but you've got something else going on as well. They're not confused about whether or not you're bipedal or not, but they're generally, I think, would see the wheel as an evolution to their stumpy or elegant legs. But either way, they're impressed, I think. Do you think when you meet a horse, when you have a bike with you, do you think the horse relates more to you or to the bike?
22:38That's a really good question. I felt a deep degree of connection with that horse from the way that it tickled my hand with its mouth. But I think that may have been projection. And it's always hard to gain. I think I may have been projecting my own emotions onto that horse, actually. And that will require years of therapy to probably unpack, actually. Much healthier than projecting your emotions onto the bike, though. Yeah. Which you do through grunting.
23:06Alice Fraser: Thank you. And that out of five was? Well, I was going to give the bit in the Nature Reserve five and then the A-Rod zero. So again, it's two and a half out of five. Two and a half, two and a half out of five. It's a two and a half star sort of week, which brings us to ghost news now. Apparently, the scientific literature is being polluted by the ghosts of AI models that have left detritus all through our beautiful scientific knowledge, making it almost impossible to get a clean idea of reality. Robin, your eyes are blurred by ghosts of the past. Can you tell us more about this story? Yeah, ghosts, along with hallucinations, is more euphemistic language for AI making mistakes.
23:56And Claude, in particular, has been inventing volcanic experts and then citing them. And then they enter the sphere of the internet and start getting quoted by other sources. and we spiral into a world where academics have been conjured out of thin air. And yeah, I suppose it's indicative of another AI panic. And I suppose comes back to our initial point about the counterpoint to AI, the counterculture. How do we ensure things are real anymore? Well, we're just going to have to actually meet up with people and pretend shop and go to libraries again and act like it's 1956, but in a good way. That's the main thrust of it.
24:34And different, and I don't know if you saw this story, Josh, but different AI models have been hallucinating different things or have been haunted by different things. Yeah. It's, I think ghosts is the wrong term. Like I like that you said they're conjured out of thin air, right? Because ghosts used to be alive. That's the thing about a ghost is that they lived and now are no longer alive. These are like if a ghost could exist without a person, which seems unfair. If you could be haunted by someone with no history, that's they're just doing it for the love of the game. There's no unfinished business.
25:09I also think that the names that the scientists have have been repeating because they're being picked up by large language models and then repeated as if they really exist. And they have names like Marcus Chen and Aris Thorne, which that's a giant red flag to me. Aris Thorne is not the name of a scientist. It's what you call a Dungeons and Dragons character who is sexually attracted to the dragons. And apparently that's sort of by design because some of the models in earlier training have been asked to be cuter or dorkier, nerdier, to kind of appeal to their user. And so they started putting in fantastical characters, goblins and gremlins and things like this keep conjuring up to the dweebs like us who are using them.
25:56Alice Fraser: Yeah, manic pixie dream hallucination. It's a terrifying future that we're staring into. I got a glimpse into the adorable retro terrifying past recently. Apparently the bogong moths are back on the east coast of Australia. Now my childhood was haunted by moths. and you know it is a nostalgic thing to think about opening the door to thousands and thousands of moths and then they sort of went away and it was environmental degradation and habitat degradation and climate change but recently a couple of cooler seasons have meant that the bogong moths have regenerated and are back where they belong fucking everywhere they're in your face, in your eye they're in your breakfast cereal the personification of dust is back at home.
26:50Alice Fraser: Do you have moths in New York, Josh Gondelman? We do. We have these species called the spotted lanternfly, which is at least moth adjacent. And they are so prevalent that the city will frequently release PSAs that are like, if you see this, and they're very kind of striking to look at. And so if you didn't know this, you might just go, oh, that's like an interesting looking bug. But the city tells you, kill them on sight. You have to stomp on them. And if you are with a person visiting New York City and you aggressively stomp out a moth and you're like, I'm just doing my civic duty, you look so bloodthirsty.
27:31You look like you're living in the New York City of the warriors. It is wild. Are they quite big, Josh? I feel like killing a moth, there's a kind of cutoff point where if they get about bigger than a centimeter and a half or an inch or so, then it feels like a violent act and you look like an absolute arsehole. Right, because it almost seems like you're killing a butterfly at that point, which is so sadistic. And you can see the beautiful patterns and you feel like an ogre crushing a beautiful thing. It's exactly like that. This story has got to be the worst good news I've ever heard. When you picture an endangered species making a resurgence, you think of like a panda or a rhinoceros, not the kind of pest that you would stomp to death or electrocute on sight but like a win's a win
28:15Alice Fraser: well they're being they're being as a fascinating they're tracking these moths and not through any high technology uh but by painting small blue dots on them and then asking people to report if they see a moth with a small blue dot on it uh to trace uh the path and apparently the people of australia are really getting their hearts behind it everyone is having this surge of nostalgia it's It's like yo-yos are back or something. Everyone's quite excited to track the moths and find them in their underpants and all of the joyful things that we used to do as children. Well, I love that. Apparently the collective noun for moths is an eclipse or a whisper, which I find incredibly charming.
28:52Am I right in thinking there were so many of these whispering or eclipsing together during the Australian Open and at other times, Alice, that people actually thought it was a weather cloud approaching? So they're huge, huge numbers.
29:04Alice Fraser: They do come in massive numbers. If you do want to get rid of your moths humanely, there's like a hipster trend for getting a mason jar, putting fairy lights in the bottom of it, and then having a funnel in the top. And so the moths will crawl down, attracted by the light, into the funnel and will not be able to escape. And then you get a jar full of moths that you can then release into the wild. Or use this decor for a rustic wedding. um this you weather event is like such an interesting thing to bring up here because the reason it seems like that the moths are rebounding in numbers is that there was extra precipitation this year providing more food for moth larvae which like finally a positive climate change story sure the coastlines are becoming uninhabitable but one of the 10 plagues has come to life and that's exciting let's all eat a tasty wool sweater in celebration and i think josh this means that we have solved your shower problem which is that if the person who you're inviting around and having a shower before they arrive is a moth they are going to be delighted by your moist bathroom they'll be like oh look at this spread you shouldn't have are you quite popular with the moth community, Josh, as a shining character of comedy, yes.
30:23I have a lot of woolen sweaters, so I feel like my closet would be very hospitable to moths.
30:32Alice Fraser: And that brings us to the end of this week's episode of The Gargle. I'm flipping through the ad section at the back. Robin, where can people find and support your work? Yeah, people can find me at Rogers Velvet Rendezvous, which is a relaxing, ambient comedy podcast, and Thinking Deeply, which is a collaboration with wadham college at oxford which foregrounds the humanities at times of technological change so yeah check out those two things and josh gondelman where can people find and support your work oh my gosh i am i have a standard special called positive reinforcement on youtube and a newsletter called that's marvelous you can find it that's marvelous newsletter.com i'm also on tour currently tickets are on sale uh for coming up very soon uh irving texas houston texas san diego and chandler arizona and then in slightly further out, Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Raleigh, North Carolina.
31:24Excited to come to all those places and then more in 2027. That's all through the end of the year.
31:28Alice Fraser: You can find me online at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. Sign up there. Please sign up at my Patreon. You can sign up for free or for money. I use it mainly as a one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials. You get my stand-up specials there for free and I run weekly writers meetings and I'm just about to reboot the salons where we meet once a week on Zoom and talk about ideas, if that sounds like not a nightmare to you. Otherwise, you can just come over to patreon.com slash alicefraser and you can see all of my stuff there early and usually for free. Some of it is behind a paywall. This is a Bugle Podcast and Alice Fraser Production.
32:01Alice Fraser: Your editor is Harry Gordon. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week.
On this week's episode of the Gargle, Alice is joined by Robin Clyfan and Josh Gondelman as the three, dive into the world's science and tech news! From the moral case of gene editing, to the discovery of a new species of Lizard in Peru. Plus Dopamine spiking fake shopping, AI-generated 'ghosts' polluting literature and the return of the Bogong moth!
Alice Fraser: https://www.patreon.com/AliceFraser & https://www.instagram.com/alicefraserhuman/
Robin Clyfan: https://www.instagram.com/robin_clyfan/
Josh Gondelman: https://www.joshgondelman.com
Subscribe to Realms Unknown - a fantasy, sci-fi and speculative fiction podcast from Alice Fraser and The Bugle!
https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/news/realms-unknown
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Produced by Harry Gordon, with Executive production from Chris Skinner
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