The Gargle - Monkey Friends & Illegal Waste

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

On this week's issue of the glossy newspaper pullout The Gargle, Alice is joined by John-Luke Roberts and Josh Gondelman. The trio jump into this week's science and tech news - from the looming ice age to great apes having human-like friendships. Plus we're back with another Reviews Section!Alice Fraser: https://www.patreon.com/AliceFraserJohn-Luke Roberts: https://www.johnlukeroberts.co.uk/Josh Gondelman: https://www.joshgondelman.com/🎤 Get tickets for the LIVE episode of The Gargle HEREhttps://www.angelcomedy.co.uk/event-detail/the-gargle-live-fri-26th-jun-the-bill-murray-london-tickets-202606261800/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 Laura Turner, with Executive production from Chris Skinner Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to The Gargle, a satirical science and technology news show brought to you by The Bugle. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and this is the podcast for people who read press releases with one eyebrow raised and the other one down, one finger in their ear and one foot out and one foot in and also being quite skeptical about technology and science. I'm experimenting with format since the reboot of the Gargle. So if you have any suggestions for segments you'd like to see, let us know by emailing The Gargle at The Buglepodcast.com or hitting me up personally on Blue Sky or Instagram. I'm not going to tell you my handles. Go on an adventure. Life is too easy. But first, before we get into the body of this podcast,

I'd like to welcome our co-hosts out of the gate. He is the Big Apple's Big Apple, the Big Apple, the Big Apple himself, Josh Gondelman. Welcome. Thank you. It is nice for me, Josh, the Big Apple, Gondelman, to be here with you. And it is the Peach of the Northwest.

John Luke Roberts, welcome. Hello, thank you very much for having me. I suppose hemispherically I'm in the northwest, am I? Is that where? Look, I just always, I mean, it's just a joke iteration on the fact that I once went to a place that called itself the Venice of the East. And it was just a small town with a river in it. Before we get into the rest of the show, I'm going to have a look at the front cover this week. Front cover headlines for science and technology this week. there is a major Atlantic current proposed to weaken 50% by 2,100.

Europe asked Eurovision how much less sexy Eurovision will be when all of the hot Eurotrash has to wear layers or become a walrus to survive. This is the danger. Apparently researchers are combing through more than a century of ocean temperature data, and they've confirmed that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation slowdown is real and also definitely our fault. The AMOC is a conveyor belt of warm water that keeps Northern Europe from becoming a miserable grim wasteland of people who romanticise human suffering. Even more than it already is a grim, miserable wasteland of people who romanticise human suffering.

The instigator of the slowdown is fresh melt water from Greenland, diluting the salty, dense water that drives the current. To summarize, we are de-frosting Greenland, which is rusting the engine that keeps Europe warm, which will ultimately make things cold, which will make your personal dick smaller. So you better not be wasting our planet's resources watching Instagram reels about how you're wasting your planet's resources as a way to assuage your guilt about wasting our planet's resources and if this joke has made you feel slightly guilty about wasting our planet's resources please go touch grass, it might not be around for long. John Luke Roberts, you're in the path of this terrifying amok.

How are you feeling about the prospect of a new ice age? Well, much worse than I was before I knew about it. Before I knew about the new Ice Age, I was fairly relaxed about the New Ice Age. Now I know about the New Ice Age. I'm tense, I will say. I mean, it feels like it's going to be not good, but on the bright side, nothing. Yeah, I guess there will be some sweet release involved. I hope so.

So Sam Oldman has admitted out loud that AI will not, he thinks, take all white-collar jobs. He did say it was going to take all white-collar jobs, but he revises his prediction to say that it'll still take most white-collar jobs. But later, he spoke in Sydney about this and he walked back his do-mo slash booster line go-up messaging apocalyptic forecast saying, saying, quote, human interaction remains valuable. I assume he said that because the numbers told him he'd made a mistake. I think that's what it sounds like when a robot makes friends.

Like, human interaction is so valuable. I've noticed they keep saying 18 months. It's like Trump always says two weeks. The AI people always say in 18 months, all jobs will be replaced. And it's been that for certainly at least 18 months now. But it's a nice little area of time, I guess, to get some investors. 18 months is also far enough in the future that it doesn't show up on any calendar you have so people can't mark it down and then verify whether it happens or not.

I think 18 months is just slightly longer than anyone can imagine forward into the future. Like we all might make long-term plans, but we can't actually envision anything further than 18 months away. I think that's just the truth of the condition. We can't imagine the next season we're in that's this one after that. Yes. We can imagine one more of summer, and that's it. That's it for now. We can't carry on.

Also, Sam Altman saying it's going to eliminate, not every white collar job must just be a result of him saying it will eliminate every white collar job. And then everyone going, well, yours first then. And then he's like, whoa, wow, we got to keep some of them. Sam Oltman is valuable. Tech jobs are not white collar jobs. They are, I wear a t-shirt to work because I'm too cool for a white-collar job. Right. What's the technical term?

What's the color of the collar on a quarter zip pullover? Camel. Camel is the color. Now, this you will be very excited about headlines-wise. They've resolved the muon G2 anomaly. Exciting. They notice if you're obviously aware of the muon wobble, they've, They've declared it not a, it's a non-wobble.

The original plan for physics was boring but correct all along. After two and a half decades of trying to figure out this tiny magnetic hiccup in the muon, which is a particle that lives for 2.2 microseconds. They were wondering it was a portal to hitherto unsuspected physics. They have concluded that someone just did the maths wrongly and they have resolved the anomaly. The good news. now the standard model of the world works.

And we don't have to rewrite physics. We are so back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The bad news is no one's getting any new superhero powers. And no one gets to buy a new larger Hadron Collider to figure out the anomaly. And then our final piece of headline news this week is Google has proposed a plan to put data centers in space.

Because in space, no one can hear you scream about sustainability. It's a project suncatcher, which is a moonshot to build AI data centers in orbit. The pitch is that space has abundant solar power and no neighbours to complain. Does, however, offer the novel challenge of when the server crashes in order to turn it off and turn it back on again, you need a person in a rocket, I assume. So this is about noise complaints because then we should put some nightclubs in space as well. I've actually had neighbors that I would like to send to space by that rubric. No, but then they'll complain.

What last thing we need is neighbors in space? That'll ruin all the plans. I mean, I have to say that this week, basically, it's been incredibly hard to fact-check a lot of the stories because of the new version of Google, which is like so predominantly AI-based. It's very difficult to, because I'm not familiar,

sufficiently familiar with like these, how do you check things? And I actually had to re-up my old J-Store by getting a friend who's still at a university to let me go and check scientific papers. So thanks Google for making me actually do human research. AI is accelerating the pace of human research by making you do it instead of reading AI results. Yeah, yeah, the traditional way by asking a friend of yours if they can give you their details

so that you can log into the thing that their university pays for for them. Because research should not be accessible to ordinary people. We've learned what happens when you let people do their own research. We're going to do our reviews now, which is where we ask, as you know, each week slash Fortnite. We ask our guest hosts to bring in something to review out of five stars. Josh Kondelman, have you brought in something to review for us? Yes, I have brought in the experience of hanging out with my friend Sean's five-year-old daughter and Sean. The three of us were hanging out.

We were at a lake. She wanted to play a game where we pretended to catch her on a fishing line as she was a mermaid, and then she would chomp the fake imaginary fishing line in half. We played that for about 45 minutes. Not a lot of heightening, kind of repetitive. Could have been a little more imaginative with the gameplay. she asked me why I was bald, which I found hurtful. But then when they dropped me off at the airport,

I was texted by my friend Sean that within one minute of me getting out of the car, she had said, I miss Josh. So five out of five stars, perfect experience. One of the best experiences of my year. Oh, that does sound like an excellent experience. And I will put a thumbs up on your five stars. saying it was helpful to me because that's how the world works. Now it does, we have to review our reviews.

Isn't that a sign of the times? Yeah. I also got to watch this was in the south. I was in Tennessee where Seltzer is not always abundant because Jews are not always abundant. And so I got to watch a five-year-old in the American South try Seltzer for the first time, which did feel like doing Jewish missionary work. Why is it so bubbly?

Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Can I just ask a seltzer question? Please. So I've only really, like, you've seen it used in sort of vague, like, you know, slapstick. Is it just so? Yeah, yeah, sure. So do water, but there's all sorts of flavored ones that you can get in cans and bottles and stuff over here. Yeah.

Oh, hard seltzer. I remember. Yeah. Well, then soft too, soft but flavored. Oh, yes, good. Good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you.

We weren't getting that five-year-old drunk. For the non-alcoholic market, they should do a soft-hard seltzer, I think. That's right. That's what I've been calling it is soft-hard shelter, which I guess says a lot about the way I've been living more than anything else. I am not telling the jokes that are coming to my mind. John McLaughlin's what to be brought in for us to review. Well, since we're reviewing experiences, I would like to review the experience the other night of I forget what it was I was watching.

It might have been the hacks finale, but I'm not going to renew that. I'm not going to review the hacks finale. I thought it was actually very good, but don't listen to that because that's a review and that's not what I'm reviewing. But as we opened now, there was a little box for a movie

and it was two sad faces next to each other. It was obviously a breakup movie, and it was called No More We. And that was We with OneE, but I really hope that. I haven't watched it, but Guy really got excited about the idea that they'd done this on purpose, and it was a clever play on words, and it was about maybe a world in which you can't urinate anymore. But it did make me want to make a prequel to it, and I came up with the title,

a kind of prequel about codependency in the forming of this relationship, which would be called We Over Me, who'd be a couple ahead of the individual. And I had such a lovely time. I was by myself, but God, I laughed. I'm giving that five stars. Perhaps you would also enjoy the French movie No More We, which is about a couple that can no longer agree to or assent to anything with one another.

I'm going to tell a cute story now because I have to, and I'm aware that when you quote your own children, essentially framing up your own parenting. But I must say that after watching Star Wars for the first time, I was delighted when my daughter said to me, she turned to me and she said, Mommy, the people in the resistance don't seem to ever do poo. And I said, yes, that is the takeaway.

What's interesting, though, is that she's not just said the people in the resistance. Like the empire, I don't think we see them pooing either. No. Yeah, there's not like some recently reinstated. deleted scene of Darth Vader on a toilet. I think the reality is sort of we see the, we see very brief periods of the empire at work. You know, it is conceivable that they're doing poos offstage.

So whenever we cut away from them, that's when they're probably doing it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I love that level of inference too, where she was like, I can, I can use my imagination, but we're hanging out with Luke Skywalker. Like, we would have seen it. This is like the problem with Kiefer Sutherland in 24 all over again. your ad section because you can't be what you can't buy.

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Each purchase entitles you to one freshly observed exotic quark configuration. Yours to admire for slightly less than the time it takes to read this word. Comes that there's a difficult authenticity that outlives the particle by approximately 100%. $4.2 billion, collider not included. That brings us to our top story of today. This is a 53-year-old clinically dead man. become the first person to receive two kidneys and a whole liver from a genetically modified pig. So this news story contains within another news story, which is not new news, but is news

to me, which is that there are now pigs who have been genetically modified to provide human compatible organs. So this man, his organ function was sustained for almost five days with consent from his family. And there was no signs that the organs were being rejected in the first 24 hours, according to a study published this week. So, look, because it's not kosher, I'm not going to ask Josh Goldman to deal with this story. John Luke Roberts, can you talk to us about this tale of transplantation? Yes. So I've misread it to begin with. I thought, oh, they put a pig liver and some kidneys into a clinically dead person. And I thought, that's not news. Who of us has not done that? They transplanted them.

so that they were working properly for 24 hours and then they started being rejected, I think, but that's very low down in the article. It seems like it's good news. It's bad news for pigs. It's bad news for pigs, I will say. They've got another use, another thing for them to be given up to. But probably good news for humans on the basis of being able to survive if you can't find a human liver lying around, being able to grab a nearby pig and use that instead.

It did make me a bit sad because we have like the partial individual organs have already been transplanted from pigs into humans, like bits of hearts and livers, I think. Although as far as I can see, they've never done the ears or the nose or the tail, which I would think would be a lot more fun. We could do with a few of those on people. And of course, I've not heard of a sausage being used as a penis transplant, which is just an open goal, I think. It also feels like there's, you know, this should be being pitched in the same way as all news stories now are as 1984 all over again. No matter what side of politics you happen to be on, it feels like this really is the end of 1984 in which you cannot tell all the difference between the pigs and the humans. And, you know, something, something, something satire. I think this story was lacking, right?

We found out that the man lived or his organs continued to function for five days after receiving the kidneys and liver from a genetically modified pig. The story did not say whether the pig made it. I assume no, but we don't know that the genetic modification was ability to survive without kidneys or a liver. So like it really is still in play. And the, as John Luke said, the body did not. not reject the organs within the first 24 hours, but after 36 hours, it seemed like there was some rejection of the organs. And I think that's pretty good. Who wouldn't want to live another 36 hours? There's so much you could do with an extra 36 hours of life. And knowing that it's just

that much is very precious, right? You could watch 98 episodes of Seinfeld. You could play 216 games of speed Jess. You could eat 25,920 individual items you dropped on the floor, according to the five second rule. So there is a lot in play with just this 36 hours, which I think is a very promising start. I think we've buried the lead here. You think it's a five second rule. I'd always heard it was a three second rule.

Well, over here, we've loosened the standards for health and safety. The image in my head is always of like the E. coliobacteria or whatever. They're all around on the floor. And then the thing is dropped. They go, oh, better to get ready. And they go and they pack their bags. And as long as it takes for them to get the bags on and pack them and jump on the food, that's as long as you've got.

And I think it's ridiculous to think that that wouldn't be at least 10 seconds. Right, because you always forget something and have to go find it. Yeah, you have to go back. Yeah, yeah. I saw, I had a long travel delay yesterday. And like against the window in the airport. kind of nestled into a corner of the carpet, I saw one lone green pharmaceutical pill. And I did think, hey, we could have a day.

I was like, if I were a different guy, this would be a great travel delay. Our next news is the news that nearly 30 suspected illegal waste supersights is each containing tens of thousands of tons of rubbish have been identified in a new dump watch list in England. Again, this is a news which contains within it news because I did not know until this news story that there was a dump watch list, but apparently there has been four ages

and that makes me happy to know that there's someone in the world whose job is dump watcher. Josh Gundleman, you've seen a lot of shit in your life. Can you unpack this story? Absolutely. So there are 28 illegal super sites, each containing 20,000 tons of waste. And I know this isn't accurate,

but I'm picturing that that waste is tens of thousands of DVD copies of Nicholas Cage's early 2000s filmography. Like, did you know he's been in a movie called Knowing where he finds a time capsule that tells the future? No, then maybe every hard copy has been sent to an illegal dumping site. It's not just the 28 super sites, though, that they found. The dump watch, as it's called now, fixed out, identified over 700 sites in total. So you better start now if you want to knock them all off your bucket list before you die. And by going to the mall, you will probably die sooner.

The biggest site is in Cheshire and it contains 281,000 tons of contaminated soil. And that just makes me wonder, how do you contaminate that much soil? Did a truck containing a year's supply of rat poison crash into a working windmill? Was a farmer planting a crop of nuclear explosives? Either way, this is a level of littering that should be classified as one of the gross wonders of the world. Like those fat birds in the ocean or the drawers in Bill Maher's bedside table. Do not want to know what's going on in there. Well, I'm currently potty training my son, and we call that the dump watch.

You guys, no pants in the house until we leave for the morning and we're all on Dump Watch. Well, I'm glad they've released this list because it's very expensive now to travel abroad and it's good to have more tourism options in the UK. So you can go to Walton Towers, you can go to the Pennsylvania Museum. And now there's like 30 super sites of Dump. Ah, brilliant.

I'm looking forward to going along and visiting a few. you. And once you've done those, there's 117 like, oh yeah, they've put it in rank of like how illegal. So there's 700 in total, which are like, oh, they're illegal. And then there's 117 which are pretty illegal. And there's 30, which are, wow, guys, how illegal can your rubbish get? So it's nice of them to rank it. Also, it does seem to be that the government have made this list and then that's sort of it that they've gone, we've got a list. We know they're there, right? Are you going to do, no, we can't we have any money? How can we do anything about it? But they're there and they shouldn't be. Thank you very much.

They have been filed and prioritized. Is that not sufficient? If there is a taxonomy of waste, we have dealt with the issue, at least in an etymological way. I think, I mean, look, okay, all right. First of all, this worries me because I had not realized until the recent release of the Hunter virus, how many people like to just go and look at some waste for their fun. I mean, they say it was for the birds, but I don't believe.

it. Yeah, I'm pretty upset by this, really. I mean, if you had asked me to imagine how many piles of illegal waste they were in the UK, I would not have thought this many, I think. What makes illegal waste, right? Is it, because like, if you throw recyclable paper in the garbage, technically that's illegal. And that's kind of a, that's pretty benign as far as illegal waste goes, or is it something that was illegal to have in the first place, like a big, a whole landfill just full of cocaine and bazookas or whatever, or is it something that is illegal to throw away, like tags on a mattress? So it could be anything. If it's illegal to possess cocaine, surely like throwing it away is actually what you ought to be doing. It doesn't

seem fair that that's illegal too. That's right. Jeepers, creepers. You're damned if you've got it. you're damned if you don't. Might as well have some fun. That was the thing about Al Capone. They had him banged her rights on tax evasion, but they were going to get him for littering. That's so funny. The FBI just tailing him in an unmarked car

waiting for him to throw a candy bar wrapper out the window. Speaking of remembering Al Capone, there is news. about memory, which is that it's not as good as we thought it was. It's not as good as we remembered it being, unfortunately, for all of us. John Luke Roberts, can you remember how this story went? Well, I thought I'm a bit, actually, I now think maybe I can't because the story, the story is one of those stories about like, oh, actually, memory's malleable than what you think

you remember you don't remember, and memories can be changed quite easily. And I was like, I read that years ago. So it's a surprise to read it now and go like, oh, it turns out, this is new. But the news seems to be, if I've got it right, about using witnesses in criminal trials. And when there's a lineup, the difficulty of, well, the research seems to be when people say, yes, that's definitely him. And it is the suspect rather than the three, the filler queens. it's used they, we used to think that was accurate if they're certain. And then that was thrown into doubt that certainty has anything to do with accuracy.

And now mathematics has shown that yes, certainty does have something to do with accuracy. But if you leave it for a while and you try and persuade people about different things, then things become inaccurate and they'll change their minds. This is huge. Because if the idea of eyewitness evidence as a standard for criminal convict. is thrown into doubt because it's so often inaccurate. Great news. If someone is sure they saw you committing a crime, you are innocent and you may walk free, which I don't think is quite Howard, although it is very intuitive, but memory is unreliable and able to be manipulated by people

who have a vested interest in having you come to a certain conclusion, right, through false or manipulated memory. And I know what you're thinking. That doesn't sound like something the police would ever do. Police wouldn't do something they'd benefit from, even if it breaches the ethical standards their profession allegedly adhered to, by convincing someone they remembered something they didn't. Wouldn't they feel bad being treated like heroes after doing something like that? Shockingly, it has happened. People keep their eyes open. Folks remember things wrong all the time, right? So this is not surprising to me. One famous kind of false group memories called the Mandela effect, which if I remember correctly, is based on the popular false recollection that

Nelson Mandela had a three-episode arc as Rose's lover on the Golden Girls. But fortunately, there are more accurate ways of ascertaining criminal culpability, right? Like DNA evidence. No one has accidentally looked at a complex nucleotide sequence and mistakenly shouted, I just know I've seen that combination of cytosine, thiamine, guanine, and adanine before. That's the real killer. Well, I mean, I had always thought of that. I'd always known that as I'm in the universe where it was called the Mandala Effect.

And that's where in the history of the human race, apartheid in Africa was ended by everyone getting around and doing complex sand drawings. Oh, I also experienced the Mancala effect, which was just the false memory that the universe is kind of a bead related game. Beads all the way down. Mandalay. Something about the mandalay effect. Punch it up later. That's where Nelly the elephant went. Yeah, right.

Oh, yes, yeah, yeah. Okay. Back to her trunks. No, I think it's where Nellie Furtado went in my universe. There we go, we've done it. We've got to the end. I remember her name being Nellie Frittata. Is that wrong?

Don't over-egg the joke. your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy, but you can buy tickets to the gargle live in London on the 26th of June at the Bill Murray. We are selling fast. So please come along and enjoy yourself. See me and other gargle hosts doing the gargle. But like, it's like this, but more so and you can smell us.

I don't know. Not like, if you've got a very good sense of smell and instead. at a normal distance, you're allowed to breathe in and smell us. I really didn't think where this was going. Lots of people will be there and I'll be signing books afterwards. If you're enjoying listening to this show, why not try listening to a different show? Our sister podcast, Realms Unknown, where we talk about science fiction and fantasy. It's lots of fun. Don't listen to it now. Wait till the end of this episode and then listen to it. That brings us to our final story of the day, which is the news that chimpanzees and bonobos apparently have human-like

friendships. Josh Connellman, you've had human-like friendships before. Can you tell us a bit more about this story? Just another way that I'm better than Sam Altman having had human-like friendships. Sure, both orangutans in bonobos monkeys share the social trait with humans where we have some strong social bonds and then some less strong social bonds. And first of all, we evolved, we evolved from apes. So this is their trait that we share. This isn't our thing just because we realized it first. Like, just because I occasionally eat oatmeal doesn't mean that horses are ripping off my signature breakfast, you know? The conclusion was drawn by tracking the grooming habits of these monkeys and apes. The more time they spent grooming each other, the closer

their relationship. And that is also unlike human relationships. I am definitely not spending the most time with the friends who need me to help them wash their hair, or at least ask me to. But here's the thing. I think this is really interesting to know, right? And Bonobos, they have more egalitarian relationships start the course of their life while it gets more specialized with orangutans over time, which I think is really interesting, and very human-like. But if they really socialize like humans, they would have a couple of friends that they only know through their significant others, a few friends whose jobs and first names, they can't remember a friend they text with all the time but can never schedule an IRL hang out with. And one friendship that seems to have run its

course, but both parties keep trying, which is beautiful in its own way, but always leaves both apes feeling wistful afterwards. Apparently, they also change. friendships as they age much like we do in a familiar way that as you get older you have fewer friends and a smaller circle but they are closer. I assume also because as you get older you get grumpier as a chimpanzee and less willing to put up with other chimpanzee bullshit and you don't want to talk to the young chimpanzees because they still have hope about the future. Sorry, I'm just wondering if I can make friends with a monkey. It sounds like the the chances have gone up at this point.

Like if they're formed, but I'd have to go for a youngish one. The old ones do seem to be more selective. So I'll find a chimpanzee in a moderate age. We have nothing common so that we could have a good friendship. So, you know, I'm talking like a university lever monkey, probably at least. And maybe I could be a mentor figure to the monkey. And I think that'll go well.

We can go and watch films together. I won't have to worry because there's always that thing about, you know, when a friendship kind of, You meet someone, an acquaintance enough, that you think this is going to tip into friendship. But then you realize you can't, you didn't hear their name the first time, and then you asked again, and then they said it again, you didn't hear it, thought, I'm just going to have to go along with it. And now you can't ask for their name again. You've been to too many things together.

You've gone bowling. But it is going to drift apart if you can't get the name. With a monkey, you don't have to worry, because you won't have the verbal part of it. So this is great news for John Rick Roberts, and I'm going to form a circle of monkey, friends because people have let me down. I think I was saying orangutanamo when I meant chimpanzee, and that was wrong of me. And I just want to assure any monkey or great ape listeners that I'm listening and learning and I will do better in the future.

I think if we've learned from this monkey friendship hierarchy system, if we've learned anything, it's that not all of the apes are great. That brings us to the end of this week's episode of The Gargle. through the ads at the back. Don Luke Roberts, have you got anything to plug? Oh, well, I'm doing my new, I'm working up my new Edinburgh show at the moment, called what I talk about when I run about talking. And I'll be taking that to Edinburgh Fringe and various places around the UK in the run-up to that. So if in August you're in Edinburgh, come along. Oh, and if you can't come along live to see me, I've just put all my, well,

they're going out at the moment. Last two years ago, I remounted all ten. of my solar shows, one a day and then five a day, which was mad. But go fast the stripe, filmed them. And if you'd like to watch them, they're coming out now. You can basically, you see the shows. The shows are good. You also get to watch a man realize five shows a day is too many shows. And so you can track my decline while also enjoying some absurdist comedy.

Yes, indeed. Dizzying. If you are in London and enjoy both John Luke Roberts, and me, and I don't know why you would be listening to this podcast if you weren't. I mean, the second part, not the first part, people outside of London are allowed to enjoy this podcast. But if you are in London and enjoy both John Luke Robbins and me, we're doing a shared work in progress and you can find out the details of that over at my Patreon, patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. That's also where I do my weekly writers meeting. It's on the 17th of June at

Aces and 8th. Josh Gondelman, have you got anything to plug? I've got a couple of things. I am, as always, writing my newsletter. That's Marvelous. You can find it. That's Marvelous Newsletter.com. It's free or you can pay me money for it, your choice. I have a comedy special that is on YouTube. It's called Positive Reinforcement. I would love if you watch it if you haven't. And I've got a couple tour dates. My fall is filling in, which is exciting. Tickets for Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 19th. They're on sale. Those will sell out. And then I'm going in October to Houston and Dallas. Those are not on sale yet, but they will be eventually, I guess, is the premise. And then more to come. So subscribe to the newsletter. You'll get updates as I add

tour dates. And I might, I'm trying to figure out if I can go to Fringe for a week and hang out and do some short sets on other people shows. So that is a goal, but I cannot promise it's going to happen. But this week, I'm trying to lock down a week to go. Excellent. That is very exciting and fun. You can find me online at patreon.com slash alice Fraser or various other locations. I will be flying to the UK next week. So I'll be in the UK. I have Passion for Passion on the 12th of June. I have a work in progress. On the 11th of June, I have aces in. I've got work. I've got all of it everywhere. I'm filming a Passion for Passion and my new show, Oh man, in Cardiff on the 17th of July. All of that is available over at my website, Alice Fraser.com.

or, as I said, patreon.com slash alicephraiser. You can sign up there for free, and it's sort of a weekly newsletter, plus various shenanigans. This is a bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Laura Turner. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next fortnight.

Hello, I am Andy Zaltzman, as you may know. The bugle, as well as being the world's only ever, longest-running and arguably best audio newspaper for a visual world is one of the very few fully independent media empires remaining in this thus far very silly millennium. Our voluntary subscribing listeners have made this possible and you, if you are not already one, can join them to keep our shows free, flourishing and independent

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