Influencer Repeatedly Punches Sick Old Man

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4322 of the Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World with me Andy's Altsman coming to you live and recorded from a hotel on the outskirts of Leicester in England.

I truly am living the showbiz dream.

Joining me from let's have a glamour off now.

Who can claim the most

glamorous location?

Alice, Alice Fraser, joining us.

Where are you in terms of glamour?

I am downstairs in my own garage.

I'm about two and a half feet from a bicycle.

Which is how I like to live my life.

Means I've got a getaway vehicle if none of these jokes go well.

to be fair I'd be getting away from my own house but

yeah I mean it's um uh and you are yeah you're you're in Australia where I think you're I mean they say it's like you know with rats in London you're only ever two and a half feet away from a bicycle in Australia so just the way things are

that's a marsupial

Also joining us, Adival Powell, can you beat a basement with a bicycle or a hotel on an industrial park in a Midland city.

Where are you?

So, Andy, I'm basically in a storeroom

in my apartment building because I'm not allowed inside my apartment building because there's local elections going on in a little lobby area of my apartment building.

So, all us residents are locked up in basically what is a storeroom.

It doesn't have a cycle, Alice, but it just looks like it's got garbage,

which is sort of where I belong, really.

I feel quite at home here, and I don't have any ultimate Wi-Fi, unlike the Premier In, but I guess it's glamorous in its own way.

Well, yeah, I mean,

for democracy, Andy.

So look at the glamour of democracy.

You win the glamour off because you are at the very heart of human freedom in the democratic process.

So congratulations.

You are the most glamorous Bugle co-host of the week, a coveted title

that I think I won for 293 episodes in a row at the start of the start of the Bugles existence.

We are recording on the 22nd of November 2024, meaning it's exactly 61 years to the day since John F.

Kennedy was assassinated.

Or was he?

Yes,

he was.

Also, on this day in the year 498, two popes were elected.

There was a big schism in the church.

There were, well, there was briefly a double pope situation,

which might seem like one too many popes uh for you but i think maybe this is uh this is something the world could learn from uh you know having having two

two leaders elected surely that just you know gives people gives people what they want could america not learn from that you know to have because basically presidents don't get a lot done because of the built-in gridlock in american politics so why not just have two so that everyone can you know just live in their own echo chamber with the president that they want i think the the catholic church in the year 498 unwittingly set a blueprint for human happiness, which is not always the Catholic Church's MO, to be fair.

As always,

I think all of us are the more popes, the better.

You know, they get fragrant when you put them all in a bowl together.

That's yep, that deserves more.

Why is that not not a thing?

There should be just like, you know, what is it?

A craven of witches, a poppery of popes.

It should be

as always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, well, we have a special competition for you, bugle listeners.

We've teamed up with incoming President Donald Trump

to give you the chance to choose what will replace the Statue of Liberty, which is going to be symbolically smashed to pieces on Trump's first day in office, the spiky-hatted torch waggler, full metal janitor, as she's also known.

Now, obviously, not just obsolete, but also embarrassingly anachronistic and dangerously French in both origin and philosophy.

So do send in your suggestions to

the bugle, special bugle competition address,

which is hello, buglers, at thebuglepodcast.com, with your suggestions for what should replace the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.

Maybe a giant Marjorie Taylor Greene made of melted down machine guns, or perhaps a statue of Donald Trump himself naked, firing a semi-automatic weapon into the air, eating a burger and symbolically urinating into the waters of New York Harbor.

Interestingly, or perhaps you want Thomas Paine curled up in the fetal position with a constant flow of tears from his eyes and thrice daily diarrhea and vomiting.

It's up to you.

You send in your suggestions for what would be the most appropriate replacement for the statue of

Liberty.

And also you might want to update the poem famously written by Emma Lazarus in 1883,

which concluded: Give me your tide, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempered, tossed, tempest, tossed to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Perhaps you want to replace that with, Are you a huddled mass yearning to breathe free?

Then right off.

We don't want you, and we're rolling back environmental legislation, so you won't be able to breathe free anyway.

Something along those lines, or just simply in massive great neon letters, just suck it.

So do send in your options um

and uh it will be uh we'll try and get it uh sorted out in time for january the 20th that section in the bid but do genuinely send in your suggestions and maybe we'll um

this could be the not sure but it'll quite match the hotties from history emails that you sent in all those years ago but let's see uh let's see what we can get

Top story this week.

Well, we're going to start with Continents of the Week.

I'm going to draw the winning continents out of a hat from the world's leading 10 continents, and this week's winner is

Asia.

Well,

what a good continent to start with.

Easily the most popular continent on earth.

What is it?

Four and a half to five billion people.

Can't be wrong.

Anuvab, you have long been the Bugles representative of the vast majority of humanity.

And what's a few interesting stories, including that one of the things that's emerged from COP is that delegates have suggested that China and India should no longer be called developing countries, which was an official designation dating back to the 1992 UNFCCC.

I can guess what the F, the C, the C, and the C stand for, based on how international diplomacy works, but I'm not sure about the U and the N.

Oh, it's the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

I was completely wrong.

Anyway,

how has this news been received in India?

So, you know, this is the interesting thing: is Indians love telling the world that they're a wealthy, developing nation, except at COP, they want money.

When we show up at COP,

then it becomes like a Monty Python sketch where we want to outdo everybody and prove that we're poor.

And what's happened at COP is a number of African nations.

So, this gentleman from Nigeria who's leading the Nigerian delegation, and his name is Mr.

Balurabe Abbas Lawal.

And he said that basically China and India are developing nations now.

They no longer should be clubbed together with all the African nations and get aid from Western countries because, you know, they're, you know, they have pretty high GDPs now.

And he said they should try and support us.

They should also come and make some contribution financially, like the Western countries do, to the poorer countries to help climate change.

At which Indian delegates started screaming, we're very, very poor.

We are very poor.

Till someone said, Is that a Louis Vuitton bag that you hold?

So, this is the thing.

It's difficult, which is why I have sent the Indian delegation, I personally have sent the Indian delegation some tips on how to appear poor when your GDP is growing at 7.5%.

And what they need to do is to go back to the Monty Python sketch of the four Yorkshiremen where they were trying to prove out to each other and how poor they were.

Where one Yorkshireman said, You know, I'm so poor that we used to have a cup of tea without milk or sugar.

And someone else said, a cup would have been a luxury.

We used to put our tea in a newspaper.

Someone else said, we used to suck on a piece of cloth.

So

I think that, you know,

double standards is really the best way to play it at COP26.

Only double.

I mean, usually we're looking at treble or quadruple standards at COP conferences.

Is the fifth Yorkshireman an Indian who goes, tea?

Where did you think they took the tea from?

Exactly.

Exactly.

Exactly.

How do you think that that man in the RG League is poor?

They took his tea and now he has to live in a house with holes in the roof.

He probably doesn't even have a house.

He probably lives in a corridor.

You know, it's endless.

COP29 climate talks, more like climate cops policing language.

Am I right, Andy?

I think this is the woke agenda.

Next time, you know,

if we can't call developing nations developing nations anymore, next thing they'll claim that not all nation states are women who can be drawn in satirical cartoons with their tits out.

Actually, you know, I think it's a reasonable request because these designations were given to various countries back in 1993.

They're slightly out of date.

I feel like the old designations ought to be resignated and then new designations nated to the relevant nations.

But

basically,

the argument is China and India are developing nations, they're just not developing developing nations.

They're doing well for themselves.

They're at about a seven on the scale of up and up to up if one is up and up and ten is up.

So it's not a m meaningless

thing because if you're classified as a developer the reason it's relevant is if you're classified as a developing country, it means you have no formal obligation to cut your greenhouse gas emissions or to provide financial help to poorer countries, and it means they're also eligible to receive climate age aid, which India does, but China does not, which is nice to know it has some standards.

You know, it's like you know, you know, how Darth Vader is technically eligible to apply for disability payments, but he draws a line somewhere.

You know,

he's doing okay, Alice is absolutely right.

I mean, the small gober Beijing doesn't come for free, as opposed to it, someone has to be paying for it.

Um, so I think what India needs to do in COP29 is to send a delegation dressed like the cast of Slum Dog Millionaire.

You know, there are a number of ways that

you can't show up in posh suits with Louis Vuitton and Armani and then want money to put into your climate change thing.

You've got to dress for the part.

So if you want money from COP26, dress up like Slum Dog Millionaire, show up.

Not like the quiz master of Slum Dog Millionaire.

He was quite well dressed.

So like the rest of the,

and then you can demand some money.

I mean, all countries are developing in some way or another.

It's just some are developing in the same manner that an illness develops.

For example, the USA, but arguably the country that is developing fastest

right now.

Also, based on its Belt and Road programme,

through which China is investing in over 150 nations or international organizations, China is not a developing country.

It is developing countries.

So that's a slight

semantic difference.

And, you know,

like we said, these classifications date back to 1992 and things have changed.

For example, in 1992, I was a teenager.

That's how f ⁇ ing long ago it was.

The internet was basically two guys with yogurt pots and string describing naked women to each other.

Hope was going through a little bit of a late 20th century boom.

Nuance was still legal.

I mean, this is a long, long time ago.

This is longer ago from now than from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War.

That is a big old chunk of history.

It's almost as long as from the first Christmas to the first Easter, which is really when things started going wrong, to be honest.

So, I mean, it does seem a bit ridiculous to still be using those classifications.

India's GDP, Anavab, up by over

1,200%

in that time from around 290 billion to 3.5 trillion.

The GDP per capita up by 800%.

Those billionaires are doing some seriously heavy lifting on that one, to be fair, but still

significant.

Also, a huge gap between India's GDP per capita, about $2,800, and America's at $35,000.

So, my question for you, Anuvab, and I know you like to come on the people with questions for me.

Should a nation that has over 300 billionaires, does it need

this kind of financial help that

COP conferences give, or should it be sorting out its finances a little better?

Well, Andy, if there's free money going and all it takes is a nice-looking PowerPoint with fortunes of poor people, why not?

Why not?

I mean, that's the same.

If all it takes is to go into a holiday inn in Brazil, I think it's Brazil, right?

And give a presentation and get money, why not?

And tell me this, Andy.

If India's grown so much and if there are so many rich people, why am I in a store room right now?

Why does none of this trickle down to me?

I'm in a storeroom staring at a broken lamp.

You know, nothing's changed from 1994 for me.

And

I just want to know that

I think among the things the 300 Indian billionaires are not doing

is one of the, I think, one of the basic things they're not doing is giving the money to the rest of the country.

That's probably how they are billionaires.

I think they're spending it on really efficient things like aeroplanes and fast cars, which leaves the rest of the country to have to ask for carbon credits.

I mean, you might not be a billionaire yet, but I mean, let's look at trend in India, Anuvab.

There are three times more billionaires in India than 10 years ago, which means that if things keep going at the current rate, if I've done my maths correctly, which is quite a big if, in just 190 to 200 years, every single person in India will be a billionaire.

So you've not got that long to wait until just by the sheer force of statistics,

you also are a billionaire.

And also, in terms of developing countries and the model that developed countries set,

the fact that india has these billionaires but still a huge amount of poverty shows how well we have taught the developing world to repeat our economic mistakes and idiocies so you're you're welcome you are welcome

well on the subject of illian

well on the subject of indian billionaires indian billionaire news now and uh well i mean it's been quite an exciting week for the rich and powerful being charged with with stuff the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense stroke offense minister Joav Gallant as well as the probably dead Hamas ubeshite Mohammed Dave all for alleged war crimes Netanyahu's office described as anti-Semitic no war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza

they claim now whether or not you agree with that claim and regardless of the extent to which you agree with it I think it's probably fair to say that you know regardless of the justness of the war, however you define that, it's not always been waged in a remorselessly just manner.

But anyway, we will see what happens with that.

Joe Biden, very cross, said, let me be clear, whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence, none between Israel and Hamas.

I would agree with that, but it doesn't mean that they can't have both committed different non-equivalent atrocities.

But such is

the world we live in.

Anyway, as a species, we've never been that good at holding multiple opinions at the same time.

It is a skill worth practising, but I think we've basically given up on it.

Well, Andy, some of us aren't very good at holding multiple opinions at the same time.

I'm definitely not, but also, on the other hand, I also am.

I'm very good at holding multiple opinions.

You are the exception that proves the rule, Alice,

in so many ways.

So let's move on to slightly chirpier, rich and powerful people being charged with stuff.

And executives from the Adani group, including Gautam adani one of the uh india and india the world's richest people have been accused of agreeing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bribes to the indian uh to indian government officials between 2020 and 2024 uh relating to solar energy supply contracts which are expected to make two billion dollars in profits over the next 20 years and this to me is a good news story because what it shows is, and we've had the COP conference and all this talk about how we're still not taking the environment seriously enough.

But if renewable energies have become worth the time, the effort, the subterfuge, the tedious admin involved in a multi-billion dollar corruption scam, this can only be good for the future of the planet.

This shows that saving the world is going to provide so many openings for the kind of corruption that drives humanity on.

And this is a hugely exciting time.

Well, absolutely, Andy.

We've been saying this in India for a long time.

There's nothing,

there's no world problem that bribery cannot solve.

I feel like they need to work on this with a pincer movement.

If you can get money and corruption via money on solar energy, maybe it's like we need to address the other end of the motivation spectrum and suggest that windmills whip up pussy or something.

Absolutely

family show.

It's a two-stroke engine that drives men forward.

See, these are the benefits of the developed world that we don't get to see here.

So very quickly, Alice Andy, this is what happened, right?

The U.S.

authorities, the SEC and others, have charged Adani and issued an arrest warrant against three people, including Adani himself, basically for paying bribes to Indian officials to get solar energy contracts.

Now, the reason this is an issue in the United States is because

Adani has gone to the U.S.

to raise money with US bonds.

And America has this weird, weird weird thing.

I don't know if it exists in other developed countries, of doing due diligence to find out whether companies are ethical.

This is a frightening sort of thing.

I don't know when it started.

If only they did the same with their finging presidents, for example.

Yeah, Anivab, you'll often come on this podcast and scoff satirically at the very suggestion that Western corruption can hold a candle to Indian corruption, pointing to instances like vote buying or this kind of like solar energy bribery.

But have any of your billionaires bought the entire government of America?

No, I have to say, Alice, you're right.

It's getting better.

The West is getting better.

They're not as good as us, but it's getting better.

I mean,

clearly there's nepotism, nefarious things,

loyalty is being rewarded.

But I mean, they've got a lot to learn, if anything.

I know the Treasury Secretary job is still open, and I would highly pitch for Mr.

Adani as an option for Donald Trump

because it's ingenious what he did.

He basically

raised, he basically got a bunch of solar contracts by bribing the entire department, right?

And then becoming the monopoly provider.

Now, this is the thing that is genius about Indian billionaires is before they figure out what product to make, they make sure everyone in the relevant government department is bribed.

Then they decide what product to make.

We probably need to chuck the word allegedly in various points of

this bit.

So just assume it's there, people.

Just assume it's there at the end of the beginning of every sentence, probably the end, just to cover our backs legally.

It's there, allegedly.

Number one, and number two, we're not saying this.

This is the charge sheet.

This is the accusation that's come from the U.S.

authorities.

They're basically saying that he bribed everyone in the government department to get solar government contracts.

And all we're extrapolating is that if he's bribed everyone, then he's only decided that this is what he, you know, the product he wants to make came after bribing everyone.

Because this is the thing, right?

Steve Jobs often says the audience, they don't know what they want till you give it to them, right?

So

all that's going on with Indian billionaires, not just Mr.

Adani, is they're making sure everybody is bribed.

And then they decide what to make because they don't want regulations to get in the way.

It's fundamentally kind of capitalism-durbo-charged, if you think about it.

Yeah.

And thank you, Gautamadani, for leading where others may follow, and

at last, taking the environment seriously.

And big business hasn't done that enough.

But I mean, we've all in our times, in our own way, paid bribes, whether it's handing over a cheeky banknote in a shop or a cafe in exchange for some food, or saying if you eat your vegetables, you can have your ice cream.

That's bribery.

We say that to our children, or our parents, or ourselves.

And yeah, full disclosure, we at the Bugle, we are currently bribing both Alice and Anuvab with money to bring their wit and insight to this show rather than just screaming, growling, or reciting baudy poetry.

That's just the way the world works, isn't it?

That is just the way the world works.

Oh, so it's my ethical core and willingness to refuse bribery.

That's why I always forget to invoice.

Is that it?

Wait, Alice, what is an invoice?

I've never heard of it.

Can I just say, you know, while the West is very concerned about business ethics and making sure their bondholders have transparency,

in India, the news was regarded with the question,

why is this news?

The Indian stock market, as we speak, and I just checked it before getting on this podcast,

is up 2,000 points today.

So,

not only is this not seen as a bad thing,

I think it's, you see, it's quite rewarding, actually.

I think its respect has gone up in the eyes of other billionaires.

Crypto plutocrat buys banana news now.

And,

well, I mean, quite often on the bugle over the last 17 years, we've explored the

extent of idiocy which money can buy.

And

an excellent contribution to this

section of the Bugle Encyclopedia of Human Life

after a Chinese crypto entrepreneur bought a work of art for 6.2 million US dollars that is uh a banana gaffer taped to the wall.

Um, it's entitled Comedian.

Um, I don't know what kind of jokes that comedian would tell, presumably a deeply personal show about how it feels to be strapped to a wall if you're a banana, not necessarily laugh out loud, funny, and mook, but moving if a little bit contrived.

But anyway, uh, 6.2 million dollars.

Obviously, you know, this art, the art itself is not worth $6.2 million.

The idea is not worth 6.2 million dollars but what is worth 6.2 million dollars to a crypto wanker is being seen to spend 6.2 million dollars for no reason other than to show people that you are prepared to spend 6.2 million dollars for no reason that that in the crypto world is a bargain i'd say that's probably even worth 7.2 million dollars

I mean, it's extraordinary.

It has confirmed my deeply held belief that crypto guys really don't understand art or money.

All they understand is hype and buzz.

And they think buzz is the same thing as art.

And they think hype is the same thing as money.

On the other hand, maybe he just bought a bunch of NFT apes and he needed something to feed them.

I thought the idea of a banana might be.

This is a really good, really good strategy, Alice, to feed NFT apes with a real banana.

Well, is it a real banana or is it the concept of a banana in a particular place?

Apparently, you get a certificate.

You don't get the actual banana.

You get a certificate saying you own the idea of the banana.

And then also you do get a banana and some duct tape as a sort of a starter kit to making your own.

One of the people involved in the auction said it's an artwork that's a perfect representation of the times that we're living in.

Never a truer word spoken because we live in finging stupid times.

Really fing stupid times.

With that money, with the $6.2 million, I reckon you could buy at least 60 million bananas and half a million rolls of gasoline in

get a

bulk discount.

It is all about context, though, Andy.

Like, I've been at the airport with a hungry toddler.

I would have paid $62 million

for a banana at that point.

Can you imagine painting the

ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and thinking, what will art be a couple of hundred years from now?

Poor old Michelangelo spent four years up a fing scaffold painting plunkers on a ceiling when he could have just nailed a courgette to a baguette and taken the rest of the decade off.

Other news now, and British farmers are fing cross.

This results from a measure in the recent budget, the first budget of the Kiostama Labour government, uh which changed inheritance tax that uh farmers have to pay and it's one of those stories where uh it sort of happened while i was starting my tour and i missed the beginning of the story with all the detail on exactly what the the measure was and all i've had since is everyone screaming at each other and it's really hard when you miss the start of a news story and then it just becomes the furious debate.

It's really hard to pick it apart and find out the rights and wrong.

I mean, it's somewhere in between Labour wants to ban farming and force all farmers to become poets and Labour tries to stop the wealthy using farmland as a tax dodge.

The truth is, somewhere in between those two things.

And short, farming is a hugely difficult career, very difficult compared with, say, being a social media influencer and beating up a 58-year-old man recovering from a major illness for the entertainment of millions.

It's definitely more difficult than that.

So,

or even by strapping a banana to a wall and saying, I'm fing Rodan.

So,

Alice, as our British farming correspondent,

can you clear up some of the confusion for me?

Well, apparently, from April 2026, if you have agricultural assets that are more than £1 million in value,

they'll be subject to an inheritance attacks.

Farmers hitherto have been not having inheritance taxes because it harkens back to a time when you just one serf would die, and then whichever of their children was the least sickly would inherit, but they didn't have to pay for it.

The thing is,

in England, in the UK, farming is is one of two things.

Either it is a heartwarming family tradition where honest Johns make a small but respectable living serving the land they till, selling their produce and running an Airbnb out of a converted shed.

They pass the land down generation by generation, originally to the firstborn son, and then afterwards to whichever one of their children is least likely to fuck off to London.

The other thing that farming is...

That's thing number one.

The other thing that farming is, is a massive depersonalized industrial process whereby underpaid and undocumented immigrants earn a pittance, greasing the processes of food production.

Now, we want a world where the small family farm thrives by selling locally to organic farmers' markets, but we also need a world where even poor people get to eat.

And in order to feed all the people we have,

currently we've got to deal with the big old monster farm.

Now, of course, another solution that I don't think anyone else is considering here is that we should have fewer people to feed, but people do just keep making more people.

And

I don't think that any of the solutions to that that are being proposed are currently tenable.

Farmer wants a wife, Andy.

Farmer wants a wife.

Alice, I don't know if all countries can fall into that accusation.

I mean, look at India.

We've got only 1.6 billion people.

I mean, it's just, it's a tiny population to feed.

Can I just say that between,

you know, if you do have a choice between taxing farmers or oligarchs who get rich on social media,

which do you think is better?

Like, my thing is, I think farmers are better because they didn't invent Instagram.

They've just fed you.

Anyone can feed you.

Social media news now, and Australia wants to ban children.

Alice,

that's as far as I got with the headline.

I got bored because I got a short attention span.

What's going on?

We are going to ban, we're proposing to ban a social media for everyone who is a teenager.

Basically, under the age of 16, you will not be allowed to have social media.

Parents are for it.

They're very afraid of the mental health impacts of social media on their teens.

Everyone else is for it because they don't like teenagers having a nice time.

The teenagers obviously have agreed for, you know, very enthusiastically.

Their Their parents will hand their phones to the teenagers and say, please teach me how to lock you out of your phone.

And the teens will happily oblige.

I mean, it's obviously not going to work.

It is obviously not going to work.

They will find one million ways to get around it before the law has passed.

I think it's sort of a nice idea.

Australia is in a uniquely privileged position because we are so dominated by mining billionaires that we don't have a lot of space in the being dominated by billionaires region to fit tech billionaires in.

So, you know, Australia's refusal to invest meaningfully in its intellectual infrastructure from copyright to entertaining to technology in favor of relying on the old faithfuls of mining and sheep farming has meant we can actually say f off to the big tech companies.

But,

you know, I think the problem is that there's plenty of things that are actually good about social media.

You know, finding connection as a lonely, bullied teenager, finding a community of your own that is slightly larger than the small town you're growing up in, and so on and so forth.

Those things are really powerful.

And so I think, you know,

this is probably not the solution, but I think it'll be an interesting experiment to watch fail.

I was just going to say, the reason I don't think it's going to work, Alice, is that the whole framework is built by young men,

tech experts from Stanford who haven't ever seen sunlight.

And nothing gives them more pleasure.

than a band that they have to go around that involves technology.

This is what they live for.

But also, just in terms of

from the parenting point of view,

throughout history, we've found ways of making children more miserable, whether it's organized religion or private education.

And social media has stepped into the gaps in the post-religious world that many of us live in.

So we're going to have to find something else.

I don't know what it could be.

But anyway, I'm sure humanity has always found ways of doing that.

Another social media story around, well, a social media influencer, one of the most prominent influencers of the recent influencer epidemic that has struck the world over recent years.

Jake Paul.

the social media star has heroically repeatedly punched an ill 58-year-old in the face in what was allegedly a sporting a sporting contest that has really made humanity feel sick about itself on so many levels.

Mike Tyson,

formerly

one of the finest heavyweight boxers in history for a brief period, troubled life,

not always a 100% well-behaved human being.

And the spectacle really was, I think, one of the low points in the entire history of

not just of sport, of human civilization.

You'd like to think that we're on a general forward progress as a species, but I'm not sure even the Romans would have paid to watch that shit.

The latest,

well, the next thing, the prominent social media influencer Preble Chicken Jr.

says he is primed and ready to go ahead of his contest with the 90-year-old former number one ranked tennis player Ken Rosewall.

Chicken has said he's confident of victory, a special hybrid version of tennis in which he will clatter Rosewall repeatedly over the head with a heavy-based frying pan whilst the Australian full-time winner and the finalist sits strapped into a chair being read the last rites before Rosewell gets his go, the chance to respond with some old-style servant volley tennis using a wooden racket like the good old days.

So it's going to draw a huge estimated 2.3 billion strong pay-per-view audience, which would make it the highest-grossing sporting contest in the history of the universe.

Although that itself could be broken the following week when PewDiePie hurls the 1964 Olympic long jump champion Mary Rand into a crocodile pit while smearing melted down dollar bills all over his face.

But such is sport.

You know, I love sport.

So, you know,

that's what it's become.

I think the biggest

defeat for Jake Paul was probably that despite winning the fight,

the one moment that went viral from the fight was Mike Tyson walking away from the camera with his buns out

and the Netflix camera operator desperately zooming into his upper back

after a full two seconds of total bottom exposure.

Any YouTube star versus any other person could be great matchups.

For example, here's one I'm suggesting.

Maritime Calypso crooner Harry Belafonte

versus eminent chef Gordon Ramsey, whose YouTube channel for an omelette has 20 million views.

Who wouldn't watch that?

Well, we need to wrap this bugle up at that point as sport plumbs depths that no one thought could be plumbed

or even found.

But anyway, such is the world we live in.

Thanks for listening, buglers.

Do come see my tour show dates and ticket links at andysolson.co.uk.

We've added a few extra dates now running through till May,

by which time presumably the world will have changed and I have to write a load of new jokes.

But anyway, thanks for those who've come so far.

It's been

a lot of fun.

Alice, anything to plug?

Sport lifts us up and gives us inspiration.

And I just am so glad that there are children out there who can watch that fight and think one, you know, they can just go out into the street and punch an old man.

You can find my book at unbound.com.

It's called A Passion for Passion.

And I do a podcast called The Gargle, which is the sister podcast of this podcast.

It is the glossy magazine.

It's got all of the news and none of the politics.

And the rest of my stuff, you can come to my twice-weekly writers' meetings at patreon.com slash alicefraser I'm also running a kind of a new year reboot creative online course if you want if you're doing something creative and want to get writing or working on that it'll be in the Gooch of the year between Christmas and my birthday but patreon.com slash Alice Fraser is the time for that place

time and place

just very quickly I have two days in the UK my last trip for the year next weekend I'm at Headliners Comedy Club in Chiswick, where I'm opening for Dylan Moran.

But the more important announcement is that I will be spending my winter holidays trying to make a map of Italy from a Madnekin inspired by one Andy Soltzmann from his Taskmaster

map-making skills.

And I'm hoping to give that as presents to lots of people over Christmas, even though it's not even an Indian holiday.

Well, you know, inform, educate, and entertain the Wreathian values.

I do a lot of work for the BBC.

I just can't, I can't help it.

I just can't help it.

Thank you for listening, buglers.

We will be back next week.

Until then, goodbye.

Hi Buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.