4135 - Decade starts badly

Hello, buglers.

It's producer Chris here.

Thank you for all your love and support in this the first week of the last post.

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to the first bugle of the rest of time.

Not for the first time, of course, but also the first bugle of a brand new decade for only the second time in the history of decades.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann.

It is now the year 2020, and I am frankly no fing happier about that than you are.

But time is irritatingly good at its job, and there's all we can do about it.

So happy new decade buglers and welcome to A the second 50th of the millennium which I am counting as starting in the year 2000 because that's when the fireworks were and B issue 4135 of the bugle audio newspaper for a world whose slavish obsession with the visual seems to exacerbate by the minute of which there are still more than five million to go in this decade.

So strap in.

We'll be bringing you world exclusive coverage of everything of relevance that happens in every single one of those minutes anywhere.

To join me in this first bugle of the 2020s, I'm joined in London firstly by resplendently pink head Tiff Stevenson.

Hello, yeah, I'm in the pink.

You know, as soon as the election happened, I was depressed for a day and then I went, I'm just going to put neon on my head.

That'll help.

That'll help everything.

And has it helped everything?

Yeah, it has helped everything actually, just having a bit of brightness.

I mean, it's quite full-on.

I'm hoping it'll tone down a bit, but it doesn't seem to be going away because it's sort of stuck on my head.

I look a bit like Adrian, I don't even look like Frenchie from Greece.

I look a bit more like Dame Edna.

It's kind of almost tipping into a neon sort of violet colour.

But, you know,

I'm all for it.

I'm happy about it.

Would you ever dye your hair, Andy?

Not really.

I don't like to interfere with the curses of nature, frankly.

So I'll just let it disintegrate.

Just let it go free.

Yeah.

Of course, John Oliver dyed his hair pink for every single bugle that he ever did.

That's a little known fact.

Oh, yeah, of course, of course.

Yeah, I must, how could I forget that?

And also joining us, I've no idea what colour his hair is currently.

All the way from San Francisco.

It's NATO green.

Buenas dias bugleros.

Feliz año nuevo, feliz navidad a todos.

Absolutely.

To be honest, when I hear words like that, I just automatically assume a plate of ham is in the offer.

Is Feliz Navidad

is that Merry Christmas in Spanish?

Yes, yes, it is.

Oh, cool.

There we go.

Just some basic arse GCSE creeping in there to save me.

Also, a terrific baseballer.

Played for the Mexico City Mayhems back in the 1970s.

So, NATO, how's your decade going so far?

So far, so good.

I survived the Christmas holidays.

You know, as a Jew, the Christmas time is challenging for me.

I don't really know that much about Christianity.

And everything that I learned, I learned from the lion and the witch in the wardrobe.

So basically, as far as I can tell about the way that Christianity works, is that

the children in the C.S.

Lewis books escaped the Nazi bombing of London by

going into a cabinet and discovering a magical wonderland.

And that cabinet escape plan did not work out so well for Anne Frank.

So that's what I know about Christianity.

Also, would have been what about Hanukkah?

Hanukkah.

I don't think it's pronounced that way, is it?

I don't want to really bang on about Hanukkah again

on this show while the candles are still

warm and melty.

So let's gloss over that.

I've heard it was a cracking one this year.

Tip, have you ever enjoyed a latka?

I have, yes.

Yes.

I mean, I'm

quite spectacular.

All over the latkers.

You can't beat a good latker.

Is it a potato cake?

Oh, hell yeah.

Yeah, okay, all right.

I was just going, is it that or is it like a sweet dessert type thing?

I don't know if you're supposed to put the candles in the potato cake or not.

I'm

rusty on that.

Okay, it's not a potato cake that I'm getting the feeling it's not a potato cake.

Oh, it is a potato cake.

Oh, it is, yeah.

Well, it certainly was last time I heard that word, which is a long time ago in my childhood.

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

A special section, everything to look forward to in the 2020s.

That section has gone in the bin after two and a bit days of the decade.

It is in the bin for reasons we will touch on later in the show.

Also in the bin, a special guide, how to explain the news to your children without using the word.

That is currently completely obsolete.

Top story this week, it's the 2020s.

Now,

I don't know if you guys make New Year's resolutions.

I resolved not to this year.

It's going pretty well.

It's going pretty well.

So you've kept your resolution.

Yeah.

Self-defeating, really.

I always set myself to do 30 days of yoga with Adrian at the beginning of the year.

I don't know how many buglers know.

Do you know Adrian,

NATO?

No.

Do you know yoga?

I do know yoga, yes.

We have

a law in San Francisco that every white woman between the age of 20 and 35 is legally required to do yoga.

The Trumps were asked what their New Year's resolutions were.

Melania Trump said peace on the world, and her husband, Donald Trump, replied, peace is right, but I'm not sure you're supposed to say a resolution out loud.

I'm not sure quite where he got that idea from.

And Donald Trump, to be fair to him, did not say his New Year's resolution out loud.

He dropped it from the fing sky on an Iranian general because, well, why not set a new record for the shortest time for a decade to turn fully shit?

I mean, it's been two fing days we had of this decade before things got funky.

Yeah.

Well, hold on.

Can I just unpack that why you're not supposed to say it out loud?

It's not like a birthday wish.

No.

Is that what he's confusing it with?

Like when you blow out candles?

Yes.

Other things you're not supposed to say out loud, I think in his mind, include facts and evidence.

Correct information.

Testimony.

Yeah, we're hardly into the new decade, and there's already, it was trending on Twitter as World War III.

And I thought about this because I think I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast.

We're going to get a bit podcast inception-y here, but he was on there recently talking about when the first time the war in Iraq began, that he was at Doug Stanhope's house, and they said war coverage starts at five.

And Doug apparently said, oh my God, there's a kickoff for the war.

And now we're sort of seeing it again now.

I feel like the hashtag, it's like war is becoming memeable.

I mean, what does that say about us as a society?

That was literally trending last night on Twitter.

Happy times.

I mean, it does seem that,

NATO, that extrajudicial slaying seemed to be some kind of badge of honor amongst world leaders.

And maybe Trump just was getting embarrassed having to rock up to his monthly golf and karaoke night with the Saudi Arabian royal family, unable to match their body count.

Right.

I mean, Trump mostly wants to be able to preen about and talk about what a bad guy

this Iranian general,

Soleimani, I think his name is, Qasem Soleimani,

was, and that he was such a horrible person.

And

the Democrats,

faced with the least popular president in American history,

who's currently tied up with an impeachment scandal, their initial instinct that has led them to victory time and time again is to try to see both sides.

So the Democrats are falling all over themselves to agree with Trump that Solomani was a bad guy and an enemy to America, and that probably

we should have droned him illegally and started a war, but with more congressional oversight.

They would have preferred a different procedure to reach the inevitable worldwide conflagration.

Well, I guess we need to put this in perspective.

And it's only one extrajudicial slaying of a senior military figure from a large, well-equipped military power in a region that has been a political tinderbox pretty much ever since God said, yeah, I'll just whack it there.

This will go overboard, but just the one.

But as you said, it took basically about 0.1 seconds before the words Archduke Franz Ferdinand started trending.

And within minutes, Hollywood had announced the raft of a new Blockbuster War movie set to start coming out in around eight to ten years' time after a brief dignity pause.

I mean,

what's the strategy here, NATO, as an American?

I can't remember if you're a member of the U.S.

government or not, but I mean,

can American strategy now think more than 280 characters ahead?

No, no.

Basically,

you watch what's happening and you keep hoping that at some point the deep state that we've heard so much about will rear its ugly head and assert control over the levers of foreign policy.

But that's not happening.

Like,

have you ever heard about that there's certain kinds of like worms that their memory only lasts one minute, and that so then if it takes them like 75 seconds to die, the only memory that they have is from their perspective their entire life is spent dying?

That's sort of what American politics is right now.

That's so funny and bleak.

I don't know if you've seen

any of the tweets being fired back at Donald Trump over the fact that he was obsessed with Obama starting a war with Iran.

So people have like flagged these up to Donald Trump going back to the 29th of November 2011.

I mean, what a decade

it's been.

In order to get elected, Barack Obama will start a war with Iran.

October 9th, 2012.

Now that Obama's poll numbers are in a tailspin, watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran.

He is desperate.

September 2013, I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face.

And then on the 25th of September 2013, remember what I previously said?

Obama will someday attack Iran in order to show how tough he is.

So from that, we can take that Donald is desperate trying to save face.

He's already elected, so he's not doing it for that, and trying to show how tough he is in his own words.

And also trying to be the Barack Obama that Barack Obama never had the courage to be.

Trump's dream.

I would say...

This is possibly the worst start to a decade since the asteroid mashed up the dinosaurs on the 2nd of January in the year 66 million BC.

Can you think of a worse,

like a more inauspicious beginning to 10 years of

universe history?

Because I can't remember what the beginning of 2010 was, really.

Like, you know, I can remember my own personal milestones.

I mean, it was a great year for Edinburgh shows.

Right.

Because I did one.

Yeah.

But I mean, some people in the world may see that as the worst start to a decade.

Actually, the show I did that year was called Dictators.

And it was, who was it?

It was Hitler, Mugabe, Gaddafi, OK Magazine, and my mum.

And so the big five.

So

I think we expect to see my mum really rise through the ranks.

Well, I think

your mum probably had the best decade of any of those people in that show.

She did.

Certainly way better than Gaddafi.

And I mean, is this, how far-reaching do we think the implications of this are?

Well, I don't know.

Nato,

what's the sense in America?

Have people reacted to

this act?

Well, it's been interesting to watch social media because

since the bombing occurred, I've been monitoring the feed on my Twitter.

And mostly the general consensus as I scroll through my timeline is people saying this is really bad.

It's going to lead us into war.

We need to unequivocally oppose this kind of wagging the dog foreign policy of the president trying to distract from his domestic problems.

And then sort of plopped in the middle of it will be people who are completely checked out entirely, who are like, you know, back to the gym, rise and grind, or whatever.

So

it's always fun when there's like a, it's when you're following something on social media, when there's a national crisis, and then someone who's completely

not paying attention and is on something totally trivial.

You know, when I think back to the beginning of the last decade and how this measures up,

you know, Obama had just been elected to the United States, and, you know, it was, he had taken office a year earlier, and people were still talking about whether America was post-racial.

Wow.

I mean,

I love that

noting of like stuff going through when one country, something's happening in one place, and the rest of Twitter seems to be unaware.

That happened, I think, during the Oscars.

It must have been 2016 when we'd all just discovered that our prime minister had banged a pig.

And all through the American timeline, they come up with just like, who's going to get best actress?

Ah, what a gag.

And we're like, stop.

Our prime minister banged a pig.

And America just didn't seem to be interested in it.

They were like, yeah, pig schmig.

I mean, that's libelous, of course.

He didn't bang a pig.

He was fallated by a dead pig.

Sorry, yeah, sorry.

Technically accurate.

I don't want to get sued.

Wait, I just want to be clear.

Are you saying that you haven't all been fallated by a dead pig?

Well, I mean, it depends what school you went to.

And it depends on how I do describe my ex-boyfriends.

I don't know.

Family show.

It's a family show.

I did do a rundown of the decade in the style of

Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, if you want to hear it.

I mean,

it is a fascinating decade to look back on, the 2010s

that have just passed.

I mean, how is the future going to?

I mean, you're the official historian, of course.

I'm the official historian as of now in song form.

I'll give you the past, the past decade, huge decade, Brexit Trump, Leopard, Printersa, South Pacific, most terrific volcano, Game of Thrones breaking bad, Golden Age television, North Korea, South Korea, Episode had to go.

Kardashian to Rambe, Putin, Pikachu, me to the Prince of Nairn, fascism is on the rise, Trudeau, anti-vaccine, England's got a gold piano queen, David Bo, Professor Snape, Thomas Cook, goodbye.

Oh, I almost got it out in

in one breath, yeah.

And I kept some of the original song in.

I just had to change vaccine to anti-vaccine, one of the terrifying trends of the last decade.

I do think, you know, future generations, look at my note, I can't remember if I've speculated on this before.

I think this decade has proved that time travel will never be developed.

Because if time travel was ever developed, at some point in the last 10 years, someone would have pitched up from the future saying, what the f ⁇ are you guys doing?

Yes.

With all that opportunity, you're doing this, you fing idiots.

Wake up!

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely no time travel because everyone would have gone through and deleted every tweet or Facebook or social media post they ever made just for fear of being cancelled.

Or Elsa, as I call it, which is to be so frozen by cancel culture, you just

never bother posting anything.

I don't know what to do.

That's the future.

The future will be pre-thought.

It'll be like minority report.

They'll go in our heads and

they'll think about what we were going to say before we even put it on Twitter.

So, I mean, do you see a future, Tiff, and I'll throw this out to NATO across the Atlantic as well, where people can be sacked from significant jobs due to things that they may at some point think to themselves in the future?

Yes.

I think so.

It's not far off, is it?

I mean, we don't have to.

I think we're not far off developing technology

where we think tweet.

And because I reckon in the future, mobile phones, you'll have your iPhone.

It'll be connected via your umbilical like lightning cable.

Right.

So it just plugs straight into you.

You're supposed to have that taken off at birth.

You still got your.

Yeah, I've still got mine.

I'm still plugged in.

I'm still plugged into Apple.

I've

jammed my iPhone completely up my ass just to be prepared.

I'm just waiting for the guy to come around to connect the cable.

Right, right.

Well, that's a good place for it.

Has anyone got one of those?

Is it Weiwei phones?

What are they called?

The Weiwei?

The Chinese ones?

Huawei.

A Huawei phone.

So you can have that grafted directly onto your face.

Right.

And then everyone will get to see what you're seeing first person.

Probably just replace your eyes.

Well,

that is the future, I think.

Yeah.

The apple eyeball.

NATO, how do you look back on

the last 10 years?

Before we look ahead to the 2020s, just a quick, you know, you're the NATO green summary of the 2010s as a decade.

Oh, I mean, you know, look, the 2010s, it was a great decade.

You know, Obama was president, and, you know, he had been a community organizer.

That was very exciting.

And he,

you know, and

people thought that he was using his presidency as a teachable moment about the futility of electoral politics.

We had the Occupy movement, the movement of the 99% against the 1%.

It was incredible and it was inspiring.

And we also realized that Occupy,

that 99% is a lot of people

and it includes a lot of assholes.

And it's hard to have like a philosophical belief

in the idea of the 99% and then know who it actually consists of.

Like I always wanted to leave a few people out of my 99%.

like I believe in the 99% except for people who work in human resources and Jennifer from high school, who broke my heart.

You know what I mean?

Like, I just want to

leave a few people out of the 99%.

You know, we had

many more prominent women taking role in leadership in politics.

We had the emergence of female leaders like Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin, who

seemed like they were the kind of people who would be very enthusiastic about baking muffins for a lynching.

And I'm not saying that they, like, that that's the a woman's role is to bake muffins for lynching.

I'm saying that I believe that they are

capable and willing to fully participate in the lynching, but just are, you know, like I'll know that a lady doesn't show up at a social event.

Well, they'll set things on fire and then they can do a nice baked Alaska, couldn't they?

That would be Sarah Palin's speciality.

Baked Alaska.

so and you know and and and now uh they say trump is destroying our democracy but to be fair uh we weren't using it so uh

you appear to have dropped this

yeah

let's look ahead now to the next uh the next 10 years well slightly less than 10 years i'm already looking forward to the 2030s um i mean surely at some i mean trump is reaching a point where now he's gonna have to issue not just a presidential pardon to himself, but a booklet of 50 presidential pardon vouchers for himself, maybe plus an extra 10 for bulk purchase.

NATO, this is going to be the year of impeachment and election.

It's going to be a curious year for America politically.

How do you see it ending?

Well,

here's what's going to happen.

I mean, is, look, you know, part of the strategy around impeachment is

just to use the procedure itself to,

in a roundabout sort of way, assassinate the president.

The expectation is that

if House Democrats continue to vote for impeachment and hold hearings and then people surreptitiously send fried chicken and ribs and cheesecake to the White House, the president's heart will just explode as he storms around seething and shouting at people and we'll be done with him.

The expectation is that the Senate

will not vote to vote to go through with it, and he'll remain in office because the senators are craving cowards and have nothing else to stand on.

But at some point by 2030, Trump will be behind us.

Right now, when we look around the world, we're surrounded by Trump, Boris Johnson, Netanyahu, Orbin, Putin, a bunch of creeps, people who would be fascists, but they're too stupid to do it.

But by 2030, they'll be gone.

Will they, though?

Or will they be pressed for Life?

They could be Poz for Life, but I think they'll be gone and people will wake up as if it was a gross dream, like a dream where you're having sex with a much older relative on the subway.

Like people will wake up feeling queasy and ashamed.

Or like when you're, you know, how you might, you have a friend in a totally dysfunctional and abusive relationship, and everyone can see it but them, and the person they're in love with forbids them from hanging out with their old friends, and then finally the other person predictably leaves them for a younger, hotter lover, and your friend comes back around and says, why didn't you tell me?

And you're like, we tried, buddy, but you wouldn't listen because you were so excited that you both liked the Fujis.

That's going to be what it's like when we get to the other side of this moment in history.

Well, I mean, it's good to have a note of optimism to throw into

this podcast.

I don't think they'll be behind us.

I think that

they'll make themselves Pres for Life, and that's going to happen.

My hope for political leadership is technology, really, and the use of deep fake, which has generally been seen in a negative way.

But, you know, would the Labour Party not take a deep fake Clement Attlee at this point?

Yeah, would America not take deep fake Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

I think most Americans would vote.

Would Italy take a deep fake Julius Caesar?

F yeah.

How far do we have to reach back?

I mean, 2020 is the year of hindsight, so I'm hoping we just, it'll be the year that we all learn from our past mistakes.

Alternatively, everything will be on fire.

Well, you say this could be the year humanity learns from its past mistakes, but obviously, one of the great mistakes of humanity is the failure to learn from its past mistakes, and we keep failing to learn from that mistake.

So, I think it's just an unending circle of refusing.

I mean, the problem is if we start learning from our mistakes, we're going to have to admit that we got things wrong, and that is not easy to do as a human being.

To point that finger of blame into your own eyeball, no one like doing that, or shove your own iPhone up your ass.

I mean,

the choices are there.

I think it will just be one, there would just be one city and everyone will live in it.

Right.

And it'll just be baby Trump on the wall wailing and people will fling like a taco bell to him via catapult.

Are you workshopping your new sci-fi movie?

I am.

It's going to have the only television show be Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan on a loop where he'll be flogging vegan sausage rolls.

No, sorry, he'll be forcing them onto people because I think that's what he thinks happening at the moment.

Because, you know, compulsory vegan sausage rolls.

Compulsory vegan sausage roll or steak bait because he's so obsessed with it.

Like literally, no one's forcing you to buy it.

Oh, you've not read the Magna Carta, have you?

No one's read the Magna Carta.

Greggs have a charter from 1215 in which they are legally entitled to force people to eat vegan sausages.

Right, okay.

That's a fact.

Well, it's in our future then, plus a multi-headed Johnson.

You know, like, is it Cerberus?

Cerberus, yeah.

Cerberus, yeah.

So, like, I think it would be like Boris, Stanley, and Rachel, like like a three-headed one.

Right, that that's just appearing on every panel show in place of like a human.

That optimism is draining away.

I have great faith in technology.

I think technology can solve

a lot of our problems, including prejudice, because we tend to cling on to our prejudices for a long time, you know, from thousands of years of prejudice.

But I think with technology, we could have a new

local, national, even global nemesis on a sort of monthly rotating basis.

So you don't have time for that hatred to get sort of baked in into kind of intergenerational.

Oh, like jury duty.

We just swap them in and out.

Yeah, and you know, you just have, you know, you could have one month, you know, the government just turns all its hostile fire and the tablos ever go at men who like golf or everyone from Nantwich or Dungeons and Dragons fans.

And then you just move on.

So, you know, I think, you know, everyone will get a turn to be a target of that.

You just get your, you know, your month, maybe one month every two or three years.

One of your social groups is

the victim of this.

Is this like the minute of hate?

It sounds like Orwellian.

I'm sure there's something in 1984 where they do two minutes of hate and everyone has to stand in front of the TV and like boo and hiss at

whoever that person is.

As I think what I talked about the other day, we do seem to be looking more and more to George Orwell as a textbook to have to run the country.

Yeah, it was supposed to be a piece of fiction, everyone.

Clearly, there's going to be some sensational technological breakthroughs this decade.

I mean, it's amazing to think of all the technology that's been developed over the past 10 or 15,000 years, from the papyrus to the directionally controllable horse to the bucket to the smartphone.

So, what will be coming

in the next 10 years?

Now, I'm just going to pick up on social media.

I think there will be an app that conducts all social media for us, so we don't have to do it ourselves.

And then it just generates all our tweets, our Facebook postings, our Instagram phones, and all the rest, and then just automatically sends it to someone else's social media, which is also acting independently of them.

So, it's really just a virtual fury pit in which humans are no longer involved.

Right, so it's just algorithms, which it kind of is now, just algorithms calling each other.

Yes,

I like the idea of that.

It would give us all more time, more mental energy to go about life in the old style way, but safe in the knowledge that on our behalf, our social bot is calling someone else's social bot a f stain on our behalf yeah and i'll be happy because i'll be spending all my time with my robot husband there we're going we're building a better world also i can i can see home self-composting funerary pods for the eco-aware corpse formerly known as a hole in the ground in your back garden and uh an e-dog i think this could be the decade of the e-dog oh just not like the cheetahs that they have at boston is it boston tech right those terrifying robot dogs that have a stealth mode where they hide in leaves and then jump out, and everyone's like, That's so cute.

And I was like, Oh, no, that's kill mode.

Like, why would

robot dogs need to hide in leaves?

What a terrifying time to be alive.

I do think there is a way of kind of like, um, we might self-preserve.

You know, if you drink enough, you can probably pickle yourself slowly over a number of years.

I mean, I've been trying.

I think that the self-composting funerary pods is a thing already.

My stepmother asked to be buried in a worm suit

so that to accelerate when she passes away,

to accelerate the composting process.

Right.

Is this one of your other dreams about elder relatives?

Because they seem to be pretty weird, NATO.

This is peak San Francisco chat right here.

So a worm suit, as in a suit made of live worms, rather than like a pantomime worm suit, as if you're playing a worm in a Christmas theatrical production.

No, a suit made of live live worms.

Wow.

I mean, is that a problem?

Apparently that's an option that's available

and

there's an app for it and you can get

a guy with no pension to come and deliver it to your house.

Right.

And I mean,

I mean, so I guess if you're not feeling very well and

huge boxes full of worms start arriving at your house, you have to

start questioning the motives of your family.

And also, those poor worms, they've only got a 60-second memory and every 60 seconds they're going to go, oh, I'm on a dead body.

Oh, my God.

I want to die.

Oh, oh, I'm on a dead body.

This dead body is a bit gamey.

I would like the technology where the world can tilt on its axis so you don't have to turn your phone on its side to view something.

Right.

So if the world could like correct rather than, you know, like you're moving your head, your phone like does that thing.

Yeah.

If it's not on lock and it flips around and it's annoying.

So if we could just tilt the earth

for my benefit, that would be a useful piece of technology.

It's a touch kink and UT, though, isn't it?

But

we've got to have ambitions.

I think other things I'd like to see happen.

I'd like to see the installation of a kiss cam at the United Nations.

I think

that would improve the quality of international discourse and peace.

I mean, because no one can resist a kiss cam, can they?

No.

Well, you feel the pressure, don't you?

Yeah.

I mean, I wonder if we're far off, like, instead of kissing someone doing just something rank and sexual with an elderly relative.

I mean, I think we need to close that that horrific tunnel down.

Sorry, poor choice of words.

But with the current crisis, if you sit America and Iran next to each other at the UN, kiss cam, no one can resist a kiss cam, put a kiss cam on them, crisis averted.

Oh, yeah.

But I mean no one wants to see that.

No one wants to see it, but for the good of humanity,

we would all take Trump and the Iranian president

and

for the good of the world.

First ever baseball game, I went to see the Yankees, and there was a kiss cam at that, and someone asked someone to marry them, but then it sort of cut away.

And I was like, oh, my God, that means they said no, right?

It's horrific.

The tension is unbearable.

To be honest, out of all the appalling things that happen in the world, I do believe that marriage proposals on big screens at sporting events are the absolute pits.

Anyone who

perpetrates those should be instantly barred from ever being in a relationship ever again.

War criminal.

They're war criminal.

We asked you, our bugle listeners, for your questions about the forthcoming decade, and our eminent panel of futurologists, Tiff and Nato, will endeavour to answer them as best as possible.

This came from Jack.

The 1920s were the era of fedoras.

What headwear will define the coming decade?

I'm going to say that the hat of the 2020s will be the Panama hat.

It's lightweight and comfortable, will provide the needed protection from the sun as climate change makes protecting yourself from the sun all the more important.

And the Panama hat perfectly captures the racist spirit of our age, as it is called the Panama hat, but was invented in Ecuador.

It complements the statement, all you brown people look the same to me.

Tiff, I mean, as

a fashionable person?

Well, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, all things being relative on this podcast.

How rude.

Outrageous.

It was rude to myself, wasn't it?

Do I manage to insult us both in one sentence?

Well, I would say, with my pink hair at the moment, there's absolutely no reason to cover my head.

But I would say a wee Scotch bonnet

just for, you know, which will become a symbol of the Scots' freedom from the tyranny of the United Kingdom, because I think they're going to leave.

Right.

So

a Scotch bonnet as in

the little tartan one with the

not a lethally hot pepper.

Not a lethally hot pepper.

No.

I thought you meant a Leth, like a hat from Leith.

Right.

So

I'm very confused.

Yeah.

I mean

but yeah, hats will be important like like NATO says I suppose to protect protect your head from the the complete lack of ozone layer.

Personally the watermelon.

I mean it's Australia's greatest contribution to world culture, I think, the watermelon hat.

And, yeah, I think that's pretty much their only hope at the moment.

This question came from Dana Nana Known,

who asks, what would you like to turn out to be a hoax, Tiff?

Jacob Reesmog.

I'm sort of hoping he isn't real, and he was, in fact, a Frankenstein's monster created by Waddington's games.

Right.

Because he's a f ⁇ ing Cluedo piece.

So I would like him to be a hoax.

I'd like the results of the recent general election to be a hoax.

But they were a hoax, but they were a hoax under First Past the Post, so they're a legal hoax, essentially.

Oh, right.

Yeah, so

yeah, those would be my two.

And pretty much everything that's happened in the last 10 years.

But I'll like all my personal good stuff.

Keep that.

I'm hoping global warming will turn out to be a hoax.

I mean, it's not looking good at the moment, but

no smoke without fire.

Unless, I mean, it the idea that global warming is a hoax could itself be a hoax, in which case the whole process becomes self-perpetuating, I think.

Well, Australia is supposed to be a hoax, the entire country, isn't it?

So that's a current conspiracy theory.

So it could be, you sort of hope it is, because then all of this awful stuff that was happening there wouldn't be happening and it was all a hoax.

This came from Rory, who asked, What were the top stories of January 1920?

The world was settling down in the aftermath of the First World War to think, well, there'll probably be no more war ever, given that that was the war to end all wars.

The Treaty of Versailles was working an absolute treat after a couple of months.

I think it had been, it had even been signed by January 1920.

I'm not entirely sure.

England had been undefeated in Test cricket for over six years, albeit only due to a large war.

The Queen had not been born yet, but was still f ⁇ ing amazing.

America has generally had a bit of trouble starting the

20s decades of centuries.

On the 5th of January 1920, Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees.

So Americans doing f ⁇ ing stupid things in the first week of of a new decade in the 20s is not a thing exclusive to this millennium.

I think to be fair, the 1918s and 1919s were not great for America because the Spanish flu made it over.

There was the New Orleans axe murderer prohibition.

So they were going in sober and

rough.

Kenda's rule asks, what colour goes best with apocalypse?

I need to make wardrobe decisions now before the rush.

It's good to plan ahead.

Yeah, as the fashion correspondent for the Bugle, I would say i always find that with all the trees and plant life gone if you opt for floral you're sort of really going to stand out firstly that would be my first suggestion um also you need to think about bunker wear you want fabrics that are breathable when you're slowly running out of air so maybe like some light cotton or something with moisture wicking you don't you don't want to be the embarrassment you know like you don't want the embarrassment of sweat when it's the end of the world and finally i would say accessorize accessorize it any human body parts you may have taken during the purge can be fashioned into a nice earring, like a literal earring.

You can mount it on the ring pool from your canned goods.

So you would have an ear ring, a ring of an ear.

And I think that would be, I'm very crafty when it comes to the end of the world.

I've got a lot of suggestions.

And quickly, Chesterfield Zoidberg asks, are the proposed changes of Test Cricket to a four-day rather than five-day time span a sign of the end of times?

Yes.

Yes, they clearly are.

They clearly are.

I mean,

what is the point of cricket match that lasts less than five days?

I mean, that's the whole, if anything, they should be going longer.

Pope news now, and, well, at the start of a new decade, the Pope has been

in action

with a, well, quite a feisty little wrestling move.

Yeah, with a woman trying to kiss his ring.

The papal ring, grow up.

Well, I mean, she did yank at his arm quite...

quite aggressively and the Pope sort of shook her off in quite an annoyed, slightly un-popey way.

But I guess, you know, if you're Pope.

Wasn't very popified.

No.

He was saying it was a hygiene thing.

He doesn't want people

touching him, which is a bit of a problem because it's in the job description.

Yeah.

If you're Pope.

So on one side of the world, we've got the Pope refusing to shake anyone's hand.

And then on the other side of the world, you've got Scott Morrison just desperate to shake someone's hand because no one wants to shake his hand because while, you know, his country was on fire, he was sipping Mai Tai's in Hawaii.

So they seem to have opposite problems.

yes i mean i think it's important to keep context on on this this you know latest entry into the canon of when popes attack um

that um i mean historically just shaking your arm free of a worshipper is not the worst thing a pope has ever done i mean let's try and get this in kind of historical context uh pope john x12 notoriously a hot contender for naughtiest pope ever slaughtered an entire village and castrated a bishop wow so i mean that's worse isn't it than just shaking your arm free slightly aggressively from

Pope Stephen VI chopped three fingers off his predecessor, who in the tradition of ex-popes was dead, and then dragged his predecessor's corpse through the streets of Rome.

So that's worse, isn't it?

Are you trying to bring nuance to this, Andy?

Everyone wants to be mad about it on Twitter, and you're ruining it.

I just think you've got a Pope Urban VI had six cardinals tortured and executed, and then apparently complained to their torturers that their screams had not been loud enough.

So, I mean, in the context of historical popy activity, this is by no means the worst.

And Pope Innocent IV head-butted a leper in 1249 after mishearing the afflicted individual.

Pope Innocent explained, I thought he'd said I was a pointless twat, whereas in fact he was saying, I had a pointy hat.

He compensated the victim with a bonus, unquestioned, extra 12 months in heaven, no questions asked.

I think

this whole story, I mean, people are acting like the Pope was being a jerk, but I think it's about time.

Finally, a Catholic clergyman showing some concern about consent and unwanted touching.

Not before.

Sorry, I've absolutely slandered Pope John XII.

He was one of the naughtiest popes ever and was apparently killed by a jealous husband, which is not your classic pope death.

It was Boniface VIII who killed an entire town.

Sorry, my mistake.

Oh, Boniface.

Little Bonnie.

Isn't he the first pope to

stop condemning masturbation?

So

maybe he was upset that the person had grabbed his wanking hand.

It's possible.

We just don't know.

Or maybe he was afraid that she'd been masturbating.

She could have been making bean casserole and then just gone straight in.

I think producer Chris has enjoyed that joke, Andy, so you're going to have to.

I mostly enjoyed Andy's reaction to it.

Cheese news now.

Nathan, you're the Bugles cheese correspondent.

There's been a huge cheese for Ago in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

That's right.

I'm going to...

bungle the French pronunciation, but Mark Virant, the chef and owner of the French Alps restaurant Les Maison de Bois, which, as you know, is French for, I think, let's hear it for the boys.

The Michelin guide knocked Veirat down from three stars to two stars, and he sued and lost.

He sued because he's a grown-ass man who desperately craves the approval of a tire company.

Don't we all?

Look.

Yeah.

Sometimes you get a bad review, you know, so you don't sue over it.

I didn't sue the Chicago Tribune when they ran a piece saying that I dressed like Kim Jong-un's body double.

I didn't sue the comedy critic who described my first album as a lecture from a depressing professor.

That is, I've got very turned on at that description.

Someone's commenting.

I don't see that as a criticism.

I see that as a compliment.

I mean, he was suing them for losing a star, but they claimed that he used English cheddar in one of his soufflés,

which, if true, is magnificent or c'est magnificent

because he turned a classic French souffle into a Jamie Oliver number by just banging a bit of cheddar in.

Bouche, that'll be lovely.

But I love that a French man is so insulted by the idea of there being English cheese in his food.

The reviewer thought that he used English cheddar because the souffle was yellow, but in fact, he'd used French Revolution Buffort cheeses and saffron.

And as you know, in the French penal system, mistaking the appellation of a cheese is ground, is a criminal act

for being beaten with stale baguettes by an angry mob.

Yeah.

Do you think he hoped he'd get away with it?

Away?

Away?

But we can't go down that road.

Oh, I just thought that if there was any story that was open for the...

I mean, there's no point crying over curdled milk.

But I just, I thought, Andy,

you would have gone full pum run on this.

No, no, I want to keep it brief.

Well that concludes the first bugle of the millennium.

If you wish to see the final three extra added shows of my certifiable history show they'll be on at Soho Theatre 6th, 7th and 8th of January.

Also available from another dimension, the world exclusive the last post hosted by the Alice Fraser from the Parallel Dimension featuring

well many other people you may have heard on the bugle but from a parallel world I wonder what parallel me is like I wonder if the England cricket team is as parallel-y shit as it is in this one

sorry viewers

and and just quickly before we go you two are doing a show together imminently yes at sketch fest San Francisco I'm doing my show mother and I have NATO opening for me very kindly as he's in San Francisco as well on the 17th of January Sketchfest right that concludes the first bugle of the decade.

We will be back before the end of the decade, probably within a week.

Until then, buglers, 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.