The Last Post - Episode 1

Hello Buglers, producer Chris here.

Happy New Year.

You're about to listen to episode one of the Bugle Presents, the last post.

If you like it, please subscribe now in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all the other great places.

Episode 2 will appear in that feed the very next day.

Yup, that's right, the very next day.

And the day after that, and it's a daily show.

The link is in the show notes.

Click away and enjoy.

Sorry, sorry.

sorry, nothing bad will happen.

The bugle presents

the last post

with Alice Fraser.

Hi posters and welcome to today's episode of The Last Post, the final word on this, the most final of worlds.

This is January the 1st of the year 2020 and my guest today is a regular contributor to this daily podcast until recently.

Nine Times Back to Losing television panel show Andy Zaltzman's Day in Cricket and recovering from his time in the jungle on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me a Job.

Welcome back to the show Andy Zaltzman.

Well it's great to be back and I'm just sorry that I didn't get the one job available in that show.

January the 1st is historic in a number of ways.

Famously George the Last Hawaiian tree snail of his kind died on the 1st of January in 2019.

Because that must have been galling for him.

Yeah very sad for him.

Right.

And in 1801 Ireland was...

How did he die?

Old age.

Right.

What do snails die of anyway?

I guess if you know you're dying of old age, do you then hang on for January the 1st just to get that extra little stat on your headstone?

Do you have a headstone?

You probably died of like a wild New Year's Eve party.

Do snails have wild New Year's Eve?

I assume they stay in the assume they just stay in.

Today in history, a number of events.

Ireland was added to Great Britain in 1801 on the 1st of January, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Exciting to know that'll be winding up in 2020.

The Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln freed slaves rebelling against the Union.

And 26 countries in 1942 signed the Declaration of the United Nations.

Good to know that will be winding up also in 2020.

It was also the 1st of January the EEC, the common market, was formed by Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

And in 1973, by Britain, Ireland, and Denmark.

Good to know that'll be winding up

in 2020.

As ever, some headlines.

In Italy, a glitch in the computer voting system has led to babies being given the vote, and the Wiggles have immediately been elected to power.

A privacy leak as a result of that.

They vote in Italy, the Wiggles.

They stand.

They're not Italian, are they?

Well, I think babies don't know.

Right.

And the Wiggles are franchised.

So do babies.

I mean, can you be born Italian as a baby or are you just baby?

All Italian babies are very Italian.

Right.

But non-Italian...

So you're saying all babies are Italian until they are then...

trained otherwise.

Yes, all babies are Italian, which is why they got such an overwhelming victory in this Italian vote.

Right.

I guess also also that would explain why babies are so over-emotional.

Yeah.

I mean, everyone's always been saying there's a downside to letting babies use iPads.

Right.

And apparently, it's that they can log into the voting system of Italy.

There we go.

A privacy leak as a result of a the last decade in review app has led to everybody's sexy Facebook private messages being public on their feeds.

A boom in the divorce industry is anticipated.

A classified section now for sale.

400,000 political bots want to change the discourse?

Buy this job lot of lightly used election bots and you can propagate your own wild theories to everyone on social media.

Think not enough people have been exposed to the truth about the flat earth?

Want to call 400,000 women whores or tell 400,000 men that everything wrong in the world is their personal fault?

Programmer and batteries not included.

How big is a bot?

Because I've been quite tempted to get some bots and then obviously where will I put them?

There's enough shit in my house as it is.

Oh, you can, they're intangible, so you can just put them in your pirate's chest along with all your bitcoins.

Giving away a full-size blow-up bouncy castle replica of Buckingham Palace, true to life.

free or nearest offer, pick-up-only.

For sale, a fully organised honeymoon holiday for two, including flights and hotel rooms, no longer necessary.

£1,000 or happy to barter for economy-sized pack of tissues.

New Year, New Year, half-price cloning, half the money, twice the you.

Call 9969-7567 for details.

And that's our classified section.

The last post!

A top story.

What have we got in store for 2020?

Andy, do you have any predictions?

Well, Alice, as you know, I'm a massive fan of facial recognition software.

It's what makes me sure that I'm me when I wake up in the morning and switch my phone on.

And it's, I think this year we're going to see finally, I mean, some amazing developments.

I think we're going to see the world's first fruit-free lemon.

Which is a big breakthrough for carnivores like me.

What will it be made of if it's fruit-free?

That we don't know.

Just the liver of a polar bear.

Squeeze it into a martini.

It's

everything.

Nothing is on the table.

Nothing is off the table.

Also, as a health advisory, please don't eat the liver of a polar bear.

We'll give you vitamin Osis A and you'll die.

Right.

And a polar bear will be extremely angry.

More to the point.

There could be a revenge liver eating if you're not careful.

I think face recognition software, I mean, it's clearly improved enormously since people had to paint self-portraits to unlock their own wardrobes or whatever it was back in the day.

I think we're not far off from facial recognition software being able to read your expression and just replace it with an emoji automatically based on what you're looking like.

That I see happening in the first three months of this year and then later in the year I think it's going to get even better and we'll then be able to not only to predict what expression you're about to make, but also what words you will then say based on that expression.

Then it will predict what the response of the other person involved in the conversation will be.

then it will predict what expression you will make in response to their response, and then what retort you would issue, then how they would fire back at you in dispute, then how your frown would start getting deep and your voice angrier as you counter their counter before they respond with some tangential ad hominem insult.

And then you hit back with a stream of invective, and the software will then be able to automatically punch the other person in the face for you using the Assumpto Tech Autodugenator RoboFist 3.1, all within 0.08 seconds of that very first facial expression.

That is the level of technology we're talking about.

So we won't even need to get out of bed in the morning.

We'll know what was going to happen anyway.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just accelerating the hostile confrontation process, which has been what most 21st century technology has been about.

I feel like animals are going to unionise against humans.

They'll be sick of our faffing around about the environment.

They're going to unionise and demand rights.

I think nothing other than a full strike of all animals would lead us to reassess our behaviours towards them.

Okay, well we'll turn it out that way well first time, didn't it?

Incidentally emoji is a Latin verb for I have lost my ability to express myself with words.

And did you know, I mean you probably know this, there's only two legal emojis in Australia.

Yes.

No worries and some worries.

Also I think we've you know we've seen security breaches get more and more popular.

Yes, particularly with that release of all of the Facebook messages.

Yeah, which with regard to that, I think in future, we're just going to have to reach a point where all voting-age adults are legally obliged to post naked naked pictures of themselves once a year, as well as a publicly accessible sext to a hypothetical partner from a range of state-provided options.

So we should just get it all out in the open and then we can stop worrying about things getting out in the open.

So, you know, just

pre-emptive nudie pics.

I mean, I'm up for that 100%.

I think 2020 is also going to be the year of the election security breach.

All elections will be hacked, and we'll just accept that, and people will vote for who they'd like to hack the election.

Right.

I like that, actually, because I do think think democracy

needs to be modernised.

And

because clearly some covert government operations are better at hacking elections than others and you want it done well.

Yeah.

If we've basically decided that it's fine and we don't really mind.

So might as well

get the best to do.

I mean there is another change that I'd like to see around the world in 2020 and this might be just blind utopian optimism.

But what I would really like to see is no one being able to vote in the elections of their own country only people from outside that country being allowed to vote so in the american election they should take the vote away from all americans and give it to everyone else in the world because it clearly affects yeah because we know what's better for them better than they do i mean we're more objective on it i think and also you know american foreign policy impact on the whole planet as well as cultural imperialism clearly so we should have a say in that it seems anti-democratic i keep banging on about how much they love democracy anti-democratic to for americans to vote in their own elections i would say you know if only people from EU member states have been able to vote in the Brexit referendum, rather than people from Britain, which is...

Do you think they'd have kept us?

No, obviously not.

Well, not if they were voting now, having seen how we behave for the last four years.

It's the will of the people.

You can't argue with it.

So here's a little news story that has caught my fancy, Andy.

A new fertile landmass is apparently emerging off the coast of New Zealand, driven by undersea volcanoes.

Are you sure it's not just New Zealand?

It's a third island of New Zealand.

What do you anticipate that doing to world politics?

Well I think it's going to save the world basically.

I mean we

we're probably going to need to have a war for it because that's generally what humanity has done whenever it's discovered some kind of landmass I think.

You sure we can't just do scissor paper rock?

Well chess.

I mean let's let's go let's aim a bit higher than than scissors paper rock or even scissors paper stone as I like to think of it.

Potato potato Andy.

But you know chess the Cold War, we had Fisher against Spassky, basically decided the Cold War, didn't it?

In favour of

America, I think that was the result.

So just a game of chess for who controls the new landmass.

And, you know, I think this is...

People have criticised the international community for not having environmental solutions other than hoping new land masses emerge.

But evidently

that has now worked.

Yeah.

There is now a new landmass.

And

New Zealand basically is largely unoccupied as it is.

Yes.

I reckon it could take 250 odd million people.

How big is this new landmass currently?

I mean it's still emerging so we're yet to find out but certainly as big as New Zealand itself.

Right.

I mean that's that's that's pretty massive to know.

I can't wait for Peter Jackson to put a movie on it.

From my point of view it just sounds like this is another country that within 15 years we're beating England at cricket so I'm not particularly happy about that.

But anyway, I think new just relying on new ma land masses emerging is probably the way forward for humanity.

In terms of feeding the planet, in in terms of space for people to live, then, I mean, either new land masses emerging or just a new next-door neighbor planet, you know, maybe 50 miles away.

So you don't need like a massive space, just a kind of entry-level space rocket will get people there.

I'm going to email Elon Musk and ask him to sort it out.

I assume he's already on it, isn't he?

Probably.

So that is our episode for the first of January of the year 2020.

Welcome to this year, and I hope you tune in every day.

Thank you so much for coming, Andy's ultimate.

Ultimate.

I hope to see you soon.

Yeah, can I just plug my gallery opening?

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, I've got all the paintings that I did in the jungle.

Some of them are

pretty raw, actually.

Yeah, I mean, I saw only a few of them.

I didn't really watch the show, but certainly works of heartbreaking brilliance and honesty.

And a strange eroticism, one of the reviews said.

Like the cats movie.

The last post is a production of The Bugle with something else.

Executive producer is Christopher D.

Skinner and it is hosted by me, Alice Fraser.

So there you have it.

That's the last post.

There's a new show every day.

Please rate and review and tell your friends and

live your life to the full.

Be the best you that you can be.

Happy Christmas.

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.