Cormack McCarthy's Spring Break

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4275 of the world's foremost source of reliably unreliable half-truth speculation, an analysis of the latest developments in the human race's fierce battle with itself in the evolutionary race.

I'm Andy Zaltzmann, Lord of all I survey, albeit that the only surveys I do are of me.

And it's time to do this week's survey, right now, in fact.

Here's the first question on the survey.

Do you think Andy Zoltzman should remain as host of the Bugle podcast?

I think I'll put down don't know, no change in the polling on that one.

It is the 25th of September 2023 and today I'm joined from the unremittingly Utopian Harmony Fest and glittering beacon of mutual tolerance and respect that is the United States of America by Josh Gondelman.

Josh, welcome back to the Bugle.

How are you?

I'm well, thank you.

Happy to be a utopian correspondent.

And also joining us here in London in the enduring land of grudgery and recriminational stroppledom that is the UK.

It's the one last best hope for a brighter future.

Ian Smith, Ian, can you live up to that hype?

Oh, I don't know.

It's a lot of pressure, isn't it?

It is.

I think you're after it.

I think you're after it.

What worries me is why no one, and I've only just finding out about this now.

Right, okay.

Yeah.

So I'm on the committee and we pick you as our last one last best hope for a brighter future.

So

I've got to start doing some prep.

Josh, you join us on an exciting day.

It seems that the

reminder.

The writers' strike is coming to an end.

Can you just fill us in on what's happened and why?

It seems that way.

It seems like the Writers Guild of America and the ANPDP, the Alliance of Studios, has come to a tentative agreement.

So there aren't a ton of details yet, but it is really exciting news and hopefully more good news to come.

It's been 146 days, and so I think people are really excited to hear that we've reached this tentative agreement.

SAG AFTRA is still on strike, and hopefully that will get resolved soon as well.

And then I'm excited to go back to being just regular unemployed.

That's what's on the horizon for me.

And I mean, how do you think this is going to change writing?

Because people have been, you know, they've got 146 days of pure quality backed up in them.

It's just going to just all come splurging out into the greatest television ever, ever created.

That's right.

It's going to be like uncrimping the garden hose for just 11,000 writers' brains all at once.

And it is going to be, yeah, it's going to be a geyser of excitement and quality.

Ian, since you were lost on the Bugle, you've been to the Edinburgh Festival where you

lost uh you lost the festival um yeah hard luck I mean you you were announced as one of the the near runners up so congratulations for that but I mean how has that that defeat weighed weighed on you

um yeah well because I guess it's quite good I was nominated for um three varying quality awards and didn't didn't win any of them so um the there's a moment where you feel very proud of yourself, but you know that there's an inevitable crushing defeat coming not once but three times.

So it's quite a testing month, a bit of a roller coaster.

Well, you'll fit right in on the bugle as a serial loser.

That's why we have you on this show.

In more positive news, though, I got a text message from my voiceover agent today saying that I might be able to audition for a role in the CBB's animated series Dog Squad.

So

yeah, maybe in a few months' time I'll be too big to be coming on this podcast.

Who's the real winner now?

Ian's last performance in the shed, Andy, in May featured Ian panicking about what he should do for his Edinburgh show this year.

So it's nice to see the full narrative arc of that show.

Well, yeah, congratulations on doing so well.

And we will give you a chance to plug your imminent run at Soho Theatre later in the show.

But first, as I said, we are recording on the 25th of September 2023 On this day in 1690, the first ever newspaper to appear in America was published.

Public occurrences, both foreign and domestic,

lasted one issue in 1690 before it was closed down by the British colonial authorities.

Very unlucky for public occurrences, both foreign and domestic, to launch on one of the very few momentary micro-periods of British history when a remorseless commitment to free speech has not been on the British core values list.

It was shut down for

reasons that

the 1690s could probably share with us at some point.

It does raise an interesting question though.

Should all newspapers be restricted to a maximum of one issue?

Would that lead to a healthier media landscape if they weren't allowed to kind of just keep festering the society from within?

I'd be in favour of that.

But the problem with only ever having one issue on the 25th of September 1690 was that we never found out the answers to the daily quiz in that first issue but luckily I can share them now the answers to the quiz question one Ferdinand III preceded Leopold I as Holy Roman Emperor was of course the New York bunny wangers who won the inaugural 1689 season of the American Rabbit Hurling Championship question three she was his cousin question four probably a witch question five definitely a witch and question six the best-selling children's book of 1689 was of course that's not my pope

So that on this day in 1690, the only ever issue of the greatest newspaper of all time.

As always, while we're on the subject of newspapers, a section of this audio newspaper is going straight in the bin.

And it's featuring a man who's, well, published a lot of newspapers, Rupert Fox Murdoch, so-called because of the stench he leaves behind in the detritus of public discourse after he's rummaged around with it, is stepping down as the boss of Fox and News Corp.

And our section in the bin looks at where now for Rupert Murdoch?

What next for him?

He did say as he stepped down, the battle for freedom of speech and ultimately the freedom of thought has never been more intense.

And he can certainly take a lot of credit for quite how fing intense that battle has become.

And you can decide what side of that battle you think he was on.

Murdoch, of course, is best known for being in charge of News Corp when Times Online launched the Bugle podcast.

Rupel didn't have a particularly hands-on role though, as I remember.

But what next for him?

Well, of course, he has been linked with the Man United job with Eric Ten Haag under pressure.

An experienced leader such as Rupert Murdoch could be what the Red Devils need to turn around their faltering season.

Alternatively, he might open a coffee shop and or fair trade sustainable fashion boutique.

Option three, to pursue his childhood dream of a career in interpretive dance.

He is apparently working on a solo ballet based on the Australian mythological frog Tiddalick, one of the star amphibians of Aboriginal creation stories, teaming up with tennis star Pat Rafter to save a distressed platypus called Mildred.

from being kidnapped by aliens.

Can't wait to see that.

Option four is that he could be put out to stud to breed the next generation of democracy-skewing media billionaire truth-splatterers.

Some suggest that might already have happened.

Another option is to start a new news empire from scratch.

Rupert apparently looking at starting up a local newspaper in the rural Bolivian town of Bermejo.

Good challenge for Rupert to see if he's still got those skills at the age of 92.

Another option is to run for elected office.

Not a particularly efficient way of wielding power.

In fact, let me do the maths.

It's 0.03% as effective as what he's done previously, so he might not be interested in that.

And of course, the most likely option is the belated formation of his prog folk band of quite literal 90s music with fellow non-agenarians Buzz, Honestly The Moon is Real, Aldrin, Henry Kissy Kissinger, and retired monarch and celebrity own Death Faker The Queen.

Tour dates imminent.

Well, I mean, whatever he does,

he's really been in an intense position for a long time.

He's really just probably, whatever it is, going to take a step back and enjoy a little period of transition before his, what clearly is his ultimate goal of hell, eternal hell.

Yeah, I mean, I guess you don't want to rush into that, do you?

No, you don't want to move from one big thing right into the next big thing.

But I mean, maybe that's what hell needs.

We will actually touch on hell

later in the show.

Ian Smith has proved himself hell correspondent.

We'll have all the latest from there.

Top story this week: opening gates news.

Well, life is in many ways, if you want it to be, all about opening gates, closing gates, and choosing whether or not to open or close gates, both literal and, of course, metaphorical gates.

And if you're a surgeon specializing in tech billionaires, Bill Gates is too.

But one gate I've generally been sceptical of opening is the gates of hell.

But it turns out they have now been officially opened, according to the UN Secretary General, Antonio.

Go with your Guterres.

Humanity has opened the gates of hell.

Ian, I mean,

generally, people have been opposed to opening the gates of hell.

Do you think this is a good move or not on behalf of humanity?

Well, I think I just assume this must have happened ages ago.

It doesn't feel like a shocking development, just more like a reminder.

Because, yeah, he said as well that we're heading towards a dangerous and unstable world.

And if we're not in that now,

what is coming up?

Um,

I think to say something that's going to make us feel um scared, it would have to get to sort of uh Cormac McCarthy the road levels that he has to come on stage and say, We're we're heading, um, we're heading towards a world where we're carrying all our possessions around in a trolley, trying to protect our children from cannibals.

And I think even then, some people would see that as quite an aspirational lifestyle.

There's two sides to that, right?

Some people might hear that and go, I'm going to have to protect my children to be a cannibal.

And then other people might think, I'm going to get to eat a kid.

I've always wanted to.

Two sides to every coin.

Yeah,

that's that positive American attitude you bring, Josh.

I mean,

is, you know, America, I mean, opening the gates of hell is pretty much, you know, a summary of American politics 2016 and following years.

I mean, are people concerned about what might come out of the gates of hell or are they hoping for an improvement if the forces of evil from within the bowels of hell actually come out and start working in American politics?

Will this improve things for America as a nation?

Well, I do think there is about half the country that is against opening the gates of hell pretty firmly.

Or like we should at least means test what it would do to open the gates of hell.

And then we've got the other half that wants to kind of kiss the end of the world right on the apocalypse.

And

I do think that climate change, right, it is, hell is an apt metaphor for what's happening because if it gets warmer, it will be spring break everywhere all the time.

And I can't imagine a more torturous set of circumstances under which to live other than Cormick McCarthy's spring break,

his lost novel.

Yeah, so he was, Guterres was specifically referring to the environment.

And, you know, I don't know what you think of the environment, if you're for or against it, but it's proved to be a very irritating opponent for us humans.

And particularly now as we find ourselves forced into kowtowing to the woke agenda of wanting the planet to remain inhabitable beyond the economically crucial next five to ten years.

And, you know, obviously there's those who think the environment is a hoax.

or that the reason we get once in a millennium weather events about once every three months is not because the environment has changed, but because time has changed and millenniums are in fact only 12 weeks long these days.

Or even who think that what's the point of having a planet to live on in 200 years' time if your quarterly economic figures don't start improving now?

So, I mean, it's not quite as clear-cut an issue as destroying the environment and the planet is bad.

And maybe the UN needs to have a little more flexibility on that.

It is alarming to hear diplomats invoke biblical imagery, right?

That's not their purview.

That's truly like if a priest was like, you have a 0.7% chance of survival.

And you're like, whoa, you really shifted the paradigm, father.

And he made these comments at a one-day climate summit.

And I was very relieved that there was a one-day climate summit because I think that what the world needs in these times of global boiling is another summit.

And not just any summit, but a one-day summit that is preparing for another summit later in the year.

Because there is no problem too big that it cannot be solved by throwing good summits after bad to get it fixed at some point in the next 300 years.

The next summit as well, COP28, is in Dubai.

So if they're worried about things getting hotter, just hold it in Norway.

What to make things seem better?

That's

it would feel cooler.

Right.

Yeah.

I think that could work.

I was going to say, how do you get a climate summit in Dubai?

That feels like a World Cup level of bribery must have been involved.

Yeah, it's not that obvious place to have it, is it?

And, you know, as always, with climate summits, it will involve a fk of a lot of people flying a f of a long way for not very much time and not doing a great deal with it.

I did feel a little sorry for Guterres.

I mean, his face, as you'd expect, I guess, from the UN Secretary General, his face very much says, I hate my fing job.

And, you know, there must be a day when he just thinks, oh, can we just talk about something less depressing than all the stuff I have to talk about?

So, I do feel a bit sorry for him.

Do you think at the UN conferences they have a silly story at the end?

Like on the news?

If you were a delegate at the UN conference, and that's surely just a matter of timing,

what kind of thing would you tag on to the end just to perk things up?

Usually, it's like a record-breaking size bit of food.

That's the crowd pleaser to come on and say,

well, we've made the world's longest baguette, so

it can't be all bad, can it?

Speaking of warming, warming, this world record-size pizza was cooked in an oven that gets up to 550 degrees.

There was an article here about, well, the impact that these things are having on the younger generation.

And a survey for the Prince's Trust in the UK found that young people are...

now abandoning their dreams and ambitions because of a range of factors including the cost of living crisis but also the sort of doom-laden state of the environment and this was presented as a bad news story.

And to me, I mean, this is one of the few silver linings from this, because, I mean, it used to be that it took, you know, I don't know, a decade, two decades, sometimes even three decades for society and life to crush the spirit of the young until they just give up all hope.

But now we're getting it done by the time people are in their mid-20s.

And this is just a rare example of efficiency in the modern economy.

And I'm absolutely right on board with it.

I agree.

I think we've, the last few generations have been encouraged to live their dreams.

and that's what got us into this mess, right?

Dreams.

In Britain, there's been

interesting moods in the environment debate, Ian.

Rishi Sunak, the interim Prime Minister, has jumped once more into the burning breach and chucked some more soothing matches into the fire.

He's announced various rollbacks of British environmental commitments.

He's delaying the phase-out of gas boilers and petrol cars.

And he also announced he was scrapping a lot of things that weren't going to happen anyway, but had kind of been mentioned so that if they were to happen, which they never were going to happen, then they could easily have happened.

And he's presented this as him jumping to the defence of ordinary British people and stopping things that weren't going to happen to them.

And with the Conservatives riding so low in the poll, Sunak clearly is jumping between environmental bandwagons in an effort to steer his government's Titanic to a slightly less less deep and soggy section of the electoral seabed.

Do you think this will prove effective?

I mean, he is relying on people just ignoring the fact that he is making shit up that he's going to stop from happening, that wasn't going to happen.

Like people being forced to have seven different bins in their homes, which wasn't going to happen.

I mean,

do you think this is the way for politicians now to just make things up that weren't going to happen and then present themselves as heroes for stopping them them happening.

It probably is the best way to get an electorate enthusiastic because, I mean, most people don't look these things up.

Like, most people don't fact-check anything.

So, if you say a thing happened and I stopped it, you're probably just going to believe someone.

Like, I think if I told my friends, oh, I saw a woman getting a handbag stolen, and I chased after the person and I gave her a handbag back.

But my friends aren't going to be checking the CCTV cameras of the area.

I said it was going to happen.

They're just going to believe me.

I'll maybe give myself a black eye, just punch myself in the face.

So, yeah, it's very, but even

seven bins, I can't think of seven categories of waste that could go in bins.

I tried to list it, and I've got recycling food waste, garden waste,

human waste.

Then all I could do was miscellaneous, and and then i've gone whites and yorks

doesn't feel right no

i mean that's a lot of bins isn't it seven

seven different bins that we'd have been forced forced to have similarly there were other other suggestions uh the number of passengers you are going to be allowed to have in your car and these weren't so much um concrete proposals they were things that have been vaguely floated as ideas for putative moments in the future.

But it was presented by Sunak as if we were going to be forced to share cars with people we'd never met who were going in completely different directions to us and were legally entitled to sit in the back seat, threateningly revving a chainsaw.

So, I mean, it's a weird thing, isn't it?

I mean, you can't scrap something that wasn't going to happen and saying, well, I can't and would not accuse the Prime Minister of losing credibility or authority or legitimacy.

I mean, similarly, on those grounds, I couldn't say that.

I mean, Josh, what did, I don't know if you've been sort of following this story over here, but again, the environment seems to become this sort of political issue where it's almost sort of being performatively wrong on the environment seems to be electorally effective.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, you're talking about this is the future.

And I'm saying this is last year's, this is old news for us.

That's classic.

Although I do think

there's no better way to fulfill campaign promises than to promise to solve problems that don't exist.

That's

betting a thousand.

Easy, right?

Oh, hey, no, no, um, extraterrestrials are going to come down to Earth and launch nuclear weapons at our

heads of state.

Done.

Done.

100% done.

Joe Biden, interestingly, we got some good climate news over here.

Joe Biden started a

climate corps, the American Climate Corps, which will employ 20,000 Americans in green energy and environmental restoration jobs.

And on one hand, I am happy to see any concrete step in the right direction.

But on the other hand, by like employing 20,000 people in this climate corps, it's like saying, oh, you want a livable climate?

You fing do it.

What do you think about that?

Sunak also said, for too many years, politicians and governments of all stripes have not been honest about the costs and trade-offs.

And he was talking about the environment, but in a country that voted for Brexit, in which he supported Brexit, and it was entirely founded on not being honest about costs and trade-offs, there was the heroic levels of hypocrisy that politicians reach for now.

In a way,

you have to admire it.

It's like watching Armand Duplantis do the poll vault.

You think, I mean, he shouldn't be able to go as high as he does, but somehow he keeps finding finding.

Well, he stood in front of a lectern as he made this speech with a new slogan on the front saying, long-term decisions for a brighter future.

I don't know if that was the first instance of a party managing to get two screeching U-turns into one pithy slogan,

or just shows the dangers of electrons not being wide enough to fit the whole slogan on, and that they missed off the words at the end.

Long-term decisions for a brighter future are absolutely not on the fing agenda, or are the kind of woke shit we won't have any truck with, broke conservative, to ram the final nail into the coffin of the future.

Also, I think we're maybe being unfair because when I think a conservative leader doesn't mean what we mean when they say long term because their sort of life expectancy in that job is about three months.

So they probably see long term as like a six-week plan.

Right.

Butterfly politics.

They're on the Andy Zaltzmann 12-week millennium

concept of time.

And it wasn't just Sunak.

Still surprising after all this time, Home Secretary Siwella Bravman, in a rare rare shaft of honesty and accuracy, said, we are not going to save the planet, and then spoiled it all by carrying on and finishing the sentence by bankrupting the British people, which is a real shame that that is not an option for saving the planet.

Because if you could save the planet by bankrupting the British people, we would have people in our government who are genuinely world-leading environmental superheroes.

And we would have to reinterpret Liz Truss's prime ministership as an effective, if extreme, just stop oil protest.

And

I'm not saying I agree with the technique she chose to use.

She shouldn't have inconvenienced ordinary people to make her point as much as she did, but at least it got the message across.

And Bravman also said that net zero targets were goals, not straight jackets.

But let's not forget, you don't need to score a goal to win a football match.

And really, we just need to grind out a nil-nil draw against the environment, take it to a replay, maybe try and force it to penalties.

Hope the environment bottles it under pressure in a game it knows it should have won.

It is the British way.

I'd also love to see a football game where the team have to wear straitjackets.

Just trying to see someone get up after a foul.

Right.

It would do away with those controversial hand ball calls, wouldn't it?

She's really writing off the potential joys of straitjackets.

You can say,

Yeah, I don't know if there's a single sport that wouldn't be more entertaining to watch if everyone involved wasn't wearing a straitjacket.

Oh, snooker?

I don't know.

It'd be funny.

It's always good to look for ways to improve sport.

The chair of Ford UK said she wanted only three things from the British government, ambition, commitment and consistency.

Which is a request which, based on the record of this government, has as much chance of success as asking your pet Anaconda for legs, well-researched tennis punditry and a fine baritone voice.

Anacondas, really, they only make a singular demand, and that's buns, huh?

Well, it's been a while since we had

some exot reference.

Lord Mixlot now, of course, since he was a mobile.

Of course.

On some related topic,

we've talked a bit about the HS2 rail line over the years on the Bugle, a flagship new rail line that was supposed to revolutionise transport across the nation,

in particular across the north of England, where there's been so little investment in the rail network over recent decades.

And it was going to revolutionize rail transport in the north of England by making it about 10 minutes quicker to get from London to Birmingham.

Now, I know, Ian, you grew up in the north of England.

You must have been hugely excited about the prospect of the slightly shorter train times to Birmingham just absolutely rocketing the northern economy into another dimension.

But it turns out now that this rail line will not reach either end of its planned route.

It's not going to reach as far as the north, and it's not even going to reach all the way into central London.

They're now talking about stopping it at Old Oak Common, and then people have to get on the tube.

So it'll basically take just as long, but with tens of billions of pounds wasted for no fucking reason.

I mean, obviously, as a representative of the north of England, you must be honoured and delighted that this has been bequeathed to your people.

I mean, yeah, the slight consolation of it not

going to the north is that it also isn't going to London.

Because,

yeah,

the thing of like when

you realise when you live in London that the further out a train stop is, the more obscure and like a sort of children's book the train station names become.

So, especially if you're at Old Oak Common, you're like, right, that's not essential at all.

Some of the ones on the outskirts, there's Chalfont and Latimer on the Metropolitan line, which sounds like a kind of ITV2 detective drama.

Or they become sort of vaguely sexual innuendos like Northwood, Bushy, Bellsize Park, and Rodding Valley.

But also, so I read that

well done, by the way, for not bringing Cock Fosters into that list.

That was remarkably disciplined, of course.

Yeah, well, I've sort of

I see it as a mark of becoming a Londoner when you can hear Cock Fosters on the tube and you don't giggle anymore.

You can spot the tourists by people who are like

but I'm yeah, Train.

I'm still there, I'm still giggling.

I mean, yeah, I'm not happy that that joy has gone from my life.

But they they're gonna come into Aldoke Common and then they're gonna have to get the Elizabeth line.

And there was an article that said that's gonna put an unbelievable amount of strain on the Elizabeth line.

And it just made me think

we can't have the Elizabeth line dying in the same way that Queen Elizabeth died, being ridden by far too many people from Birmingham until she stops working.

Family show in.

Family show.

I think that might be the most revolting thing anyone said in the entire history of the bug.

Hold on.

I wrote it down.

I felt giddy.

I had to say it.

No, I thought it was beautiful.

Just like mathematically.

Like, I saw all the pieces to that joke hovering behind my head just as a beautiful mathematical equation and was like, he's done it, he's cracked it.

Yep.

And

I think the funniest thing about them kind of doing this to the north is like a big part of how they won the last election was getting that the red belt of northern

previously Labour voting towns, and then with not long for a general election to go, they're sort of announcing basically we don't care about the north.

And the Conservatives are doing this immediately before they have their conference in Manchester, so they're going to cancel the trains to Manchester and then go to Manchester.

It seems,

I mean, if you're going to sort of do that to them, you think surely a clever person would have the conference in Manchester, tell them they can't wait for HS2 to come and then the next week go, oh, no, actually, we're not going to do that.

They're not even timing their lies.

The way they're doing it now, they're basically banking on like, well, are you going to catch us when we leave?

We're just out of here.

You don't have a, there's no transportation.

Because I do think this is, Andy, you hit on this.

I think this is an environmentally friendly move, right?

What's more environmentally friendly than getting across the country on rapid, widely available green public transportation?

And that's staying still, not going anywhere.

And I think by encouraging the public to the stay where you are initiative, the kind of a shelter in place indefinitely, I think that is going to be huge for carbon emissions.

Yeah.

It's a very exciting time.

Also, as you said, this HS2 line now, I think, has become that rare infrastructure project that benefits all parts of the United Kingdom equally.

All the different countries, all the different regions of the United Kingdom are getting as much from this HS2 project as all the others

because it's going to be absolutely fing useless to everyone.

And that is the kind of equality we have been asking for for years.

It feels a bit like the...

if I'm getting the name right, the Sagrada Familia

in Barcelona,

the sort of unfinished cathedral, that it might become a sort of tourist attraction where people will just come and look at the HS2 tracks and go, well, the architect said this was going to reach Manchester, and we keep chipping away at it over the years.

And none of us are going to admit that it does look terrible, to be honest.

Another positive environmental story.

Well, one animal that is doing very well is rhinoceroses, which have roared, if indeed a rhinoceros can roar, back up in population to 27,000, which is way more than the half a million that were at large in the 20th century, if I've done the maths right.

Before people decided that it might be a good idea to see if killing almost half a million rhinoceroses would be fun or not.

And of course, Lego started their luxury Rhino Horn Limited Edition.

Did that ever get made?

I'm not sure that ever got made.

I know they did the Hippo-Todger edition, but I don't know if the Rhinohorn one got got canned or not.

But well, there has been a bit of a recovery in the rhino population.

Is this good or bad?

I mean, because they are an evolutionary threat, as discussed.

We've discussed this with a number of species that we're supposed to be excited about being safe.

But the rhino is one of our competitor species.

They could easily horn us into submission.

And now we're we're actively helping them climb back up the ranking.

Yeah, I think 27,000 feels like plenty.

Right.

Totally agree.

Right.

You say you want a global rhino quota that

you cannot go.

A one-child policy.

That's kind of how many people...

That's about how many people live in the town that I grew up in, and that's plenty.

Right, okay.

I don't need more rhinoceroses than people I grew up around.

But I mean, what if...

So you're saying, should we put all 27 rhinoceroses in a single town and see if that helps?

Or, you know, would they just all all want to leave like you, and you would end up with a New York

full of rhinoceroses or rhinoceroses pursuing their dreams, which, as we all know, is environmentally catastrophic.

Well, this is it, right?

Our good environmental news is like, hey, there's more monsters.

Big-horned monsters are making a comeback.

She's like, oh, it couldn't be something fluffy.

I guess the message of this podcast is death to rhinoceroses

for the good of society and the environment.

I don't think they're really back until we know what one tastes like.

That's when I think we'll know that

they're back enough that we don't have to worry.

And you can casually be like, oh, this tastes like rhino.

And I mean normal people, because I think Jeff Bezos knows what a rhinoceros tastes like.

But I don't think they're back enough until regular people, like until Burger King has a rhinoceros whopper called the Rhiwaparus.

Right.

So, this now is a goal for the conservationists.

You will not have succeeded until

what did you call it?

The rhinoceros whopper?

The Riwaparis, yeah.

Yeah, the Riwopper.

The Rywaparis is on the menu at Burger Kings.

You will have failed, rhinoceros conservationists, until aim for that.

Reach for the stars.

Burger King, reach for the stars.

American news now, and what's been a bit of a tough week for Joe Biden, the president, who's well had a, well, what seems to be most of his weeks now in which various things have not gone quite as well as they would ideally have gone for a president, raising the question, is he too old?

To which the answer is, is the Pope a Catholic?

And the answer to that is yes.

And both are that way because their followers have chosen them to be so.

Because American politics has struggled, it's fair to say, Josh, to embrace the new, as we mentioned on the bugle before, since Bill Clinton was born.

The only person to be born who's gone on to be president is Barack Obama.

And it's now heading towards a quarter of a century since Clinton

was president.

It is in an extraordinary state, American politics, and it's quite hard to look ahead to the next, what, year and a bit without feeling

that humanity is entirely doomed.

So, I mean, how do you see

the week Biden's had, and what that tells us about American politics now?

It's bad, right?

Because our choices are Joe Biden, who spent the week.

He bumped into a flag.

He's getting people's names wrong.

He's forgetting to shake hands with foreign leaders.

And as the president, you have to do,

in America, you have to do one of two things.

You can be right, right?

You can get things right.

You can be astute, or you can do what Donald Trump has always been doing and been wrong on purpose.

Like, he just says whatever.

And even if he accidentally calls someone the wrong name, he just rolls with it and decides that's their name now.

Like, that's Bob DeSantis.

Doesn't he look more like a Bob?

He'd be right at home in a bucket full of apples on Halloween going up and down, wouldn't he, folks?

And so I think like he's Biden's going to pick a lane.

Is he going to like keep it sharp, right?

Do a couple crossword puzzles, memorize the clock, or is he going to do what Trump does and just say whatever and lean into it?

Biden does seem like kind of normal for a man of his age, but the problem is when you're relying on your peers and you're 80 years old, there is an enormous likelihood that they'll space out and write in Jimmy Carter or Howdy Doody for president, and that's going to tank your whole campaign.

So as you said, scary.

Walking into flagpoles, getting people's names wrong, forgetting to shake people's hands.

I mean, I would say, you know, that's probably the worst things an American president has done in living memory.

I would say that is way worse than encouraging insurrection and an attack on the heart of American democracy.

He walked into a f ⁇ ing flagpole.

For f ⁇ ing sake, I mean, are you going to accept that?

So there's a new poll, right?

And it feels like it's making an undue impact, Andy.

The same poll has been widely criticized.

There's a new poll that says Biden's approval rating is 37%, which is definitely a bad sign when a sitting president's approval rating is less than half of their age.

That's terrifying.

But the same poll has been criticized for using an unrepresentative sample of Americans.

It showed that Trump's leading Biden by 10% nationally, which seems highly unlikely considering what a huge percentage of Trump's supporters are now in jail for storming the Capitol.

You'd think that would tip the scales a little bit.

There's no chance, right, that Trump wins by that big a margin.

Our elections aren't usually that divided in the U.S.

If Trump retakes the presidency, it'll be the old-fashioned way that his Republican predecessors did.

In fact, he did it himself.

Losing by millions of votes and taking power because of a map for cheating creating enslavers 250 years ago.

Tradition.

Ian, I mean,

I don't know if you're going to planning to vote in the American election next year.

I know you love democracy and you vote as often as you can in as many different places as possible.

Would you be wary of voting for a man displaying quite such noticeable signs of age?

Which one?

Yeah,

well, Trump said that there's quite a lot of electoral fraud.

So according to Trump, who I always believe I should be able to vote quite easily

with with my fake American passport,

Jose Rodriguez will be casting his vote.

Yeah, I mean, I was trying to look up because I'm always really fascinated by the US elections.

And so, with the last one, because it was during lockdown,

I was going to stay up and do like an all-nighter,

and I baked a cheesecake and made some sort of like

American

food.

And I was like, this is going to be fun.

We're going to watch Trump get sort of ousted.

And then I couldn't stay awake any longer.

And then it was still like four or five days before it was confirmed.

And at that point, the cheesecake had long gone.

I think it started off as like jokes about him being old.

And now it's harder to make those jokes because he's doing stuff that just makes you genuinely worried.

Like, there was a thing, I read that he told the same story twice at the same event, like in a speech.

And I was mortified when I apparently did that on the first and second dates with my girlfriend.

I started telling a story, and she had to tell me that

I'd already told her that, and we'd only met once before.

But

are you still together with that girl, Randyan?

Yes, and I've told her that anecdote maybe 10 times now.

Four or more years.

That's four, more years.

For success.

More exciting news for America.

NASA has had a huge success this week by stealing a bit of an asteroid.

It filched a bit of the Bennu asteroid as it flew relatively close to Earth and has brought the samples back.

I mean, this is very exciting news for fans of Little Bits of Asteroid, Josh.

I mean, how has it been received on the streets of New York?

Oh, this is huge.

People are out on the streets.

They're chipping up little bits of the sidewalk, holding them up as mock asteroids.

Asteroid fever has swept New York City.

This is a seven-year mission that resulted in the biggest sample of an asteroid ever being removed from space.

And I think that's so great, but I do think it was a huge missed opportunity to call this mission Apollo 13's 11.

I'm worried about the scope of this, honestly, because you've got to worry about what you bring back when you go out into space, right?

Because a professor from the National History Museum in London said that she was feeling quite emotional and tearful about this mission, which made me pause because a British professor feeling tearful, I'm like, oh no, she's for sure been replaced by an alien body double.

But I do.

I love, I like mean this so much.

I love that we still let NASA solve like space problems.

Like, there's so many people whose job is just like, how do we land a thing on a thing?

And it's so complicated and they work so hard at it.

And then they come back with this little piece of asteroid and we're and we like America just reacts like they just saw the coolest skateboard trick.

Like it's so amazing that there's a department of our government employing the most qualified scientists and their mission statement is just like, sick, brah.

Well, it does, I mean, it is, you know, with the stories we've looked at today with regard to America.

Do you sort of sum up America as a nation?

This kind of incredible scientific achievements and the most inane, insane politics that you could devise.

Strange place.

Ian, were you excited by

this asteroid story?

And what else would you like to see hauled in from space?

I was very nervous for them about they had to keep it sort of completely uncontaminated.

so i was kind of one worrying that there'd be like a crack or something but it i think it would be funny if when they um looked at the sample and amongst the dust there was like a half a like kinda bueno wrapper

or something like that and it was like ah for god's sake um

or the remnant the remnants of like of the soviet space dog um

well do you know i mean this is like a real big undertaking to keep it uncontaminated you know how hard it is with those big astronaut gloves to roll the condom all the way over the astronaut asteroid.

I'm just worried that you know, the asteroids, you know, parent is going to be obviously as you've seen any film like this, you know, it's going to be bigger and angrier, and it's going to come together.

And yeah, I think that's probably what

we've brought upon ourselves.

Now, it's like the dinosaurs all over again.

It'd be horrible if an asteroid was coming towards Earth and you just looked up at it, and everyone's like, Did I say this is for my son?

Well, that brings the end of this week's Bugle.

Thank you for listening.

Thanks to Ian and Josh for joining us.

Ian, tell us about your Soho Theatre run of your very nearly triple award-winning show.

Yeah, there's such a fine line between it.

winning so many awards and absolutely nothing.

Yeah, I'm on at Soho Theatre from the 2nd to the 7th of October at 9.15 in this very cool, fancy kind of downstairs cabra vibe room.

But yeah, I'd love you to come along.

I think I shout consistently for 55 minutes.

What more could you want in a show?

Yeah.

I am also going on tour, like a little sort of UK tour as well.

So I'm coming to a number of places that I probably won't be able to remember.

But things like Manchester,

Glasgow,

you know, that sort of vibe.

Yeah, okay.

If you're in a place like Manchester or Glasgow, do go and see Ian's Ian show.

Josh, what have you got coming up?

I'm on the road a little bit.

I've got all my tour dates.

You can find in my weekly newsletter.

That's marvelous.

That's joshgondelman.substack.com.

Or if you don't want to hear from me every week, just joshgondelman.com slash schedule.

I am this weekend, depending on how fast they go back to work, I might do a couple dates opening for

Friendemy of the Bugle John Oliver.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, in Milwaukee and Bloomington, Indiana.

And then the next weekend, I'm back out in that same part of the country in Cincinnati and Indianapolis, Indiana, on the wait, wait, don't tell me stand-up tour.

And then a few more scatter dates.

Rhode Island next week with Adam Pally,

Pittsburgh coming up.

Hopefully, some more dates soon.

Or maybe in some point in the future, I will be employed again.

So we'll see.

Well, say hello to John if you do those shows.

I will for sure.

You can hear me on the news quiz.

Ian will be appearing.

You're doing another one or two of the news quizzes of this series, I think.

Yeah, I think at the end of the month, yeah.

Well, end of October, yeah.

Do tune in for that.

That's available on BBC Sounds and eventually after

a cooling off period on other podcast platforms.

Don't forget that you can join join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme.

We have a new offering for our premium level voluntary subscribers.

There will be a monthly Ask Andy show.

You can fire me any questions that you want answered and I will answer some of those questions.

The first one we are going to record next week with questions submitted by the audience at the live show we did in London that was last week's Bugle.

But you will be able to submit your questions for Ask Andy as well via an email address.

What's the email address, Chris?

Hello, Buglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

All right, there we go.

Maybe we should set up an Ask Andy at thebuglepodcast.com.

Oh, don't make me do that.

All right.

Tell them to put Ask Andy in the subject line.

Yeah, okay, that's a good idea.

Put Ask Andy in the subject line and

we'll find them better.

So do join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to get a one-off or occurring contribution.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com to help keep this show free, flourishing, and independent.

Until next week, 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.