How easy is it to trick AI?

0:00Hannah, I just Venmo'd you for dinner. Obsessed. I'm literally spending it right now on the lip gloss that's been sitting in my cart. What do you mean spending it right now? You instantly spend your balance with the Venmo debit card. Stop. Say more. More exactly. The more you do with Venmo, the more you get, like earning up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash. Get the Venmo debit card or check out online. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. Max$100 per month. See terms at Venmo.me slash stash terms.

0:29Alice Fraser: Venmo checkout not available at all merchants. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Immersing yourself in all things soccer ahead of this summer's World Cup? I'm Alex Abnos, senior sports editor from The Guardian. Whether you're a soccer beginner or you know the game inside and out, we've got you covered. From one of the fastest growing soccer newsrooms, The Guardian brings you in-depth World Cup coverage that gets into the winners and losers on and off the pitch. Read, watch, and listen as our journalists connect the dots between the games, the cultures, and this political moment.

1:01We'll have daily newsletters throughout the tournament, a global perspective, and a squad of Americans, including me, on the ground with the U.S. national team. Plus, if you want to test your soccer knowledge, try On The Ball. It's a game in the Guardian app, and it's really, really fun. And if you're into stuff like this... Well, I think the problem is if you give footballers an inch, they will take a mile. Is it too much when it's this close? It's a bit much. It's a bit too real. Maybe you could just talk with a slight delay. Be sure to listen to our Football Weekly podcast for on-the-move expert analysis.

1:30The Guardian, bringing you the whole picture on soccer. Search Guardian Soccer for more. Close your eyes. Focus. Listen to work getting done with Monday.com. Relax as AI does the manual work, while your teams are aligned on a single source of truth. Feel the sensation of an AI work platform, so flexible and intuitive, it feels like it was built just for you. Notice, you're limitless. Now open your eyes, go to monday.com, start for free and finally, breathe.

2:08Alice Fraser: Amid the 10 ,000 noises and the jade and gold and the whirling dusk of Shinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans. They would listen to the flute music and declaim poetry, test each other with jibes and quotes, sometimes find a private room with a centered silken women before weaving unsteadily home after the dawn drums, shouting, this is the gargle. Welcome to the gargle, the science and technology arm of the bugle, what is it, a body mechatron? I'm not sure what we are nowadays. And really that ought to have been a science science and technology intro but I thought it was Realms Unknown until 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.

3:17Alice Fraser: 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. Yeah, that's right. Let's say that. I'm coming from the opposite direction. This is my first podcast of the day and I hope mine is turned on. This, 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, I've, 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.

3:58So, um, you know, you guys are going to be better than that.

4:02Alice Fraser: Uh, look, it's been, It's been a week. It's been a week containing the day that an American day-tiller 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' Infowars. 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 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.

4:52Alice Fraser: I mean, it is an incredible thing. They could do nothing. that 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 2026, make Alex Jones feel funny and not just a harbinger of a bleak apocalyptic future.

5:44Alice Fraser: and in other headlines news uh scientists have won the break room prize for a 60 year quest to measure muon wobble um so it's a three million dollar prize they finally determined that the subatomic particle known as a muon is just a little bit wobbly which is yeah six decades of very expensive staring at last has come true you just gotta put a little you fold up some paper or 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.

6:37Alice Fraser: 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 Sweden have decided to troll 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.

7:22So the disease is called Bixonomania. 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. 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 because the paper 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.

8:18But a real human apparently didn't. So AI has been spouting that back as something you could get. And thank God I knew about this through this, Alice, and not Googling because I would have assumed I had it.

8:33Alice Fraser: 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-reviewed 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.

9:10So 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 opposite would happen. But I do think you're right. It has confirmed my worst fears by appearing in peer-reviewed papers already because what that means is that AI is stupid, right? AI ingesting this information and spitting it back up means AI is stupid and doesn't know anything. but uh 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 for medical things and now i can uh 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 i hope so it's it 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 dollars seeing if a horse will 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 tricked 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 yep that's a real paper so it just shows that um i find it comforting to know that even the supposedly top academics um are doing what we did as undergrads which is phoning it in and not checking our sources properly so they're not really so different you had said bixonomania which i think is probably right it's b-i-x-o-n-i mania and i've been saying bisonomania which does sound like an addiction to buffalo and so i think that i think that you're probably right maybe but maybe we're all biased uh we are all wearing glasses so maybe we don't want this to be a real disease because we feel attacked hannah i just found mode you for dinner obsessed i'm literally spending it right now on the lip gloss that's been sitting in my cart what do you mean spending it right now you instantly spend your balance with the venmo debit card stop say more more exactly the more you do with Venmo the more you get like earning up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash.

11:35Get the Venmo debit card or check out online. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. Max$100 per month. See terms at Venmo.me slash stash terms.

11:46Alice Fraser: Venmo checkout not available at all merchants. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Immersing yourself in all things soccer ahead of this summer's World Cup? I'm Alex Abnos, senior sports editor from The Guardian. Whether Whether you're a soccer beginner or you know the game inside and out, we've got you covered. From one of the fastest-growing soccer newsrooms, The Guardian brings you in-depth World Cup coverage that gets into the winners and losers on and off the pitch. Read, watch and listen as our journalists connect the dots between the games, the cultures and this political moment.

12:18We'll have daily newsletters throughout the tournament, a global perspective and a squad of Americans, including me, on the ground with the U.S. national team. Plus, if you want to test your soccer knowledge, try On The Ball. It's a game in the Guardian app and it's really, really fun. And if you're into stuff like this... Well, I think the problem is if you give footballers an inch, they will take a mile. Is it too much when it's this close? It's a bit much. It's a bit too real. Maybe you could just talk with a slight delay. Be sure to listen to our Football Weekly podcast for on-the-move expert analysis.

12:47The Guardian, bringing you the whole picture on soccer. Search Guardian Soccer for more.

12:55Alice Fraser: 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. It's called Anxiety Dreams of a CEO. It's the background psychic noise of someone raw dogging the algorithm for dopamine jizz distilled into a noise scape you can listen to while you're trying to sleep. Anxiety Dreams of a CEO, performed by a series of voice actors who make the train delay announcements in your country.

13:32Alice Fraser: I used to lie in bed until noon, staring at the ceiling. Now I wake up at 5 a.m., run a marathon, start a non-profit, alphabetize my spice rack, and then make breakfast for everybody. My friends say I'm unsettling to be around, but I don't have time for friends. I have goals. Now I'm listening to the Anxiety Dreams of a CEO. I've become the me I think my mother always thought she wanted me to be. I'm not sure. I could check, but I'm too busy now. Your thumb hurts. The lips of your soul are dry, thirsty for existential meaning. You've just watched a video of a baby falling on a duck and felt envy at their unadulterated capacity to be present in the moment.

14:10Alice Fraser: But what if you could outsource your scrolling to someone who actually enjoys it? Introducing ScrollBuddy, the only subscription monthly service that doom scrolls for you. World full of AI slop? Why not recruit an AI to slop stream the slipstream for you? For just$9.99 a month, our team of professionally understimulated remote worker drone hive AI mind spheres will spend four to 14 hours a day scrolling through every toxic rage-baiting, envy-inducing feed on your behalf. They'll leave thoughtful yet pointless comments to the other AI bots. They'll get into arguments with strangers about where the pineapple belongs on fucking pizza.

14:46Alice Fraser: Wake to a short bullet points of all your new nemeses. 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 so you don't have to. And that brings us to the reviews section of the gargle. Josh Gondelman, 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.

15:30But that's where the frisson 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.

16:19Alice Fraser: I am delighted by that. If it is reassuring to you, 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 in like any of any, of any age, I feel like that. Yeah. 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.

17:05Alice Fraser: So maybe I'm not the person to take my reassurance with a grain of salt.

17:13I'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

17:40Alice Fraser: Yeah I also think generally People don't really know anything about anything And so if you In the same way as Bixonomania If you wear a jacket They're like oh yeah I guess We're all just pretending Elena Morton have you brought in something for us to review yeah I'm gonna go the traditional reviewing route and review TV show me and my boyfriend we're trying to find something new to watch that we both vibed with and 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?

18:34And 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, I didn't buy it. I didn't buy it all. And that's really satire for you. Thank you. it's fascinating that that show quick get on Infowars 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 but yeah nobody's watching that show and going like how do these writers come up with this stuff it's Unbelievable.

19:23Although 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's 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.

19:49Alice Fraser: I was sitting behind some like 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 I think they were talking about a movie and 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 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

20:24Alice Fraser: and i cackled so loudly and they looked at me quite afraid um 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 two young men who were gonna You're 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. Dickmaxing? Is that what I mean? 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 and onto the other side.

21:09Alice Fraser: 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 and we don't really know what they are. But they are not breaking the laws of relativity.

21:55Alice Fraser: 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'm 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.

22:42There 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 encroachingly, was that darkness used to take the time spent drinking three whiskeys on the couch while your wife was away for work.

23:25and now it just it just goes there because of the voids um but yeah that's it's really this

23:32Alice Fraser: is a fascinating story yeah it's very exciting and very cool and um if i understood physics well enough to understand how this doesn't break the laws of physics i would be even more impressed uh but i'm impressed by all of my scientist friends who are like oh this is very cool um information to to have i 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, microscopic scale. But of course we all knew that because we all knew that darkness was faster than light. Cause you don't see it leaving the room when you turn on the light switch.

24:11So it would be funny if it made a sound like

24:22Alice Fraser: speaking of noises to too many bees uh i'm afraid this is going to be in your wheelhouse again josh gondelman because it's an american situation and it is an american story yep home to nearly 5.6 million ground nesting bees uh so according to a new study was it a study or was it just somebody falling into a hole and going on now too many bees i didn't even know there were ground dwelling bees nesting in the ground. I always thought that they were sort of up a tree in 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?

25:09Yes. 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. I was like, this is like a normal thing a rich person might want.

25:41Alice Fraser: Oh, my favorite phase. Just come to me, bees. 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 um 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.

26:23They're like, oh, you know, it'd 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 millions of bees is a pretty scary thing because you'd see that right you see that in a um in a cornfield or whatever and you go that's probably just where the bees rest they go they go down they come up you see that in a cemetery you're like these are

26:58Alice Fraser: zombies and they are gonna come for us all how do you know how do you know if a bee is an undead bee or a normal bee. They're just going, pollen. 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 Candyman 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 a Candyman scenario. It's only because Candyman is American. You know, if it was somewhere in Yorkshire, I'd be like, Candyman's here? What's he doing in Yorkshire? But I mean, or I'd assume it was some kind of like Wicker Man style, Eldritchian horror from back in the pagan times.

27:53But because it's American and it's New York, it's cool. It's cool bees, you know, they're cool bees. Yeah, cool bees. They're walking here. They're buzzing here. Also, I like - Now, do you - Yeah? 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 scientist comes to the heroes and he goes, I've done the calculations.

28:32It's 5.5 million bees. We never thought there'd be that many bees. Just, you know, the point where they were like, this is a lot of bees. And I think that must have been very filmic. And I'm sorry, I missed it happening. Quick, somebody bring 300 ,000 cups of tea for all this honey.

28:56Hannah, I just fanmode you for dinner. Obsessed. I'm literally spending it right now on the lip gloss that's been sitting in my cart. What do you mean spending it right now? You instantly spend your balance with the Venmo debit card. Stop. Say more. More exactly. The more you do with Venmo, the more you get, like earning up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash. Get the Venmo debit card or check out online. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. Max$100 per month. See terms at venmo.me slash stash terms.

29:26Alice Fraser: Venmo checkout not available at all merchants. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Immersing yourself in all things soccer ahead of this summer's World Cup? I'm Alex Abnos, senior sports editor from The Guardian. Whether you're a soccer beginner or you know the game inside and out, we've got you covered. From one of the fastest growing soccer newsrooms, The Guardian brings you in-depth World Cup coverage that gets into the winners and losers on and off the pitch. Read, watch, and listen as our journalists connect the dots between the games, the cultures, and this political moment.

29:57We'll have daily newsletters throughout the tournament, a global perspective, and a squad of Americans, including me, on the ground with the U.S. national team. Plus, if you want to test your soccer knowledge, try On The Ball. It's a game in the Guardian app, and it's really, really fun. And if you're into stuff like this... Well, I think the problem is if you give footballers an inch, they will take a mile. Is it too much when it's this close? It's a bit much. It's a bit too real. Maybe you could just talk with a slight delay. Be sure to listen to our Football Weekly podcast for on-the-move expert analysis.

30:26The Guardian, bringing you the whole picture on soccer. Search Guardian Soccer for more.

30:56Alice Fraser: write your book. Either way, you can go over to patreon.com slash Alice 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 last Sunday, which to me, look, I'm not, Eleanor, I'm going to get you on to pack your story a little bit more.

31:46But to me, I mean, you wouldn't be excited or surprised if a robot that was shaped, for example, like a car, beat a human in a marathon.

31:56Alice Fraser: 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, 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.

32:38It's got to be an Android like in Philip K. Duck books. 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 um it's 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 uh to it hasn't trained i assume i see we don't know and uh i just think it's a shame but but also on top of that um the bbc article here says that um the the the men's half marathon world record uh is 57 minutes so it's only seven minutes slower faster sorry than the the the fastest human which actually isn't that impressive in my opinion i would like i would like a robot to for 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.

33:59It's like 26 kilometers. That's so like a train. Every train breaks that record every day. Every car breaks that record every day. I used to, 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.

34:42And it's also not an efficient shape of robot. It's like the – 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, OK, 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.

35:24Alice Fraser: But you could you could beat this time record by stapling a cardboard cutout of Benedict Cumberbatch to a Roomba that you let run over some cocaine. And it would like it would achieve the same more or less human shaped thing. it reminds me I think of the point of sport 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 shit themselves and how much And until you can bring that level of, you know, passion and vulnerability, yeah, until they invent a robot that can sh** itself, I don't know that I'm going to be interested.

36:18Well, 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 I'd... But 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. And 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. So this robot misunderstands marathons. It's about bragging to your friends that you did it at all.

37:07And robots don't have friends.

37:08Alice Fraser: 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 if 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 beautifully untouched skin. Can you unpack this story for us?

38:00Thank 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. this is going to surprise you guys i'm actually not a doctor so um if i get oh any of this wrong josh has only been coming to me for his medical advice and now now he finds out that that was a bad idea um now i'm gonna have to start asking chat gpt um only marginally worse um but they've they so they can turn back cellular time basically or they found out a way to do it with certain cells um and that means that they can stop things like glaucoma in in eyes uh sort of refreshing the tissue i suppose more than more than de-aging it but it just means that potentially they could do that with other cells and and larger cells and essentially uh i don't know about skin cells i suppose that's the one everyone would be very excited about but but other parts of the body you know brain cells liver cells could potentially we could find a way to to uh reprogram them essentially to like switch things on and off inside them uh to make sure that they stop doing one thing or start doing another is that roughly what what's happening alice again i'm not yeah yeah so it's sort of a 2006 discovery of of these

39:37Alice Fraser: what they call transcription factors proteins uh 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 the switch, the reverso 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 would turn into billions of amoebas. Yeah, you just turn into a slop like that X-Men movie.

40:23Alice Fraser: But no, it's not that. 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 years, 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.

41:07Those 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, OK, 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 dh cells by programming and deprogramming the yamanaka factors tbd let's find out if that's on the mouth just on the mouth side i'm 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 her 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 i see that there's a sam altman seems to i imagine many other sinister billionaires have invested in technology uh in science funding for this kind of thing uh i don't know what it is the the 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 uh 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 forever thank goodness i my my big complaint about modern life is not enough sam altman yeah and brian johnson that the the one who um who He thinks he's doing a good job of looking not his age.

42:59Alice Fraser: 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 – 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 earth uninhabitable so everyone has to go live in mars or any of those things 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 yeah maybe we would be harvesting it too it is true that he's not harming many other people which is an improvement and uh it has it has the you know um potential upside of his hobby maybe making him die so we'll see what happens i 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 the these new technologies could literally rejuvenate old organs that's what 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.

44:48Yeah. And you can just alter all the ones before then when you didn't. You can look 25 but not be 25. That's the difference because nobody actually wants to be 25 forever.

45:01Alice Fraser: No. That's right. You want to look and then you talk to a 25-year-old and you're like, oh, no. 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, you're just suppressing that accent. You're like code switching if you're a vampire that doesn't talk like that. and that brings us to the end of this week's episode of the gargle i am uh flipping through the ad section at the back of this science and technology magazine uh eleanor morton have you got anything to plug yes uh you can now get tickets for my edinburgh french show in august it's called the mermaid it is about being a mermaid uh and some other silly things james cameron comes in there um and you can also buy my book live lessons from historical women everywhere you get books uh it's about women from history i thought were kind of cool um and also if you like uh listening to me ramble on uh in your earphones i do a podcast with alistair buckett king called ellen and alistair read that where we talk about children's books classic children's books and ask do they still hold up and what a great idea it's been a lot of fun we're doing we've just done johnny and the bomb by terry pratchett and we're going to do charlotte's web next so so i'm about to read that i'm looking forward to it and josh have you got anything to plug i do um 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 uh traveling to tell jokes that is you can get that at that's marvelous newsletter.com um i i have a comedy my new comedy special which came out last year but it's still the newest one i have is called um positive reinforcement it's on youtube and i'm bumping around new york a bunch uh for a bunch of really fun shows coming up you can find that in my newsletter on my website josh condelman.com and my road dates are picking up kind of and i'm going to i'll be in uh bristol tennessee at the end of May and then more in the fall.

47:21So, uh, come to my website, subscribe to our newsletter, come see me live.

47:25Alice Fraser: I am also going to be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at the Monkey Barrel. And my show is called, Oh Man. Uh, 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, uh, all the way through June or July, um, head over to patreon.com slash alicefraser. 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 and fantasy. Or you can listen to our parent podcast, The Bugle.

48:03Alice Fraser: I'm Alice Fraser, and 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. Thank you. Max$100 per month. See terms at venmo.me slash stashterms. Venmo checkout, not available at all merchants. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Immersing yourself in all things soccer ahead of this summer's World Cup? I'm Alex Abnos, senior sports editor from The Guardian. Whether you're a soccer beginner or you know the game inside and out, we've got you covered. From one of the fastest growing soccer newsrooms, The Guardian brings you in-depth World Cup coverage that gets into the winners and losers on and off the pitch.

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