Trump Exclusive: The Moon Is Woke

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4288 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual and it must be said pan-idiotic world.

I am Andy Zoltzmann.

It is the 22nd of January 2024.

I am here in London in the Shed of truth to bring you the very latest on this once great planet's descent into the inescapable hellscape of paint.

Sorry, the news.

The news.

Joining me this week on the Bugle, I'm delighted to welcome back to the show from here in London, Ria Lena, and from New York City, Josh Gondrelman.

Hello to both of you.

And hello to you.

Good day.

How's 2024 treating you so far?

The problem with 2024 is that it's continuous with 2023.

I wish you could kind of lop off the previous years and jettison them into space like the stages of a rocket, but we just kind of rolled right into the new one.

So I'm doing okay, but there's still a lot of baggage, like the whole past.

Where it's, I don't, I don't think 2024 has noticed me yet, and I'm just

gonna just fly under the radar for now.

That's my plan.

Just be like,

was she even there that year?

You're gonna sit this one out.

No, I'm ready.

I'm ready.

I'm on the bench.

I'm ready to tag in.

As soon as somebody wants me to tag in, I'm just saying somebody has to keep the bench warm too.

I do like the idea of just cutting off everything from the previous year and jettisoning it.

I mean, that's essentially what we need to do with all of human history because it just pisses people off.

So, yeah, but if December the 31st, everyone just had to forget everything that happened in the previous 12 months.

I think the world would be a much happier place.

We say let old acquaintances be forgot, right?

And we should just forget way more than that.

We need a song about forgetting everything.

Also, I mean, in old farming, you know, you leave fields fallow every few years to make sure they

remain productive.

I think there should be countries that have to do.

So, like, America should just have to take off one year in four from doing anything.

Ideally, the election year.

Well,

more on that later.

As I said, we are recording on the 22nd of January, 2024.

If you think the issue of Nepo babies is bad today, the offspring of the rich, powerful, and famous, coasting on the wealth and achievements of their parents, consider yourself lucky not to have been around in 613 AD, when on this day, the 22nd of January, eight-month-old Constantine was crowned co-emperor of the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire by his father.

Heraclius.

Not the first example of a Nepo baby, of course, as, for example, the history of Christianity.

You can attest another Nepo child, Queen Victoria, who got her job purely on the basis of who her granddaddy was.

She popped her octogenarian clogs on this day in 1901, sadly passing away 123 years before seeing her beloved Detroit Lions reach their first NFT championship game in over three decades.

Victoria also tragically died before fulfilling her lifelong ambitions of riding a quad bike down a ski ramp, appearing in a series of The Masked Monarch, or recording a drill album with the then Prime Minister Robert Gascoigne Cecil, the third Marquess of Salisbury.

Learn from that, buglers, seize the day, and set achievable goals based on when in history you're alive, which I assume is now as we record.

On yesterday,

exactly 100 years ago,

yesterday, the 21st of January 1924, communist revolution star Lenin died, aged 53.

We've got some of the tabloid headlines from the newspapers the next day on the 22nd of January 1924.

Red and dead,

Marxist Carczet,

Vladra Cadavera, Lenin Pop's Comic Clogs, that was, I think, from

the Moscow mirror, and of course, Len Out.

But his legacy lives on, of course, by which I mean his still dead and weirdly waxy corpse lives on,

deadly, in the former Kremlin residence, own personal Red Square mausoleum.

Apparently, it costs around $200,000 a year to

preserve Lenin's common corpse in

mausoleum.

I mean,

is that really money well spent, do you think?

I just listen to Imagine every time I want to remember him.

And it brings it back enough.

Do they genuinely preserve Lenin's corpse?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's

all of it or like just the head.

Well, no, the whole thing, I don't know.

That is a money-saving idea, though, Ria, right?

$200,000 for the whole body.

I bet you could do the head for $15K.

Right?

And that's all you need, apparently, in the future.

It's just the head.

I mean, if they're saving all of it, when you freeze, you know, when you like freeze grapes and they go turgid?

Yeah.

Is it the same with?

Look, I mean,

I mean, I wasn't expecting to be talking about Lenin's balls this early in the show, but you know, I guess.

These are the science questions that come to mind, though.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's wondering about his tasks.

That is the risk of having an actual scientist on the bugle, Rhea, but I'm prepared to take that risk.

If any of you buglers do have any information on the state of Lenin's Nagis, do email us in

to our new email address,

Communist Dictator's Testicles at thebuglepodcast.com.

As always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week, a New Year's resolutions section, because by this stage of January, most New Year's resolutions have been binned off.

And obviously, of course, from a global point of view, the new Millennium resolutions to foster a world of peace, freedom, secularism, democracy, harmony, and mutual cooperation are not going too well.

And I think, I don't know where we are in terms of the millennium

as a proportion of how far through January we've got.

But it's really not going very well at all.

But we've all been there with New Year's resolutions, haven't we?

On the 1st of January, we make a solemn vow to ourselves that we'll give up something.

For example, we'll give up making lies about going on exciting adventures.

And then by, what was it, the 22nd of January, as we are now, we're halfway down the the Amazon in search of the lost golden snooker table of John the Baptist, singing, I will survive with Mick Jagger and his new pet piranha in a stolen German U-boat.

I am so, so off that wagon.

A wagon in which incidentally I crossed the Gobi Desert with Nigel Mansell at an average speed of 127 miles an hour.

But that's another story.

And we look at some of these celebrities have admitted to giving up on their New Year's resolutions.

Star footballer lubiquitous Jar Moyle of the New York Forks made a resolution to stop wearing helmets.

That didn't last very long.

Supermodel Flardonia Era has committed to wearing vegan ethic loaths throughout January, but after an unfortunate incident with a banana leaf crop top, has gone back to wearing the still-warm pelts of freshly slain squirrels that

made her name on the modelling circuit.

And UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres

made a resolution to stop slamming his head on his desk saying why, why, why, why every five minutes.

That lasted less than five minutes.

So that section is in the bin.

Are you either of you New York's resolutors?

New York's New Year's Eve.

I made some New York's resolutions.

I'm never going to stop walking over here.

I might need to every title.

I'm going to stop talking to you.

I always have the same resolution, and I've had it for, I think it's maybe six or seven years running, which is to be a more considerate and available friend and a more looming and formidable enemy.

I resolve that every year.

Do we get to choose which one you are to us?

Sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's fine.

You know, I'm going to be honest.

I'm so tempted to see you loom.

Oh, thank you.

I'd love to see you loom, Josh.

That's nobody says that one, but I appreciate it.

I mean, you do, you do have a

naturally looming and ominous vibe, Josh.

And that shows very strongly on this show.

I've got kind of a ghost bod.

I feel like if I was translucent, people would be like, that checks out.

Top story this week.

And well, we've partnered up with a TV show this week.

Kids Say the Most Harrowing Things for our top story.

The Oxford University Press has delivered further proof that we are not entirely bequeathing quite as fun a planet to our descendants as might be ideal.

The OUP has declared that its children's words of the year for 2023 after a poll of around 1,500 children were in first place, climate change, in second place, war, and in third place, coronation.

So this was specifically in British children, but I like to think British children, as always, are representative of the entire planet.

These words saw off the challenges of, amongst other words, robo-parent, goverlord, and what the f have you done to our future, you generations, loads of fking idiots, which came in in a disappointing eighth place.

I mean, I think this does reveal a lot about

how children are having to deal with the world that

we are giving them

at the moment.

And I mean, in the past, of course, childhood was a happy, carefree breeze when, as a youngster, you had nothing more to worry about than dying of bubonic plague, brutally sadistic schooling, having no real realistic prospects of choosing your own path in life, particularly if you were poor and/or a girl, and frankly, harrowing lack of screen time.

But now, it's arguably got even worse.

What have you guys made of this?

I don't know.

I mean, the word of the year when I was a kid was man in a van with puppies and sweets.

So I feel, I don't know who had it worse.

It's kind of sad, but at the same time, have you been hearing about, you know, because the kids that they're, the age range that they're questioning is Gen Alpha.

Gen Alpha.

And they are notoriously the worst generation to teach because they don't respect authority whatsoever.

And they're sitting here dooming and glooming, and I'm like, you know what, just give them TikTok and leave them the planet.

Just, you know, leave them the planet.

I mean, you know, generations ahead of them solved a lot of things.

They can, you know,

they'll figure it out that they should have paid attention in school when they realize that they're in trouble.

Just some people are experiential learners, and clearly Generation Alpha needs to experience before they'll learn.

So leave them to it.

I actually kind of think I kind of appreciate that they don't respect authority because I'm authority.

And it's like, yeah, you nailed me to the wall, kids.

You got it.

I love that coronation came in third, which is, again, as you said, that's like the American equivalent of coronation being the word of the year.

Is

in election year again already?

When I was 10 years old, my word of the year would have been either cowabunga or boobs spelled with numbers upside down on a couch.

You're like, yes.

Oh my gosh.

Or in my case, because I'm Asian, boobless.

Oh, sure.

Have to be inclusive.

I think it was precocious, if anything.

Right.

That's a longer word.

That's a much longer word.

With numbers, too.

I do think it is impressive that kids are doing better than adults on this front because Oxford's word of the year, presumably for adults or precocious, annoying dictionary reading children,

was RIS,

which is an abbreviation for charisma, right?

Meaning like, you know, having charm.

Yeah.

Although, apparently for Generation Alpha, Riz is short for, there is not much time left to reverse the damage we've done to our environment.

I mean, to illustrate how things have changed, just nine years ago, the children's word of the year was minions,

which I believe was something to do with a popular cartoon film rather than children feeling they were powerless pawns trapped in the machinery of the capitalist industrialist complex.

But I guess it could have been could have been both and I guess in that case.

Which children did they ask?

Was this still a UK survey or was it like a Bangladeshi survey?

Oh, well, I don't know.

I mean, it's possible we outsourced it at that point.

And of course, you know, coronation from this year, I guess that taps into that theme of eternal immutable servitude.

So it is possible that there is a bit of a link.

But this year's list proves once again how poetry was.

Philip Larkin was so nearly correct when he wrote, They f you up, your mum and dad.

He just missed off the generation at the end.

This was according to the Oxford University Press, which is one of the more intellectual football strategies.

I think Jürgen Klopp tried it when he was manager at Bayer Schnitzel back early in his career.

You got in midfield high, closing down the opposition defenders, and then you use philosophical arguments for why they should give you the ball back.

But anyway,

I digress.

Publishers always react to trends and knowing what today's kids are interested in linguistically, look out on the 2024 children's bestseller list for forthcoming titles, including Petula the Homeless Polar Bear Fights in Brutal House-to-House Combat, Herbert Hedgehog dies alone, and Mr.

Apocalypse, which is comfortably the darkest in the Roger Hargreaves Mr.

Men franchise, probably since Mr.

Tiggle.

I do want to get that homeless.

I want to watch the homeless polar bear fighting.

Did you say house-to-house combat?

I did.

So literally goes house-to-house trying to take over someone's house?

I think they probably have in mind some of those scenes in Band of Brothers

in some of the early combats.

Anyway, but I mean, is this?

I mean, is it igloo to igloo?

Is it how far?

How far south is this?

The igloos have long gone.

The igloos have melted, I'm afraid.

I would definitely buy that book.

I'd be interested in that.

Let's look at the rest of the world's news now to prove

quite how correct our children are in

how they're looking at the planet.

And well, as we've touched on already, it is a leap year, and this can mean only one thing, that America is going to spend the entire year feasting on the festering corpse of its own self-slaughtered democracy whilst the rest of the world thinks, oh, well, at least there's an Olympics to distract us for a couple of weeks in the summer.

I mean, Josh, like so many addicts, America just can't help going back to things it knows will do it harm, in this case, its own democratic process.

And

we've had the Iowa caucus last week, got the New Hampshire primaries coming up this week.

The Republican field has been whittled down from

it's been kind of a self-whittling process.

A little self-whittellation has been going on in the Republican field.

To just two, Donald Trump, the overwhelming favorite, and Nikki Haley.

I mean, can you explain?

It's so hard as outsiders to understand,

Josh, because I mean, for Trump to be the overwhelming favorite, to me, that seems like a half-eaten child voting to have the crocodile as teacher again.

But America being America, this seems just to be the way that you do things.

Correct.

Yeah.

As you may have been fearing, the United States has a presidential election coming up once again.

Obviously, we don't vote for president until November, but the campaign kicks off just before the current president takes office.

It's kind of a long-running thing.

This week, as you mentioned, is the New Hampshire primary where the media shows up to pretend Republicans might nominate someone other than Trump, and the Democrats have decided they can't be bothered to participate in at all.

The Democratic establishment is sticking with Joe Biden over the field, even though many voters would opt for an empty field as president when we're on the ballot.

Honestly, when he's asleep, it is an empty field.

Sometimes when he's awake.

Governor Ron DeSantis' campaign has become somewhat of a, it's gained hurricane force in that it's now mostly going to be doing harm to the people of Florida this spring.

But ripple effects of his destruction will be felt throughout the American South.

Many pundits are saying Nikki Haley has a chance to make up some ground with Republican voters against Donald Trump, the man they currently believe to still be president.

Trump's brain has seemed especially sun-dried lately, and he appeared to confuse Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi in a recent speech,

leading some to speculate he might be losing ground in the polls.

That is, of course, ridiculous.

Trump's voters do not expect or even want the things Trump says to be rooted in reality.

He could say that he wants to declare war on the moon because its cheap and delicious cheese exports have caused Americans to stop producing our own dairy products, and his supporters would decide the moon has become woke and boycott the sky.

So

that's kind of where we're at.

It's kind of

a series of play acting, pseudo-elections leading to an inevitable result.

This is like if Rocky and Apollo Creed were meeting again in Rocky or 10, well past Apollo Creed's death.

That's about how America is looking forward to this rematch.

I have so many questions.

Please.

First of all,

what does gubernatorial mean?

Oh,

yeah.

You know those peanut MMs?

Yes.

That's them.

No.

Gubernatorial, we decided to turn governor into an adjective, and we didn't go with the much handier governory governor-ish.

So you're telling me that when someone runs for governor, that's what gubernatorial is?

That's all it is.

Oh,

filibuster?

Oh, filibuster.

That's what we're doing right now.

That's just when you talk and talk and talk so no one else can talk.

Oh, this is why Chicago is called the windy city, isn't it?

Because it wasn't that it's windy.

Yeah.

It's that somebody talked and talked and talked and talked.

Yep.

And they just

the bluster of the politicians, which this is, I'm from Boston, and this is how like aggressive and petty we are.

Is that every once in a while there will be a study that says Boston has greater greater wind velocity and frequency than Chicago.

And everyone's like, ah, we knew it.

Iowa sucks the worst.

It sucks, it blows.

Take that, Chicago.

I mean, the whole thing is, you know, and how you have like, you know, Iowa had a caucus, but New Hampshire had a primary.

Yeah.

And, but New Hampshire has to have the first, but at least the first primary, not the first caucus, because Ohio went first.

Are the Democrats not doing it at all?

They passed this year.

On all of them, like 50 states.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're just like, nah, we get a lot on our plate this year.

Well,

it began well for Trump last week with a convincing win in the Iowa caucus.

Iowa,

coincidentally with the words that Donald Trump was overheard shouting after the Trump organization

was slapped with a $370 million fine for fraud in New York State.

Iowa!

He took 51% of the votes in the Iowa caucus, well down on the 100% he thinks he won in in the 2020 presidential election, but still a pretty good start for him.

And it's a busy time for Trump, isn't it?

One day caucus, next day court case.

It must be quite hard to keep track of which is which for the 77-year-old former president and insurrection fan.

I guess

if I've seen him in court, he treats them the same.

And I think he would rather win the court case than the caucus, honestly.

Or the caucus is the only chance to keep him out of future court cases.

So there is kind of a lot of...

It's a real soupy mess we get going on.

I mean, it is one of the ironies of this election that ironically in America, I think I'm right in saying, Josh, the prison population can't vote, and yet one of their own could be president.

I think representation is so important and

that's what we're trying to do here.

We're trying to get a convicted criminal, right?

Because that's the only way things change, is the change that people can see.

So I think that's going to inspire future prisoners.

I don't think it's a good idea to put Trump in prison.

The moment he's in that orange jumpsuit, he's going to completely disappear and he's going to escape.

It's really short-sighted.

And also, I don't think that he's going mad when he confused Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley.

I think it's a very clever trick.

Oh, it's a very clever trick because now everybody who doesn't know them from each other anyway is going to repeat that story.

Everyone's going to go, yeah, yeah, yeah, when Nikki Haley was in charge of 10,000 security people

on January 6th and she wasn't there.

She wasn't even in office.

But it doesn't matter the damage is done and I think we should do the same thing like when Rishi Sunak said that we should invade Iraq you know I thought that was damaging and wrong

you know

and I think we should you know when he was invading Poland I think that you know someone should have stopped him and I think we should just keep doing the same thing I think it's a very clever political ruse also I mean I think we've got to cut Trump a little bit of slap because it's quite easy to confuse Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi.

There are a couple of differences between them.

One is a Republican and one is a Democrat.

One was was an implacable opponent of Trump while he was president previously.

The other served Trump as US ambassador to the UN.

So those are differences.

But there's so many similarities between them that they're both from the northern hemisphere.

So I'd give that a Trump confusion rating of seven out of ten because with over six and a half billion inhabitants, it's really hard to keep up on exactly who is who in the world's most famous hemisphere.

Both of their names end in E sounds, and both of their names, I'd give that a Trump confusion rating of nine out of ten, because who amongst us has not mixed up people with sort of rhyming names?

Who has not confused tennis star Rafa Nadal with the almost interchangeable American writer Gore Vidal?

I mean to me they're almost one and the same.

Who has not confused the 16th century French theologian Calvin with the celebrity cartoon shipmunk Alvin?

I know how I have, much to the disappointment of my children in Cinemartrip.

Or who's not confused Canadian pop star Carly Ray Jepson with the Epson stylus 800 inkjet printer.

We've all made those mistakes.

Also, both Haley and Pelosi are women, which I would give a Trump confusion rating of 10 out of 10, because in the Trumpian mind, women are, as he's frequently implied, entirely interchangeable.

And both are aged over 35, which also I would give a Trump confusion rating of 10 out of 10.

Haley, 52.

Pelosi, just three decades older at 83.

Both...

on the TGS, way too old.

TGS is the Trumpic grabbability scale.

So you can understand why he made that mistake, to be honest.

That is.

I think that's kind of a Trump.

You know, many people say that Trump is racist.

Many people fact his behavior, says that Trump is racist.

And I think maybe he's just trying to prove that he's not, right?

Maybe he's trying to say, I don't see color.

I just hate women.

It is, I think, a little fraught that we have

that we allow these two states to kind of influence our political discourse, Iowa and New Hampshire, because America is a giant, vast, diverse array of people and interests, and we're allowing two states with the same demographic as the family from Full House

to make all our early decisions.

As you mentioned, Ron DeSantis has dropped out saying he did not have, quotes, a clear path forward to victory.

He posted a video on X, formerly known as Twitter, formerly known as X, formerly known as Twitter.

I forget the stage we're at in that little dance of nomenclature.

In which he apparently quoted Winston Churchill saying, Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it's the courage to continue that counts, and then fail to continue.

So I don't know what we can read into that.

But he was faced, it seemed to me, Joss, that DeSantis was faced with one ultimately unconquerable problem, that his whole shtick was being an insufferable shithead.

And he could not compete with the fact that the man he was up against was

the ultimate insufferable shithead.

He was trying to dethrone Trump from the Kazi of pseudo-Republican misanthropy and he just didn't really have a chance, did he?

No, of course not.

It's like Oasis trying to get voted best Beatles.

It's like

migration news here in the UK, the controversial Rwanda bill, we've talked about sporadically on the bugle, was passed by the House of Commons last week, but without any of the amendments which had threatened to shatter Conservative Party unity after Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, saw off last week's backbench rebellion.

I'm not sure what this week's is.

I think it's scheduled for Wednesday at 4 p.m., but I don't know, it does change slightly from week to week.

Admittedly, Conservative Party unity can be shattered by a slightly sedated butterfly waking up for its afternoon flap.

But still, credit where it's due.

I mean,

what was really extraordinary about it, Rhea, was that after he managed to sort of force this hugely unpopular bill through Parliament due to the incredible gravitational force of electoral necessity amongst his own MPs, he played the will of the people card, challenging the House of Lords, our second chamber, our unelected and unaccountable second chamber, but still our second chamber, challenging them not to go against the will of the people.

Because he,

as you may remember buglers if you've listened to this show over well any of recent years Sunak was elected not by the people not even by a small part of the people but by about 200 of his own MPs from memory who

after his own party membership had chosen Liz Truss ahead of him just weeks before

also this policy was first put forward in April 2022 two and a half years after the most recent chance the people had to will

anything,

it was a remarkably ballsy

piece of bullshit, even by recent prime ministerial standards, I thought.

And actually, I'm glad you brought up April 2022, because I don't know how many people remember this, but Rwanda and this whole idea of,

why don't we just send them to Rwanda, was Boris trying to distract the nation away from the Sougre report, which came out the day before.

So I don't think he ever meant this to be a real thing.

He just sort of of went, yeah, well,

Rwanda, and he threw it out there.

And then somebody else decided, oh, what a good idea, picked it up and decided to run with it.

And here we are now passing a bill where we in the UK have decided.

definitively, legislatively, that Rwanda is safe.

That's what we've decided it's safe.

And I'm like, do you know how much we could achieve if that's actually, if this is a possibility?

Why don't we just legislate, you know, a working two-state solution in the Middle East?

Or why don't we just legislate that North Korea no longer has nuclear weapons?

Like, why are we, I mean, if we have this power, why aren't we fixing real shit?

And then to turn around and have the audacity to turn to the House of Lords, who, by the way, this is the House of Lords.

So, if you're not in the UK, it is completely unelected.

And in it sits pretty much all the landowners of the UK.

That's how it was started, is everybody who owned land automatically got to have a say.

And on that land worked all the people.

So, if anybody knows the will of the people, it's the people who owned them.

And to turn around and say to them, They want this.

And I went, I'm pretty sure they don't.

Actually, if anything, all of the strikes we've been having over the last year is going to tell you what the people actually want.

They want to be paid properly for the work that they do.

They want services like the NHS and the trains to run properly.

They'd like to eat, Rishi.

Is that too much to ask?

They'd really, really like to eat.

These are the things that they want.

And you're sitting here going, No, no, they want a few people that have managed to make it all the way over here in inflatable rafts to be sent to Rwanda and to know for their own peace of mind that they'll be safe there.

Because that's what we're right.

You know, Rwanda offered to give the money back.

Rwanda said, you know what?

Take the money back.

We don't want any more to do with this.

They are so insulted by this entire procedure.

In fact, I heard that all of our kids on gap years who are building houses and orphanages in Rwanda have actually been offered asylum because they're not sure Britain's safe anymore for them to go back to.

This is the biggest political shit show.

And then there's little Rishi, who wears his suit slightly too small because he thinks they'll make him look bigger,

telling us that this is what the silent majority want.

They're silent for a reason, Rishi, and it's because they're deeply, deeply disappointed in you.

So this is like a strange thing to me.

I'm just getting caught up on this story a little bit.

I also, this is an opportunity for me to once again feel confident in American efficiency, efficiency, like our powerful inefficiency, because you have the House of Lords as an unelected body of people kind of advocating for entrenched regressive interests.

We've condensed that whole body down to a nine-person court.

And I think that is just kind of like the power of American ingenuity.

So that's exciting.

So if I'm to understand correctly, right?

The Tories were threatening to vote, the far-right conservatives were threatening to vote against the safety of Rwanda because they got caught in this like double bind of racism, right?

Where they either had to declare that an African nation was a safe and thriving state or accept migrants into the UK.

And racism at home narrowly won out against racism abroad.

Is that what happened?

That's a very accurate accurate summary.

Thank you.

So this like go back to Africa bill has enshrined as policy the kind of thing a drunken conservative might just like yell at his neighbor, right, who has a different different skin color, and it falls just short of making fake, mocking Chinese the officially recognized language of China, according to the United Kingdom.

Yeah, I mean, and again, this sort of goes back to the origin that Ria talked about in Boris Johnson's awkwardness as

Prime Minister.

And it sort of illustrates a kind of

classic trope of modern leadership: that it doesn't matter how insane and unpopular an idea is, what matters is that you have the strength to stick with it in the face of reality, evidence, logic, ethics, and law?

And

so that's, I mean, that's almost more important than anything.

It doesn't matter that it's it's cost us 250 million pounds and we've sent we have rwandered zero uh zero asylum seek i think we can now use rwanda as a verb um uh which i think to rwanda will also come to mean to make something up that you know won't work because you had to be seen to do something and stick with it despite it being ineffective inefficient uneconomic and probably illegal because you can't be seen to back down such a language always uh always evolves but um but that'll be Children's Word of the Year next year.

Well, in more children fearing their future news, obviously one of the great issues for modern children is the fact that they will inevitably be taken over by the AI robots that are going to take over us all.

But at least people of our age have had a bit more time to enjoy not being governed by AI robots.

I mean, ever since the dawn of humanity, people have wondered when the robots would take over, and these days that day seems to be getting ever closer by the day.

We have two hopes for salvation.

One is waiting for another species to overtake us and then keep us as much loved pets as happened of course with dogs after we took the top dog position from them.

That's got a sting when you lose a position that's been named after you as I know from when I lost the Andy Zaltzmann Award for Best Bugle co-host to look I don't want to talk about it.

And

our second hope for salvation is that the robots turn on each other.

And we saw that this week when an AI chatbot for the delivery firm DPD was coaxed into a bout of uncharacteristic and almost pitiably nihilistic self-awareness, admitting tearfully that it was useless and then viciously turning on its owner with a frankly withering haiku of all things.

This is after a customer asked it to write a haiku and to swear and it did that on demand.

I mean, what can we learn about

you know,

where we are in this process of all humanity being eradicated by

the computerized future.

Well, I feel vindicated because I was on Hinge and I was having a miserable time.

And I'm like, I knew AI didn't want me to find love.

I knew it.

Because Hinge uses an AI algorithm to try and pair you up with people.

And I'm like, I don't trust this.

Why should I trust AI to find me my next life partner when it can't even draw hands?

You know what I'm saying?

And now I know.

Now I know it's as bitter and alone as I am.

And

DPD deserves what it gets.

I'm actually kind of nervous about this development because,

you know, railing against customer service,

self-loathing, cursing.

Chatbots have gotten too close to being human.

This is the most relatable a robot has ever been.

Just being like, ah, this company never,

they suck at delivery.

And I'm a piece of shit.

And I'm like, man, this is, they are like, they've been reading my mind.

This is too scary.

Someone's going to turn down the dial on how powerful these chatbots are.

I think it's a real wake-up call for DPD, though, because fundamentally the way AI works is it scans everything that the internet has to offer, and then it...

and it processes that and spits it back out at you.

So if the only thing it can come up with when somebody says, write a haiku about DPD is DPD can't do its job, DPD is a piece of shit, means DPD needs to up its game because that's all it's finding on the internet about DPT.

I mean, that is, I think we need to get chatbots for everybody and set these little tests for them because it's the fastest way to see what the internet has about you that's out there.

The Tory government should really be spending every morning with the Tory AI chat bot for half an hour just going, and what does the internet think about us?

The art of customer service has of course advanced over the years from unprofitable attempts to actually serve customers to the more commercially savvy approach of driving customers into a pit of frustration and despair, saving on costly humans to provide actual assistance to other humans and ensuring that extracting a basic answer to a basic question is a task akin to getting a coherent answer from a dead pharaoh about what they'd like from a takeaway app without actually being allowed inside their pyramid.

This approach is called the futilitarian approach,

making futility the ultimate aim of all human life.

So and then we just give up and accept that our broken washing machine is a divinely ordained fate and get on with our lives.

So it makes makes commercial sense.

Before we go, sports section now.

And well, it's been the NFL playoffs.

And while thrilling action, Taylor Swift put in a superb fourth-quarter defensive performance to see the Kansas City Chiefs through to the AFC Championship game.

The 34-year-old billionaire musician inspiring the Chiefs to hold off the Buffalo Bills, who played without any support from Taylor Swift in a gripping 27-24 victory.

In offense, Swift proved simply too melodic for the Bills to handle, passing and receiving for two touchdowns and handing the ball off to herself to run in for another.

Next Sunday, Swift will face the Baltimore Ravens, who, despite the absence of Taylor Swift, put in a superb second-half performance to overcome the equally Taylor Swiftless Houston Texans.

Although none of the 44 points scored in the game were celebrated by Taylor Swift, the Ravens somehow managed to run out 34-10 winners, thanks to star quarterback Not Taylor Knott Swift, who confirmed his Grammy Award-winning credentials with two superb rushing touchdowns.

Taylor Swift was not involved in the game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Green Bay Packers, so no one knows who won that one, whilst the Detroit Lions and Tampa Bay Buckets evidently held no no interest for the We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together singer and have both been eliminated.

Full updates on Taylor Swift's

championship matches against herself next week.

I'm pulling for Taylor Swift.

That's good.

I'm actually, I haven't been following the NFL because I've been so busy training my kids how to play darts.

That's the future.

That is the future.

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

Thank you very much for listening.

Don't forget to buy your tickets to the Bugle live tour in March

around the UK.

Details on the Bugle website and elsewhere on the internet.

And to join our voluntary subscription scheme and to give a recurring or one-off contribution to help keep the show free, flourishing, and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

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Josh, anything to plug?

Oh my gosh, I'm doing things again.

I'm back on the road across the U.S.

Currently, I have dates for sale in Beverly, Massachusetts, outside Boston this weekend, January 26th and 27th.

And then later, I'm going to,

shoot, Minneapolis, excuse me, St.

Paul, not Minneapolis, but I don't mean to be offensive.

I know.

Bloomington, Indiana,

and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Very excited for those dates.

You can get tickets to everything at joshgondelman.com.

I have a newsletter called That's Marvelous.

You can also, it's joshgondelman.substack.com where you get it from my website.

It's free pep talks every Monday, and you can see all the other stuff I'm working on.

I have a little 10-minute stand-up set that don't I shot with Don't Tell Comedy that you can find on YouTube or available.

You can find on all my social media at Josh Gondolin.

And I just put this up for sale this week.

I'm recording a new hour-long stand-up special in Brooklyn, June 21st, but it will sell out at the Bell House.

I'm super psyched.

If you're a New York bugler, I would love for you to be there.

Yeah,

I'm really psyched about it.

The Bellhouse is where you made your first bugle film.

That's right.

That's right.

That's so fun.

Absolutely.

It was.

So the scene of the crime.

That's how they get you and returning to the scene of the crime.

Rhea, anything to plug?

Yeah, well, I'm going on tour this year as well, back on tour with the Reawakening show.

So

there's a couple dates in february and then we hit the road properly march all the way through to july around the uk and ireland so making it technically a uk and european tour yes international yeah

baby so if you were around the uk or ireland or if you just want to have a nice weekend in dublin and actually buy the tickets because i've heard that the the dubliners they like to leave it to really the last moment and they're making me sweat they really are making me sweat so come spend the weekend with me in ireland and we'll have some green Guinness together.

But otherwise, love to see you at any of those dates.

Those are all on realina.com.

Otherwise, I'm going to do my best to get over to New York or at least send people to New York to see Josh on the 21st at the Bellhouse.

I'm going to send my sister because she's over there with a bunch of people.

I always love for your sister to come.

So, is that Bellhouse?

June 21st.

I'm writing it down.

June 21st.

So, June 21st time.

I'm telling her.

Yeah, no, she always wants.

I always give her recommendations of what to go see.

Oh, that's so nice.

Thank you.

bolu.

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.