Orcas, AI, Idiots: A summer feast

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here and he is on holiday still trying to de-cricket himself.

When he's successfully de-cricketer sized himself, we'll be back with some of the greatest bugles of all time, probably in early September.

In the meantime, you still still want new bugle action, right?

So here are some bits we deliberately held back for you to enjoy.

Starting with Andy, Chris Addison and Hari Kondibolu.

Cancel culture news now and a chemical weapons expert has been fired from a conference after it emerged that he'd posted tweets that were, brace yourselves everyone, slightly critical of the British government.

This is,

I mean, slightly Kafka-esque.

If Kafka had begun his story as Gregor Sampson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into someone who was no longer going to be an expert speaker at a government-backed conference.

What happened to me, he thought?

Oh, I remember.

I retweeted a meme showing Peter Rabbit devouring a lettuce with Liz Truss's face on it.

This is essentially what what happened.

It was the chemical weapons demilitarization conference, which is not, as some thought, an unexpected sponsorship deal in non-league football.

It was in fact a meeting of experts to talk about how to defend yourself against chemical, biological and other naughty weapons

and attacks with pieces of fresh fruit, I think.

The London-based weapons expert, Dan Cajeta, had been due to speak at the gig, but was de-invited.

Now,

did it count as being cancelled, Chris?

Because this expert, Dan Caseta, was not instantly given a talk show on GB News to complain about being cancelled.

So does it count as a full cancellation

if that didn't happen?

It's a full cancellation.

No, absolutely not.

I think I find the procedural aspect of it odd.

I don't know why the government needed to vet his social media feed.

If they're wanting to know who said they're shit on social media, they just need to know who's got social media both one to one,

including a lot of Tory MPs that just keep

basically saying we are shit, don't vote for us.

And the old minister, yeah, I listened to, you know, there's the Johnson's biography of his time at number 10,

just published by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Neuro.

And I listened to it rather than read it.

And

there's a lot of that text, which is just written in quite a neutral tone.

But whoever was reading it really hated Johnson.

It's like 11 hours of sarcastic narration.

Phenomenal.

At which point, Johnson said he was too busy.

Amazing.

I fully recommend.

I mean, it's the latest instance of someone being deplatformed.

And, you know, we are, yeah, we live in nations famous for our tolerance of free speech.

I'm personally a huge tolerance fan.

I demand that everyone else tolerates things just as tolerantly as I do.

And if they don't, then they should be put into a special pod and fired into fing space.

There is no place for the intolerant in my Britain.

No arguments.

No second chances.

F off.

So, obviously, it would be nice

to say, in terms of this cancellation, that Chris and Hurry were our absolute first choice for this week's bugle.

But we had actually booked the Pope, Barack Obama, Beyoncé, and British comedy legend George Formby.

Sadly, we did have to have to cancel them for being respectively

controversial views on birth control, being a cricket sceptic, insensitive lyrics about whether or not people are ready for jelly, and not responding to his emails.

So, um,

it's uh

it's a tough world, Everyone can be cancelled.

It just doesn't take a lot.

We are just hearing, in fact, that highboard diving and next year's Paris Olympics will be rebranded as deplatforming to fit with the current trend.

Tough crowd.

Finally, this week,

some news from India.

Anuvab Pal alerted me to this story.

A government official in India has been suspended after

he ordered a reservoir to be drained because he dropped his phone in it.

The food inspector called Rajesh Viswas was taking a selfie, as you do when you're in front of a reservoir.

Otherwise, how do you prove that either you or the reservoir really existed?

He dropped his phone into the water, at which point he had two options.

Option one was to think, oh, that was careless.

Oh, well, it's only a phone.

I can get another one.

And learn a valuable lesson about not taking selfies near reservoirs without attaching the phone to a flotation device, just in case.

Or option two, empty half a million gallons of precious, life-giving, farming-assisting water out of the reservoir over three days of pumping in an effort to A, find the phone, and B, hope that being underwater for three days hadn't in some way damaged it.

This is one of the most sensational

pieces of desperation phone retrieval in the proud history of humanity.

Well, this is why you gotta back stuff up on iCloud.

Like,

this is what happens.

Also,

what's on that phone?

Something's on that phone.

Well, the problem is he had backed up onto iCloud, but the iCloud then rained into the reservoir.

That was a...

Everybody knows that the tip is, isn't it?

If your phone gets waterlogged, the best place to dry it out is in a pile of rice.

So if you're going to drop your phone in a reservoir, India is probably a pretty good place

to do it.

The dilemma, of course, is that you need to get your phone to get the rice delivered.

This is why I have to stick with landlines.

You never have this problem with the landline.

You drop a landline phone in a reservoir, you can just pull it out by the cord.

How would you drop a landline in a reservoir, Chris?

What circumstances could that happen in?

Well, if you're using a landline next to the reservoir and you're being a bit careless and it goes in the reservoir, I don't know how much more straightforward that could be, Andy.

You can't take a selfie with a landline.

Well, what kind of attitude is that?

That's the kind of defeatism that has got British controls in today.

Younger buglers are now Googling

hoarded phone.

Those three people have pressed pause to Google hoarded phone.

The age, the three 21 to 35.

My children who are 14 and 17,

they cannot get their heads around the idea that you use a dial on a phone.

I've sort of demonstrated it to them, they cannot get their heads around it.

It's a lost art like stained glass window making or cathedral building.

Or witchcraft trial holding.

They all come back, though.

They will come back.

You can do a little...

You could probably do it on a stag weekend, couldn't you learn to dial a phone?

Or build a cathedral.

More future of humanity news now.

And well, all of what we've been talking about might be completely moot because it's quite possible that we will have been well brought to an end as a species by a war with nature.

Nature's creatures are starting to take vengeance on humanity for all the wrongs that have been committed over recent millennia.

In particular an orca off the coast of Spain

a vengeance-fueled orca, no less, by the name of Gladys, or as her friends call her,

has been wreaking havoc on the yachting community.

Won't someone please think of the yacht owners?

It's

well, it's a harrowing story.

This things are getting very, very awkward indeed off the coast of Spain.

Gladys, the self-styled Liam Neeson of the Mega Dolphin World, was apparently hit by a yacht.

And after copying a bit of a yacht working, rather than brushing it off as an unfortunate accident, has gone orc about and solemnly vowed not to rest until all yachts are dead.

Now, obviously, we humans know that yachts are inanimate objects, albeit female ones.

But if you're an orcor, you could be forgiven for thinking that they're jumped-up pricks who couldn't give a shit about you and your aquatic mammal friends.

Whereas, in fact, that is just the owners.

But anyway, Gladys has struck back by orkering three yachts, sinking two of them.

Those are pretty good stats.

That's what, batting 666 for the season so far.

She can keep that up for the whole summer yachting season.

She could easily win the coveted MVO award.

I mean, this is hugely worrying, isn't it?

Because not only is Gladys on the wet warpath, but she has apparently sparked a wave of copycat or copy orca boat clonkings and is apparently training other orcas to attack yachts I mean this is not where's it gonna end

right this is a good thing this is a what first of all I've never wanted to make a Pixar movie so much in my life

this is

the kind of art I'd like to make secondly notice that it's yachts it's that it's not fishing boats or smaller vessels It's yachts.

This is the kind of political revolution I've been waiting for amongst the members of the animal kingdom.

Gladys was traumatized by a boat hitting it, now training others to ram these yachts.

And also, it's not just, think about the training.

On one hand, you're like, okay, it's clearly she's training them for violence, but it's not a pointless violence.

It's not just fueled by vengeance.

Divers found copies of the autobiography of Malcolm X, the Communist Manifesto, and the Art of War by Sun Tzu in the waters where the yachts were hit.

So, I mean, clearly, this is something bigger.

This is what we've been waiting for.

Well, I think you might be right, because the article in question suggested that the orcas were after revenge for being trapped in illegal fishing nets, which rather begs the question, how did they realize the nets were illegal?

Now, we know that orcas are highly intelligent creatures, as you point out, Hari, and

we know that in the same way that we know everything that we've learned about nature, which is because David Assemborough told us.

Given that these orcas are so intelligent, it's entirely possible that they've had some kind of legal training, probably starting in a school of fish, they in the University of Dolphins, where they'll have got a degree in the Faculty of Humanities, before going on to Shale Law School.

And the likelihood is they aren't ramming the boats at all, just trying to deliver a summons, or as they're better known to the underwater legal community, a subpoena.

Perhaps, given the orcas' intimate knowledge of, and presumably respect for, the law, all that's really needed here is some kind of strongly worded cease and desist letter.

Well, orcologists claim that Gladys, who is described as being black and white with fins, aged between nought and 100, over 20 centimetres in length, and of no fixed abode, has been training these other orcas to attack yachts.

And there must now be concerns that renegade gangs of guerrilla orcas and their Dolphinian and Balinian buddies could soon bring an end to all shipping, if I may exaggerate slightly, which, given that we live in the 21st century, I emphatically may.

I mean, and also, you know, if this copycat behaviour spreads not just within the orca community, but between species,

we're in trouble.

I mean, if, for example, pigs learn these same vengeance skills, we could be heading for a very uncomfortable bacon blowback and sausage reckoning in the not-too-distant future.

And

I'm not happy about that at all.

I do feel if we are truly in a war with nature, the government should be putting out some kind of information in the mold of the old nuclear war protect and survive booklets from the 70s and 80s.

You know, just simple advice like, if you encounter a tree, remember it's probably more scared of you than you are of it.

Just lie down and wait for it to go away.

You know, if an animal is threatening you, try neutralizing the threat by domesticating it.

For years, packs of ferocious wolves would slaughter and eat humans, but now they fit in the handbags of Kardashians, can only be fed steamed pack choy, or they succumb to the kind of violent liquid diarrhea that's very hard to scrub out of the bottom of a Gucci quilted leatherette tote.

The same is true of plants.

Domestication drastically reduces the dangers.

There have been very few sunflower-on-human homicides since we started using them as a staple crop, unless you count the few hundred people who die each year choking on muesli.

That's just Darwinism, isn't it?

Yes.

You know, so we hear a lot about humankind's war on nature.

Yeah.

Right.

And if you believe the news coverage, it would seem to suggest that we're very much winning.

But that said, I regularly drive three miles to buy sacks of specially formulated gravel, which I bring home and place in trays.

My cats then shit in the gravel and I clear out the shit and eventually the gravel washing and cleaning the trays before the whole cycle begins again.

And I have to drive another three miles to pick up more of the gravel.

So I'd say nature is doing better than most people seem to think.

They've basically managed to get a ton of their guys behind enemy lines and have us set up entire shops full of food, bedding, and toys for them.

Well, it's harrowing.

We will, of course, bring you weekly coverage of the final climactic war between mankind and nature over the following 3,000 years on the bugle.

Some more secret gems now.

We've got Alice Fraser, Anavad Powell, and Andy.

Technology news now and scientists, them again, have done something fing useful for once in their stupid finging lives and found a way of turning humid air into renewable power.

We on the bugle have documented many of the more ludicrous scientific discoveries and alleged breakthroughs.

But this, Alice, seems to be something that could be genuinely exciting.

So could we soon, once this technology is harnessed of turning humid air into electricity, could we soon all have our own power stations in our gym kits so when we work up a sweat, we can power a coffee machine or a developing world village according to choice?

Yes, Andy,

as again the dildo manufacturers declare, wetness is power.

And a team at the University of Massachusetts apparently have successfully generated a small continuous electric current from humidity.

And they published a paper back in May and since then they've made a device that's the size of a thumbnail.

It's one fifth of the width of a human hair and is capable of generating roughly one microwatt, which is enough to light a single pixel on a large LED screen.

But this is very promising according to a number of other scientists who are looking at similar ideas.

It's just the idea if you can create energy out of the humidity in the air, it's going to be incredibly environmentally friendly if you don't count how costly and energy intensive it is to make the devices and how difficult it might be to scale them up.

Still, it's a really lovely idea and arguably a good thing that maybe a billionaire could invest in instead of machines for shooting themselves into the most inhospitable parts of the atmosphere or Earth.

You know, just a suggestion.

So, will we all be dangling our mobile phones over pans of boiling pasta to give them a quick recharge so we can then post Instagram stories about how our hands and arms have been scalded by steam while we made pasta?

Is this the future, Aniva?

You know where this all started, this all of this, I can pile my laptop with my sweat thing.

You know, there's I've I've got one there's always one person to blame for everything.

Uh for this I'm blaming the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla.

Oh, yes, he's got a lot to answer for.

Of course, Elon Musk, Alice's favourite, named a car after him.

He believed that the earth was basically a large battery and you could charge either end of it and everything in the air around us could be used for electricity.

Like a lemon.

I just feel like this is, you know, again, really hopeful technology,

but as somebody who's fairly cynical about human nature,

I can just see this going badly wrong and people, you know, trying to steal each other's clouds and fighting over vaping.

And like, just,

maybe we need to back off this until we've all calmed down a little bit.

All right.

But was it California last week where

one particular

street lights went off because too many people were charging their cars and taking it from the lampposts?

Well, I mean, there's always skeptics, isn't there?

We have the same with solar and wind and, you know, people saying, oh, yeah, what if the sun's not shining or the wind goes off?

And it'd be the same with this you know what about when it's dry what then so we better open a few more coal mines as a cover bet and also we've always got to think with any scientific breakthrough we have to think of the sci-fi end game because

you know anything can always lead to disaster and the end of humanity and I just can't see anything other than this leading to rogue electrified microbes in the air growing to 12 trillion times their normal size and eating their way through Manhattan

is there any way that won't happen

Direct correlation.

And on the other hand, I've always wanted to be a cloud farmer.

It looks fun.

It's just so hard to train the dogs.

Well, they're easy to train on the ground.

It's just once you shoot them into the air with a trebuchet that things go wrong.

That's basically what the Soviet space program was all about, cloud farming.

I live in the technology capital of the world, and every time I step into a hotel in India, there are all these conferences going on for different companies.

Fifteen, twenty years ago, I'd be able to recognize the conferences.

It'll say steel industry meet.

Last week, I went into a thing, and it just said conference cloud question mark.

I don't know what the future of Indian technology is, but I figure it's got to be a lot of words next to words that don't mean anything.

Well, that's a great future.

Now, it turns out that this discovery was

sort of accelerated or even happened because of an accident.

It wasn't a deliberate piece of research, but

something accidental happened and they've picked that up and run with it.

And it's like many of the great scientific breakthroughs, famously penicillin.

Um, Alexander Fleming left a pencil in his lab overnight, and when he came back in the morning, it had turned into a jar of pills.

Um gravity, I mean, if Isaac Newton hadn't had a snooze under an apple tree, we'd still all be floating around in the air, and snooker would be a very different and even more difficult game.

Um, X-rays, they came from an uh an accident.

Did you know that?

No, I didn't know that.

The Pervy German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen was trying to develop a way of seeing through people's clothes, but he went a step too far and enabled doctors to look right through to people's bones instead.

Microwave ovens, Percy Spencer, trying to develop a machine that could turn an insect into a superhero by blasting it with magic braids.

Almost worked.

Instead found a way of cooking sweet corn quickly.

And LSD, of course, that was famously discovered by accident.

Albert Hoffman in the 1930s had been tasked by the MCC.

and the Marliban Cricket Club who

formulate and guard the laws of cricket with finding a way to make cricket more exciting by finding a replacement for the LBW law

that also had a convenient three-letter acronym.

So he came up with LSD.

After initial tests proved a bit too exciting for the crowd and players alike at a Gloucestershire versus North Hant's second 11 trial match, the experiment was quietly shelved and they tweaked the LBW law instead.

Reptilian Messiah news now and scientists in Costa Rica have documented a virgin birth by a crocodile, a female crocodile living in isolation isolation for 16 years, laid an egg that had a stillborn baby crocodile in it.

But this essentially raises a lot of questions that

this crocodile without mating

could give birth to another.

I mean, does it mean that Jesus was a crocodile?

Does it mean, I'm coming at this from a lapsed Jewish perspective, that

a crocodile is now the best we can hope for for our long-awaited Messiah?

Or is it simply a sign of crocodilian evolution?

Because let's be honest, if you're a female crocodile, you ideally want to be able to breed without having to

congruulate with

a male crocodile, because let's be honest, they are not the most attractive species, each of their own, obviously.

But I can see why a lady crocodile might want to breed unaided.

I mean, they're not exactly leopards or parrots or mandarin fish.

Sorry, am I sharing too much?

I I feel like everyone is missing the lead here.

What we have discovered is an invisible crocodile.

Right.

I mean, that's...

Yeah.

I mean, that's very much

the Sherlock Holmes approach when you've eliminated the impossible.

Whatever's left, however improbable must be the truth, or whatever it was that

Sherlock so famously and fictionally said.

But I guess also, if you're a crocodile and you've been in isolation for 16 years, you must be bored out of your reptilian mind, surely.

Because, I mean, what do you do?

And the novelty of sneaking up on a log, pretending to be another log, that must wear off pretty quickly.

I mean, how do you find fulfilment in life as a crocodile in solitary confinement, aside from looking askance at stuff,

I mean, and writing sonnets about loneliness of a form with morse code clacks of your crocodiles?

I mean, there's f ⁇ all else to be doing, isn't there?

Well, I mean, and it does cast some light on the commentaries of the Bible and so on and so forth.

Nobody hitherto knew that while Jesus was very able to bite down,

if you could keep him from opening his mouth again by just holding his nose and chin with just two fingers, incredible.

Well, you know, I'd once gone sightseeing to the southern Indian temple town of Humpy, which is infested with crocodiles.

And the tour guide said that that particular day's tour was off because crocodiles were sightseeing.

And so, you know, it all depends on what you're watching.

One day they look at us, one day we look at them.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And that particular day, they wanted to find out about the 7th century Vijayanagara Empire.

And a group of crocodiles went about in the Indian sun to do that.

So, I mean, I think that, you know, there are ways to keep yourself busy.

You know, just because you don't have Netflix doesn't mean you can't get out.

That's all I'm saying for crocodiles.

You mentioned the wildlife in India.

An elephant in India has been having a bit of a tough time of late, Anivab.

Just bring us up to date with the ordeal.

Big story, this one.

The elephant's name is Arik Khomban, which almost sounds like something out of a Bruce Lee movie.

And Arik Komban, there's a big fight about this elephant.

It's a single elephant, it's not part of a herd.

He's from the state of Kerala, but basically he's been going into Tamil Nadu, which is the neighboring state, looking for vegan meals.

It's been eating a lot of rice,

lentils, vegetables, so much so that

various forestry officers in Tamil Nadu have captured him, sent him back to Kerala.

He keeps coming back looking for rice and lentils.

And I'm wondering if this is even an elephant or a millennial who lives in Drixton or Notting Hill.

I don't know what kind of elephant this is.

So, yeah.

If they find an avocado stone, they'll know.

They will know.

There's a petition in the Madras High Court seeking compensation for the damages that the elephant has caused in Tamil Nadu.

And I'm hoping that they are looking for damages from the government rather than from the elephant.

No, it's a tough time.

Captured twice, tranquilised, moved home.

I mean, there's going to be one vengeful elephant they've got in their hands.

This does feel like this elephant could become the Liam Neeson of elephants, and no one wants to see that.

And the thing is, it keeps coming back to Tamil Nadu for meals.

Like, it hasn't, I mean, yes, it's ransacked a bunch of agricultural land, but it hasn't attacked any people.

You know, it just keeps going back to the same villages and granaries and restaurants.

Right.

So, what is it?

Because, I mean, the food in that part of India is delicious.

But I would say the food in Kerala is delicious.

So, I mean, the food in Tamil Nadu

is equally delicious.

I mean,

why is the elephant rejecting Keralan cuisine

we've just got an ungrateful Keralite elephant that's what we've got I mean I'd say you know Kerala has a range of great non-vegetarian food as well it's got some excellent beef curry yeah in in some way it's got almost got like sort of a rebellious cuisine you know against this the the powers that be that are saying we have to be vegetarian in hindu so I don't know maybe it's a very nationalistic elephant I don't know what it's trying to do but in many ways its diet is very very modern you know it's it's looking for dairy-free,

you know, vegetation and rice.

I mean, you know,

it needs to be on Instagram reels, if anything.

In other Indian news, Narendra Modi, the

Prime Minister of India, has been visiting Australia.

How has this gone down?

I mean, it's an incredible thing to witness, Andy.

Yes, Prime Minister Modi is in Australia making deals about imports, exports, immigration, and having what appears to be an embarrassingly nice time.

He's being cheered in stadiums of 2,000 people.

There's a lot of smiling photo opportunities.

On one hand, for Australia to be in good trig with major superpowers and massive countries is a good thing, given our presently prickly diplomatic dance with China.

But given Modi's complex approach to such things as ethics, honesty, and civic responsibility, it does feel like we're being a bit too enthusiastic and providing too many photo opportunities that may come back to bite us in the future.

I have a quick question for you, Alice.

Now, as you know, Prime Minister Modi has played, quote-unquote, the Madison Square Garden to 50,000, 100,000 people.

He's played Wembley Stadium with David Cameron, where David Cameron spoke in Gujarati and they riled up the crowd together.

In Sydney, I've never been to Sydney, but he played something called Kudos Arena,

20,000 people.

Is that a big gig gang arena?

Like, would would would he be up there with Elkin John?

Or or Our arenas are constantly being renamed as various people fight to stop sponsoring them.

But this is the this is the arena that Bruce Springsteen played.

So it's sort of a large capacity arena.

Our Prime Minister Albanese said the last time I saw someone on the stage here, it was Bruce Springsteen, and he did not get the welcome that Prime Minister Modi has got.

Of course, Modi played all of the classics.

Being in a truck on an Indian road,

my girl's gone home with her ex-boyfriend, and I'm having him tracked by government forces.

You know, just the real ones that everyone really loves.

But

everyone was incredibly enthusiastic.

And I think, you know, it's a nice time for Modi.

And I'm not sure if it's correct.

I mean, you just named some of my favorite songs.

I mean, I like the pre-remix version, but that one is a good one.

Apparently, one of the things he did was have a lot of anecdotes for Albanese about Indian street food.

And Albanese didn't have an, I guess, equal number of anecdotes of Australian street food.

So he just interrupted his speech and just said, Modi wins this food thing we're having, this competition, and he's the boss.

And he just kept calling him the boss.

I don't know if that's an Australian term of endearment, Andy.

Well, that's Bruce Springsteen's nickname, isn't it?

The boss.

So we might be just, maybe that's just what he always says to people who are in that particular arena, just in case.

I mean, the problem with Anthony Albanese is

he's quite cool, which I think you should avoid being a politician if you possibly can.

In other Australian news, Alice,

I hear that Australia is...

We're banning Nazi symbols.

Is this, do you think, too early or maybe, maybe too late?

Well, yes, Andy Australia Nation of Naysayers is about to say nay to Nazi symbols passing legislation to ban the sale and trade of Nazi memorabilia.

I mean this is first of all most states already have a ban on the display of Nazi flags and symbols in public spaces.

This is going to ban the trade in

Nazi symbols.

Exclusions include things like religious, educational, artistic purposes, which is good for those in religions who were using swastikas before they were cool,

which is to say before they acquired their current unfortunate word cloud of associations.

I just, look, I don't know.

I generally consider myself more on the side of free speech than not.

As someone of the first generation of teens with untrammelled access to an internet, our parents barely understood.

There's stuff that I was exposed to that I feel in retrospect I ought not to have been exposed to.

On the other hand, I don't know that the problem is the symbol.

Like, I don't think Nazis were bad because of the swastika.

So I'm not sure that banning the swastika will necessarily uh

ban other people's um affiliation with nazi ideology particularly given you know access to the internet on the other hand if you're a small business innocently going about your work as a swastika salesman i do think you should be encouraged to diversify

i mean also i mean whether you should ban the sale of nazi memorabilia or just ban anyone who shows any interest in buying nazi memorabilia um i i guess you know that's a

a semantic thing, I guess.

But

personally, if someone is hovering over the bid button in an online auction on some Nazi memorabilia, then they should just be taken politely to one side and told that they are never allowed to speak to anyone ever again or leave their house.

And I think, you know, we have the freedom and we have control.

And also, it's quite a wide-ranging set of things, Nazi memorabilia.

I remember, Andy, I think you were doing commentary in Pakistan at some point, and you sent me a link to a clothing shop called hitler's things uh

yes that's what it was a fashion shop yes it might just have been called hitler actually um or hitler clothing

um

yeah driving through the streets of karachi that was i mean unexpected certainly and it didn't appear that the contents of the shop had been influenced by the name luckily

yeah i mean maybe maybe

they're worse than happy dresses.

It's possible that Hitler liked

a nice summer dress.

I don't know.

I don't know.

But it was a bit of an unexpected shop front to see.

I mean, for a while, Mumbai had a cafe in 2007 or 2008 called Hitler's Cafe, and it was an espresso place.

And the owner was a millennial, and he was confused as to why there was so much ruckus.

And he said, I don't understand.

We just sell espresso.

I wanted an avant-garde name.

In further news of the robot takeover,

classical music has been rocked by the news that conductors are set to be vaporized by alien robots in the near future.

The first step towards this was a robot conducting an orchestra in Seoul in South Korea, but it seems that the vaporization of all conductors by alien robots is therefore now inevitable.

I guess it raises the question: do orchestras need conductors?

Is it not time to see what these so-called professional musicians can do without an ego maniac waggling a stick at them?

Is this not progress?

I think so.

I mean, I think you're talking about this thing in Korea recently.

The Korean Industrial Technology Institute came up with a conductor that conducted the main Korean orchestra, National Orchestra in Seoul on Friday evening.

It was called Ever Six.

That was the name of the conductor.

Did a pretty good job.

There was only one complaint from the musicians that the robot couldn't listen.

And that tends to be a small problem as a conductor.

But then they spoke to one person in the audience, one Ludwig van Beethoven, who said that's okay, neither could he.

So that's not an impediment to making great music, apparently.

I mean, ironically, in Seoul, the robot conductor without a Seoul,

led the performance by South Korea's national orchestra.

It's a pimped-out metronome, right?

It's a pimped-out metronome that's meant to look like a person and is just going to make everybody watching the performance feel really sad.

Its name is Ever Six and the orchestra leader Choi Su Yeol, who worked alongside the robot said that he was able to present the detailed moves like a conductor would do much better than imagined.

But on the upside also it can't be a dick and you know composers.

Am I right?

Am I right?

We all know composers.

Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, supposed to be complete terrible human beings.

All the great conductors are apparently insufferable.

Well any elephant riders in the Bugle Ordnance will know that, you know, the conductor is the Mahoot, right?

They think they're in charge, but the orchestra can go out of control at any time and just trample you.

So it's a dangerous position to be in.

I think we should be replacing these kind of dangerous, like mining and conducting very, very dangerous.

Yeah.

I'm just glad the word Mahoot is making a comeback.

Thank you, Alice.

Also, I mean, I do think it's progress in terms of

the quality and focus of orchestras.

Because if you're third violin, and frankly, no one's going to hear if you are or aren't playing, you're going to make damn sure you come in with your twiddly-toddly bits at the right time if you have a robot conductor who can instantly vaporise you with a death laser from his battle.

No more drifting off trying to remember if Pizzicato is an Italian snack or not, whether you want your pasta andante or allegretto for dinner, or whether all bassoon players nickname their instruments Beekfried or not, and if not, why not?

You're going to give your full undivided attention to your robot von Carrion.

You're absolutely right.

Every time I've seen a classical music concert, I've thought, why is there not more violence?

Blind, ugly violence.

If your cello is off, your second cello is off.

I think under fear of death, music gets a lot better.

Yeah.

I mean, that's quite dark.

But I think history would probably back you up on that.

And other art forms as well.

Poetry, for example.

Exhibit one, the First World War.

The OECD has has released a report saying that this AI revolution that we talk about so much now,

the jobs most at risk will be high-skilled jobs, such as orchestra conductor, lawyers, surgeons, weather forecasters, rock drummers, human cannonballs, and cricket statisticians.

It could all be on the way out.

But AI won't be bothered with the less skilled jobs, such as nightclub bouncers, toilet cleaners, or podcast hosts.

So I'm half okay and half in trouble.

I mean, this is...

Is this a worrying sign?

apparently that already the robot takeover has barely started and already they're being picky about what jobs they do.

They only want the nice jobs and we're going to have to rely it seems on cheap imported robots to do the jobs that our entitled Western affluence affected robots don't want to do.

Yeah, I mean I think it's a terrible thing.

Back in my day, you know a robot would just do what a robot was meant to do which is sort of suck dust off the floor or you know

steal your children away to take them to the Goblin King or

create a ethical condum conundrum that meant it had to murder an entire high school.

You know, just that kind of thing.

It's kind of a classic robot stuff or you know befriend a child in a slightly creepy way and go to outer space.

Like just really proper, proper robot things.

And now I feel like they're getting, yeah, as you say, above themselves, they're getting prestige focused.

I feel like we need to get put them back in their place, Andy, put them back in their place.

Put them back literally in their box.

When it comes to objective things, like say like cricket statistics, the argument has been that artificial intelligence will not have the human consciousness to give it empathy.

So maybe the future of critical statistics, having you spent you've spent your life in this,

would be more empathy, human consciousness, more literature surrounding cricket statistics.

So I need to start doing my stats in

sonnet form or something.

Or burst out crying if you're very unhappy.

I do that quite often on England.

One very quick final story.

We've been doing a lot of stories on new technology and AI, and there's reports this week that technology that can reveal your private thoughts is not very far away from being developed and indeed perfected.

In fact, I've got a prototype.

I'm really not sure what I think about technology like this, so I'll just use the technology to find out.

Turns out I'm terrified of it.

And, you know, that's just from me.

I mean, my private thoughts are not particularly unexpected.

Alice, Anuvab,

I mean, you can probably read my private thoughts right now.

Just give it a go.

Family brain, Andy.

I think you're doing the podcast, but you're thinking, was Colonel Gaddafi a real colonel?

Well, no, but I mean, the ashes start in three days' time.

So, you know,

I'm just thinking about cricket, to be honest.

But it might have quite useful political applications, do you not think?

You know, to know what candidates are really thinking when they're,

if you, you know, if they had a special helmet, that, you know, actually, rather than them saying words, the helmet just spoke their inner thoughts, we might avoid some of the issues we've been talking about in this episode.

So bring it on.

I mean, a lot of political memoirs, when you read, you know, all these books of presidents and prime ministers after they leave office, you know, you think they'd be filled filled with lots of insight and stuff.

And Obama's, there's a lot of petty detail.

Like, you know, the whole time David Cameron was talking, I thought his fly was down.

You know, that sort of thing.

Like, it's not great, grand thoughts.

That's what's really

unfortunate.

That's it.

You're lot.

Remember, live Bugle, 16th of September, London.

Be there or I will be sad.

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.