Radioactive Toddler Waves Arms Around

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4329 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world with me Andy's Altsman.

We are another week further into the history of humanity yet again.

The latest plot twists have been a bit predictable and annoying, but that's solving the way with series that have gone on for so long.

Just gratuitous, schlock horror, squirm-inducing nonsense to desperately try to keep people interested enough to make it to the next outbreak.

To discuss this latest episode in Earth, the human years, I'm joined by two locals, two planet Earth, two veterans of the second and third millenniums, both controversial in their own different ways.

Two people, I mean the millenniums, not the people, two people who've skillfully managed not to allow themselves to become species-sundering plutocrats or resentment-mongering politicians.

Congratulations to both of them for their dignified refusal to go down those poisoned political paths.

Firstly, from Australia, it's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Alice.

Hello, Andy.

I am starting to suspect that whoever's writing this season of Earth hasn't planned an ending yet.

It's that thing where they just keep hitting you with twist after twist after twist, and you're like, Well, I'm waiting, but I feel like they're just trying to write, I think they're going to try and write their way out of it, and I don't think they're going to succeed.

There's too many plot holes.

Well, to uh, well, who better to bring in to discuss that than uh than someone who professionally works on films um uh

dealing with scripts and plots from uh from India, Anuvabh Pal.

This is the world at the where in screenplay turbes, we've done away with the protagonist.

We're now living on a planet where we don't need a protagonist, it's a planet of antagonists.

It's fair enough.

Um,

I'm speaking to you right now from the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat.

And

the world is reaching an interesting place.

I was here for two nights to watch a British band called Cold Play, who apparently were very famous in your country in 2005.

They sold out a massive cricket stadium, Andy, Alice,

for two nights straight, 100,000 people, world's largest cricket stadium, one Andy, that you're quite familiar with.

And in the middle of the concert, 200,000 Indians going crazy, the lead singer of the band apologized for colonialism.

And I don't know what to expect now, Andy.

Now, this is not, in screenplay terms, an element of surprise.

This is more an element of shock.

I'm half expecting the British pop band Wright Said Fred,

who had a 1991 hit called I'm Too Sexy, to do a live concert from the Taj Mahal seeking forgiveness for ruining a perfectly good biryani recipe.

Well, I mean, I guess, you know, in terms of belated apologies, I don't know if it counts, does it count as an official national apology if it's delivered by the country's biggest-selling rock group?

I don't know.

I think that's as close as we're ever going to get, Anuvab.

You're not going to get anything from a head of state or a prime minister.

So, cold players, you know, basically some sort of, I don't know, in-between state between prime minister and monarch.

Maybe that's

as good as we're going to get.

I'd like an apology from Coldplay for colonizing the airwaves back in 2012.

I think so.

And also what's very clever is India's a big market now for live entertainment.

So if British artists keep apologizing and making a ton of money while they're at it, it's sort of like the new empire, isn't it?

Because it was always about money.

And now there's good cash in apologizing.

Great.

Well, I mean,

this is a huge step forward for humanity.

I mean, put it in those terms.

If we realize that there is serious money to be made from apologizing for historical wrongs, not only could we cure some of the festering resentments from the tides of history, but we could also fix the entire global economy.

I think this might be the most positive thing that has ever come out of the bugle.

I think we are genuinely on a path to a happier, more equitable planet, believing the fact that you can now make shitloads of money from apologising for historical wrongs.

Yeah.

I mean, no one expected the reparations to go the wrong way round.

Well, I've had a curious week

since we last bugled.

We recorded the news quiz last week on Thursday in Dundee in Scotland

as Storm A Owen hoved its way across the Atlantic.

It then got into full hoving mode and hove the shit out of

Ireland, Scotland, Northern England,

meaning that I was then stranded in Dundee on Friday.

So I couldn't do my Leeds tour show.

Apologies to anyone who had tickets for that.

It's been rearranged for the 11th of March, and your original tickets will remain valid, or you can get a refund if you can't come.

Then I had to get to Nottingham on the Saturday.

But thanks to, I don't know quite how to describe this in terms of the infrastructure of the nation,

absolutely decades of incompetence and underinvestment.

My attempts to get from Dundee to Nottingham involved all the trains from Dundee being cancelled.

So me and my BBC colleagues got a taxi from Dundee to Edinburgh.

Then all the trains from Edinburgh appeared to be running on time.

So I got on a train from Edinburgh.

It got half an hour out of Edinburgh.

It then stopped just outside a place called Dunbar in Scotland.

It turned out there was a bit of plastic on the line.

They had to wait half an hour for someone to clear away the bit of plastic.

It went on again and then they found out there was a tree in the way.

A tree had blown up and they hadn't bothered checking this.

before setting the train out from Edinburgh.

The train was then sent back to Edinburgh where my BBC colleagues were waiting for the following train which had sensibly never left.

We then hired a car

and the only car they had left was a tiny, tiny car, a tiny car and it had to have four adults and about six suitcases in.

and we had to drive from well they had to go all the way to London

we went from Dundee to Nottingham I pulled up outside the theatre in Nottingham three minutes before they were due to open the doors to the audience so I managed to get the gig done but it was it was like being in a metaphor for the state of the UK that train that left Edinburgh went pointlessly for a while stopped for a bit went pointlessly on again as if it was making progress even though it was in fact getting further away from where it was eventually going to end up, which was back where it started.

So it was, I mean, in many ways, a joyous experience, being actually within a performance metaphor for the state of the country.

Andy, I think you might have just helped someone solve their A-levels mask question.

Yes.

Yes.

If Andy leaves on a train from Edinburgh, but he's doing so in 2025 on the LNER service, how long does it take him to get back to f ⁇ ing Edinburgh?

The answer was about an hour and 40 minutes.

In terms of storm Iowin, it was a huge storm, one of the biggest weather systems to hit the British Isles in many years.

I'm not saying it definitely was divine retribution for sending Liz Truss and Nigel Farage the other way across the Atlantic for the inauguration, but it's also

definitely not divine retribution for sending Truss and Farage across the ocean or for even retribution for backing down and allowing the flawed pipe dream of American independence to get out of control and lead us directly to the Trumpo-Muskick-Zuckerbergian world we now exist in trapped like a pharaoh in a pyramid of our own making.

Anyway,

we are recording on the 28th of January.

I'm safely back in London.

On this day in 1896, a historic day in

motoring history, in British cultural history, Walter Arnold from East Peckham, a little village in Kent, not far from where I grew up in Tunbridge Wells, became the first person to be convicted of speeding in the UK.

He was fined one shilling plus costs for speeding at 280 miles an hour

in modern day equivalent.

It was four times the speed limit, which is 70 miles an hour an hour.

It was two miles an hour then, the speed limit.

Walter Wizzy Wheels, as he was known, clattered on at eight miles an hour.

breakneck speed.

The local traffic police managed to chase him down on a bicycle after a five-mile low-speed chase.

Presumably the bicycle was traveling at the modern equivalent of at least 281 miles an hour.

Of course, there were no flashing blue lights in those days.

The police officer had to hold up a gas lamp surrounded by miniature blue-tinted chiffon curtains, which rotated on a mechanical sprindle, of course.

And no siren.

He had to ride along with a swan under each arm, squeezing like a bagpipe to make the now traditional

on the 29th of January 1594.

The mathematician John Napier

dedicated his plane discovery of the whole revelation of St.

John to King James VI of Scotland.

It was a mathematical, statistical analysis of the book of Revelation, which predicted that the end of the world would happen in either the year 1688 or the year 1700.

We now know that he was probably wrong.

I mean, basically, I mean, I work with statistics.

admittedly not biblical statistics and you know I'm a professional statistician sort of hashtag not all statistics

but look I've crunched the numbers from the book of Revelations and basically what he was doing was the 16th century equivalent of expected gold in modern

soccer coverage I think

I can exclusively reveal that the end of the world will in fact happen in hang on let me get the Excel spreadsheet up here

oh it says 2016

maybe that's just the start of the process rather than the actual final end itself anyway we'll let him

Napier was wrong of course what happened in fact in 1688 was the first documented mention of the balalaika, and in 1700, the first documentary evidence of the existence of the piano.

So I don't know why he got wrong, but it appeared that he was finding out dates of the first mentions of musical instruments.

My spreadsheet also suggests that 2025 will see the first provable evidence of the existence of the electric walrone, a brass wind instrument made out of a walrus's.

That can't be right, can it?

Family show.

I need to double check.

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

We have more realistic kids' books.

I think we had Winona the Wildebeest Goes for a Graze last year.

More realistic kids' books have come out to show children what really happens in the world, including Henrietta Herring and the Inescapable Trawler Fleet of Doom.

Also, Why Can't Granny Remember My Name?

Terence the Turkey's Lonely Christmas, Billy Badger vs.

the Four Lane Motorway, The Tiger Who Came to Repossess the house due to poor government regulation of the short-term loan industry, and Louisa May the Laboratory Mouse and the ethically questionable range of budget facial cosmetic products.

All fantastic kid books for your young children to help them teach them about what really happens on this planet.

Of course, Alice, you've got a book coming out.

This seems a good time to plug it.

Yes, A Passion for Passion will be out in the UK on the 6th of February.

We've got a launch party on the 5th of February, but I shouldn't tell you about that because it's already sold out.

But we are having a live stream at 7 p.m.

on the 6th because I thought it would be nice to do a thing.

Thebuglepodcast.com for the live stream on the 6th of February.

And then I'll be on tour in the UK, going to all different places.

Currently, there is no date for London, so you'd better...

Better take a chance of your luck on the train at this point.

If you want to see the show, A Passion for Passion, which is about the book, A Passion for Passion, which is available, as I said, online right now.

Put it in your eye holes, please.

Alice, for the Instagram generation, you know, who have an attention span of 12 seconds, if you had to summarize the book, what would you say was about?

I would say it is about romance novels, and it is good for people who like romance novels, and also for people who have no idea why people like romance novels, which is to say it's for everybody.

Stick it in your eye holes.

Top story this week, Elon Musk is a nasty.

Let me emphasize what I just said there.

He's a nasty, NASTI, which means that he's like a cross between NAS Borter, the legendary South African fly hoff, who Musk would have definitely watched playing rugby when he was growing up in South Africa, and

a well-meaning Setsi fly.

Let me emphasise that legally.

This follows,

well,

we recorded last week as the inauguration was happening, and so we sort of covered some of the things that were said, but

everything, what happened afterwards.

And Elon Musk at an event on Inauguration Day,

he put his hand on his chest and then thrust his hand outwards

in a manner.

Obviously, he's denied it was a Nazi salute, and he did it twice in quick succession, just to prove.

that it definitely wasn't a Nazi salute because he did the same thing twice.

I'm not quite sure what the logic is.

But it was unquestioned.

I don't think you can deny that it was unquestionably the kind of salute that someone might make if they were an actor playing the part of a fascist leader in a film about a, let me emphasise, entirely fictional nation based on 1930s Nazi Germany.

Is that fair, Alice?

Look, Andy, I think what he was trying to prove was definitively the mathematical equation that two wrongs do not make a Rich.

And

he's either a Nazi or he's just hoping to provoke people into

thinking he's a Nazi because he wants to ride the wave of 4chan, Pepe-wielding meme lords who are enjoying the outrage and upset of people who find overt Nazi symbols distasteful.

He's trying to get over the reputational hump of being revealed to have paid people to pretend to be good at games for him.

I don't know why people are debating this, Andy.

The finger angle, you know, finger tension, the angle of the relief.

Look, I can make it really simple for you guys.

Any salute is a Nazi salute if the person doing the salute is a Nazi.

You don't have to

stress out about it at all.

I don't know.

I don't think we should be worrying about this.

Elon Musk isn't going to not do whatever he's planned on doing with the American government.

I don't know whether it's cool, chill, relaxing, mere corruption of due process in favor of unregulated, exploitative business practices, or step one in a global unification of technologically advanced, corporatized, populist nation-states in the interest of an authoritarian space colonization project so we can mine the stars to make more phones.

We will all find out soon enough.

I would be a bit disappointed if it were just boring old Nazism, to be honest.

I back Musk to have more entrepreneurial vigor than that.

He's probably stolen a better idea from a sci-fi novel.

I think there was a film called Nazis in Space.

I think there's a

well-known motion picture.

I have a question for both of you.

Now, one of the things Elon Musk said

is there's no need to keep harping back to the 20th century.

And, you know, I know, Andy, you like history.

And I've been thinking about this for a long time.

What really is the point of history?

You know, because

I mean, let's look at the big things of the 20th century.

Now, obviously, the Third Reich, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, the partition of India, the Cambodian genocide, now, all of these things, by remembering them, what are we learning except not to do these again?

And why is that even important?

He's bringing up a good point here, don't you think?

I mean, I don't know.

Well, yes, I mean, I guess.

I mean, I've say this many times.

I say it in my current live show that the only lesson we learn from history is that we will never ever learn the lessons of history.

So

why bother even trying?

And you know, if it's taken the world's most vocal mobile cancer, the cartoon evil genius of the decade, to tell us that, then

more fool us.

If he didn't want us to be harping back, he should have said we shouldn't guitar back.

Come on, harp's like 18th century.

Yeah, harps.

It's too wistful, isn't it?

Well, that harping back.

For the sake of balance, and because I do a lot of work for the BBC, I should point out that there were very long bits in Elon Musk's speech in which he didn't give two things that looked exactly like Nazi salutes in in quick succession.

So let's remember that as well.

And he's dismissed criticism of his hand gestures as, quotes, tired.

Well, of course it's tired.

Everything's tired now.

You have fing exhausted the world, Musk.

You're like a radioactive toddler.

Just fing calm down.

To be fair, it's a really good way to etch a sketch the memory of anything you said in that speech.

That's just erasing everything you said.

That arm gesture can just wipe the board clean, and that's all people are focusing on now.

I went to that tweet, you know, the X comment, whatever it's called now.

I think the comment was the everyone is Hitler attack is so tired.

I think that was his point.

And very early on, there was one heart emoji under the tweet by one A.

Hitler.

I'm not sure who that happened.

But he went in there and gave it a heart emoji.

So clearly, you know, people agree with him.

Yeah.

I mean, of course, we at the Bugle, we like to take people at their word.

We are a trusting, open podcast.

So let's assume that Musk was right and uh genuine when he said it was not a nazi a nazi salute um there are innumerable perhaps even infinite convincing explanations of what he was actually doing as you say clearing an etcher sketch could be one of them maybe demonstrating the optimum trajectory for throwing a modern javelin um so that it doesn't dip too quickly maybe showing you how to scrape snow off a car windscreen quick enough that your hand doesn't get cold if you don't have an actual scraper.

Maybe how to remove a large circular glue-covered caterpillar that has roosted on your chest pocket quickly and affix it instead to a passing horse.

It could easily have been doing that.

Or how to stroke a crocodile that has fallen asleep lying headfirst down on a playground slide firmly enough that you wake the crocodile up so it can move back to something that isn't a playground.

So I ideally leave the playground, but not so hard that it gets cross and eats you.

Or maybe it's just one of the dance moves from Reach for the stars by s club seven there's just so many possible explanations in the uh the us the anti-defamation league what a league that is i think you can watch the anti-defamation playoffs soon uh on various cable channels i'm working on my anti-defamation fan league fantasy team at the moment

really hard to narrow it down isn't it um It's an organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and other strands of prejudice.

Describes Musk's

arm actions as an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm and

an early contender for euphemism of the millennium, I think.

I know we're just over 25 years in now, but it's going to be tricky to beat.

That's going to be tricky to beat.

I'm still stuck, Andy, with the image of one salute being compared to stroking a reptile and an S-Club 7 song.

Phil Gates described Musk's recent actions as, quotes, insane shit.

Which pig of me Musk took as the highest compliment one gazillionaire can pay to another.

I mean, that's the opposite of a euphemism.

That's so far opposite of a euphemism, I'd call it a mephemism.

I don't know.

Bill Gates shouldn't be talking about this sort of stuff.

You know what insane shit is?

And if Bill Gates, in Bill Gates's world, is trying to add four columns in Microsoft Excel and getting a circular reference every time.

I testify.

Oh, my struggles in Microsoft Excel.

Don't get me started on f ⁇ ing co-pilot the AI bit of Word.

Honestly, I know it's not really his problem anymore.

Clippy would be rolling in his grave.

I think Elon Musk definitely sleeps in a grave.

But I mean, it is that you compare what Gates has famously spent vast amounts of his vastly, vastly vast wealth on

various humanitarian projects.

Musk has chosen to leverage his absurd profit fruits to make the world angrier, more deluded and darker.

So I guess that's just different ways of doing everything, really.

More tech bros news now.

And

well, an article, an interesting article, Alice, that you alerted us to about the challenge Europe is facing in dealing with

the scroterie of tech whiz wankers who basically now run our species, who are Europe facing some tough decisions and crawling compromises to try and curry their favor.

Just bring us up to date with the latest in this, I don't know if, to describe it as a battle,

a dance?

How would you describe it?

Well, it's a sort of, yeah, it's a detente, a face-off.

The EU wants to regulate these tech bros.

They don't want to be regulated.

The EU wants to encourage tech bros.

They need to be wooed.

Basically, in an age where tech companies, the leaders of tech companies and their transnational mega corps have more functional power than most governments, as well as the proven power to control information, outpace, overthrow, and straight up by those governments while simultaneously disintegrating the fourth estate, we need to ask the question of how can mere regulatory regimes hope to compete.

You know, governments are simultaneously trying to woo and control these men who, despite their fragile egotism and general delicacy of temperament, are functionally the embodiment of the corporations they lead.

They're like Greek gods with less chill.

They have the capacity to control the weather, the night sky with their satellites, and whether Andrew Tate gets to whisper sweet nothings to your 13-year-old son at night until he calls his mother a bitch at the dinner table.

But I want to provide a counterpoint here, Andy.

Like, is it so bad that men are making money?

Like, surely the drive to make money is what has pushed humanity's development forward throughout history from the time that Prometheus stole fire from the gods and then sold it for a dollar a pop and then licensed out his liver on a renewable contract to Eagle Corp Unlimited.

Sure,

sure the three richest men in America now make more than the bottom 50% of Americans all stacked together.

But Zuckerberg probably does work 3.2 million times harder than a nurse.

Think about how much more value he adds to society, right?

Just how else could that nurse post her charming memes about minions, the only thing that keeps her thankless and underpaid job from sapping the very last of her will to live from her overworked husk?

These men have children to feed, and they each plan to have at least 18 to 34 more children to feed in order to do grassroots eugenics.

Do we begrudge their need to leave at least a billion dollars to each of their children?

Are we knocking gold toilet seats out of the mouths of innocent babes now?

These men are nobly out to prevent the imminent population collapse, single penisedly.

What do you mean normal people can't afford to have children anymore, Andy?

They should have already had children, Andy.

Let them have bread.

Let them have bread.

That is the greatest defense of capitalism I've ever heard.

Look, I mean, look, I have a question for you guys.

Don't you think Europe is looking at this the wrong way?

They're trying to to woo tech billionaires because they want a piece of the Silicon Valley action.

But shouldn't Europe be selling the assets it has?

And one of their biggest assets Europe has is laziness.

You know, not replying to emails, a seven-day weekend, cycling everywhere and eating bread, growing Chinese vegetables on the ledge of their studio flat.

Now, these are the things that that have made Europe famous.

I mean, these guys want to build an app in six days.

Michelangelo took 22 years and didn't refund a lot of the money for works that he promised other people.

Perhaps American capitalism, so aptly and beautifully described by Alice, needs a dose of healthy European communism.

Right.

Well, I mean, that's, I think that's a very good.

I mean, I do think the world basically needs a, I'd say, a 75-year siesta.

Everyone just had a snooze for 75 years.

I think we come, we're just, you know, basically, we just have the accumulated fatigue of thousands of years of civilization.

We've just never, never really just, apart from the dark ages, maybe, we never really just sat back and had a snooze.

I mean, that was quite a long snooze in many parts of the world.

Look, I mean, as we discussed,

the hippopotamus of progress has chosen for various and whatever reasons.

to splosh belly first into the murky swamp of corporate conquest.

Now, in wiser, simpler times, if we wanted something to work out well for us, we would simply gather around and sacrifice a plumped up farm animal, maybe a nice round number of oxen, or in particularly urgent matters, a spare daughter.

The Bugle does not endorse any form of sacrifice, real or mythical.

Now, instead, we offer up preferential tax regimes to unhinge very, very sillionaires and metaphorically lick their metaphorical feet

after metaphorically removing their metaphorical socks with our metaphorically quivering teeth.

So it's just different ways of doing things, I guess.

You might think it's not unreasonable to ask tech companies to take responsibility for the material that is distributed by their platforms or the users of their platforms.

And of course, you would be right.

But something being not unreasonable is no longer good enough for it to be actually done.

So that's progress.

And I will only respect Silicon Valley.

The only time I'll do it is when the Instagram algorithm goes on strike.

You know, till the Facebook Instagram algorithm goes on strike.

There's no humanity in it.

You know, like till they take three days off.

Because, you know, I don't want to feed a beast that is relentless.

You know, that's faceless.

My best friend at the moment is going through a divorce, and I have, I feel quite kind of honored and privileged that their kind of emotional trauma has started appearing in relationship advice clips in my Instagram.

I feel like you know, period sinking is one thing, algorithm sinking is another.

Are you dating an avoidant man?

No, but I know we'd afford this too.

In other tech news, panic across the U.S.

markets sparked by a Chinese AI bot called DeepSeek,

which has wiped off hundreds of billions of dollars worth of the value of various tech firms.

In particular, Nvidia, the computer chipsters, who had a suite 600 billion sklunked off their market value, which is now yours for a bargain basement, 2.9 trillion if you've got spare cash

sloshing around.

It's been described as a Sputnik moment, which refers back to when America realized it really needed to raise its game after the Soviet Union blasted Sputnik 1, the first human-made satellite into space in 1957, followed by Sputnik 2, which contained celebrity space dog Leica.

Sputnik 1, of course, was designed to look like a tennis ball, so Leika would instinctively direct her rocket after it.

So deep.

I mean, that was obviously after the first two rounds of space attempts, Sputnik Spitnik and Spatnik,

which didn't manage to break the atmosphere.

It just involved shooting dogs over palm trees with a cannon.

Deep seekers absolutely rock the markets by apparently doing a better, cheaper version of what US-based AI companies can do.

Firms like OpenAI, ChatGPT, Apocalyptec, Auto Mayhem, H2O, that stands for Hurry and Human Obsolescence, and FXHG0, fingers crossed here, goes nothing.

So

Alice, you've kept

an eagle eye on

the development of AI and technology for us ever since you joined the bugle.

Can you explain exactly

why this panic has spread so fast?

Well, I mean, fundamentally, all of these tech companies have been going in hard on AI.

They've been putting billions of dollars behind it.

They've been doing rounds of fundraising, basically on the premise that AI would eventually prove a use case for itself that would earn back the billions of dollars that they were pouring into it, and also that it would solve the energy crisis that it was creating by virtue of solving the problem more quickly than they could solve it.

So, they were pouring more and more and more money in in the hope that it would come back out.

And what has happened is they have achieved the goal of AI.

These American tech companies have finally achieved what we call like a human-level AI, which is to say that AI has become so human that it's had its job stolen by AI.

That the AI out of China has come in, it's about four months behind in development of the current leading US

models.

It's tanked U.S.

tech stocks in a way that, had I been a tech billionaire who had some information that this was going to happen, I would have definitely rushed to get my little handies on the levers of government power in order to establish some sort of nationalist protectionist regime so I could fend off some of the shitsticks.

Alice is absolutely right, Andy.

You know, intelligence doesn't have to cost money.

You know, I live in a country that sent a spacecraft to the moon for like 15 rupees.

So, you know, it's possible to do things at low cost.

As a child, you know, outside my school, they used to sell two encyclopedias.

One was called the Encyclopedia of the Whole World, and it cost a thousand rupees.

And the other was called the Encyclopedia of the Whole World, and it cost 10 rupees, which is one tenth.

Now, that second book didn't have all the depth of the other encyclopedia, but it had all the subjects.

So, say you turned to the page that said Spain, right?

You were studying Spain, and it had one line: it said, Spain is a country that has oranges and a king.

That's good enough.

Good enough.

And DeepSeek is like that.

Only apparently, if you type in Tiananmen Square, it starts playing the Los Lobos Lobos hit song Labamba.

So it does have a sense of humor as well.

Also driving the market panic were rumors that at some point humanity might think to itself, is this all making us happier?

A full source, I should add.

We're far too sophisticated and advanced as a species nowadays to ask a stupid question like that.

You know, to really compare, to really compare cheaper and more expensive sources of intelligence, I'd like to conduct a test at some point.

I'd like to type in Andy Zoltzmann Cricket into four different

chat intelligence bots and see what comes up and then figure out which one is cost effective or not.

It should be, I mean, if you give you the same information, you know,

for one Remdembi.

Yeah.

Well, I'm prepared to throw myself into that competition.

I'll take them on.

Oh, I will absolutely take them on.

i'm yeah my daily rate is very competitive

and and of course we will go into a world andy where your own biography of yourself would be less relevant than the deep seek and chat gpt biographies of you

American news now and uh well let's have an update on uh the past week as the old saying goes a week is a long time in politics and right now if you're not a fan of Donald Trump and

without wishing to judge a book by the podcasts they listen to, I'm guessing that you buglers are probably not fans of Donald Trump.

If you're not a fan of Trump and everything he stands for, 207 more weeks really feels about as appealing as an eternity on hold to a government call center.

Now,

look, it's hard to know how to analyse this, whether it's a travesticious betrayal of American values or America finally revealing its true eternal self or some kind of mixture of the two.

It's too early to say.

But anyway, Donald Trump, as we recorded last week, as I said, was back back at the Capitol, the proverbial dog returning to its vomit.

The human political incarnation of sunny delight, unnaturally orange, highly processed, containing nothing genuine and really not good for you short term or long term, but oddly addictive to some people.

And he has unleashed an absolute deluge of

executive orders and policies.

I think they've revealed his taste in films in many ways.

The purge, where he's basically legalized crime with his presidential pardons for people who've tried to essentially destroy American democracy.

The day after tomorrow, environmental devastation.

God knows what the f Elon Musk has been watching,

but

probably some films that sparked numerous memes.

He's announced detention camps,

which are, I think, fair to say historically tainted.

Trump issued an order ending birthright citizenship for the US-born children of immigrants, which I'm pretty sure includes him

and also contravenes the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.

But look, we woketers, we've been complaining about how addicted America is to, for example, the Second Amendment.

So is this not just a welcome move away from blindly sticking with outdated amendment dogma?

No, it's not, but let's pretend it is.

He's renamed the Gulf of Mexico and Mount McKinley.

Now, it's quite odd, bearing in mind that he's basically said that he doesn't believe in the concept of gender, saying there's now only two genders allowed in the USA.

He can't accept people changing their pronouns, but he wants to call a mountain in Alaska after a a guy who never went to Alaska and came from Ohio where there are no fing mountains but maybe that'll be a gateway to him being more accepting of people changing their names and titles going back to the old Mount McKinley name rather than Denali so

Alice any particular highlights for you

I mean there comes a time in every every life where you have to you suddenly realize that your parents can't stop you and I feel like we need to thank Donald Trump for showing where

most of American history has been regulated by, oh, no one would do that.

Turns out you can and you will.

And

it's either within the rules or it's against the rules and who's going to stop you.

I think my favorite was the Bishop of Washington delivering a sermon in front of Donald Trump and asking him to show mercy.

towards the people in America who were afraid.

And Trump just came back with sort of a real

anger, as though he were being personally attacked by the request to show mercy.

And when he was told that she was citing the teachings of Jesus, her boss, Trump posted, I hear bad things about failed carpenter and radical left loser Jesus.

He owes me an apology for the hardline anti-Trump commandments.

Rabbis didn't like him.

Romans didn't like him.

Couldn't even decide between being his father, the son, or the Holy Ghost.

Indecisive exclamation mark.

I just feel like asking for mercy is such a milquetoast thing to be offended by.

Someone asking for mercy with the people who are scared of you because you ran a campaign deliberately geared towards scaring them so that the people who enjoy seeing their enemies be scared and upset would vote for you.

That's like being a Hun mid-pillage and some weeping teen flinging themselves at your feet and is like, mercy for my family, Lord.

Please don't cut my head off.

And you're like, how dare you imply I'd cut your head off.

So you you cut his head off to serve him right

i mean it was an unusual sight of someone standing by their principles when talking to donald trump that's something that we just

there was a kind of i don't know cognitive dissonance we're so unused to it uh now mercy is one of the many terms that has been essentially ripped out of the dictionary um i think i think they were one of trump's executive orders was to remove the word mercy from uh all dictionaries in uh in america but it is one of the harder aspects of of trumpic success to understand how the christian right in America has thrown its support behind the least Christian person in the history of the USA.

But I guess, you know, in some ways, there's some similarities between Trump and Jesus Christ himself.

Also, albeit in a different way, a rehabilitated convict,

also,

you know, only really achieved what he achieved in his career because of the legacy of who his father was and what was handed down.

And also, I guess another thing that Trump has in common with Jesus Christ is that when people talk about them, the word cross crops up a lot.

So there are some similarities, but even so,

I still can't quite understand the Christian rights love of Trump.

It makes no sense to me.

I mean, it truly is Jesus who was the original Nepo baby.

And like classic Nepo baby gets a second chance even when you die.

Just remac.

You know, it says something about the world where this reverent is giving the speech and she talks about kindness and mercy.

And she said, basically, what she said was, be kind, be merciful, merciful, and have compassion.

And Trump's response was, What a nasty thing to say.

And immediately, once she finished her speech about compassion and empathy, she received 5,000 death threats.

So that just shows you where the world is.

It's a good place, I think.

Yeah, it's a good biblical number of death threats as well.

You know, if that was going to happen in the Bible, you know, like the feeding the 5,000, you have the 5,000 death threats.

That is just what Christianity has

metastasized into, clearly, in America.

Interestingly, at the end of the day.

Poor lady, she's got to have more cheeks to turn than those clown robots at the circus with their mouths open.

In possibly related young people turning away from democracy news now, a survey has been reported in the Times

here that 52% of people aged between 13 and 27, Gen Z, or Gen Z, if you're pronouncing it wrong, said they thought the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who doesn't have to bother with Parliament and elections.

We do need to remember the unspoken blanks, the words that essentially come afterwards in square brackets, which are they'd prefer a strong leader rather than someone who doesn't have to bother with Parliament and elections brackets, compared with the current decayed state of our democratic system and the media systems that feed it with intravenous artificially concocted bile.

We have to remember that when we put that in context.

Alice, you are the closest of the three of us to Gen Z.

Do you relate to these feelings?

Look, Andy, I have in my darker moments thought, I had the thought that I'm not sure our current institutions will survive the internet.

You know, our current ideas of law and justice and structural authority, I don't know that they can survive.

You know how the aristocracy didn't really survive the printing press?

People could suddenly read about what aristocrats were and be like, oh, better burn all that down.

Suddenly realizing that they're not special just because they could afford a bath.

So I'm not sure how the democratic ideals of like the will of the people can survive the reality of the internet, which shows you what people are actually like.

Well, that brings us to the end of

this week's bugle.

Thank you very much for listening.

Thanks to everyone who's come to my tour shows.

There are a few tickets left for some of the shows details at andy'sultsman.co.uk.

Alice, just remind us of

your book tour.

My book tour is going to be in February in the UK in a bunch of different places, including Leicester, Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester,

Brighton,

Edinburgh.

There's a bunch of dates.

You can find them at thebuglepodcast.com or at alicefraser.com.

And the book, of course, is still available.

It's called A Passion for Passion.

The tour is A Passion for Passion.

Come along.

I will sign almost anything

if you bring it to me.

And

why did I say that?

Also, expressions of interest are now open up on my Patreon for my writers' retreat in September.

If you want to express your interest, go to patreon.com slash AliceFraser.

Also,

a new podcast is out under the Bugle umbrella.

It is called Realms Unknown.

It is a podcast about sci-fi and fantasy and genre fiction, books, gaming, television.

It's the podcast that I was always meant to do.

It redeems my wasted youth reading sci-fi and fantasy novels up the back of the room.

I am hosting it.

It's a Bugle podcast production.

It's going to be a lot of fun available now.

Ish.

I'm just picturing Alice on a book tour and people coming up with rental agreements to get signed

Various bond agreements

I'm back in the UK in March

to be at something called the Chiswick Comedy Festival on the 14th or 15th of March, which I believe is in Chiswick

and given there is some evidence in the title.

And I will put up details on social media about times and so on.

Great.

Well, thank you for listening.

We will be back next week, Buglers, with the latest instalment in the elongated novel of human history.

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.