Too Much News - Bonus Edition

Speaker 1 The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Speaker 2 Hello, Buglers, welcome to Bugle issue 4345, sub-episode A. For, as I said last week, there is no new show this week.

Speaker 2 Instead, we have some choice offcuts from recent Bugles, which you can listen to whilst booking tickets to my forthcoming show at the Froom Festival on Monday, the 7th of July.

Speaker 2 Also, new tour dates coming soon for 2026.

Speaker 2 Anyway, there's been so much news happening lately that we've held some stuff back, especially for a week like this when it's probably a bit more healthy for everyone to think about news that's already happened than news that is actually currently happening.

Speaker 2 First up, I spoke with Tiff Stevenson and Hari Kondabolu about Shock Horror, a possible female archbishop.

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 8 and a job that both of you might be interested in, actually, Hari, with

Speaker 8 your past

Speaker 8 in the world of work, helping refugees.

Speaker 13 An Iranian-born refugee could be becoming the first female Archbishop of Canterbury in one of the most exciting job openings currently on the market.

Speaker 4 This follows the resignation of Justin Welby, who announced in January that he was handing in his badge, gun, chasible mitre, lightsaber, and inflatable cross and resigning as head of the Church of England.

Speaker 18 And the current front-runner is the Bishop of Chelmsford, Julie Frances Decarney,

Speaker 8 who was born in Iran and came here as a child when her family had

Speaker 20 to leave Iran.

Speaker 12 And so this is the chance to be the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, starting with St.

Speaker 9 Augustine back in the year 597

Speaker 18 via the 1170 assassination victim of the year, Thomas Beckett, who sneaked in to pinch that title on the 29th of December, four days after Christmas. Disappointing time to be assassinated.

Speaker 4 Barely had time to play with his presence.

Speaker 18 But you can't assassinate archbishops anymore because of the work.

Speaker 8 But anyway,

Speaker 23 it's a huge call for the Church of England.

Speaker 4 It would be a massive step to have a female Archbishop of Canterbury.

Speaker 4 Take care only, bear in mind the origin story of the Church of England, which snapped off from the Catholic Church back in whenever it was, ages ago, that had something to do with Henry VIII wanting to get his end away without being struck down by an unimpressed god or something, something like that.

Speaker 24 So, you know, there it is.

Speaker 4 It's a huge opportunity for someone, or either of you contemplating throwing your hats into the ring.

Speaker 25 I think it's exciting that it's going to be a woman. I know people say it's positive discrimination gone mad, but I just think a woman's less likely to cover up all the sex crimes.

Speaker 25 So, I think it's a smart play.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I mean, that's so.

Speaker 25 I don't know if you're aware, um, Hari, but that is part of the reason the previous Archbishop of Canterbury had to step down.

Speaker 25 Um, so I just think more women in positions of power every every everywhere.

Speaker 25 Um, I I mean, to be Archbishop, you have to, there's rules to a candidacy, like for you to be able to be the new Archbishop, you have to be at least 30 years old, but they're generally younger than 70, and you must only move diagonally.

Speaker 30 I was excited.

Speaker 31 I mean, I would be excited if this is for the Archbishop of Cadbury.

Speaker 30 Then

Speaker 32 I would be delighted.

Speaker 30 I'm not exactly sure what religion that would be. Would that be Christianity?

Speaker 31 Why do they have the chocolate eggs?

Speaker 30 I guess that's the question.

Speaker 25 I think the religion would be pre-menstrual,

Speaker 25 which is when I get my desperate need for chocolate. So I think,

Speaker 25 but I think the Archbishop of Cabarets would be a great, would be a great title to have.

Speaker 25 If you get everything in chocolate, like you say, Andy, the scepter,

Speaker 36 what do you get?

Speaker 25 You know, if it was all chocolate and part of the being sworn in, I don't know if you get sworn in. I can't, the church doesn't agree with swearing.

Speaker 28 But, you know, like

Speaker 25 part of you being, I was going to say, indoctrinated, that's probably the wrong word as well. Anyway, sworn.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 Part of it is you get the hat and then you get to eat the hat and then you get a, you know, a sword or a, you know, you can eat it all.

Speaker 27 You should be able to eat it all.

Speaker 31 Every day you'd get a new hat and a new scepter. Every day.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 9 But the difference is in the Church of England and the Catholics, they can't agree on whether the hat is actually the genuine hat of Jesus or just a symbolic hat of Jesus.

Speaker 5 But I guess that's

Speaker 5 the same old arguments over and over again.

Speaker 8 I mean, the whole origin, as I said, it was a

Speaker 4 philosophical, o-theologistical difference between Rome and London over whether or not Jesus was a British carpenter who could do your cupboard sometime next month and will get back to you on exactly when.

Speaker 38 as soon as he can.

Speaker 5 And we've been split for 500 years ever since.

Speaker 9 But interesting that Archbishop of Chelmsford and Essex, and you think of the great Essex-based leaders, Graham Gooch, former England cricket captain, Alistair Cook, former England cricket captain, Johnny Douglas, former English captain.

Speaker 39 I'm out after that.

Speaker 6 I'm absolutely out.

Speaker 30 She's the front runner, apparently, according to Ladbrooks,

Speaker 40 which

Speaker 30 I think is... How addicted to gambling do you have to be to bet on that?

Speaker 25 Oh, we you can bet on anything here. Yes.
And also people in government have tried to when it's outcomes of who's going to be voted in in government. So that's a problem.

Speaker 28 Yeah.

Speaker 25 You can vote on the new, you can, you can gamble on the, not vote, but you can gamble on who the new Doctor Who would be,

Speaker 25 what the Brexit result would be. It's, it's like we're a nation of we're obsessed.

Speaker 43 You can still gamble on that, actually, but

Speaker 16 because that still seems to be up in the air, some of our newspapers.

Speaker 15 Well, I mean, Tiff, this kind of outlandish theory that the world would be better if women were in all positions of power,

Speaker 17 I do think it's definitely worth giving that a go for maybe, and how long has the patriarchy had,

Speaker 43 what, I don't know, what should we say, what, 10, 80,000 years or so?

Speaker 20 So maybe,

Speaker 27 yeah, you've had a run, you've had a good run,

Speaker 26 six months off and see how it goes.

Speaker 25 Yes, give us, leave a mess and then say clear that up. Right.
And then when we haven't done it within five minutes,

Speaker 25 you know, when it's not done quickly enough, that you can then blame us for causing the mess. That happens quite a lot.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 You know, but I listen, if you want an example, I only found this out the other day.

Speaker 25 So,

Speaker 25 so apparently, Waterloo Bridge, which I only found out recently, was built by women during the war.

Speaker 25 And it's the only bridge on the River Thames that went up

Speaker 25 in time and on budget.

Speaker 25 Saying, all women, an all-female war effort is the best,

Speaker 25 you know, most concise, effective, budget-friendly version of a bridge that's gone up.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And you compare that with an all-male infrastructure project, Stonehenge, still not finished.

Speaker 28 Well, it's 5,000 years old.

Speaker 26 Moving on,

Speaker 12 Flying duck news now.

Speaker 9 Well, as if rogue kangaroos causing apocalyptic mayhem across the length and breadth of the contiguous USA.

Speaker 4 Sorry, it's the age of exaggeration.

Speaker 8 What can I do?

Speaker 20 Also, traditionally neutral Switzerland has been infested with law-averse wildfowl flying at quite literally lightning speed.

Speaker 16 If it's one of those slower bits of lightning that waddles down from the clouds at the speed of an unusually perky duck.

Speaker 18 A duck in Switzerland has fell foul of police speed cameras when it was clocked going 52 kilometers an hour in a 30 zone.

Speaker 3 Perhaps by coincidence, the same camera that caught the duck going way too quick, sorry, also snapped a French chef on a bicycle with a carving knife and a string of oranges around his neck in hot pursuit.

Speaker 8 Again, this is very worrying, even though the repercussions of this story obviously will not echo around the world.

Speaker 48 But it's, you know, I mean, if ducks are not respecting the speed limits in Switzerland,

Speaker 24 where for civilization now?

Speaker 25 Caught doing a 52 and a 30.

Speaker 25 I mean.

Speaker 25 If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably speeding.

Speaker 25 The main thing is they're saying that they think it's the same duck.

Speaker 32 Yes, the goblin.

Speaker 26 Seven years like.

Speaker 25 But I don't believe it's the same duck. It hasn't aged a day.

Speaker 28 Like

Speaker 25 what's this duck's beauty regime? It must be swimming in all that algae. Like, I don't know.
This duck looks snatched. Jawlin's looking good.
The beak's looking shiny.

Speaker 25 I don't, I don't believe it's the same duck.

Speaker 2 Tiff Stevenson and Hari Kondabolu there. Next up, we have James Nakise and Felicity Ward celebrating the King's Birthday, New Zealand Edition.

Speaker 4 Obviously, the biggest news in New Zealand, James, is that it is the King's birthday

Speaker 49 in New Zealand, but not actually anywhere else.

Speaker 40 The King's actual birthday is the 14th of November 1948.

Speaker 17 That was when he was born, which I think makes him a Valentine's baby.

Speaker 43 But look, don't think about that too much.

Speaker 40 It's not our business.

Speaker 23 But it's his official birthday

Speaker 49 in New Zealand

Speaker 13 Monday, is that right?

Speaker 50 We go with the first Monday of June, so that we always remember when the white weather comes, we celebrate the white ruler. That's the normal state of play in New Zealand

Speaker 50 so as it gets cold and we cover up we think of England and we go oh it's it's it's it's chilly here if only we had central heating like they do in the UK

Speaker 50 but we don't because we're too tough we're too tough to New Zealand if we if we get central heating the all blacks will never win a World Cup again

Speaker 43 that's that's right you don't need central heating when you just huddle together in masses of 16 people

Speaker 5 sort of fighting.

Speaker 17 The official birthday is quite an interesting

Speaker 49 tradition that, like I say, the monarchs have their own birthday when they were actually born, but there's an official birthday that's different in different countries of

Speaker 49 the Commonwealth.

Speaker 13 In the UK, it's a Saturday in mid-June, so it's the 14th this year.

Speaker 49 New Zealand, as you mentioned, the first Monday in June.

Speaker 49 Canada, it's Victoria Day, which is the last Monday before the 25th of May, because Queen Victoria's birthday, she was born on May the 24th of 1819.

Speaker 15 So, someone's mummy and daddy got very excited by the result of the August 1818 general election.

Speaker 49 In Australia, it's mostly the second Monday in June, but Western Australia and Queensland can't be asked with that.

Speaker 24 So, they give the

Speaker 15 birthday later in the year, whenever they can be asked.

Speaker 24 But the whole idea of an official birthday, as well as an actual, I mean, it wouldn't be a monarchy if it didn't have completely ridiculous traditions.

Speaker 49 That if you suggested we're introduced now, you would be politely invited never to share your thoughts and opinions in public with anyone ever again.

Speaker 4 Felicity, I mean,

Speaker 15 obviously,

Speaker 8 you grew up in Australia, you live in the UK now, so you get to celebrate two official monarchs' birthdays.

Speaker 5 That must be very exciting for you.

Speaker 52 It is. Look, I would say one of the best things about living over here is having a working knowledge of holidays from Australia,

Speaker 53 but having

Speaker 52 them surprise me every year.

Speaker 52 I can't tell you, I've missed Mother's Days, Father's Days. The fucking end of financial year is a different date.
It is, I am constantly jet lagged. I am too early or too late for everything.

Speaker 52 Any event,

Speaker 52 I am two months ahead or two years behind. Just look at how much tax I owe the HMRC.

Speaker 52 My interest rates on penalties threw the rope.

Speaker 52 I just thought I put £200

Speaker 52 to the HMRC every month just because I know I'm going to be late. I mean, look, there's also some deciding factors like I'm fucking disorganized.

Speaker 36 But

Speaker 52 every year, I'm like, now

Speaker 51 it's now for anything.

Speaker 15 Along with the official birthday comes the birthday honours list, which sees people rewarded for a range of activities with honors ranging from

Speaker 22 CBEs to knighthoods.

Speaker 49 They can be rewarded for, for example, decades of selfless unseen public service and/or charitable work, or for being good at sport, or for being good at being famous, or for being rich, or for being good at knowing people who are rich, or for conquering a foreign land and naming it in honor of the sovereign, which is not as easy as it once was, sadly.

Speaker 5 So do keep an eye out to see if you've made it onto the list this year.

Speaker 52 I'm sure you've been here. I'm very disappointed.
Yeah. Yeah, I look very disappointed.
I've half of London, and still I get no CPE

Speaker 51 for the charity work that I have done.

Speaker 51 Probably sorry, that's why I had to leave.

Speaker 50 I had to,

Speaker 50 I'd heard the wave was coming.

Speaker 50 I heard the wave was coming, and I was like, I got to get out of my shop.

Speaker 51 You're in the firing line, James.

Speaker 51 Yeah,

Speaker 50 how close to Brixton?

Speaker 23 I got to go.

Speaker 52 Sorry, I just thought that would embarrass everyone and it did.

Speaker 52 My work here is done.

Speaker 32 Right, should we do American news now?

Speaker 2 Alice Fraser and Neil Delamere joined me just a couple of weeks ago, and we failed to reveal any medical news.

Speaker 6 So instead, here it is now.

Speaker 11 Medical breakthrough news now and medical science, that perennial foe of the will of God, scourge of the undertaking industry's profit margins, bringer of hope in a world of furious darkness, keeps coming up with the goods.

Speaker 4 It's come so far in the last 250 years, medical science, and now potentially definitive breakthroughs in the battles against Parkinson's disease and HIV.

Speaker 12 Let's start with Parkinson's. History has proved over and over again how the pen is mightier than the sword is perhaps the most factually incorrect claim ever made.

Speaker 13 And that is a hotly contested title these days.

Speaker 20 But thanks to science, that much maligned niche hobby of the increasingly marginalised Boffin community, a new type of pen could be much, much better than any sword for one specific activity, and that activity is diagnosing Parkinson's disease, which is do not use swords for that or indeed any other form of diagnosis.

Speaker 5 Now, anyone who's personal or family experience of Parkinson's,

Speaker 13 which affected my father for many years, will know what an absolute remorseless, hope-stripping shitbag of a disease it is.

Speaker 4 This pen can, it is hoped, help capture signs of Parkinson's based on hand movements during writing, and early diagnosis could help with treatment and quality of life.

Speaker 35 And look, I mean, there's so much to be kind of upset and pessimistic about in the world, but medical science seems to be one of the few areas, despite the assault on science from certain high-profile regimes, that

Speaker 37 keeps us generally with a sense of human progress on the go.

Speaker 43 Of course, handwriting can be used to diagnose other medical conditions, including megalomania.

Speaker 4 If you lock a suspected sufferer of megalomania in a room with just a pencil and paper, they are very likely to draw a picture of themselves on a horse in the form of a heroic equestrian statue.

Speaker 5 That is generally 100% accurate diagnosis.

Speaker 55 And vertigo,

Speaker 35 if left on a high ledge with a notepad and pen and told only to communicate via the written words vertigo sufferers are significantly more likely than others to write please help me get down so it's good to know that you know pens uh and and paper yeah traditional technology that i stand by in my cricket stats work still have other benefits also in medical breakthrough news a possible breakthrough in the search for a cure for for hiv

Speaker 13 um researchers to explain it simply researchers showed for the first time that

Speaker 4 mRNA can be blasted into cells where HIV is, like the deceitful loser that it is, hiding.

Speaker 4 The mRNA is encased in a specially formulated fat bubble, too small for the human eye to see without the use of artificial seeing small stuff equipment.

Speaker 4 The mRNA then instructs the cells to reveal the virus at gunpoint, presumably.

Speaker 4 The cowering cells then judic up the HIV virus, which is bundled into the back of a van and taken back to HQ to be viciously interrogated and then covertly slain.

Speaker 56 So

Speaker 17 it's, I hope I've explained the medical science of it there.

Speaker 41 It was like being dropped into the middle of an episode of Gray's Anatomy. It was just amazing.

Speaker 41 They created a new lipid nanoparticle that will bring mRNA into cells and then it can tell the cell to show up to HIV within the cell.

Speaker 41 They've created a new type of fat bubble and the fat bubble eventually could cure HIV.

Speaker 56 A fat bubble.

Speaker 41 Science laughed at me when I put sausages in the soda stream. They laughed at me.

Speaker 41 They said the world wasn't ready for carbonated lard Neil.

Speaker 56 That's what they said, but they were wrong.

Speaker 6 They were wrong.

Speaker 41 I walked so the people at the Peter Daugherty Institute for Infection and Immunity could run, my friends.

Speaker 28 And

Speaker 41 I think we all know that the R there in Peter is doing a lot of work because the Pete Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

Speaker 56 is an entirely different organization.

Speaker 41 So it looks like, listen, we don't know how far how how much the progress is going to be over in this next few years, but they seem extremely excited about the results.

Speaker 41 And one of the questions for the future, apparently, though, is: do you have to completely wipe out the reservoir of HIV in the body to cure somebody, or can even a trace of it repropagate in an area like Japanese knotweed or hipsters?

Speaker 54 And will they just come back?

Speaker 4 But either way, good news, guys. Come on.

Speaker 53 It's amazing. Now, if you combine this treatment with the currently existing

Speaker 53 treatments that are available, I think this is like,

Speaker 53 this could be it. This could be it.
This could be the end of all of those 90s scare ads.

Speaker 53 They could put the nightmares of a generation to sleep and pave the way for a lot of people to stop using condoms and get all the other

Speaker 42 SPDs. Whoop!

Speaker 29 Whoop, whoop.

Speaker 4 The report was several hundred pages of medical and scientific jargon that I found very hard to understand, but but it did culminate in the words, seriously, just trust us on this one.

Speaker 48 I don't care what you read on the internet, uh, on that internet chat room, we are genuine scientists, we know what we're doing.

Speaker 4 But whether that's enough to win over the sceptics

Speaker 4 remains to be seen.

Speaker 26 Tea news now, and well, it's well known that drinking a good cup of tea is one of the greatest pleasures in life.

Speaker 20 It communes you with your fellow humans across the millennia, bound by a timeless love of steeping plant matter in water and sipping its wondrous concoctions whilst contemplating the nature of existence.

Speaker 8 Or just because you need a bracing pick-me-up whilst falling asleep whilst recording a podcast.

Speaker 6 All right, that's better.

Speaker 40 I'm absolutely on it.

Speaker 11 Alice, you are one of the world's leading bridges between humanity and the tea community.

Speaker 4 It's been a strained relationship for

Speaker 38 some

Speaker 3 well, literally strained relationship for quite a long time.

Speaker 22 Bring us up to date with the latestness between humans and tea.

Speaker 53 Yes, Andy, it is all on apparently

Speaker 53 matcha stocks are running low. Tea is a calming beverage, evocative of ritual, mood boosting.
It has calming L-theanine

Speaker 53 in order to keep you chill.

Speaker 53 And Uji Japan, which is the historic matcha capital, is facing a soaring demand from a terrifying coalition of morning routine slimfluencers, alpha bro health optimizers, and image-conscious obsessives.

Speaker 53 So much so that the call for the extremely rare ceremonial grade matcha powder is outstripping its supply. So, if you like matcha, which is the powdered green tea, it's grown in the shade.

Speaker 53 The ceremonial grade is the fanciest matcha, but the people who are scrambling for top not matcha are using it in frappuccinos or matcha lattes, and it's causing great concern among the local

Speaker 53 community who are now changing the motto for Uji, which is: Come for the tea, leave with a black eye from a fist fight over the tea.

Speaker 53 The ceremonial grade matcha is the thing that's being sort of snaffled up. It's shade-grown, it's stone-ground.
Each tin requires eight hours of grinding to make. Someone calls Sting.

Speaker 36 That was

Speaker 53 a joke about Sting.

Speaker 28 Well, it's always nice to leave a podcast with a sting in the table.

Speaker 41 I do think we can connect this to a previous story, though.

Speaker 28 Okay, yeah.

Speaker 41 We think that you know, sinking cities is necessarily a bad thing.

Speaker 41 If Uji, the matcha capital, matcha capital of the world, sinks into the sea, but then we can figure out a way to just raise it back up out of the sea and then back into the sea again.

Speaker 41 Think how lovely the sea around that area will be.

Speaker 56 Oh,

Speaker 29 Well.

Speaker 2 And finally, in this week's sub-episode, Tom Ballard and Tiff Stevenson joined me to have a good old gawp at Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 17 In other rich, powerful men showing off news, Jeff Bezos,

Speaker 4 a man with so much more money than sense that he could pay himself $2 billion a year to be an idiot for 100 years and still have more than $20 billion left over to be a f with.

Speaker 13 He has incurred the wrath of the people of Venice by deciding to get married in the majestically canaled Italian city.

Speaker 4 Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sanchez, will be exchanging their, let's be realistic, we can't call them vows.

Speaker 13 We cannot call them vows.

Speaker 24 Ephemeroths?

Speaker 17 I'm not sure even that is appropriate.

Speaker 7 But anyway, they're technically.

Speaker 57 I think they're signing a contract, a zero-hour contract with each other.

Speaker 3 Yeah, zero-hours referring to the amount of time that people as rich as Bezos generally like to spend with their actual spouses.

Speaker 24 But he's,

Speaker 17 and it's been, it's seen as a sort of further example of the sort of excesses of

Speaker 23 tourism and the negative impact they can have on historic cities like Venice, which, to be fair, does bring it upon itself by being absolutely incredible.

Speaker 7 And,

Speaker 13 you know, there's other cities that have set an example to Venice

Speaker 47 and haven't become the tourist hotspots that Birmingham, for example.

Speaker 23 Birmingham has

Speaker 4 more mileage of canal than Venice, but has cleverly not made

Speaker 4 itself so attractive to tourists.

Speaker 47 So maybe that should be a lesson for Venice to learn. I mean, Tom,

Speaker 12 have either of you been invited to

Speaker 12 the happy occasion?

Speaker 25 I'm still waiting. I'm still waiting for my invite to the wedding.
But to defend them ever so slightly,

Speaker 25 there's been a campaign against Bezov's having his wedding there and saying, you know, this, this area has long suffered from the effects of excessive tourism.

Speaker 25 It's turned into a playground for the rich.

Speaker 25 And I think it's quite funny that the Italians are like, Venice is not a playground for the super rich when historically, that's pretty much what it has always been, or at least since the 12th century, when it was seen as the richest and most powerful center of Europe.

Speaker 25 Like, are we now pretending that Venice is a plucky little upstart?

Speaker 25 People here are just trying to live their lives, gondolaing to work every day, barely able to eat an ice cream without someone bursting into a chorus of just one cornetto.

Speaker 34 Like, I think,

Speaker 45 I mean,

Speaker 34 I mean,

Speaker 25 you can be against the people who are having their wedding there, but, you know, they're doing a European wedding.

Speaker 25 And in America, this is seen as a battle of old money versus new because Soros is getting married as well. And I think he's getting married in...

Speaker 25 California, whereas the new money, Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, are getting married in Venice. And she had a henu in Paris, Lauren Sanchez.

Speaker 25 Well, they say she had a henu, but we know what actually happened.

Speaker 25 She had a hen do in space a couple of months ago because Blue Origin, that flight, was definitely a henu because they had their makeup done before

Speaker 25 they went up there. There were terrible karaoke renditions in space, courtesy of Katie Perry.
It was definitely a henu because they had penis-shaped party favors. That was the rocket.

Speaker 57 The guest list is pretty impressive. You got Kim Kardashian, Oprah Winfrey, Ivanka Trump, and Leonardo DiCaprio, which I thought was very surprising.

Speaker 57 Leo doesn't really like entering anything that's older than 25.

Speaker 28 So it's weird for him to be

Speaker 57 that he'll be heading to the very old city of Venice. Do you hear that one, Andy?

Speaker 32 Family show, Tom.

Speaker 47 Family show.

Speaker 57 I'm totally on board the broader anti-tourism movement across Europe, though. I think this is fantastic.
I'm against all the isms. I'm against racism, sexism, and I think tourism is the worst of all.

Speaker 32 There is no room for tourism.

Speaker 57 We can stand against it, right? I mean, I think the anti-tourism movement across Europe could be a great way to find a sensible compromise to the toxic immigration debate, okay?

Speaker 57 We should absolutely welcome immigrants, people who move to our countries to build a new life for them and their families. Thumbs up.
Let's stop hating immigrants, start hating tourists, yeah?

Speaker 57 Stop xenophobia, start tourismophobia, okay? These fing weirdos in their Hawaiian t-shirts and their big maps, get the f out of here.

Speaker 57 And the great thing about this is that when you tell a tourist to go back to where they came from, they do.

Speaker 28 Everybody's

Speaker 25 You should have seen me in Australia. I was drinking coconut water out of an actual coconut,

Speaker 25 wearing big heart-shaped sunglasses. I mean, what an absolute sight.

Speaker 25 But they're calling it touristification, which is a great word.

Speaker 25 And apparently, cities where holidaymakers can expect disruption

Speaker 25 include Barcelona, the Pyrenees, Majorca, Venice,

Speaker 25 Valencia, Naples, Palermo. Anyway, look, this all sounds good.
And I love a protest, so I'm going to make that my holiday. So I'll just hop on a bikini and join in.

Speaker 25 Like, go home, tourist, while eating a Calippo.

Speaker 27 That will be really good fun for me.

Speaker 25 Get out, foreign scum. I'll be shouting in my union jack One Piece.
And I feel like that is an ace time.

Speaker 24 The problem for

Speaker 4 Barcelona, there's been protests over the weekend in which protesters fired water pistols at tourists.

Speaker 17 I think what might be

Speaker 4 the most most polite form of protest, essentially just cooling people down on a hot day

Speaker 13 whilst making a political point. You know, everyone wins from this.
I mean, the question is, are we not all just tourists on the

Speaker 4 hop-off bus ride of existence?

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 42 And

Speaker 4 again, Barcelona, I've been to Barcelona, I've been to Venice, I mean, some of those other places you mentioned, Tiff, and they've all got the same thing in common.

Speaker 41 They are really nice, and people

Speaker 4 want to go to them.

Speaker 17 And the problem is that

Speaker 4 there's nothing inherently wrong with tourism in itself.

Speaker 17 It's just the way that the free markets have,

Speaker 18 well, as previously discussed, they do not always throw their darts into the trouble 20 of communal progress and shared benefit.

Speaker 43 And this has led to rents going up and city centers being almost stripped of any local people.

Speaker 20 It is a very delicate balance.

Speaker 4 And underpinning it all is this genetic human urge to visit other places apart from where you live that has been pretty strong ever since the early days of evolution when a stressed out fish thought to itself, you know what I need?

Speaker 48 A fing beach holiday and evolved its way out of the sea.

Speaker 4 And since then, we've just not been able to shake that little

Speaker 10 sort of, you know, evolutionary echo from

Speaker 8 our minds.

Speaker 13 But I mean, I guess the problem is, as the old saying goes, on the timeline of life, either side of a delicious steak is a dead cow and a pile of shit.

Speaker 55 And

Speaker 13 that's essentially what the, I'm not sure if that is what.

Speaker 44 Anyway, but you know, that's, I mean, it might be relevant, who knows?

Speaker 57 Do you think that fish that like walked out of the ocean did it ever go back to the other fish and just wouldn't shut up about all the things that it's seen on the shore?

Speaker 57 It's like, oh, yeah, slideshow.

Speaker 40 Here we go, Terry.

Speaker 57 Jesus Christ, we're glad you had a good time.

Speaker 28 We don't care, man. See grass.

Speaker 25 You just have, oh my god, you haven't seen grass. I'm embarrassed for you.

Speaker 57 Comes back with that accent.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 44 Barcelona.

Speaker 25 I think I pronounced it wrong, you know.

Speaker 25 Sorry, I pronounced it tolerably. Sometimes it's quite hard to take people wrong.

Speaker 4 Well, I think tolerably is a that's a that's a little tourist village outside Barcelona.

Speaker 12 Fake emergency news now.

Speaker 10 Now, obviously, as we've discussed, there are a lot of genuine emergencies around the world, but uh Britain is being ripped to pieces by a slew of fake emergencies emerging from music festivals and people

Speaker 18 having a good time.

Speaker 32 Police have issued a mosh pit-based warning ahead of a festival this weekend because people,

Speaker 11 quotes, thrashing, slam dancing, or pogoing

Speaker 32 at music is causing their wearable tech gadgets to trigger automated emergency calls to

Speaker 6 the police and ambulance services.

Speaker 37 So, I mean,

Speaker 13 obviously, you know, the mosh pit has

Speaker 13 a deep place in our national heritage, Tiff.

Speaker 13 It began in medieval warfare, in the numerous civil wars that we used to have, where towards the end of a day's battle, if neither side were winning, each team's musicians with their various horns and

Speaker 18 lutes would form a supergroup at the side of the battlefield and play what passed the dance floor bangers back in the day.

Speaker 13 And the remnants of the two armies would mosh, fully armed and clad in metal, until they could mosh no more. And the winner was decided by the last man moshing.

Speaker 13 So, you know, it's a part of our history and our heritage.

Speaker 4 But, I mean, this could signal the end of the great British mosh pit.

Speaker 34 The mosh will never end, Andy.

Speaker 34 The mosh will never end.

Speaker 25 My favourite thing about a mosh is that there's always a mosh pit admin.

Speaker 25 There's a lot of admins surrounding a mosh pit that people don't realise, but there's always someone who sort of organizes it and holds everyone back until the appropriate moment to mosh.

Speaker 25 And they're controlling the crowd. It's normally like a beefy ball bloke in a leather waistcoat, a mosh elder, if you like.
And he has to be there to make sure that everyone goes in at the right time.

Speaker 25 Either to minimize, I think it's less to minimise damage to each other and more to kind of go, we need exactly when the beat drops and we know when that bit is.

Speaker 25 So I was at a Biffy Clyro gig at the end of last year in Shepherd's Bush Empire, and there was some glorious, glorious mosh admin going on there. The young ones were definitely held back.

Speaker 25 They're like, Listen, guys, you don't know what you're doing yet.

Speaker 25 We've got more tattoos than you, so let us go first, lead it.

Speaker 25 It's good stuff, but I love this. This is what smart tech was built for, isn't it?

Speaker 25 Smart tech, like thinking people have been in an actual collision when they're just banging around each other in a, you know, calling my doctor because my

Speaker 25 Apple Watch has freaked out at my heart rate during intercourse, you know, those kind of things.

Speaker 28 That's what they're for.

Speaker 25 My blood pressure rising, and it's called 999 because I'm raging at selling sunset on the TV.

Speaker 25 I'll keep watching it, but it makes me so angry. And I think this is

Speaker 25 what have we made smart tech for, if not this?

Speaker 57 I just love it. How bleak is post-Brexit written that young people having a good time is an emergency?

Speaker 1 We need to alert the authorities. These young people are dancing and enjoying life.

Speaker 1 Shut it down.

Speaker 25 I would like to say people of all ages are enjoying the mosh. The people of all ages is at download.
So it's very specifically at download festival.

Speaker 25 So like a latitude, I don't think anyone's in danger of

Speaker 25 getting taken out in a mosh.

Speaker 34 Yes. Unless you count.

Speaker 17 Well, I mean, you say that, Tiff, but there have been similar alerts triggered.

Speaker 22 For example, example, at top-ranking snooker events, where the fact that a thousand people were sitting dead still for two hours was interpreted by their wearable tech as a sign that those people had been permafrozen by an escaped ice-blasting super villain.

Speaker 55 So, yeah, they are,

Speaker 32 you know, it can work both ways, really.

Speaker 25 Your tech can tell when you're depressed. You appear to have not moved off this sofa and done any steps for three days in a row.

Speaker 1 Just constantly asking the snooker audience, Are you still there?

Speaker 17 Which I do at my gigs every 15 minutes, just to be sure.

Speaker 1 Shout out, actually, shout out to David Quirk, wonderful Australian comedian who I saw in a gig recently.

Speaker 57 He's wonderful, he was having a tough time.

Speaker 1 And on stage, you just said, Is everybody okay?

Speaker 57 Is anybody okay?

Speaker 4 But yeah, that just shows where technology is. That

Speaker 18 wearable tech assumes

Speaker 4 that humanity must be involved in some kind of

Speaker 18 absolutely harrowing disaster rather than be simply rocking out to some thrash core, metal bot, bone jangle, bass whamp, drum blast, brain grunger, heavy blast, wackity whack, rockadoodle, or whatever niche genre people are dancing to in these mosh pits.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's gone too far in terms of the alert system.

Speaker 4 It's gone too far from the old days when to send an alert that something bad was happening, you have to set up a chain of beacons a mile apart over several hundred miles and pass information via the medium of visible fire.

Speaker 18 I just think there must be some middle ground between those two that works for us.

Speaker 2 Thank you for listening to this week's sub-episode. We will be back next week with Josh Gonrelman and Josie Long.
Until then, goodbye.

Speaker 58 Hi, buglers, it's producer Chris here. I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Speaker 58 Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything. So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.