Hack Attack!

0:00Buglers, it's that time of year again. The time of year when the official Bugle Christmas t-shirt is back. The perfect gift for any pun-loving, satire-craving, bugle-adoring wearing a t-shirt at Christmas fan. Ideal then for Southern Hemisphere Buglers, or any buglers in any other hemisphere who won't back down from t-shirt wearing just because it's winter, or indeed for anyone living on a rapidly heating planet. In stock now, and limited edition, so it may well sell out. Details on the website. Merry Buglemas, one and all.

0:57Alice Fraser: Remember that this is the gargle. This is the glossy magazine, the Bugles audio newspaper for Visual World. We talk about all of the science, all of the technology. We used to talk about none of the politics, but now everything's political, isn't it? Welcome. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and my guest editors for this episode of the podcast, the trombone of truth here from New York City. It is Josh Gondelman.

1:25I realized maybe it's kind of a happy trombone week and I had to pivot in the middle

1:31Alice Fraser: and the piccolo of perspicacity Tom Neenan hello I don't have any kind of brass instrument to proffer I would just use my voice well you are extremely welcome to do so I'm very excited to have you we are going to plunge into the latest in science and technology it is tricky to be avoiding politics on this of all days. But let's start. A series of supermarket hack attacks have heated up refrigerators all over Europe. Tom Neenan, your hot stuff, can you tell us more about this story? Thank you so much. Yes. So this is the news that obviously the suspected Russian hacks have sort of, they're cyber attacks that they hit French stores.

2:18I think this was on October 11th and 12th, and they're Belgium, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands. And these are places that have frozen food aisles, and they've been turning off their frozen food aisles. Now, controversial opinion. If Russia wanted to conduct all of its warfare like this, I would be up for that. If we could have a war that doesn't include bloodshed, doesn't include people going to war, if it was just causing petty annoyances between countries, Like you turn up and all the VNs have melted and you can't get like, you know, a calippo. That's the kind of war I think we should be looking at moving into, you know, 2027, 2028.

3:00Annoying people, doing really annoying things, hacking into bus stops and just putting in slightly wrong sort of timing information and stuff like that. I think if we can move war to just sort of the kind of thing that would annoy a stand-up, like, you know, just sort of, isn't it annoying when X, Y, Z? I think that actually that would be better for the planet. Unfortunately, what I think this is, is maybe just a flex of what they're able to do by going, look at us, we can sort of disrupt your supply chains and it will escalate. If it all stayed at this level, I would be fully on board with that personally.

3:34Alice Fraser: It's putting aside the whole an army marches on its stomach and cold chain logistics are the backbone of civilization. And modern non-agricultural existence is predicated on the existence of these incredibly complicated systems that bring food from one place to another where we don't grow food. So far, so mainly expensive and annoying. And, you know, what are we all man up and drink some hot milk for once, says I. Josh, how do you feel? Yeah. Well, I mean, this is tough because, you know, starting with France, this kind of cyber attack, given the amount of unrefrigerated cheese that this has created, the cyber attack will soon qualify as biological warfare.

4:17That is, it's kind of a naturally escalating situation. Although it is interesting, it kind of is in companion with what's happening to the climate globally, that 35 years after the end of the Cold War, Russia has waged what can best be described as the room temperature war. It does seem bad for international people.

4:40Alice Fraser: Slowly increasing room temperature. That's right. Because look, I think it's going to be bad for international morale. We've all seen the chaos that erupts when a single toddler's ice cream cone melts. And I'm terrified to see what happens when that transpires at a national scale of lukewarm, soupy ice cream. People are going to be thrown into the pits of despair. Part of what's sort of pernicious about this, of course, is whether it's happening at all. It's very difficult to trace who's causing it, what's happening here, whether this is sort of AI or bot attacks or who's in. And I think in this world of extreme weather events, now we're coming up to extreme weather events.

5:21Alice Fraser: We're not sure entirely whether they're events or not, but what we are sure is that our ice cream has melted. I would say in defense of my maybe naive thought that this will all be fine if we continue to this. Obviously, apparently the other thing that has been happening is that you can sort of turn off the turbines or the fans that kind of keep nuclear reactors cool. And I would say of the two, if I had to choose, it would be your Ben and Jerry's leaking onto the floor, rather than something that could cause like a three mile island or something. But that's, you know, only if those were the two options, if it was a binary.

5:58Alice Fraser: Well, I like to imagine that they're competent enough to turn on and off the refrigerators in distant countries' supermarkets specifically, but they are not sophisticated enough to tell people that that's what they're doing. Tweeting about it eludes them. Yeah. I mean, nobody these days wants to take responsibility for their actions. 20 years ago, something like this happens on this scale. People are climbing over themselves to claim responsibility. Everybody wanted to be the one deemed responsible for chaos and discord. And now people are like, was it us? We'll never tell. XOXO gossip government.

6:33There was a celebrity in the UK called Yuri Geller who used to bend spoons, was his main thing. He was kind of a paranormalist of some kind. And what he would also do is sort of whenever something like there was a power outage in London or like there was a, you know, for some reason, like Big Ben didn't chime or something like that, he would always find his way onto the news to go, that was me. like that was his his thing was just his raison d 'etre was to be like yep i did all those things and i'm surprised then that that isn't exactly what as you say what russia is doing whenever there's anything even slightly inconvenient going that that was us so yeah we did it we're everywhere yeah it all ties together though because bending spoons is significantly easier when your pint of ice cream is very cold it's all connected

7:24Alice Fraser: Speaking of things going off in the heat, let's look at Smell-O-Vision. Apparently it's happening. The dream of our youth along with flying cars, which have now happened and somehow were less impressive than I thought they were going to be. Smell-O-Vision has arrived apparently. An artificial intelligence-assisted olfactory interface for remote odour sharing and transmission is on the table. Josh Gondelman, you stink. Can you tell us his story? I do really stink. So AI-assisted interface has enabled remote sharing of olfactory experience. Smells can be transmitted over great distances, which is exciting because finally science has caught up to the technology embedded in my dog's butt.

8:15I do think it's important, right? This is big because it can end the stigma and prove technologically that you can smell it while being thousands of miles away from whoever dealt it. And that is a tech that I could have used back in fourth grade. This technology is called Centronic. It entails the use of an e-nose, which is a huge breakthrough because it's the only nose your uncle can't replicate by putting his thumb between his index and middle finger. the device could have fascinating applications in healthcare online shopping right for for products that have signature aromas but it does feel like it's mostly for pranks and if it gets in the wrong hands it would really amplify the effects of a grocery store refrigerator cyber

8:58Alice Fraser: attack i feel like this is the potential pathway to a perfect future first of all online dating will become much better if you can smell people because sometimes you can get on with someone online and then you meet them and you're like there's just there's just something wrong and it's not that they smell bad it's just that they don't smell like your people and um you know that that's or you know perhaps if you were getting really hit up about a game of warhammer online and were taking very seriously the insults that someone was throwing at you and then you could smell the bedroom that they're in and the scent of Mountain Dew and cheese flavored Doritos, then you would take the insult less seriously.

9:42Alice Fraser: Although, I mean, I really do think there are some politicians whose success can only be explained if they smell amazing. And there are some who would be completely undone if you could smell them, I bet. I'll tell you, look, I don't mean to be ageist, but there, I imagine, is no cure for a gerontocracy like an olfactocracy. Yeah, put that on C-SPAN. Yeah. That's part of the debate. To make sure this isn't political as of now, which past politician do you think smelt the best? Do you think? Sadly, it won't be anyone before sort of, you know, your Abraham Lincolns and people was sort of before personal hygiene sort of advanced.

10:21In terms of the United States, I feel like JFK probably smelled great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't bag Marilyn Monroe by honking out the place,

10:31Alice Fraser: to you completely that sort of casts marilyn monroe as a kind of version of pepe le pew anyway yeah she floated yeah i did find out the other day apparently that um one of the places that old person smell is um most um secreted slash stashed on the human body is behind your ears because it's sort of a greasy place that holds on to dead skin cells. And so if you are worried that you are accruing old person smell, if you're heading towards old person smellatory territory, if you wash behind your ears, you may stave off that particular indicator of old age. That's so ironic because when my grandparents, or not even ironic, I guess it's kind of a complimentary fact, because if your smell is behind your ears, when my grandparents used to come visit, I would sleep on the floor and they would sleep in two twin beds on either side of me and they would snore so loud.

11:36So old person's smell is behind the ears. Old person's sound is in the nose. It's a lovely image. Did you get that tour of that chocolate factory in the end? That's what I would have known.

11:48Alice Fraser: Stay tuned for my reboot of Charlie. Yeah. They turned me into a, they turned me into a bunch of mint wheels. Brutal, brutal. Tune for my gritty reboot of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is where everybody wears a hairnet and follows OHNS health and safety standards. They just walk across a gantry and look at some vats. It's not exciting, but it is accurate. And of course brings us to the ads, 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 religious schisms. Religious schisms. A sect, but wrecked. This makes me want to go out and get some schisms.

12:34Yeah.

12:35Alice Fraser: And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by a friend of the podcast, Chairs. Chairs. The floor, but more. Yeah, they all rhyme. Do you hate looking at your own disgusting feet during a meal? the opposite. Are you the opposite of Quentin Tarantino? And not just because no one's trying to sell their girlfriend on the quality of your work, but because you don't like looking at feet, especially during dinner or breakfast or lunch. Try tables. Tables for when you want to eat without seeing your feet.

13:12This really has the feeling of an Alice looked around the room.

13:24Ceiling.

13:24Alice Fraser: You, I mean, this is not a good pitch for my final and only genuine ad of the section. Do you want to write satire or a book or a solo show? Join my November writing intensives. I'm fresh off my Swiss writers retreat and oozing enthusiasm for helping people get their shit writ. Genuinely, I did tell you they all rhyme. Genuinely, head over to alicefraser.com and you can join. I'm running classes in Australia. You can US time zones so that they are accessible to everybody. And yes, thank you for asking. That is more than twice as much work. But I'm doing all of this mainly because I believe in interpersonal, you know, doing it one-on-one and human attention and, you know, being a person as a central part of anti-AI, blah, blah, blah.

14:14Also online selling

14:16Alice Fraser: my hand-drawn clinch cover pencil sketches if you want a Fabio they're slightly overpriced because I do have to hire a babysitter in order to do one otherwise my children color them in and then I have to charge less for them but head over to the website alicefraser.com and the website shop you can join the masterclasses or buy yourself or a loved one a Fabio what a great Christmas present the gift of learning how to write by me learning having me teach you how to write well what you're offering as well, Alice, because I feel like you're crumbling before our eyes. What you're also offering is community, right?

14:55You're offering like, you know, people say, why do you bother going to film school now? Because we have all the ability to make films on our own. And you go, it's the people you meet as much as it's the skills that you learn. So I would say that it's absolutely worth it. And I was unable to join you for one of them, but I hope to in the future at some point, because I think that would be an excellent thing to do.

15:15Alice Fraser: Yeah, it's genuinely Certainly the writers' retreats are so much fun and the writers' meetings are also fun. And if you want like a quick bang taster of what I have to teach and the cool community, head over at alicefraser.com. That's your ad section for today. And now it's time for Martian meteorite news. And this is exciting news about an ancient Martian meteorite, Mars attacks, 4 point something billion years ago. Tom Neenan, you're red. Can you tell us more about this? I am indeed devastated by last night. Not saying why, not saying what last night was, just because we're not political. But this is a weird story.

15:57Okay, so I get that it's quite exciting that there is a bit of rock that was on Mars that has been on Earth for a very long time, right? It's been on Earth for an extremely long time. Or has it just arrived? Hang on. I should have read the story more fully, I'll be honest. I basically I just got disappointed because it says that this rock is 4.1 billion years old right isn't all rock 4.1 billion years old I'm not I couldn't get excited about it I know there's a there's a meteor out there that is worth like isn't it worth like 80 quintillion dollars because it has so many rare metals on it and if it was to crash to earth it would basically like absolutely obliterate the entire global markets because there's so much gold and platinum and stuff on it that basically all of those metals would immediately be rendered worthless kind of thing.

16:47I assume this is all nonsense. So when I hear about this meteorite that's been around for a long time, I'm like, first of all, all rock's been around for a long time. And secondly, it was found in 2022 in Sahara in Mali. And okay, it's from Mars, but there must be loads of stuff that's from Mars that landed here. Basically, I'm sorry, I can't get excited about the rock. I really tried. I looked at it for ages. I was like, does it look like anything? It kind of looks like a nugget. It looks like the, you know, there's the different shapes of McDonald's nuggets. It looks like the one that kind of looks like, I guess, the Horn of Africa kind of.

17:24That's all I could get from it. It's rock and it's old rock and it is from Mars. But what's the most boring thing that you could get from Mars? Probably rock. So I'm not as excited, but please someone else convince me why I should be absolutely bowled over by it.

17:38Alice Fraser: No, Tom Neiman, you're so wrong about this. Unless it's coming from a volcano, rocks are old. No. Did you sleep through geography? I mean, rocks are incredibly exciting. If you are billions capable of sort of – the problem is, essentially, the problem is the core of our political problems of this time, which is it's very hard to get your head around the size of a billion. A billion is very big and long and large, and the history of the planet is stretched out of this vast span. But basically rocks have been forming all along the way and they can be formed in all different ways. They can be formed by sedimentation and pressure and heat and cold and the different kinds of rocks.

18:20Alice Fraser: You know how there are different kinds of rocks? You can look at those rocks and examine those rocks and figure out what conditions they were under when they were formed and how old they must be in order to have these various features. So, for example, you can say a rock has to have been deep under the earth under a lot of pressure and then come up and cooled very rapidly for it to form certain kinds of things. And so that they can tell and then you can track backwards where it was and when. You know, if you pick up a clump of sand on the beach, that's like how sometimes they hold together in a sort of a lumpy bit and then they crumble under your hands.

18:57Alice Fraser: Eventually, if you left that long enough, that might become a rock. but it would take you ages. So rocks are happening all the time. Not all rocks are 4.2 billion years old. This rock is 4.2 billion years old and it was wet once. Like women you've known, Tom Neenan.

19:17Alice Fraser: Still trying to make rocks sexy. They're so sexy.

19:24Alice Fraser: Don't tell me you don't fantasize about tectonic plate movements during sex, Tom Neenan. this is yeah did the earth move for you yes incredibly slowly that's at all times that's how we got south america so very true i'm sorry i'm sorry if i've been a real i've really poured cold water on this that's fine it's important to it's important that we talk about finding the pan g spot people need to know i do think it's like kind of a cool so let's put this in perspective atlas like you're talking about scale this is four billion years old which means that this uh this meteorites coffee table is covered with an estimated 208 billion unread issues of the new york one week for 4.1 billion years that's amazing um it's it's really kind of a neat thing right The water means that there was likely microbial life on Mars, which answers the open question proposed by Dr.

20:30Ziggy Stardust, who tragically didn't live to see his research come to fruition. But he kind of opened that question about whether there's life there. And this is the thing that gets me, though, that it came from Mars and it's here. and that means that like when i'm talking to my mom on the phone i have no excuse for how inconvenient it is to come home for the holidays if uh if a rock from mars can make it here that's that's an effort you know my mom's like well mars is rocks never complain so did someone throw it good question yeah how'd it get here i mean i assume a billionaire on mars a billion years ago.

21:17Imagine what problems would have to exist on Mars that their billionaires are trying to come with.

21:26Alice Fraser: Less exciting, a little bit worrying, is that Google has announced that it will be leaving schools that opt out of AI tools because the AI tools are so integrated into Google's suite of services that now schools that don't want to engage with its AI services are going to be left sans search. They'll have to go back to, I don't know, Boolean search terms or the Dewey decimal system. Josh, you love filing. Can you tell us more about this story? Yeah, so Google's Gemini AI functions are controversially automatically enabled in its educational products as if people needed another reason to hate Gemini's.

22:08You know how everybody who was born in June is a liar. Google has threatened to disable search functions for schools who opt out of AI use, which is, I think it's like a very ideologically consistent stance from the parent company. Because whether it's with AI-generated information or a lack of access to search functions, Google is going to make your kids dumber. That's a promise. They have made some concessions, though. Like instead of offering students an answer immediately when they use an AI enabled search function, the function now walks them through a series of steps to show them what the answer is.

22:49And as ChatGPT says, teach a man to fish. It's fish time, baby. Turn a man into a fish. He can revolutionize eating himself. That's something ChatGPT told me.

23:01Alice Fraser: No, Josh, you're right to push back on this. Look, I think actually this is not going to be a bad thing for the schools that are deprived of search. I feel like search was the beginning of a slippery slope. I feel like AI itself is merely accelerating tendencies that we were already beginning to have in terms of our technology use. And if we have to go back to a time where instead of just typing something into a search bar, you had to find out about a website by being told about it under the desk at school by a friend or going to Bologna to visit some monks and ask them to give you the knowledge, as in the medieval times.

23:39Alice Fraser: I think we could do with a bit more of that, actually. In the olden days, Google search used to be called asking your grandmother. Yeah, what do kids need to search? I mean, I hate to be one of those sort of awful boomer people who's like, in my day, you left your door open and bin men had muscles or whatever. but like i i'm like i look at it and i go why don't um it's a very specific old honestly i know it's very pull it i know this gets it too into the weeds of like partisan politics but um garbage collectors not being strong anymore sounds like something that donald trump would say on the campaign trail and then every conservative america would have to be like yeah they should be more muscle i mean he'd do an impression of like nowadays we can't get political but he'd definitely do an impression of like someone struggling to like lift the garbage and they want to be like great work mr president big strong men tell me they can't even get higher lifting up the guy and being turned away because i woke scrawny little pipsqueaks picking up your garbage three at a time exactly that what was i talking about i can't remember that no nowadays nowadays it gets picked up automatically doesn't it by a machine so you can't even pervert your garbage man anymore anyway children shouldn't yeah well yeah now children can children do not search yeah garbage man this is with without google search being activated uh we're gonna see just an absolute torrent of children rushing to wikipedia to search boom they're gonna learn a lot they're gonna get a real medical history and they're gonna learn about birds look i mean my day in my day we had in carter 2000 on cd-rom and it had a diagram of the human body and if you pressed the penis in a lady's voice, it would say penis.

25:49Alice Fraser: And if you pressed the vagina, if you clicked on the vagina in a man's voice, it would say vagina. And the number of happy hours I whiled away as a child with my father and a number of friends making it say penis, penis, vagina. That's the thing. Kids don't need to know lots of complex things. They just need to know five things like fire's hot, ice is frozen water, and cows go moo. And if you can't put that in one book, then what do you need the internet for maybe i'm oversimplifying it

26:25i've got it coming out next year it's just everything like a seven-year-old needs to know

26:33look i think you're onto something top because dr seuss spread out those things into all different books yeah and you're like one book that's it one and done everything everything Stop bothering each other.

26:45Alice Fraser: That's the great thing about when people yell, well, no one think of the children. It's extremely inadvisable to be the person who stands up and says, I'm always thinking about it. Finally, someone said it. You thought I was a weirdo over here. That brings us to your reviews section. Your reviews. As you know, each week our guest editors bring in something to review out of five stars. Tom Neenan, what have you brought in for us? Okay. I've brought in, someone's waving at me. Oh no, they're not. They're waving at someone near me, which is, and it averages out because it starts at five stars. I love being recognized and I love talking to people.

27:29So someone's waving at me. That's a five-star experience. I'm about to have a conversation. I'm about to interact with a human. Maybe that'll enrich my life in some way. Then it dips down to a three-star experience as I realize that person is not making eye contact with me. And then to a one-star experience as I realize that I'm not going to be interacting with at all. And not only that, I've probably humiliated myself in public. And then that evens out again to a three-star experience as I realize no one's looking at me. Even the person waving at me wasn't looking at me. I'm at this second insignificant and sometimes that's fine.

28:04So that is a solid two and a half to three star experience overall that I'd encourage anyone to have personally. And I experienced that yesterday and I'm still thinking about it and I have neither negative nor positive thoughts about it anymore. It just happened and that's fine. When I wave and the person wasn't waving to me, but they see me, I go, no, that's for me now. I still wave. I used to put that one.

28:30Alice Fraser: So I saw this happen in a way that I can only describe as like one of those skateboarding accidents that you think is going to be a complete disaster and then they save it at the end. I saw someone catch a wave that was not meant for them, wave enthusiastically back, realize that the person who was waving that they thought was waving at them was not in fact waving at them, but someone behind the person who they had been waving at was actually a friend of theirs and clocked the wave, the return wave, and then they connected. And it was this like incredible, it was like triple backflip. You're about to like crush your nuts on a handrail and just saved it, saved it at the last minute by an actual friend being on the other side.

29:12Alice Fraser: That's like a ricochet wave. I nearly cried. It was so beautiful. That story felt like watching the last 20 minutes of Ocean's Alive.

29:24Alice Fraser: I mean, there's so much planning that goes into those, like, 2000s heist movies. There's so much, like, free thought that requires such extensive chains of causation. It's like three months ago I started to make sexy eyes at the bus driver on this exact route, and then I claimed custody of his child. Like, it's an incredible forethought that it requires someone to go down the exact path at the exact hour. Very impressive. Maybe that wave was set up months in advance. There's a great podcast called Last Scene about the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum heist from 1991, which is my favorite heist. And what they were saying was like, art thieves aren't like guys in tuxedos who love art.

30:07They're just people who are looking for something valuable to steal and are near art.

30:15Yes, I have a review that I brought in. And Alice, I should not have teased you earlier for looking around the room for things to advertise because my review is for pie from four days ago. I'm not going to tell you that leftover pie from four days ago is as good as a freshly baked pie because I don't want to lose all credibility. I'm here to tell you that it's better than freshly baked pie. Last weekend, I purchased a pie to bring to a dinner party, and my friends who hosted sent me home with the leftovers in an act of generosity so pure it should be in the Bible. Because of that.

31:10matters. Automated recovery, clean data, a business that keeps moving no matter what hits. One platform, not a patchwork of stitched together tools and gaps. Don't wait for the next attack. Secure and accelerate your business at rubric.com. Again, rubric.com. It feels less like a baked good I bought and more like one that was given to me as a gift. I've been enjoying a slice of pie as a snack, little slice with afternoon coffee all week. many things in this world exist on a spectrum but i strongly believe in the pie the binary the binary of buy of pie versus no pie so for that reason four days ago's pie gets five stars because it is pie that exists in my home um can i ask what kind of because because this is uh one of the great uh things that divides our great nations is uh what we would describe as a pie when you when i think of pie i immediately think savory i immediately think there's meat in there there's maybe a bit of cheese there's some vegetables was was this but did you have a sweet pie this is a dessert pie yep i thank you for asking because we have listeners all over the world and i went with a very u.s centric concept of pie this is a bittersweet which is i guess bittersweet is like an olive branch across yeah yeah kind of the middle appreciate it and uh a bittersweet chocolate uh bourbon chocolate pecan pie whoa yeah it was so good It's from this place in my neighborhood.

32:40And the first time that I remember having this pie was Thanksgiving 2020. So it was deep pandemic. And we got a fairly disappointing Thanksgiving dinner pre-boxed from a restaurant in the neighborhood because we couldn't visit my parents or my wife's parents. And it came with this perfect slice of pie within it. And so this pie always reminds me of like feeling joy for the first time.

33:03Alice Fraser: Yes. To be clear, if you're not in the US, when the Americans say pie, they mean sort of like a deep tart or a Marilyn Monroe, if you will. Wow. Yeah, for me, a pie has to have a pastry top as well. But that's just that. Oh, yeah. This was an untop. This was a convertible. I'll accept it. And that brings us to our final story of this week's episode of the podcast. they're putting forward a blood test that may help detect Alzheimer's risk 10 years in advance of any signs of the disease showing on the surface. Tom Neenan, you understand blood as an ancient vampire. Can you tell us more about this?

33:52I really had it planned and it was going to be really fun but my glasses would mean it doesn't quite work to deliver this entire piece with sort of saucer-wide unblinking eyes. because we're talking about the ability to detect things with just one drop of blood, and we all know who recently made claims about that. And it's, yeah, this is very exciting, but I am obviously thanks to, what was the name of her technology? Grinost? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's burned everyone now, so everyone approaches all of this with a real amount of skepticism. But from the looks of it, this could be a really good piece of development whereby you can detect this risk, as you say, 10 years in advance.

34:41It feels like the more I read about these things, the more that you can actually kind of unravel someone's kind of genetic predisposition going all this way back. So this is from a scientist at the Mass General Birmingham Neuroscience Institute who are involved in this. And they are the ones who say that basically, yeah, you can map for the next 10 years just by the genetic code that's locked up in your blood. What I do want to know is, can you avoid it? Are there steps you can take if you have a predisposition to Alzheimer's that you can actually avoid that sort of taking hold? Or is it just the kind of thing where they take chest your blood and go, you're going to get hit by a train in four years' time?

35:22And you're like, oh, that sucks. Oh, okay. I guess I'll look out for trains now.

35:26Alice Fraser: I mean, it depends. They've got these kind of blood biomarkers, which you may be able to turn off, but they're not sure how much those are kind of correlation or how much those are causation. Overall, if you have a high Alzheimer's risk, one of the things they recommend, obviously, is weight-bearing exercise, lifting weights, and cardiovascular fitness has a lot to do with Alzheimer's risk. So blood flow to the brain can help with that. And there are also So arguments that sort of complex thinking and complex tasks can help fend off Alzheimer's symptoms in older adults. Interestingly, what they did, what a lot of people did was like puzzles and cool crosswords.

36:11Alice Fraser: And actually a far more complex sort of set of things for your brain is something like going to a dinner party and trying not to offend anyone. so people with a strong active social life uh can tend to have better outcomes if they have high alzheimer's risk um because apparently that is way harder to get through a dinner party than it is to do a sudoku every day for 40 years this this is helpful for me to know because i have been eating a crossword puzzle every single day it is they're crunchy i like it if it's fibrous i need a higher fiber people are talking about protein nobody's talking about how much fiber you get in your crossword puzzles every day if you eat them um it is tough though because it says that the this reporting says that like there's not that much more you can do if you know you're at risk right there's not like a preventative drug you can take which puts you in kind of this is this is dark to say but like the hardest position of being like more aware than anyone in human history of your alzheimer's it just like increases your cognitive locking into your alzheimer's or potential alzheimer's which is very uh difficult i'm sorry i'm now just obsessed with them because the the australian other than your good self uh alice who i see most um on my computer is uh is the guy who does the cryptic crosswords um you know the guy who's like another word for deceive that guy um and now i just imagine that while he's very good at that he's probably he might just be going to dinner parties and absolutely putting his foot in it everywhere and being like you know just being so rude he doesn't mean it's like you look like you might be uh another word for pregnant and then just be like i'm not i'm not pregnant he's like well i've ruined this evening um that's such an exciting the the two of you have reminded me that this or made me think there's such an exciting possibility because normally when someone is unpleasant at a dinner party you go um man that person I hate being around them but now at least you get the schadenfreude of going like that guy's brain's probably deteriorating well well well I just like the fact that you said oh you know that guy who does the cryptic crossword puzzles like I would know that guy because we all secretly believe that everyone has access to our particular algorithm.

38:33Alice Fraser: Never heard of the guy, Tom Neenan. Never heard of him. My algorithms are mainly old rabbis telling men how to treat their wives. I'm not in that cul-de-sac of Twitter, but I'm not touching anything. It's fine. They all seem quite nice. He was my one hope that the monoculture existed. He's a reference that I've been able to make. The crossword guy. Yeah, the crossword guy. Oh my God, he's gorgeous. He's got like strawberry blonde hair and he sits in his little study and he does crosswords and he's incredibly soothing is he as fuckable as a bin man tom that i mean no one is no one is you've got those brain yeah google him one minute cryptic he'll be your new crush i guarantee it one minute cryptic that sounds really i i understand why he's called that but it does also sound like a guy appearing and being like in one week something will happen that will change the course of your life forever and then just kind of disappear i mean that's basically what this blood test is isn't it it's just like in the future something might happen and you're like oh thank you the phone call from the ring that's really i hope it happens fast so i can forget about how bad and that brings us to the end of this week's episode of the gargle i'm flipping through the ads at the back.

39:59Alice Fraser: Josh Klemelman, have you got anything to plug? Yes, I do. If you're in New York City, like I am, I'm performing one headlining show at the Bell House on November 11th. You can get tickets at thebellhouseny.com. It's part of the New York Comedy Festival. And then I'm on the road, a bunch coming up. I think tickets are on sale for Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, North Carolina, Austin, Texas now, and Northampton, Massachusetts out in Western Mass. and you can find all that info in my newsletter my weekly newsletter that's marvelous which you can get it that's marvelousnewsletter.com and tom neenan what have you got to plug uh i just say follow me at instagram at tp neenan maybe on sub stack i think it's at uh t neenan on there um i'll probably start putting out things for like uh work in progress is in the new year um so to start working out sort of another hour or something uh which would be quite exciting but until then just sort of keep following me.

40:53I'm on Blue Sky as well. I think I'm at... Blue Sky is a weird way of saying how you... tpneedon.bluesky.social if that's the thing. Blue Sky sort of had a bit of a resurgence certainly for me last night as I was watching a certain set of results come in but we're not allowed to talk about that.

41:09Alice Fraser: Head over to my Patreon at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. If you are subscribed to the Patreon, you get 50 % off the November intensives. So if you do want to come and have a taste of the writers' meetings and have these intensive courses, there's Write a Book, how to write satire and how to write a solo show. If any of those things interest you, head over to alicefraser.com and you get 50 % off if you're a patron. So that works out well for everybody, mainly me. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Harry Gordon. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week.