The Gargle - How easy is it to trick AI?

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

On this week's Gargle, Alice is joined by Josh Gondelman and Eleanor Morton as the trio jump into the week's news in science and tech. From fake diseases to trick AI, scientific advancements on de-ageing to Robots running marathons now. Listen now on this week's episode of The Gargle!Alice Fraser: https://www.patreon.com/AliceFraserJosh Gondelman: https://www.joshgondelman.com/Eleanor Morton: https://eleanormortoncomedian.com/Subscribe to Realms Unknown - a fantasy, sci-fi and speculative fiction podcast from Alice Fraser and The Bugle!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/news/realms-unknownYou fund what we do!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donateProduced by Harry Gordon, with Executive production from Chris SkinnerProduced by Harry Gordon, with Executive production from Chris Skinner Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Amid the 10,000 noises and the jade and gold and the whirling dusk of Shinnan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends drinking spiced wine in the North District with the cortisans. They would listen to the flute music and declaim poetry, test each other with jibes and quotes, sometimes find a private room with a scented silken woman before weaving unsteadily home after the dawn drums, shouting. This is the gargle. Welcome to the gargle. the science and technology arm of the Vughal. Like, what is it, a body mechatron?

I'm not sure what we are nowadays. And really that ought to have been a science and technology intro. But I thought it was realms unknown till about an hour ago. I'm going to be honest. So I'd like to welcome our co-hosts first. He's the watchman who watches. The Watchman watches. It's Josh Gondelman.

Hello, it's an honor to be here to keep an eye on everything. And she's turned being caught between a rock and a hard place into an inspirational business speaking business. It's Eleanor Morton. Hello, this is my second podcast of the day. I hope my wit hasn't run dry. I also hope your wit has not run dry. I think you've probably just wet your wit and now it's going to be coming. Yeah. That's right. Let's say that.

Full stream ahead. I'm coming from the opposite direction. This is my first podcast of the day, and I hope mine is turned on. This is my first podcast of the day, but it is subsequent to a flight with a four-year-old and a two-year-old. So I've been doing a lot of talking to people who are not making a lot of sense. I've been doing a lot of talking to people who are not making a lot of sense. So, you know, you guys are going to be better than that.

Look, it's been a week. We containing the day that in American datula notation would be called 420. So a lot of people made lots of jokes about that. But the best news, the headline that came out of that, was The Onion reached a deal to take over Alex Jones's Info Wars. They've been fighting to do this for about 18 months. And it has finally come true on that most hallowed of days this week. it's a move that makes like having a take on fake news feel futile beyond belief.

It's a satirical outlet acquiring a conspiracy empire in a sincere attempt to vindicate the suffering of the parents who were accused of false flag faking the murders of their own children. I mean, it is an incredible thing. They could do nothing. They could just leave all of the headlines and news stories exactly the same, except now you are illegally obliged to read them in a sarcastic voice. I don't know. Incredible news.

Josh, do you have thoughts on this? I do really think it's wonderful. I'm so glad they've succeeded in this attempt, it seems like. And, you know, Alex Jones seems upset by it, which makes me happy on its own. You know, Diana, I'm delighted by this. Shout out to Ben Collins and the whole team at The Onion for achieving something that is like the only way to, I think in 26, make Alex Jones feel

funny and not just a harbinger of a bleak apocalyptic future. And in other headlines news, scientists have won the Breakerie Prize for a 60-year quest to measure muon wobble. So it's a $3 million prize.

They finally determined that the subatomic particle known as a muon is just a little bit wobbly, which is six decades of very expensive staring at last has come true. You just got to put a little, you fold up some paper, you put it under your muon, and then it stops it from wobbling during dinner. But that brings us to our top stories of this week.

And our first news is that there has been a new disease invented. It has been put on the internet and AI is now diagnosing people who are trying to use AI as their GP with the disease that has been invented. Eleanor Morton, you've woken in the middle of the night, wondering if you have three heads. Can you unpack this story for us? That's not even a joke because I am a hypochondriac and I do constantly assume I am dying of something.

So I have never asked AI about any diseases because I know that whatever it said, I would believe. But yes, some scientists in, I think it's Sweden, have decided to troll, troll the kind of, and also experiment with the large language models by making up their own disease and making up a paper about the disease and seeing if AI sites would take them at face value and decide that this was a real thing to tell people they had. So the disease is called biopi-bixomomania. Is that how we're saying this? And it is basically meant to be, they've made up some images of it as well, when your eyes get red and sore from rubbing them too much.

It's not a real thing. But they wanted to see if they could make people think it was. And they did. In fact, it was too good because it just became completely real. And it was very easy, if you were looking, it was very easy to tell that it was not real. the paper has that they used to cite this has thanks in it to the Starfleet Academy and the funding is from Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation. So if a real human looked at this, they would easily know it's not real.

But a real human apparently didn't. So AI has been spouting that back as something you could get. And thank God, thank God I knew about this through this Alice and not Googling because I would have assumed I had it. Well, I mean, there's a few tells in it. Bix on a mania, like you wouldn't have an eye condition that was classified as a mania. Manias are all psychiatric conditions. Another element of it that's a bit troubling is that it is already being cited in peer review papers

that are going out in peer reviewed journals, which means that AI, there are people who are using AI in their footnotes and that these peer reviewed journals aren't reviewing peerily enough. They're not peering closely enough at the things that they're reviewing. They created a fake paper by a fake scientist to see if AI models would unquestioningly ingest the information. So despite popular opinion, right? And despite what everyone fears, AI is actually creating jobs for human fiction writers. It may be messing up the science, but it has created a new lane for people writing things that are not true, which we were all worried the episode would happen. But I do think you're right.

It is, it has confirmed my worst fears by appearing in peer reviewed papers already. Because what that means is that AI is stupid, right? That's AI ingesting this information and spitting it back up means AI is stupid and doesn't know anything. But the second layer means they've proven even beyond what they thought they would prove, which means if you use AI, you are also stupid for medical things. And now I can, now I can point to that when I say that to people and they won't. just call me an asshole. I'll say, no, it's sound of the group. It's, the whole thing feels like too easy, right? Like, of an experiment, like, oh, let's make up something and see if it gets

sucked into large language model inputs and outputs. It's like, oh, do you also want to spend $10 million seeing off a horse? We'll lick a sugar cube. Like, what are we doing? I think I feel bad for the researcher. I think she spent so much time and effort on this, like to really make sure it trick people. And I don't think she even needed to do that. I think she could have submitted a paper that just said, eyes bad, real disease, and AI would have been like, yeah, that's a real paper. So it just shows that I find it comforting to know that even the supposedly top academics are doing what we did as undergrads, which is phoning it in and not checking our sources properly. So they're not really kind of as different. You had said Bixanam, a main

which I think is probably right. It's B-I-O-N-I-Mania. And I've been saying bisona mania, which does sound like an addiction to Buffalo. And so I think that you're probably right. But maybe we're all biased. We are all wearing glasses. So maybe we don't want this to be a real disease

because we feel attacked. That brings us to our ad section, your ad section now, because you can't be what you can't buy. You've got your keys, your wallet, your phone, your penis or other genital configuration of equal validity. But what about your ambition? Introducing your hustle culture, grindcore, optimization, sleep harassment, broadcast podcast.

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of all your new nemesies. I've seen things. A man arguing that birds are government drones, a live stream of someone ironing their socks. Get the AI drones to scroll this shit so You don't have to. And that brings us to the reviews section of the gargle.

Josh Connell, who have you brought in something to review? I have brought in something to review. I have brought in wearing a jacket that you're not quite sure you're pulling off. I think wearing a jacket that you're not quite pulling off is, it's, you know, it seems scary, right? Because you don't know if you're pulling it off. But that's where the first. comes from, you're like, ooh, are people going to enjoy this?

Am I going to get compliments from a pack of older men who are kind of hanging out near my apartment while I walk to the subway? Maybe. Am I going to get sarcastic compliments for a bunch of teenagers once I get on the train? Probably. Am I going to, for sure, keep bringing up that I'm not sure whether I'm pulling off the jacket that I'm wearing. Oh yeah, I'm going to do that. Will people be reassuring in the face of my obvious neediness and insecurity? Hopefully, four stars. Great experience. Loved it. Would wear a jacket

that I'm not quite sure I'm pulling off again. I am delighted by that. If it is reassuring to you, I maybe it's just my general lack of skepticism in life. I'm sort of quite easily carried away by movies or books. I sort of enjoy almost everything to some degree. I'm quite uncritical in the moment. But I've never seen anyone wearing a jacket and felt unconvinced by it. I've never thought, oh no, when I've seen someone like any of any of any age of any nastiness level. I feel like that, yeah, that for me, I'm convinced by a jacket in almost every instance. I've never, I've never doubted a jacket. And I put that in the context of like,

I'll watch the Fast and the Furious movies and have a great time. So maybe I'm not the person. Like take my reassurance with a grain of salt. I'll take it. No, I'll take any reassurance. I bullied people into it last night. I was wearing a kind of flashy jacket.

It was very beautiful. It was loaned to me. And I was like, this is such a cool jacket. And I don't know. And people might think it's too cool. for me and everyone was like nice jacket and I was like hell yeah I gotta see this jacket now I'll send you a picture after when we're done recording yeah I also think generally people don't really know anything about anything and so if you in the same as the same way as bixsonamania if you wear a jacket

they're like oh yeah I guess you know like we're all just pretending Have you brought in something for us to review? Yeah, I'm going to go the traditional reviewing route and review TV show. Me and my boyfriend were trying to find something new to watch that we both vibed with. And we've been, well, we've started a couple of episodes in The Man in the High Castle. I think it's a Netflix original. It's from a few years ago now. And it is the Philip K. Dick sci-fi story that said,

What if the Nazis won the war and America was split between the Japanese and the Nazis? And I've got to say, I find it very unrealistic that America would ever be taken over by fascists. So I'm going to give it a two out of ten because I don't see that happening in real life. No, no, I didn't buy it. I didn't buy it all. And that's a satire for you. Thank you. It's fascinating that that shows.

Quick, get on Info Wars. Yeah, no, it's very weird to watch a show that was from like 10 years ago where it was like, imagine this. And you're like, oh, I have to say, the version you imagined is a lot more stylish than the one we ended up with. Yeah, nobody's watching that show and going like, how do these writers come up with this stuff? It's unbelievable, although I think it will get, I mean, I don't know the story. and it is Philip K. Dick. So I assume it will get more sci-fi at some point. It has to.

It's Philip K. Dick. I assume one of them will be a robot or something. That's the end of all his books, isn't it? One of them is a robot. Or they're all robots. I don't know. Except for one of them. Except one of them's not a robot.

That's the twist. I was sitting behind some quite young boys on a tram in Melbourne. and they would have been like maybe 13. And they were talking about Philip K. Dick, and it gave me hope for the future of humanity because one of them turned to the other and he was, I think they were talking about a movie. They said, oh, wasn't that based on a short story by Philip K. Dick?

And then the other one said, well, you know why he had to put the, why he had to go with the middle name in the middle. And the other one said, yes, obviously, because if he didn't put the K in, his name would be feel up Dick. And I cackled. so loudly and they looked at me quite afraid. But I made me feel very, very good about the future.

Like, you know, all you hear about teenage boys nowadays is that they're all getting radicalized by the Manosphere. But it felt like these were two young men who were going to be okay. These guys are in the opposite of the Manosphere. They're in the Dickodrome. Yeah. Can we say they're Philip K. Dick maxing? Is that?

They've been dick-pilled. It's not what you think. It's the opposite of Alex Jones. You can't have satire anymore in the world. We've passed through onto the other side. An exciting new frontier. Speaking of which our new news is, oh, sorry, five stars for those young men.

Pinpricks. Now I can't stop. Pinpricks of darkness moving faster than the speed. of light without breaking the laws of relativity. So researchers for the first time have had the capacity to measure singularities of combined light and sound waves that are moving faster than the speed of light, which has implications for all sorts of things.

First of all, that we have empty voids that are zipping around real quickly. We don't really know what they are. But they are not breaking the laws of relativity. They are, you can see them accelerate. And it's all quite exciting. Josh Gondelman, you're full of tiny specks of darkness, as are we all. Can you unpack this story for us? I do have a void inside me.

So I am delighted to present this story. For years, we've believed that nothing moves faster than light. And then scientists recently discovered that that's not true. In actuality, nothing moves faster than light, which is a subtle but important difference. It turns out that speed of darkness is no longer just a rejected name for a late 80s Metallica album. It's also a recognition of the fact that certain empty voids move faster than light itself. There are collisions between these voids. They act like tiny whirlpools, which I think of as cosmic hot tubs.

And these whirlpools with no matter or energy. in them are not encumbered in the way that even light is. They are known as singularities, and the only thing faster than their movements is the speed of a scientist explaining how it's not an oxymoron to have multiple singularities. This is a huge development, because the previous speed record for darkness

to kind of come on quickly, all encouragingly, was that it used to, darkness used to take the time spent, drinking three whiskeys on the couch while your wife was away for work. And now it just goes there because of the voids. But yeah, it's really, this is a fascinating story. Yeah, it's very exciting and very cool. And if I understood physics well enough to understand how this doesn't break the laws of physics, I would be even more impressed.

But I'm impressed by all of my scientist friends who are like, oh, this is very cool information to have, I'm not sure what the implications will be, but I do like the fact that we're still twiddling with the frontiers of reality on this microscopic scale. But of course, we all knew that because we all knew that darkness was faster than light because you don't see it leaving the room when you turn on the light switch. So it would be funny if it made a sound like, whoosh!

Ooh, l'la, la. Speaking of noise. to too many bees. I'm afraid this is going to be in your wheelhouse again, Josh Gondelman, because it's an American situation. It is an American cemetery. Yep, home to nearly 5.6 million ground nesting bees. So according to a new study, was it a study,

or was it just somebody falling into a hole and going on? No. Too many bees. I didn't even know there were ground-dwelling bees. nesting in the ground, I was thought that they were sort of up a tree and a hive. So that's a disturbing revelation for me. But also that these are sort of fairly loner bees. Josh, can you unpack this story for us?

Yes. So at first when I heard this story about five or six million bees, about five and a half million bees found underneath the New York State Cemetery, it didn't phase me. I had simply assumed that some kind of wealthy media or real estate mogul had requested in the tradition of maybe an Egyptian pharaoh to be buried with his pet six million bees. And I just went about my day. It's like this is like a normal thing or rich person might want. Oh, my favorite days. Just come to me bees.

Like I couldn't possibly go to the afterlife without my pet six million bees. Normally, though, so there are these ground-dwelling bees and they're pretty, as you said, I was pretty solitary. They don't hang out by the millions, which raises questions about whether these insects borrowed into the earth's surface in preparation for some kind of flash mob in the late aughts and then fell asleep and forgot to dance the poker face by Lady Gaga or something. Or they're all listening to the same podcast and have thought that they've all had the same idea. Oh yeah. They're like, oh, you know, it would be really cool. We all go under the cemetery

right now because cemeteries actually are really important locations for these kind of bees because it's where a lot of pollination happens, which is problematic because the cemetery is also the number one place where it's terrifying to see living creatures emerge from the ground. Yeah, like millions of bees. Millions of bees is a pretty scary thing because you'd see that right. You see that in a in a corn field. or whatever. And you go, that's probably just where the bees rest. They go down, they come up.

You see that in a cemetery. You're like, these are zombies, and they are going to come for us all. How do you know if a bee is an undead bee or a normal bee? They're just going, pahler. If I was in an American cemetery and I came across 5.5 million bees, I would assume I was trapped in some kind of thing. Candy Man sequel and I was about to die in a way that was hilarious but also scary. I like that you give America credit for being the only nation capable of Candyman scenario.

It's only because Candyman is American. If it was somewhere in Yorkshire, I'd be like, Candyman's here? What's he doing in Yorkshire? Or I'd assume it was some kind of like Wickerman style Eldritchie. horror from back in the pagan times. But because it's American and it's New York, it's cool. It's cool bees, you know. They're cool bees.

They're walking here. They're buzzing here. Also, I like... Do you call Candyman the same thing, or do you call him like the sweets lad or something? The sweetie bloke. That's what it was released as in British cinemas. I liked the bit where the... Because obviously they couldn't count every individual bee.

So they calculated how many bees there were And that was quite a funny thing to picture Again, as in some kind of dystopian sci-fi film Where the scientists comes to the heroes And he goes, I've done the calculations It's 5.5 million bees We never thought there'd be that many bees Just the point where they were like

This is a lot of bees And I think that must have been very filmic And I'm sad I missed it happening Quick somebody bring 300,000 cups of tea for all this honey. This ad is just a completely sincere ad for my writers retreat in Switzerland in October. We still have a couple of spots. We do walks in the morning and then it's classes by me and a few excellent guest

teachers and then free writing or one-on-one sessions with me and the other teachers if you want them. There's nice dinner. We serve it up and we do like fireside readings or performance workshops so you can just sit staring into the middle distance or lock yourself in the room and write your book. Either way, you can go over to patreon.com slash alas Fraser and sign up there, even for free and get access to the application form. That's that ad section done now.

God, I'm good at capitalism. Speaking of cups of tea, that brings us to robots running marathons in China. They just had in Beijing a half marathon race. I always don't like it when people talk about marathons and then it's just a half marathon because a marathon is a very specific distance. But the robots beat the humans in the marathon in Beijing on last Sunday,

which to me, look, I'm not, I'm going to get you on to pack this story a little bit more. But to me, I mean, you wouldn't be excited or surprised if a robot that was shaped, for example, like a car. beta human in an marathon. For example, a car. Yeah, the kind of robot that we would call a car. I had an argument with my boyfriend because he's very excited.

He's excited about the future of technology and I'm scared of it. And I, yeah, I agree. First of all, it's, I don't see why this is impressive. I mean, they are human shaped, which this is another thing. I think we keep trying to design human shaped robots, even though human-shaped robots don't seem very good at most things. And even these ones, they can run fast, but they look weird doing it. And I think they all fell over immediately as soon as they finish.

But it's like we have this need for like, well, it's the future and it's technology. It's got to be an Android like in Philip KDook books. You know, it's got to look like a person, even when that is actually really detrimental to any of the tasks you want the robot to perform. Also, I can't help feeling. sorry for all the runners who trained for months for this half marathon, having all the spotlight taken off them by these robots, this robot,

because it's just, you know, it's not an achievement for the robot. The robot doesn't care. The robot's not done anything to, it hasn't trained, I assume, we don't know. And I just think it's a shame. But also on top of that, the BBC article here says that, the men's half marathon world record is 57 minutes. So it's only seven minutes slower, faster than the fastest human, which actually isn't that impressive, in my opinion.

I would like a robot to, for a robot, I would like a robot to do it in 15 minutes. If a robot can only shave seven minutes off the human total, that's, I'm sort of like, well, big deal. I'm super with you, I don't know, because this is certainly a half a half marathon, right? That's 13.1 miles. It's like 26 kilometers. That's so like a train. Every train breaks that record every day. Yeah. Every car breaks that record every day. I used I drove a 1999 Toyota Corolla as I was saying until 2015. And even that car would shatter this stupid Android record.

And that's not the future. That's literally the past. It's also, I'm with you, Eleanor. This is so, your point is so well taken that it's not, it's so narcissistic of humans to only be impressed by robots that look like humans. Yeah. Like, that's dumb. It's like, because it doesn't, it's not a human achievement when a human shaped robot does something. And it's also not an efficient shape of robot.

It's like, you know, it doesn't make its robot jobs easier. You're like, oh, this, we have. this android that stands in the corner and waves its hands really fast and that cools the room. And it's like, okay, so you combined box fans and the concept of enslaving a race of robots. Human form doesn't make a robot more impressive. It only makes it scarier. Like a humanoid robot winning a half marathon, I'm like frankly bored by. If that human robot were chasing after me, way scarier than a car doing that.

So that is fair. They've made a very scary robot. But you could beat this time record by stapling a cardboard cut out of Benedict Cumberbatch to a Roomba that you let run over some cocaine. And it would achieve the same more or less human-shaped thing. It reminds me, I think, of the point of sport, saying the point of art and all of these stuff in the onslaught of AI and technology and all of these kind of increasingly human-like technologies.

that actually, you know, what you watch a marathon for or what you engage in the interest in a marathon for is not to see the time done, it's not to watch a very long race. It's to the human drama. It's for the being on the edge of your seat wondering who is going to shi-themselves and how much. And until you can bring that level of, you know,

passion and vulnerability, yeah, until I invent a robot that can sh-h-h-h-it-self, I don't know that I'm going to be interested. Well, you'll be very interested to hear what I've been working on in my lab. Yeah, until we've got a robot who's going to faint halfway through the course dressed as Woody Woodpecker, then it's also like marathons are mostly not about winning. That's the thing. Marathon is the ultimate participation trophy event.

I know dozens of people who have run marathons. If you were like, oh, did you win? They would look at you like you just landed on Earth. Nobody I've ever met has run a marathon, even hoping to finish in the top three. No, no. It's a- So this robot misunderstands marathons. It's about bragging to your friends that you did it at all.

And robots don't have friends. It's about having a midlife crisis and wanting to drop five kilos. My friend, a childhood friend of mine ran the Boston Marathon. this week. And he ran an incredible time and still, I think, lost by like an hour. Oh, yeah. You go, that's still cool. He still did something.

I couldn't have done it. It was amazing. And I wouldn't have cared at all of a robot had done that. And that brings us to our next story, which is apparently they're about to test some reversing of cellular aging on humans. Dorian Gray, eat your photograph of yourself. Eleanor Morton, you have a beautifully untouched skin. Can you unpack this story for us? Thank you.

It's all sun cream all the time, even Christmas Day. That's the secret. So, yeah, I mean, this makes it sound like we're all going to start to look like babies again. But it's actually that they've managed to figure out how to, well, this is about, eyesight. So restoring eyesight in older people by de-aging the cells, I think. It's going to surprise you guys. I'm actually not a doctor. So if I get any of this rock, Josh has only been coming to me for his medical advice. And now he finds out that that was a bad idea. Now I'm going to have to start asking chat GPT. Only marginally worse. But they've, they, so they can turn back cellular time,

basically or they found out a way to do it with certain cells. And that means that they can stop things like glaucoma in eyes, sort of refreshing the tissue, I suppose, more than de-aging it. But it just means that potentially they could do that with other cells and larger cells. And essentially, I don't know about skin cells. I suppose that's the one everyone would be very excited about. But other parts of the body, you know, brain cells, liver cells could potentially we could find a way to reprogram them essentially

to switch things on and off inside them to make sure that they stop doing one thing or start doing another. Is that roughly what's happening, Alice? Again, I'm not a doctor. Yeah, so it's sort of a 2006 discovery of these, what they call transcription factors, proteins in the cells that can transform an adult cell

into a stem cell, an IPS cell which can then be rewritten and made to turn itself into other cells, which is very exciting news because stem cell technology is very powerful. But they're suggesting that they can partially deprogram a cell, but before it, quote, unquote, forgets what it is, turn off that, the switch, the reversal thing, because you don't want everyone turning back into an amoeba. I mean, that's not actually how it goes, but just imagine. You turn into billions of amoebas. Yeah, you just turn into slop, like that X-Men movie.

But no, it's not that. It's like they are thinking they can partially deprogram a cell into sort of a younger state, and then it can rejuvenate itself, which would be incredible for things like degeneration of the brain and things like Parkinson's disease. So it is exciting. They are about to start testing on humans, which is always, this is the nature of science news is that the science news is like in 15, yes, this might be cool. But, you know, after they've done some rounds of human testing,

I'm excited to see what kinds of things that they can do with this technology. It sounds very cool. I mean, if all we wanted to do was cure mice cancer, we would be so happy right now. Does mice don't know how good they have it? Right. Oh, yeah, they're getting the benefit of all this technology before we even know if it works on us. It is always interesting to be like, okay, this works on mice. Does it fall into the center of the Venn diagram of things that are true about mice and things that are true about people? Yeah. Doesn't overlap as much as scientists want you to believe.

I know. You're like, likes cheese. That goes right in the middle. Can D-H sells by programming and deprogramming the Yamanaka factors? TBD, let's find out if that's on the mouth, just on the mouse side. I'm really excited because if this is possible, right, if it is possible to reverse time, share is going to have to re-record or hit song if I could turn back time and rename it. I am going to turn back time and you cannot stop me. That time I turned back time. Oh, I love that.

I see that there's Sam Altman seems to, I imagine many other sinister billionaires have invested in technology, in science funding for this kind of thing. I don't know what it is the billionaire to I want to live forever pipeline is, but there's something about having an immense amount of wealth. I think, I guess it's a symptom more than anything else of people being absolutely terrified of death and aging, even when they have arguably. the best possible life you could have. But there you go. So I suppose if Sam Altman wants it, then maybe we will make it work. And then we'll get Sam Altman forever.

Thank goodness. My big complaint about modern life is not enough Sam Alpin. Yeah. And Brian Johnson, the one who thinks he's doing a good job of looking not his age. Look, I've come round. I've come round on Brian Johnson. because I feel like of all the billionaires in all the bars in all the world,

you happen to walk into my, I just, no, I feel like of all the billionaires' hobbies, his seems sort of so pleasingly solipsistic. It is, it's not taking over the reins of power or, you know, trying to make the uninhabitable, so everyone has to go live in Mars or any of those things. That's fine. He does harvest his own son's blood. But who amongst us hasn't done that? Come on.

We don't know how good that blood is. Maybe we would be harvesting it too. It is true that he's not harming many other people, which is an improvement. And it has the, you know, potential upside of his hobby, maybe making him die. We'll see what happens. I think this is really exciting news, though. It's like a huge step forward for anti-aging technology, which currently consists of injections that make your head look like a sexy beach ball.

And these new technologies could literally rejuvenate old organs. That's what they say. Which does, it sounds both lofty and grotesque. Doesn't rejuvenate old organs sound like how Shakespeare would describe King Lear getting a boner. The time has come to rejuvenate old organs. this is the thing this is i think the best part about working on uh time reversing technology is that it doesn't matter how long it takes you to do it because once you nail it you're going to look 25 in all the pictures yeah and you can and you can um you can just alter all the ones

before then when you didn't so you can look 25 but not be 25 that's the difference because nobody actually wants to be 25 forever. No. You want to look. And then you talk to a 25 year old and you're like, oh, no, thank you. It's like how in Twilight they had to keep hanging out with high school kids. And you're like, I know 600 years worth of stuff and you don't know geometry. Oh, my God.

That's the big help. Oh, my God. Did you hear what Sandra said? If I were a vampire, I have heard everything for centuries. I know they didn't talk like that. But to me, that you're just. suppressing that accent. You're like code switching if you're a vampire that doesn't talk about that. And that brings us to the end of this week's episode of The Gargle. I am flipping through the ad section at the back of this Science and Technology magazine.

Eleanor Morton, have you got anything to plug? Yes, you can now get tickets for my Edinburgh Friends show in August. It's called The Mermaid. It is about being a mermaid and some other silly things. James Cameron comes in there. And you can also buy my book, Live Lessons from Historical Women. Everywhere you get books. It's about women from history I thought were kind of cool. And also, if you like listening to me, ramble on in your earphones, I do a podcast with Alstead Bucket King called Eleanor and Alstead. Read that, where we talk about children's books, classic children's books,

and ask, do they still hold up? What a great idea. It's been a lot of fun. We're doing, we've just done Johnny and the Boy. on by Terry Pratchett and we're going to do Charlotte's Web next. So I'm about to read that and looking forward to it. And Josh, have you got anything to plug. I do. I have a newsletter called That's Marvelous. It's free or you can pay me money for it every Monday. It's full of jokes and pep talks and lets you know where I'll be traveling to tell jokes. That is, you can get that at that's marvelous

newsletter.com. I have a comedy, my new comedy special, which came out last year, but it's still the newest one I have is called Positive Reinforcement. It's on YouTube and I'm bumping around New York a bunch for a bunch of really fun shows coming up. You can find that in my newsletter on my website, josh condolman.com, and my road dates are picking up

kind of, and I'm going to I'll be in Bristol, Tennessee at the end of May and then more in the fall. So come to my website, subscribe to our newsletter, come see me live. I am also going to be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at the monkey barrel and my show is called, oh man. But I will be doing my show,

A Passion for Passion in Brisbane from the 7th to the 10th of May, in Sydney from the 16th and 17th of May. And then I've got gigs in the UK on the 11th of June, 12th of June, all the way through June or July. Head over to patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. It's the one-stop shop nowadays. Or follow me on all of the social media. Also, we have a sister podcast called Realms Unknown,

which is about science fiction. fantasy, or you can listen to our parent podcast, The Bugle. I'm Alice Fraser, and this is a beautiful podcast and Alice Fraser Production. Your editor is Harry Gordon, your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week. 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

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