Sunak Without A Trace

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers, and welcome to issue 4302 of The Bugle, the audio newspaper that has been holding up the mirror to this visual world since 2007, albeit holding it up at such an angle that all you can see in it is the sport on the telly.

I'm Andy Zoltzman and we are recording on Friday the 3rd of May 2024.

Just eight months to go until the halfway point of what has been thus far a disappointing decade for the remaining fans of planet Earth and the human race.

But still time to pull it back and to try and jolt this decade back towards some vague sense of trying to be a little bit less shit as it hits middle age.

No judgment.

I've all been there.

I'm joined by two people who have experienced every single day of the decade so far

and are thus uniquely qualified to pass their judgment on the most recent few days of it.

Plus, someone who's only recently joined the decade also joining us on the call.

From Australia, Alice Fraser, plus Alice Fraser's latest baby.

And from London, Alistair Barry.

Hello to all three of you.

Hello.

Hello, yes.

Sorry, I forgot my baby.

That's an entirely different podcast.

So we are recording on the 3rd of May 2024, which is World, Stop Believing All the Shit You Read on the Internet day also world keep things in perspective day and world calmly inform yourself about all sides of an issue or argument before spouting off about it online sadly all of those days have been cancelled once once again on the 4th of May in 1626 the Dutch explorer Peter Minuet

arrived on what is now Manhattan Island

and soon as the legend goes he purchased the city of New York at the knockdown price of around $24 on a box of junk, selling in train a chain of real estate chicanery and trickstery that pretty much leads in a direct cause and effect line to Donald Trump sitting in a court courtroom barking at the moon as we speak.

The name of the city, of course, comes from the noise Minuit made when told the asking price, Yoike,

which is the Dutch version of yikes.

Minuit unable to control his excitement at picking up such an absolute bargain.

I may have to leave the podcast now.

That's tickled a funny bone I didn't know I had.

Of course, it was later anglicized to York when God rightly gave the city to Britain.

A rumor is that it's come back, everything comes back round.

A rumor is that Minuit knocked the price down even further during negotiations due to traffic noise, the price of coffee, and the fact that he wasn't allowed to build a casino in Central Park.

Whilst, of course, what happened in 1626 is shrouded in the incompletions and thugs of history.

What I'm telling you now is probably just as true as the average of all news emanating from New York today.

On the 6th of May, in 1527, just what, 497 short years ago, Rome was sacked

again.

I mean, it was sacked quite a lot, Rome.

And when you, yeah, you can't sack me, I'm fired.

I'm on fire.

It was also fired.

Certainly during Nero's time, and presumably at other times as well.

Why was Rome sacked?

Well, apparently, the then 2,208-year-old city had started turning up late in the mornings, not completing stuff in time, and falling well short of its kpis and successive quarterly reviews there was also some talk about it containing an excessive number of paintings of naked willies on its ceilings that the bosses weren't happy with at the time so it had to go and when you get sacked that often rome maybe the problem is you not the job uh it so of course then went freelance and it's actually probably happier now just tootling along as an antiques museum and visitor center rather than uh doing its old high-stressed jobs of running an empire or a religion um so uh anyway many uh scholars consider the sacking of rome in 1527 to mark the end of the renaissance which has to go down as well.

Do you agree with that little one?

What a wonderful interjection.

Absolutely.

Someone who's just enjoyed his own naissance very recently, obviously, taking an interest in it.

Another one.

God, exciting.

Disappointing closing ceremony for the Renaissance and the sack of Rome in 1527.

In 1889, on the 6th of May, the Eiffel Tower was discovered.

The 330-metre-high metal prong was found by archaeologist Gussie Eiffel whilst he was looking for proof that the ancient Gauls had invented the bicycle and jitans in around 200 BC.

Previously, there'd just been a 331-metre-high mound of earth there, and no one had ever thought to dig it up and see if there was anything underneath.

Anyway, well, I've heard history podcasts are all the rage, so I'm just trying to muscle in on some of that filthy old Luca.

As always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bend this week.

Beverages.

It's National Beverage Day on Monday the 6th.

So we look at the state of beverages and the future of drinking in general.

Is liquid going to be the next previously championed cultural hero to be cancelled?

After all, liquid has played a role in most of the great atrocities of human history, which have been performed by people who often traveled in boats or drank water.

Also, we look at why young people are turning against drinking anything.

They associate drinking liquid with their parents' generation,

especially the post-war boomer generation, and are now rejecting it out of hand.

They prefer to spend time on Instagram and could become the first entirely desiccated generation since ancient Egyptian times.

Again, amazing how everything comes back in cycles.

Also, with tea and coffee facing an uncertain future due to global warming and Elon Musk wanting to replace all plants with garden gnomes within 10 years, could we soon be drinking an infusion made of unwanted cushions, obsolete mobile phones, and locust plasma?

Too soon to tell.

And what will be the new milk after oat, soy, lentil, parrot, and almond?

We look at the potential for potato milk, reliquefied lactose-enhanced cement, and wild sweat to take over the cow replacement industry.

All that in the bin.

Top story this week, America is angry.

I mean that's pretty much the top story every week since around about 1776 or 1773.

When was that?

When was the Boston teeth?

1773?

1776.

So let's go with that.

As discussed at various points on the bugle.

But it's particularly angry this week.

There have been student rebellions against American Middle East policy, which currently stands, and I haven't checked this in the last three minutes, their current official American government Middle East policy is asking Benjamin Netanyahu quite nicely not to use the weapons they're still sending him.

So you can see it's a bit of a complex situation.

The police got involved and unusually did not apply the usual delicate light touch sensitivity, tension diffusing, even-handedness, and aggravation avoidance that the American police are so globally renowned for.

It's more than 2,000 people have been arrested.

I mean, that's out of almost 20 million students in the USA, so that's still quite a lot to go before the police have arrested all the students and potential troublemakers.

Joe Biden has defended the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos, which I think is the opposite of what his presidential election opponent believes.

So as a result, well, America is in a state of some,

I don't know,

ferment.

Is that the right term, Alice?

Yes, sufficient ferment that it's forming a new and fashionable kombucha.

Police are doing what newscasters call cracking down on protesters at American colleges.

They call them college campuses.

To translate for non-U.S.

listeners, we call colleges universities and police crackdowns hitting people.

Because it's in America, everyone's either wrong or annoying, particularly

that thing that they do where they stand in front of each other in a protest situation, shouting directly into one another's mouths like the love song at the end of an opera.

trying to provoke the other party into punching them so that they then they get to do a lawsuit.

They're like, you know that thing where they're like hustling at each other like netball players trying to do everything short of a foul, trying to slap the moral high ground out of the other person's hands.

A lot of people are characterizing these protests as proof that the youth are all right, standing up for what they believe in and putting themselves on the line for their belief in a better world, much like the hippies did protesting against the Vietnam War and how their belief that the activated youth was a precursor to a morally better generation than the one before.

And I think we can all look at how the baby boomer generation turned out after their youth of protests and think, ah, shit.

I mean, it is clearly a delicate balance, Alistair, the

right to protest, legitimate expressions of support for the various different arguments in this infinitely complex situation in the Middle East.

But it does raise a problem.

How does protest cope with complexity and nuance?

Because without using banners that are two hundred fifty thousand words long containing a doctorate level of exploration of the infinitely difficult history and politics of the Middle East.

It's kind of hard to really

express what needs to be expressed about this situation.

Well, it's that kind of template for so many sort of similar comedy routines about imagine a strike on this, what do we want?

A global rearrangement of

when do we want it?

At some Hazy Atten specified point in the fill in your own blanks, really.

What slightly irritates me more than anything else is the big news story at the moment is protests in American universities as opposed to an absolutely horrific bloodbath in gaza and that does seem to be slightly missing the point but that's very much a humanity's default setting i think um as alice alludes to it's always interesting to see in this point how how very good it is that um English British police don't possess guns.

I don't know if you've ever seen them in a run-in with the EDL or any every time someone mentions that, you know, someone may have criticized Winston Churchill's shoe polish in 1963, a huge gang of thugs erupt onto the street, stand around his statue and protect it from absolutely no one before kicking the shit out of each other and a number of policemen who, to be honest, give as good as they get, but with batons.

You do think, Christ, if these guys had guns, I mean, I mean, it wouldn't have been the minor strike, would it?

It would have been the, you know, the Scargill massacre.

And so the only thing that's actually united anyone, if you saw that tweet, was students on either side shouting f ⁇ you Biden together, which was the one time you could see them on their faces almost the relief of going, yeah, something we all agree with, which is f you Biden.

And that,

what do we get then?

Trump.

So we're back to square one.

Well, I mean, this is, but is this the only way now that politics can bring people together in an age that is now so polarized that basically everyone hates everything?

So we have these little moments of unity where they all shout f Joe Biden.

But then that's going to then disintegrate as they argue over exactly the correct reason that Joe Biden should go f himself.

And I mean, America, I mean, can America prove truly that it is once again the coherent nation it never actually was by having crowds shout, f Joe Biden and f Donald Trump at the same time at each other?

Literally

no one turning up to the next election whatsoever as a protest vote.

It turns out Joe Biden, I feel like the possible solution here is just to drop him in the Middle East and see if we can get both sides chanting Joe Biden at him.

It might be a first step towards peace.

It turns out that by presenting himself as an almost completely middle-of-the-road hail fellow, well-met, benevolent grandpa who likes ice cream, he's managed to infuriate people on all six sides of politics, which is an achievement.

Only six?

I'd say there's hundreds more sides of politics.

Didn't they discover a Roman dodecahedron last week in some archaeological dig, which probably explains why it was sacked?

Just to go back to the

difficulty of expressing everything that needs to be expressed

in a placard or a chant,

like I said, 250,000 words, I reckon, minimum, to explore anything legitimate about the whole Middle East situation.

Now, that would be a 35-hour chant, and that's without...

That's just

rather than it being a call and repeat, which obviously would take it up to the 70-hour mark.

For a decently legible banner or placard, I reckon you can have a maximum of five letters per metre, going in an average of six letters per word, possibly longer if it gets into real sort of academic level exploration, and allowing for space between letters plus punctuation.

I reckon that would require a banner that is around 340 kilometers or 210 miles long, with letters around 30 centimeters or a foot high, plus a bit of spacing between lines for legibility,

breaking into columns with some white space to make it easier on the eye.

That would be a rectangular placard that I think would be 280 meters high by 600 meters wide, and that's without footnotes, graphs, maps, diagrams, timelines, statistical appendices, or a comprehensive bibliography.

So that kind of shows

how difficult it is and why these protests create such hostility

between the sides.

Well, I almost sense you're mocking the idea, Andy, whereas I think what you're failing to appreciate is that creating a placard of that magnificence would be the kind of communal effort that could really bring people together in a way that almost nothing else could.

Yes.

Yes.

Anyway, if you do have any solutions for the Middle East situation, do please send them in.

I feel like Joe Biden's next move is to infuriate even more people by like misgendering J.K.

Rowling, thereby angering all sides at once.

Well, I've said this many times before.

I can't remember if I said this on the bugle, but we do need a unifying nemesis to bring the world together.

In the past, I have suggested this should be the New Zealand national cricket team.

Because, you know, no one hates the New Zealand.

You know, they're a very popular team.

They all seem perfectly nice.

But, you know, their captain, Kane Williamson, has never explicitly condemned Joseph Stalin for the atrocities he committed as leader of the Soviet Union.

So maybe the world can come together.

He seems a very likable, equanimous kind of guy.

I'm sure he would accept for the greater good of humanity.

And maybe he could be deployed to the Middle East.

And his perfectly technically correct batting, I think, would just soothe the general situation.

If they just basically set up a cricket net somewhere in the Middle East with Kane Williamson batting against a bowling machine, and I can't see how everything wouldn't be fixed.

I think you could enlarge that.

I think it's a wonderful plan.

I think you'd possibly enlarge it to generally just sending New Zealanders out across the world.

It doesn't just have to be Kane Williamson with his textbook structural batting.

I think you could look a nation that grew up

in a land with...

absolutely no natural predators and developed a sort of slightly benign but delightful kind of persona in comparison to their nearest neighbours who grew up with every single predator on the planet attempting to murder them means that kiwis just send kiwis out across across the world and just go i think you know

just turning up in the middle of gaza to a crowd shouting f you joe biden at a white-haired man eating ice cream and just say manny we take a few overs with you i think that i mean i think that does it also explain why new zealand got so good at rugby that it found an activity that gave it the sense of there being predators out there to make things more extraordinary

things hunting them down and threatening physical violence.

So let's move on now to other news in America.

And the latest from the trial of Donald Trump, the former and potentially future president, words that stick in the core of humanity as much as they did when we first uttered them as the Beagle came back

in October 2016, just weeks before he was elected for the first time.

He was fined $9,000 this week by the judge and warned he could be jailed for a month if he continues breaching court orders and

attacking witnesses

in his case.

I mean, I'm not sure a month, I think he'd probably want a little bit more than that.

I mean, I think if he can do the whole election campaign from jail, I think he will consider that to be given a better chance of winning in November.

He's also, during the case, he's fallen asleep.

He's allegedly admitted nasally disharmonious, gaseous exflagrutians.

And

there's this kind of footage of him seemingly dozing off.

I read one expert saying it's possible that he could have been meditating.

Now, look, without wishing to judge a book by its cover, its author, its publisher, its publicity blurb, and above all, its contents, I would suggest that Donald Trump does not seem like a natural meditator, someone who turns to meditation to give him spiritual calm.

I don't think that's his

M.O.

Alice, obviously, you've uh lived in uh uh in New York, you you you've been a lawyer.

Um

obviously this this is just all your dream news stories come together as one, is it not?

Well, yes, obviously, it's it's sort of difficult to know whether by falling asleep during his trial Donald Trump is either aged or contemptuous of the trial process or on the other hand is committing deeply poignant and meaningful satire about the boringness of the legal system and the illegitimacy of this trial process and really who can know

at this point until there's a decision of fact made by the judge in the court.

Of course the judge did just fine him $9,000 for contempt of court and may put him in jail if he continues to be contemptuous of court.

But I feel like certainly Trump doesn't believe in the old, I think it is Greek saying, you snooze, you lose.

Yes, that was, I think Aristotle was, although that may have come in directly from Socrates via Plato before Aristotle wrote it down.

Very much a post-hemlock view, I think.

Yeah, I mean, we can all agree that Trump is on the side of the gods.

Sorry, the dogs slay us.

I do like the idea, the suggestion that he could meditate, a man whose entire subconscious seems to operate with caps lock on.

He is in a position that I think the the judge has played it really quite well by just saying, no, that's what I'm allowed to do.

I would go more.

I would threaten jail time, but nine grand.

And then there's another four grand was asked for yesterday.

And whether that comes through or not, you don't know.

But playing due process with Donald Trump strikes me as the simplest way to annoy him.

He just sat there

and, you know, he comes out and complains in that kind of vestibule.

And it's on the 15th floor.

And he's just an old man shouting in an echoey corridor.

And it really kind of strips away layers of orange foundation to show you who he is.

We will have full exclusive coverage of the old men shouting in an echoey corridor at each other over the next few months as we head towards the election.

But who are going to be the running mates?

Well, one potential running mate for Donald Trump as vice presidential candidate,

Christy Noam,

this week has been defending herself against accusations that she killed a young dog and a goat.

Accusations leveled at her by herself in a book.

She's claimed these

news reports are fake news, which, given that they were directly quoting her own book, is an impressive leap of bullshit, even by a Trumpian standard.

I'm going to leave aside the fact that the dog was called Cricket.

And the dog

was only 14 months old, but she's not the first person to think that Cricket had gone on too long or that Cricket had become too loud, even.

But those people don't always agree but the question is um you know will this damage her or is Trump supporter base going to be unsatisfied with a running mate who has only killed a dog and a goat on just one day of gratuitous animal slaying is that enough to endear herself to the core Republican support I'm not sure it is Well, she did respond to the scandal about the killing of the dog and the goat by mentioning that she had also just killed three horses.

Three horses who were family friends who had brought up her daughters.

So I think you're absolutely right, Arthur.

She's used the tales of animal slaughter in her book to prove that she's got what it takes to make it in the cutthroat goat shoot world of politics and that she's willing to do anything from puppy put-downs to horse murder if it'll help her political ambitions.

I feel like the next move for Christy Noam is to shoot two of any animals and call it Noam's Ark.

Right, I think we all need to take a little break at this point and just let that sit there.

UK election news now.

And well, we've been going to the polls this week for local elections.

Voting was yesterday.

As we record, the results are.

Well, some of them have come through, some of them still to come through.

The mayoral elections in various cities have not yet been announced.

The ruling party, if that's the right word, which it isn't,

the sort of ruling conservative party um have had a better than deserved results um at the uh at these elections with more than zero percent of the electorate voting for them for reasons that remain uh unclear uh the results as i said not yet complete but it looks like the conservatives have somehow and some way clung on to almost half of their local council seats now this is being presented as a disaster for the conservatives losing over half of their seats i would say it's a fing miracle that they've got any um so rather than the absolutely no f ⁇ ing whatever seats that they seem to be aiming for, given the unceasing shitstorm of anti-competence and national crumbling, they've been excreting onto this country for years.

Nonetheless, not looking too rosy for interim Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, or as he's now known, Rishi Soon, my pretty, soon it will all be over.

Ack.

Weird nickname, but whatever works.

There are rumours that Tory MPs could be contemplating ditching Sunak before the general election they are, sadly, legally obliged to call within the next nine months.

Perhaps thinking they might find another leader who can lead them to an even heavier electoral defeat than Sunak is taking it to them at the moment, just to prove how the system they've been running for almost a decade and a half is so stacked against them.

Sunak, the person who we should

remind ourselves constantly, began his tenure by losing to Liz Truss.

Yes.

So

it's tough for Sunak at the moment, Alistair.

You are our floundering prime minister correspondent on the Bugle.

Exactly, what level of flounder would you say that?

Well, I'd say, as the floundering Prime Minister spokesman, it's been a busy few years, as Alice has just alluded to.

My local elections, obviously, Alice is coming in from Australia, so I'm sure you're probably on the edge of your seat.

My local election, there's only one seat was up for the local police commissioner in the Hertfordshire area, and as yet, still unknown.

But I think it'll be, I mean, the local election is always funny because the kind of

the way it's

every single pundit on every side, you can just predict exactly what they're going to say the incumbent is always going to say it's midterm and it's very difficult labor's going to say that any win is a joy even if it's only crawling over the line um as you say the idea that anyone could vote conservative at this point in in their administrative capabilities is utterly beyond me he's going to wait to the last possible minute the last possible minute like most things may not be in his hands anymore because i suspect if there is a leadership challenge he'll just say sold it and go to the country but whenever he goes to the country i think the country is going to go to him and go

goodbye, Rishi.

Yes, well, I mean, there was a parliamentary by-election in Blackpool South, and the Conservatives put the bye into the by-election by losing massively.

They won the seat in the 2019 general election

with

roundabout, sorry, sorry,

they won the seat in the 2019 general election with a majority of almost 4,000 and over 15,000 votes.

Yesterday they got 3,200 votes, so around a fifth of the votes they got in the election.

It was a lower turnout, but it's sort of a massive swing against the Conservatives.

This by-election was called after the MP Scott Benton

had to step down after being caught by a newspaper sting in which he suggested that he was willing to break parliamentary lobbying rules in exchange for money.

Now, I'm just not sure in this day and age that should be a resignation offence.

To me, those are the kind of skills that Brexit Britain needs in top-level politics.

To get these elusive trade deals with the world,

we need to be willing and able to do absolutely fing anything.

We need morals left in the bin where they belong.

Line them all up with a couple of goats and see what they do.

He should have been made trade secretary, not hounded out of his job.

I do think the phrase caught in a newspaper sting is incredibly charitable to the newspaper.

It was almost more like he walked into a newspaper newspaper offices and said, has anyone got a sting like a hat?

Yesterday, Boris Johnson turned up to vote at his polling station and failed to bring photo ID.

Now, I know in a lot of countries, you probably have to bring photo ID for years, but it's a new law in Britain that was brought in by Boris Johnson's government when he was Prime Minister.

We started having to bring photo ID it was a law foisted on the country stroke passed by a democratically elected government delete according to preference actually don't delete they're both equally true and valid

it was brought in in order to track to crack down on the statistically essentially to all practical purposes completely non-existent problem of polling station voter fraud brought in by Boris Johnson who let us not forget was then allowed encouraged almost forced to personally choose friends buddies colleagues vague acquaintances and the like to become permanent, lifelong members of Parliament in the House of Lords in his resignation honours years.

And yet, in an impressively British blast of willfully myopic double standards, apparently the real problem is the handful of people voting bogusly at elections that makes no difference anyway in our ludicrous electoral system.

That was the real problem.

Anyway, so it was brought in to safeguard our democracy, which is fancy political jargon for to

try to stop people voting who probably won't vote for us.

And then Boris Johnson evidently forgot his own law, which is is absolutely on brand

for Johnson.

So anyway, it's, yeah, I mean, it just,

this was one of these classic stories that in itself didn't really mean very much.

Like I say, this law sort of makes a bit of sense, but

compared with the previous system of pointing at a random name on a printed list saying, that's me, where's my pencil?

But

it does, you know, it's a law that does, you know, sort of work more against, I mean, people say it's brought in to stop sort of young people voting who are less likely to have idea.

I think it's also quite likely to stop older people voting.

So, whether that helps the Conservatives or not, I'm not sure.

But it was just sort of one of these absolutely, out of all the things we needed to do to improve and strengthen our democracy, I'm not sure that would have been in the top thousand on the to-do list.

But anyway, the fact that Boris Johnson was caught out by it was rather glorious.

It did illustrate, once again, the danger that the Conservatives have frequently failed to support, which is allowing Jacob Reese Mogg to speak in public, because he is famously the man who said that Brexit border checks would be an act of self-harm, but everyone's like, you were the Brexit minister for opportunity, then literally sort of stood up and said, well, I mean, the voter ID scheme was a plan to gerrymander votes for our side, which clearly hasn't worked.

See someone in the background going, shut the f up, Jacob.

And I mean,

it has backfired.

I mean, it's a ludicrous law on so many levels.

And it would actually, I think,

be a really good one to get rid of immediately is a complete, simple, open goal.

There we are, back to democracy.

In other British politics news, mayhem in Scotland, Hamza Youssef, the Scottish First Minister, has quat.

Is that the past positive?

I think it is.

As Scottish First Minister,

only just over a year in post, which historically might not seem very long, but in future might be looked back on as an epoch of changeless solidity as our mega squabble politics and the glorious release of artificial intelligence enables us to change leaders seamlessly from one bot to the next on a weekly, perhaps daily, perhaps even hourly basis.

But at the moment he's lasted just over a year.

It's one of those news stories where if you missed the beginning it's sort of hard to understand.

And the SNP has been struggling for a while.

Nicola Sturgeon left office somewhat abruptly just over a year ago.

Always hard for anyone to follow such a long-standing and prominent leader.

Issues involving her husband and party funds have caused problems for the SNP.

A general sense of there's no immediate thirst for another independence referendum, which causes the SNP's defining purpose.

They've been in power for a long time.

Things were starting to mount up.

Oh, fk, he's fking resigned.

That's essentially what happened.

He ended the SNP's power-sharing agreement with the Green Party.

And I saw that headline, and then, you know, I was busy with a mixture of

work and

researching cricket stats for a book that I will hopefully release in the not too distant future and watching the snooker.

And

then all of a sudden he'd resigned.

So

such is politics now.

It all seemed to move rather quickly, Alistair.

I should say that, you know, we don't, although none of us here is Scottish, I did specifically choose.

So I was going to say,

you know, the name, Alice Fraser, Alistair Barry, to me,

that was the most Scottish possible combination of Bugle co-hosts I could have gone for.

So how Scottish are you as a percentage?

Me or Alice?

Well, you go first, Alistair.

Well, my mother is Scottish, although you wouldn't know to speak to her.

My grandparents were both from Glasgow.

My full name actually is Alistair Barry, is my middle name.

My surname is McNeil because I, yeah, because

when I left drama school, there was already an Alastair McNeil working with huge success, as you can tell from his immediately recognisable name that I wasn't allowed.

So I know

I'm half Scottish, but obviously, you know, with a voice like this, you have to be slightly circumspect about addressing that in Glasgow or Edinburgh.

And

I have Scottish ancestry as well, but it goes back quite a long time.

So my mother's family were

Callicks, and I think that was originally a Scottish

Scottish name.

But the story, and it's slightly murky in our family history, was that

a distant antecedent was executed for sheep rustling.

I know.

And of course,

you were originally Zolt's mom.

And the

family fled south.

But

Alice Fraser is about as Scottish a name as you could hope for, isn't it?

Yeah, so the Fraser comes from my

paternal grandfather who was christened Adolf Friedenberg in Czechoslovakia and

escaped.

from the Nazis.

He was a Jewish man, escaped from the Nazis during World War II, made bull bearings for the RAF.

And they said, we love the bull bearings,

but we do not love signing an invoice to an adolph.

Do you mind?

And he changed his name to the most Anglo name he could think of at the time, which was Andrew Peter Fraser.

And that's my Swedish connection.

Sorry, what was his original name?

Adolf?

Friedenberg.

The name Adolf

used to be a fairly normal name, but then at around, I don't know why around that that time it became significantly less popular as a name particularly among the Jewish population yes so

I was vaguely aware of that

so Alice here so the the back to the SNP back to the Scottish politics it's just much it's much more interesting than the SNP though isn't it that's the problem

well if you if you

trust the word of the taxi driver who drove me to the train station when I was in the Highlands a couple of years ago after the Edinburgh fringe the reason that the Scottish independence vote did not go through was because of Netflix delaying the release of Diana Gabbaldon's romantic history tale, The Outlander,

in Scotland until it was too late because

if it had been released before the vote, it would have inflamed too much national pride.

Well, that's a beautiful combination of kind of like the idiocy you would expect from a cab driver's opinion, combined with a really left-field take on where it actually came from.

They did date, the referendum did take place on the anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.

It was the 700, wasn't it 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314?

And it was the view that this would, you know, to try to encourage a sort of a nationalist vote.

But I do think, you know, if you are voting in a polling station and you find the way you're going to vote being influenced by the result of a battle from 700 years ago.

You have a sacred duty to put your pencil down and walk out of the polling station.

Democracy is not your game.

But anyway, I mean, I will say again, the Scottish, you know,

my opinion on whether or not Scotland will be better off as an independent nation is neither here nor there.

What I would say as an English person living in England is please don't go, Scotland.

Do not leave England alone with ourselves.

We're not to be trusted.

And what I would say is if you do want to do another independence vote, make sure that you precede the independence vote with visions of Jamie Fraser competently fingering a time-travelling doctor.

Well, that is something we can all get on board with.

And finally, on the bugle this week, our dystopian future is already here.

News now, which seems to be a section that comes back increasingly often on on the bugle

and well this is particularly relevant to us as part of the the the podcast artistic medium

that a man has managed to interview an AI version of himself

and Alice I know you think this is basically the future of probably not just podcasting but all human communication

well this is I mean this is such a beautiful story it is a man who has not had enough of the sound of his own voice interviewing an AI version of himself.

It's not just any man either.

It's the co-founder of LinkedIn, the billionaire Reed Hoffman, finding a new way to say, can I connect with you on LinkedIn?

By connecting with himself, he's created a digital clone that is capable of approximating

the subject's mannerisms, tone of voice, and the kind of thing that he would talk about.

This feels like the ultimate end point of all podcasts.

Well, I mean, you know, you say, this is a new thing.

I've actually been an AI indie Zaya Altsman for about half of the Bugle episodes of the last five years, but no one seems to have noticed.

And I think it's an exciting future that, you know, that

in the future, AI in nanoseconds can basically produce where podcasts are heading, essentially.

Look at the long-term trajectory of podcasting as an art form.

AI will take us there, that in nanoseconds, it can produce a podcast of you talking to yourself, telling yourself what you think, yourself agreeing with you, and repeating to you what yourself thinks in slightly different language, trying to sell you a mattress, then you and yourself criticizing an AI straw man for what you and yourself claim that straw man said, did, or thought, you and yourself agreeing that he should be cancelled, promoting a home delivery meal service, and then wrapping up for the week with a lighter story that you and yourself both found amusing, but which also confirmed you and yourself's strange views about the world.

So I think this is really

taking us, just accelerating the process to where the podcasting has always been heading.

I think it's fascinating,

as Alice says, that he's the guy who created LinkedIn.

And I do wonder if he actually accepted his own request to connect at first, because we've all sat around, we've all got LinkedIn and then gone, should I?

Oh, and then you look and you've got 700 notifications because you've never bothered checking to the extent that

even if I was asked to connect by myself, I'd still go, Who is that bloke and share

his history and whether we really had friends in common?

And then I actually watched the video and it's quite unsettling he is i would say you know someone you would not be surprised to know had a background in internet um and computer sort of technology in a slightly nerdy fashion and i started to watch the um the ai guy version and i was like this is creepy it's just not quite right and then to be fair i started watching him a bit more and went the same feeling really

um and uh

start in the uncanny gallery exactly exactly that my only because my biggest problem I'm a total technophone, my biggest problem is with the spread of AI, is it's always written as A-L, which is obviously AL, which is what everyone knows.

And I'm getting thoroughly sick of being blamed for absolutely fing everything.

That brings to the end of this week's Bugle.

Thank you very much, as always, for listening.

There are still, I think, a handful of tickets available for the Bugle Life shows in London early in June at the Leicester Square Theatre.

I will be announcing the dates for my stand-up tour round about the end of May when everything is confirmed and there's quite a lot of dates.

So yeah, come along.

I need all of you to come to

all of them.

All of them.

But anyway,

listen to this space for more details.

Alistair, anything to plug?

Not particularly.

Finished tour.

I've got a new, the special of the tour is out on Next Up at the moment called Woke in Progress.

And that was, I was very pleased with that.

So if you'd like to check that out, that'll be me ranting about the world on Next Up.

Alice.

I am doing a writer's retreat in Switzerland in September of this year.

If you would like to come, you have to sign up at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

I'm doing an intensive writer's retreat there.

Also, I've got a book for sale at unbound.com.

It's called The Dancy Lagarde Reader.

Just write in Alice Fraser.

My grandfather went to all the trouble of having an easy-to-spell name, so

type in Alice Fraser.

Also, I host a podcast called The Gargle, which is the glossy magazine to this podcast's audio newspaper.

So please tune in to that.

Yes, so if you've had enough of the relentlessly serious broadsheet stylings of the bugle, do listen to

the gargle instead.

Or as well.

Next week, we will have a glorious world exclusive sub-episode for you and then we'll be back with a full bugle in the middle of May.

Until then, goodbye.

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.

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.