Sorry Iran, it's Cost-No

I'm so sorry, I'll be right back in one second.

It was at this point that ICE agents burst into the front door of Josh's apartment.

The Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4354 of the Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World with me, Andy Zaltzman, live and recorded from the Shed of Implacable Truthishness here in London, where Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, has very kindly specially suspended the Sharia law under which we apparently all live, according to one of America's top 47 presidents of all time, no less.

Well, according to two of America's top 47 presidents of all time, technically.

And that's been suspended just long enough for me to record this week's show with joining us from New York, the city where dolphins fear to tread.

This has in common with all cities, dolphins, not city creatures, to be fair.

It's the man who hates dolphins, Josh Gondelman.

Welcome, Josh.

Thank you so much for having me.

As you can imagine, New York City is reeling after Eric Adams, current Mayor Eric Adams' announcement that he's no longer running for re-election and he's taking his 9% of the voters that were still in his corner and

staying home in New Jersey.

Right, well, that was only slightly more percent of the voters than you've got, I think.

That's right.

Yeah.

And I've actively been telling people that I should not be mayor.

Also, Johnny, someone who may now be about to throw his hat into the ring as mayor of New York, but currently in Scotland, someone whose attitude to dolphins remains a closely guarded secret.

It's James with a Keysake.

Hello, James.

Hello, Andy.

And

as they say in Scotland, don't ask what's in the scampy.

I think it's fish.

They never tell you.

They never tell you.

It's like, it's scampy.

Eat the scampy.

I think I'd be a great mayor of New York.

What would you bring to the role?

Probably just a lot of content for Law and Order.

It's

extra episodes.

I remember I was stopped and searched in New York, actually.

The one time I went and did a show in Manhattan, I had a season at La Mama Theatre and I was running late because comedians.

And

I'd picked up some gingernut biscuits, which is a New Zealand thing, I'm sure, Andy, you've experienced, from a local kiwi bar.

And so I was running out of the metro to the venue, and some cops stopped me because I was this complexion and facial hair with a backpack sprinting through downtown Manhattan.

And I found out you're not actually, it's not actually legal, is it, Josh, to stop and search these days?

Oh,

the Constitution says you were never supposed to be doing it.

But I mean,

the rules are when you're Beige and foreign in New York, stop repeating.

Andy makes a new set of rules, yeah.

That's right.

So then I had to explain what ginger nut biscuits were

and panicked because we don't have cops with guns in New Zealand, do we, Andy?

And so

I started singing the jingle from the advert,

which

for Kiwis,

I can feel Kiwi listeners right now just shrinking in on themselves because it's actually quite, it is a Jamaican person singing the jingle.

I want to point that out.

But it is, and I won't do the accent, but basically, if you can picture me in downtown New York singing with a very bad Jamaican accent about ginger nut biscuits being so spicy, made with old English.

And like

there are Caribbean people in New York, which again, not so much in New Zealand.

And they were walking past going,

who is this weird, racist Mexican guy performing for the police?

This is the worst busking we've ever seen.

And I've never gone back, but I think I'd be a great mayor.

I think you would make a great mayor.

You've got first-hand experience with the need for police reform.

uh well i've i'm not standing for mayor of new york but my dad was once mistaken for the mayor of uh new york um because he he he looked a bit like ed coch um

and when he was in new york

i think sometime in the 80s or 90s when that would have been um

uh he did get mistaken for ed koch on more than one occasion so that's my that's my personal family link to the to the mayoralty of New York.

So we've all got skin in the game.

That's what we've discovered from this.

A big election coming up for the three of us in November.

We are recording on the 29th of September 2025.

Tomorrow, the 30th of September is International Podcast Day.

And well, what with it being a day?

There are, I think, 40,000 new podcasts being launched for International Podcast Day.

Some of the best ones to look out for include Literally Nothing to Say.

That's a new book review podcast in which celebrities who haven't read the books in question sit in silence whilst reading the back covers of those books and working out whether they think they would like them or not.

Celebrity fruit description.

That's celebrities describing fruit.

Bruce brings it in on Cantaloupe melons in episode one is absolutely sensational.

The Time Swap History Pod, that's news.

Celebrity historians Wendy Pimbush Ernie Alsop, Said Huluk and Heliver Dunn from the When All Said and Done podcast, launch an all-new history show in which they speculate on what would have happened if people from history had been alive at other points in history.

What would Wayne Gretzky have done if if he'd been king of Babylon in Old Testament times?

Would the Battle of Kannai in 216 BC have gone differently if Billie Jean King had been head of the Carthaginians

instead of elephant addict Hannibal and vice versa for the 1970 Wimbledon Women's Singles Final?

And what if 7th century Japanese Empress Jito had been Che Guevara instead?

Interesting stuff on the Time Slop history pod.

No idea.

That's another one coming out tomorrow.

Celebrity co-hosts Carbol Whip and Petty Drevell from the hit Instagram show pointing at people on benches, chat about things they don't know about, wonder what those things are about, and then leave themselves in the audience none the wiser.

18 minutes of circular ignorance at its very best.

And finally, I can't believe they're paying me for this total nonsense.

A new show from celeb influencer co-hosts Bunsen McCravity and Ole Pantifex from the hit YouTube channel Six Second Slam in which they adversely critique things in six seconds.

Bunsen and Ole discuss the existential dilemmas and uncertainties involved in hosting a podcast in which neither of them has any real interest or emotional stake.

It's a surprisingly insightful, surprise insight into the emptiness of ephemeral fame.

So, those are your podcasts to look out for on International Podcast Day.

Are you guys appearing on any of those shows?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm a guest host for No Idea, and they like how little I know about so many things.

They're like, you're kind of a jack of no trades.

I think we are on course, as predicted previously on the Bugle.

I think by the year 2049 now, there will be more podcasts daily than there are human beings in the world if the current increase continues at its increasing rate.

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

Well, tomorrow is also Blasphemy Day.

God damn it.

It's International Blasphemy Day.

So we give you free insults to cast at deities.

Your insult, number one, is directed at Kepri, the ancient Egyptian god of the rising sun.

And your insult is this.

Go screw yourself, you scarab, beetle-headed, dung-bothering pseudo-symbol of resurrection.

Exactly how many fucking resurrections have you actually brought about?

Not very fucking many by my count.

And if you want to make yourself useful, try being god of something that isn't going to happen every day anyway.

Like the rising sun, you unambitious, scepter-twizzling layabout.

And insult two

towards Gefion, the Norse goddess of plowing and foreknowledge.

And the insult for Gefion is, as you're supposedly the goddess of foreknowledge, you'd have known long ago that I was going to call you a farming-obsessed loser who can go shove an entire combine harvester right at where the sun don't f ⁇ ing shine.

Goddess Goddess of chastity and fertility.

Okay, Connie contradictory.

Wind it up.

You had four sons apparently, despite being a virgin, not judging, just saying, and you then turned them into oxen, which is bad parenting.

I know times have changed and we shouldn't judge people from the past by our standards today, but that to me is bang out of order.

And you then made those four oxen son work in your plowing business.

Nepo, baby, well, Nepo oxen, basically.

And then they plowed so hard that they dragged enough land into the sea to make an entire island, which they called Zealand.

And it was so shit that soon enough people had to make a new Zealand that was better.

So take that, Gefion, the Norse goddess of plowing and foreknowledge.

That section in the bin.

I used to date an actor in New Zealand who referred to herself when drunk as the god of plowing.

There you go.

Family show.

She call it that.

Top story this week.

Oh no, it's another week where the American president is the top story.

Yeah, thanks for getting that in Lily.

Much appreciated.

I mean, it's hard to know where to begin on a week-to-week basis.

And I do promise buglers because I know not

it's not a nice thing to necessarily have to listen to every week.

So next week's Bugle, I am now pledging, will be an entirely Trump-free zone.

But since we have Josh on, who is

very close with numerous members of the Trump administration,

I'm pretty well sourced.

I'm kind of the Maggie Haberman of the Brooklyn comedy community.

You can bring us up to date with the latest in your president's remorseless drive to make everyday life easier for ordinary working Americans.

You mean how this morning he declared a 100% tariff on foreign films?

Did you see that?

I didn't see that.

No,

I missed that.

I mean, I saw that, you know, he's indicting a former head of the FBI in a naked personal vendetta.

I think that's going to bring prices of eggs down by 40%.

He's provoked the largest mass resignation of federal workers

in American, and I'm going to say universe history, and that is going to reduce the price of fuel

for people by 83%, and he's deploying the full might of the U.S.

military to fight America's deadliest foe, Portland, Oregon.

And I think that's just going to make oranges and cucumbers naturally sprout from people's windowsills.

So, yeah, exciting times for America.

It's very exciting here.

Trump has really gone on the offensive.

In addition to being offensive, he is going on offense.

A couple of big pieces of news from the past week, he has, Trump and RFK RFK Jr.

had their big autism press conference.

That's not a description of the press conference, that is a discussion of the subject matter.

And I want to say that despite working in stand-up comedy, I don't actually know that much about autism, which in this country means I could be in charge of the agency that treats it if I'd been on TV in the 80s or 90s.

RFK Jr., of course, you've probably heard, announced that the cause of autism is women taking Tylenol while they're pregnant, which is both untrue and weirdly brand loyal, loyal, people have pointed out.

And it seems to be in part because Trump can't pronounce acetaminophen, the active chemical in

Tylenol, which again has nothing to do with autism.

And this is kind of like wanting to pin the cause of vertigo on the corn extract maltodextrin, failing to say that word out loud and saying, you know what, it's the cool ranch Doritos.

There are people with with autism all over the world, and there have been for a long, long time.

And these are human beings, right?

This is what is so frustrating.

They're human beings who deserve respect and care and should absolutely not be like eradicated as the Trump administration wishes.

Trump has like in this press conference said that the Amish and Cuba...

people in Cuba and people in Amish country, there is no autism, which I think he thinks means the American economy is so powerful, you can embargo autism.

And I'm honestly surprised he has not announced an autism tariff yet.

And then finally in Trump medical news, he reposted an AI slop video of himself on a fake Fox News show and or a fake Fox News appearance announcing the existence of med beds, which is a far-right conspiracy suggesting that the super rich have like kind of mechanical electronic beds that can treat any medical condition.

And that may mean one of several things.

One, Trump doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy.

Two, Trump thinks he can bend reality with his verb, every verbal utterance.

Or three, he sees a video of himself spouting in an anecdote conspiracy theory that will ultimately only hurt his base and others and think, close enough, sounds like me, let her wear.

And I think the answer is all of the above.

Med beds do not exist, but you are definitely not going to get them if you somehow eradicate autism.

I'm so sorry.

I'll be right back in one second.

It was at this point that ice agents burst into the front door of Josh's apartment.

I'm so sorry.

Is that we're just speculating whether that is the original Josh Gondelman or a body double that has just been

returned to

this is that this is the Paul McCartney episode.

This is from every episode of Jesus going forward.

You play it backwards as Josh is dead.

Yeah.

Sorry about that.

Tylenol, we know here in the UK, it's known as paracetamol.

And of course,

there was a joke when I was a kid, and it explains, I think, why

Britain is just inherently a funnier country.

The joke was why there are no painkillers in the jungle because the paracetamol.

Whereas, you know, why are there no painkillers in the jungle because the Tylenol?

But it just doesn't work.

It doesn't work on any level whatsoever.

So I think that shows a huge, huge difference between

the two sides of the Atlantic.

Is it called Tylenol anywhere else?

I didn't know it wasn't called Tylenol anywhere else, so I'm not the guy to ask.

The full version of the joke is why are there no painkillers in the jungle?

Because the parrots eat them all, and also because all the animals have fallen down a rhinoceros hole of conspiracy theories and refuse to trust medical scientists, drugs companies, and anything that emanates from outside their own online bubbles.

So, I mean, that's a longer joke.

So, we tend to just do the shorter version.

So, yeah, he's

basically, Trump has urged pregnant women not to take Tylenol because, of course, the first law of American politics has always been and remains: a pregnant woman's body is the business of an old man she's never met.

And

that fits very strongly into that.

Medical scientists, global health agencies, even UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting have urged people to ignore Donald Trump because the so-called science, and I'm not sure there are anyone in history has had big enough hands to do the correct size of inverted quote marks, like air quote marks for that.

Claiming a link between Tylenol, Parasitism, and autism has been, quotes, continuously disproved.

But we are in the 2020s, and something being disproved doesn't necessarily mean it's been disproved.

For example, people once claimed that it had been continuously proved that the Earth is a sphere, but I looked at a photo of it today and it was flat as a fing pancake.

So join the dots.

And also I think to give Trump credit, he is doing his bit to open up science to a much broader cross-section of society, including people who aren't scientists and people who deliberately ignore science.

So I think we should give him credit for that because science is been too elitist for too long for my life.

I think a lot of people don't realise that the Earth,

part of the reason the Earth was flat was because when its mother was pregnant, it took acetamol,

which

is

the pterandol of

why did they why did they make the replacement name also difficult to say?

That's what I love about America.

It's like

I feel like I think that the drug names have to sound also difficult, or else people don't believe they're drugs.

You know, you can't just give it like fun normal names.

You can't be like, oh, take this, this pill.

It's called headache begone.

And you're like, no,

that's like an infomercial type thing.

And I guess on the plus side, Josh, that if they can find a link between painkillers and autism, it also at least raises some hope that they have the scientific capacity eventually to also find some sort of statistical correlation between firearms and gun-related violence.

So could this be, could this open a door to that

theoretical link being at some point proved?

It just feels

too tenuous so far for American non-scientists and non-statisticians to grasp.

There was also, I mean, some suggestion that the MMR vaccine, Trombocin, could also cause autism.

There was a study in Denmark that examined over 600,000 children and concluded the data did not support that claim.

But the question is...

That study must have been so annoying to conduct.

600,000 kids?

Get them to answer your medical questions?

Yikes.

But can you trust them?

Yeah.

And can you trust Denmark?

They claim mermaids are real.

I'm just not sure if this is trustworthy science.

Yeah.

How about I'll trust them when they have a famous writer named Hans

double blind clinical trial Anderson?

Get religion out of there.

We should have a look at Donald Trump's address to the United Nations last week, which was a long, formless ramble.

And if you enjoy long, formless rambles, why not come to my tour show, extended into 2026, March and April, dates on my website, and isoltsomlotco.uk for the Zoltgeist, a second thwack.

I mean, he was supposed to do a 15-minute slot.

I mean, we've all done a lot of stand-up.

Sometimes it's hard to keep to time.

And

to go on for almost an hour when

you're just supposed to be doing a tight 15, that's, I mean, that's, that's pushing it.

I could name some names.

I know, couple guys.

Look, we've all taken too many painkillers and got on stage at least once in our career.

This is an interesting story,

James, that you alerted me to.

That

maybe this is part of the Trump regime's efforts to bring down prices that I mentioned earlier on by banning Iranian diplomats and officials from shopping in Costco

in America, which presumably will lead to there being more unsold goods from the hundreds of thousands of Iranian diplomats and officials who usually shop there and they'll have to sell those goods at discount prices just to get them off the shelves.

So, I mean, this it strikes me as being,

I mean, there's a lot that's very dark and depressing about what Trump is doing to America and

to the world.

This strikes me as being just almost heroically petty.

It's a sort of retaliative snark, it seems,

as much as politics.

What did you make of it?

I do love the fact it's Costco,

but

it's like you can't even shop at places you definitely do not shop.

Iranian diplomatic corps.

Like,

it's like you ban, like, banning millionaires from Target.

All right, man.

I guess, like, where, where even is the Costco near the United Nations?

Like, where is that downtown Manhattan Costco that's up in Harlem on the east side?

Yeah, like, where, like, where is it's not in the neighborhood,

7-Elevens?

Not for you, Iran.

Aha!

It's such a bold, like, like, little asterisk to add on to the severe

UN sanctions that have been applied to Iran.

It's just the US going, and also

Costco.

It's so wild to do that, right?

The alleged reasoning is that they would be able to buy things in bulk and like smuggle them back into Iran against the economic sanctions.

But if your economic sanctions can be undone by a single Costco run, international diplomacy is hanging by a thread.

Although, I guess, if your company or if your country's diplomats are buying in bulk while conducting official business, your State Department is, to use a term of kind of international relations kind of in industry trip, they are down bad.

Like, are they also sharing hotel rooms?

Like, it's a bachelor party they're all visiting or they're all the bachelor party trip they're on.

This is, I think this is a huge mistake by the Trump administration, frankly.

Allowing Iranian diplomats to go to Costco is what we call wielding soft power.

Costco is the best advertisement for American capitalism.

Quality products are abundantly available at affordable prices.

They sell a hot dog in the food court for $1.50.

That's cheaper than you can get them on the street in New York City, which depending on what meat they use, isn't super persuasive to a deeply Muslim government, but it's still quite a feat of capitalism.

I also think diplomats all over the world should be forced to go to Costco when they come here, just to show them what America is all about.

What's America, you ask?

It's two five-gallon jugs of mayonnaise held together with plastic wrap for sale only as a unit.

European powers coming out of this week's UN session were worried we no longer share values, right?

The US and Europe no longer have shared values.

And what better place to share value with the world than a wholesale establishment?

That's where American value lives.

Look, we've all been in writers' rooms, and it is wonderful when you see a policy which is clearly giving cocaine at two o'clock in the morning.

In other American news,

well, very excitingly, Josh, for the first time since the early 1970s, Americans are going to go to the moon.

Well, to near the moon.

They're not actually going to land on it this time, but they're going to go around it on a 10-day jaunt.

It's the Artemis II mission.

The mission's named Artemis because the moon is indeed hard to miss.

It's massive.

You can see it from here.

And yeah, it could be as soon as February.

Following the announcement, 7.8 billion people from around the world have applied for a single ticket for the the outward journey.

So we'll see how

that goes.

I mean, this is obviously, again, this is just going to bring those prices in the shops rocketing down

for working Americans.

This is,

you know, again, what people voted Trump in for is to blast rockets around the moon.

Yeah, this is an American classic.

Things are going to shit on the world stage.

There's kind of fomenting dissent bubbling nationally.

We got to send some people into space to distract from all that shit.

I'll tell you what, though, I do think the original moon landing happened, but I'm very surprised that they didn't say they were going to land on the moon this time, because it would be so easy to fake a moon landing now.

I don't think AI is going to replace the job of human artists, but I do think if we were faking a moon landing in 2025, they would not bother bringing in Stanley Kubrick, as legend has it, right?

They'd go right to a large language model, which would spit out an image of an astronaut with 11 toes standing on the moon and hitting a basketball with a golf club.

The only problem is, Josh, it's the United States, and so they wouldn't be able to help themselves.

And they try and franchise it.

So there'll be some sort of plot list at the end of the moon landing.

We'd be like, hang on a second.

Is that Samuel L.

Jackson showing up?

Is that Optimus Prime?

Truck on the moon.

I mean, it's one of the curiosities of this millennium so far that as a species, not just America, we've been so much less good at going to the moon than in the second millennium.

12 humans in a thousand years, in the second millennium, made it to the moon.

That's one per 83 years and four months.

So far, naught in 26 years, that's naught per thousand years.

I mean, why has America declined so, so strikingly as a moon force?

That's a good question.

And I just think America has like a been there, done that philosophy towards the moon.

On to the next, you know, we've been to the moon and it's, it's America.

And I think we're done going up to the moon.

polluting it, leaving our junk there, planting a flag.

It's time under a Trump administration to start focusing on ruining America and then by extension the Earth first.

We're kind of space isolationists now.

I actually blame New Zealand for this one.

Okay.

Because,

you know, America dreams of going into space, you know, and making space stations.

That was the big thing as well, not just going to the moon, we're orbiting space cities.

And then Lord of the Rings came out.

And, you know, all of a sudden, everyone's doing fantasy.

And it's all about making fantasy worlds and going into the woods and having sex with a lion or whatever they do.

It's, you know, it's a job's a job.

And they, you know, I just think that you can, if you, if you look at any time that the space program has looked to get up and running.

Lord of the Rings has made another trilogy of films.

And,

you know, Harry Potter's come up.

There's been all sorts of

other type of magical films.

And it's gone away from science because, as we all know, science will kill you.

But fantasy will give you awesome powers.

Lord of the Rings is kind of the opposite of going to space.

It's like, what if there were Earth in the middle of Earth?

We tried looking there.

What's interesting, I mean, statistically, the proportion of Americans who believe the moon landings were faked faked is the same as the proportion of Americans who believe Lord of the Rings is real.

You can

read into that what you will.

Pacific News.

James, as our

correspondent for the world's largest ocean,

there's some...

There's some fascinating stories from the Pacific, including one that you have been making a documentary about

concerning macaques

in Palau.

This, just I read a little bit about

this story.

It sounds absolutely phenomenal.

Yeah, it's we've really, and shout out to Beagle fans for the past few years, because we've really manifested me actually being in the Pacific reporting on monkeys.

I think it was the moment I was interviewing the president of Palau

seriously about monkeys that I went, I feel like Zoltzmann's in the next room.

This is

a strange, strange moment.

So the story will be coming out this week, essentially, back when Palau, which is a very small Pacific nation, one of the smallest nations in the world.

If you're looking on a map, it's above Papua New Guinea,

just to the side of the Philippines, somewhere in that small area.

They were colonized by Germany back in the day who did phosphate mining.

And people will know about the canary in the cage.

Well, the Germans couldn't find any canaries in the Pacific.

So they bought over macaque monkeys

and

had them in the mines

of this small island called Angal.

And

when they left,

because of the last kerfuffle that we had as a world over fascism,

The monkeys were like, we're not part of this.

And so they left the monkeys on the tiny island and pull out.

And the monkeys aren't native.

So there was nothing to really take care of the monkeys and keep the population down.

And so they continued to build and build.

And now there's a small island in the middle of the Pacific that has thousands of monkeys that have destroyed the local agriculture.

So that the population has shrunk.

So there's about just over 100 people there now, where there used to be a thousand.

And there's thousands of monkeys from the original dozen or so that were bought over.

And like anyone would do, I went and made a small documentary about it for the ABC Australia.

And we asked the Americans, who are, of course, always there, Josh, building a satellite base.

If they had

any thoughts about building a satellite base on the monkeys, and they're like, we can't talk to you about the monkeys, which again, is a very strange moment in a comedian's life

when the United States military says they can't talk talk about the monkeys.

And

we went to the German government and said, Can we talk about the monkeys?

And they said, We can't talk to a third-party media company about the monkeys.

We don't want to talk to the international press

about the monkeys.

So that story will be, if you're on my social media, there'll be links this week coming out.

And it's a very strange moment of colonization and maybe a timely reminder of what happens when you just go, we'll deal with the Pacific later and what's going on there.

Because if you leave it alone, suddenly the monkeys have taken over.

For an American audience, the monkeys going up, human population going down, that's like our guns.

That's like monkeys are like guns to them.

It's also, I have a sincere question for you, James, because when I learned, when you started talking about this story, I was like, what is a worse infestation, right, of animals, of an of a non-native species, an invasive species?

Is it something like monkeys where they're really big relatively and can do a lot of damage?

Or is it something like an insect, right?

Because if I was tasked, I would probably rather, and if I was given a budget for

relocation of animals, I would rather deal with a thousand monkeys than like a million bees because I just don't have the attention to detail.

But here's the thing, and this is: I'm glad you asked this question, Josh, because here's the thing: the problem with the monkeys is they're smart.

Oh, sure.

Bees, you can come up with a plan.

You can drink a bees.

The inherent nature of bees, like the queen will be involved.

They've tried to poison the monkeys, the monkeys figured it out.

They tried to sterilize the monkeys.

The monkeys figured it out.

They've got a hunt.

They had a hunting

bounty on monkeys.

The monkeys figured it out.

The monkeys are outsmarting everyone.

Because it turns out, collectively, a thousand monkeys can not only write a great novel, but also outsmart civil governments.

They're like, leave us alone.

We're recreating a Hamlet from scratch.

That's incredible.

Wow.

I can't wait to see this, James.

Sport now.

And, well, there's been some spectacular sports

over the last week.

Let's start in New York with the rudest Ryder Cup in history, the Ryder Cup biennial tournament between USA and Europe

in golf.

Pretty much the only time Europe exists meaningfully as

an entity, an entire continent,

is for three days every two years in golf.

But it got very, very nasty.

It was quite a spectacular match.

Europe went way ahead, and then America almost pulled off a comeback on the final day.

Donald Trump, on the first day, having rejected my invitation on the bugle a couple of weeks ago to stay the f out of sport,

imposed himself and his security detail on the poor innocent ticket holders at the Ryder Cup, having done so at the US Open tennis earlier in September.

This prompted America to have probably its worst two days in the tournament's long history.

Before, when the echoing stench of Trumpic Darkness had dissipated somewhat, they launched this uh belated comeback um i mean it was a it seemed like it was quite a sort of new yorkish

atmosphere uh josh i don't know if you followed it uh at all but there was there was there was quite a lot of um not entirely complimentary language flung around in a uh not entirely golfish manner

Yes, well,

one of the MCs of the tournament had to step down over her participation in heckling European team member Rory Rory McElroy.

And I just want to say, as a New Yorker, and this was Long Island, so not New York City, but as a New Yorker, as an American, I just want to say there is no place for xenophobia on the golf course.

You save that for the clubhouse like golfers have done for centuries.

You wait till after.

Golf is such a weird sport to me because it requires and demands such specific politeness and decorum from the fans, but it also has some of the like most exclusionary and to me rude rules in all of sport, right?

It's like, okay, no loud cheering.

And also, of course, no women.

Like those, those are the two rules.

Even the men should shear.

So we don't ought to know what women would be doing.

And like, I do, this is like a real belief that I have.

And it is, this is.

potentially problematic, but people sometimes look down their nose at golf and say that it's like not a real sport, right?

That it's like an athletic competition, but not a sport because it's just a, it's singular.

It doesn't require you to be in particularly good shape.

Um, but I do agree that golf is not a sport, and it's not about athleticism.

This might be controversial, but I don't think I don't think something is a sport unless you're allowed to heckle.

That's the line of demarcation for me.

For something to really be a sport, the participant should have to be able to thrive while some dumbass with the strongest regional accent on earth calls them an asshole at the top of their lungs.

That is something I sincerely believe.

So, sorry, golf and tennis.

You're out.

you're practically chess to me

yeah i mean this this uh the mc led a led a chant uh saying

off rory

um

and obviously we at the bugle would never countenance uh anyone directing um any sort of you or off at anyone else that's not what this podcast stands for um justin rose another uh golf on the europe side was apparently heckled and i quite like this with um someone just shouted 1776

at him, which, you know, it's nice to see a bit of history

in a sporting sled.

I can't speak for Justin Rose.

It might be that the American Declaration of Independence has a special place in his heart, and he's easily triggered by a mere mention of the year.

But I don't think most British people are mortally offended by, but I think we see it as a time when we got rid of some of the dead wood, to be honest.

But that's quite to just heckle someone with

a year from history,

I quite admire that.

Look, I think they're all innocent.

1776, that's something to yell.

Maybe they just were trying to start a conversation about their favorite musical.

It could be anything.

F Rory, f Rory.

Maybe they're just so invested in a Gilmore girls' rewatch that they brought it to the golf course.

Someone also shouted at Justin Rose, you're lucky you don't speak German,

which may have been a reference to

the war and a claim that

America basically helped

win those two wars coming off the bench at a key stage towards the end, of course, on both occasions.

But presumably, the way I interpret it is

saying Justin Rose is lucky he doesn't speak German, because if he'd concentrated on studying multiple languages at school rather than playing golf, he wouldn't be as successful, famous, and wealthy as he is today.

So it could just have been just a basic statement of.

it's actually.

I'm sorry to be contradictory, but this is what that was:

an assertion of the uniquely American commitment to only learning one language ever.

It's just against the concept of learning a second language.

I can't imagine.

You're like, you don't speak German.

You're like, you don't speak Mandarin here.

We don't, you know, you probably almost had to learn one of those things.

I don't know where in its history America would have picked up that attitude from.

It's very hard to think of it.

Very hard to see.

James,

did you uh are you a golf fan at all i know you you you like a lot of sports but is it his golf one i do look i'm i'm not i'm not a massive um golf fan uh i mean obviously i like most people of color i i cheered tiger woods until it wasn't uh okay to do so uh

even even though um

him uh continuously um going for variations of the same white woman was so coded to my father that

i had to

A lot of people don't know that Tiger Woods is dating Donald Trump Jr.'s ex-wife right now.

And that's a real crowbar fact into the story, but worth always telling people.

Look,

the thing I found very funny is that I think in the American mind, correct me if I'm wrong, Josh, but they still think when they think of the European team as like the German or the English movie villain.

Oh, yeah.

You know, it's Hans Gruber.

It's Jeremy Irons.

And this was like Shane Lowry and Rory McElroy.

Like, I get you.

You start Patty Gilmore, too.

Yeah.

You're trying to get the, like, it's, it's like what happens when American Irish meet actual Irish.

Like,

you're like,

we're going to throw cups at his girlfriend and we're going to yell abuse.

And why is he sinking the ball and giving us the finger?

Because he grew up in the troubles.

He's from Belfast.

Did you not watch the black and white film?

Like, why?

Why would you think you can yell stuff at people from Northern Ireland and they're going to flinch in golf?

It's going to be, I don't even know if it cracks the top 20 of most arduous situations Rory McElroy and Shane Lowry have found themselves in.

And the graceful thing McElroy did was he like, and this is how you know that they definitely he was angry.

Because one of the graceful things he did was he immediately said at the presser afterwards to Irish fans, don't behave like this when we host the Ryder Cup next,

which is the equivalent of looking at your six foot eight Salmone cousin and going, we're going to be nice when we come around.

Because you know, if those New York fans try that on an island, like they'll leave the golf course and they'll never be seen again.

Yeah.

It is true what you say that like there is a strain of kind of especially a more conservative america that looks at europe like they they've never moved past world war ii and their conception of the world and they're like uh which is tough because they have to be like oh germany those are the nazis we hate now as opposed to the ones that we're currently reaching for

Some people wrote that the

sort of crowd behavior was a symptom of the sort of Trumpian era of

America.

Whether or not this is true depends on whether you think something that is obviously true is true or not.

But it's also true that a vocal minority of American golf watchers have long resided in the upper echelons of most annoying stroke impolite sports fans.

And there was an interesting piece of scientific research.

I know we've talked a lot about science on this show.

Because basically every single

golf shot ever played.

in a golf tournament in golf america uh someone shouts get in the hole and uh this year's uh rider cup in fact marked the 25th anniversary of the last time a professional golfer in the USA hit a shot without someone shouting, get in the hole, as soon as they hit the ball.

But scientists have revealed that fans shouting, get in the hole, at a golf ball, doesn't actually do anything to improve the ball's chances of going into the hole.

And in fact, if anything, it makes it slightly less likely to go in.

There's been a 15-year research program conducted by Flagstaff McCraw, the Emeritus Professor of Golfometry at the St.

Pooke University in Clank, Wyoming.

Discontinued by Elon Musk and George.

When people shout get in the hole, it very, very rarely actually goes in the hole.

He says any causal link between the get-in-the-hole shout and the success of the shot remains at best conjectural.

It's far more statistically effective when the player is putting on the green from a short distance than when, for example, hitting a shot from 550 yards away.

Statistically, said Professor McRae, shouting stay out of the hole is much more likely to result in a successful outcome.

In professional golf, around three out of four shots stay out of the hole, and only one out of four go into the hole, of which the overwhelming majority are from not very far away.

Golf fans wishing to exhort the ball, which we should emphasise, says Professor McCraw, is thought to be a non-sentient being without the capacity to respond to human speech, would be better off shouting, get into a good place on the fairway, or get close to the hole.

A written missive to the ball to get in the hole is also equally as effective as shouting, get in the hole, and considerably less annoying for everyone else also trying to watch the golf tournament.

For those wishing to be less disappointed

by the failure of the get-in-hole shouts, says McCraw, they should also consider following a different sport.

Snooker is highly recommended, where the ball is much more likely to get in the hole.

Or they could find a job, such as overseeing tunnelling work on major infrastructure projects or as a professional endoscopist.

So I hope we've cleared that up.

I think also, Andy,

just for male golfers, you don't have to just focus purely on the whole.

I do think it is important in golf to talk about the importance of foreplay.

Boom, there we go.

I stood with James.

One other news story.

The Women's Rugby World Cup finished on Saturday, England beating Canada in the final in front of a crowd of over 81, well, almost 82,000,

much the highest crowd for

a Women's World Cup final.

I think any women's rugby match.

It was a tournament that really sort of showed a lot of what is great about sport,

just people really enjoying it and not getting too cross about it.

And as someone who follows a lot of sport and most of it is men's sport, it was kind of refreshing.

But it did show how far we've still got to go for true equality in sport.

That until women's sport can have the same levels of vitriol and violence, I don't think we will truly have reached equality.

But in terms of the attendance,

across the tournament, 441,000 averaged 13,800 per match.

Eight years ago,

it was 45,000 in total across the tournament, just over 1,500 per match.

If it carries on increasing at this rate in the 2049 Women's Rugby World Cup, stadiums will need a capacity of 10.4 million in 2073 7.9 billion people will watch each game which is almost the entire population of the world now and by 2077 more people will be going to each match of women's rugby world cup uh rugby world cups than there will be alive in the world and that that shows

well i mean what a logistical challenge it is uh uh james for uh for women's rugby to capitalize on on there's going to need some huge infrastructure projects yeah with the um i i had the privilege of actually being a bit of a reporter um during the the women's uh rugby world cup and spent some time with the pacific teams and um i i think one of the most fun things like you say is the way that they both teams would just get together at the end and have a circle and do a dance and share each other's culture um

and you know

I want to see more of that in the men's game.

I feel like we're doing it wrong.

I feel like you need more post-match hugs and dancing

and crying and

sharing of joy.

And then I realized, well, really, I was just talking about football.

It's funny, the men's rugby is like, oh, the women have just like the vibe's been so cool.

They're so passionate and they cry and they get involved.

And you go, oh, it's just football.

It's literally just that men's rugby remains one of the most emotionally repressed sports

in the world.

I think this is really cool.

Like, I think it's really wonderful to see like women's sports,

like the kind of sexism diminishing and opportunities being given to female athletes and, you know, who have earned them, which is really outstanding.

I will say I have for years been

interacting with men's and women's rugby with complete equality equality by not knowing anything about either of them.

So, that which is not the equality you want, but it's the equality that we're getting for a while.

I will say,

in America, we took rugby, we turned it into a different sport, gave it the name football, despite that also being a different sport everywhere else.

So, we kind of have our own version that's different than the rest of the world, which is the same way we handle both Earth Day and, in recent years, democracy.

I mean, it's been great to see.

My wife used to play rugby at university.

I used the sports editor of the student paper.

I used to report on the women's rugby team, which was quite a new thing back then in the mid-90s.

But

it's been one of the great stories in world sport, I think, how quickly women's sport has progressed in the last

recent years.

But not everyone is on side with it.

And reading some below-the-line comments on some newspaper websites, including one specific one, which you wouldn't be particularly surprised to have some fairly reactionary comments on, described the Women's World Cup as a woke nonsense.

One said this was the death of Western civilization.

And one even said that women's football and rugby are another aspect of the Davos intention to destroy societies and nations.

And I mean, it's quite impressive to infer that

from 82,000 people really enjoying some sport.

But anyway, that's the world.

It's pretty incredible now that the word woke encompasses just like the existence of women.

It's like women are doing that.

What next?

Women existing as whole people 24 hours a day, seven days a week?

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

Thank you very much for listening.

We'll be back next week where I will be joined by Helen Zoltzmann,

who I've definitely met before.

Yes, anything to plug, Josh?

Yes, please.

I have a comedy special that came out this summer called Positive Reinforcement.

It's on YouTube.

I would love if you watched it.

It would really bring me a lot of joy.

I'm out on the road just a little bit, coming up all over New York City most of the time, but

October 24th and 25th in New Orleans,

November 23rd in Minneapolis headlining.

I'm doing the Christmas tour with Amy Mann and Ted Leo again, which I'm so excited for.

And you can find out all the information about my whereabouts and my newsletter, That's Marvelous.

You can find it at that'smarvelousnewsletter.com.

That's free every Monday, or you can give me money for it every Monday.

James?

Look, I've got this documentary on Palau Monkeys dropping this week.

That'll be on my socials.

It's another award-winning podcast series I made on the Marshall Islands and nuclear testing, which you all enjoy this, Andy.

I recently won Best International Podcast and the Asia Broadcasting Awards, where my competitors, it was

the official national radio of China, the other Chinese radio station,

Iran National Radio,

and me.

So I have managed to accomplish something something that the United States cannot do, which is defeat China and Iran.

Congratulations.

And for Kiwi listeners, I will be back home in November doing a national tour of my political show from earlier this year.

And you can follow that on social media.

Don't forget the Bugle 18th birthday show on the 26th of October.

Details of the live stream and a link to my tickets at thebuglepodcast.com.

My Zolt Guy's tour recommences next year, March and April.

Details at andysoltson.co.uk and I will have some dates in Australia

in sort of late November to early January that will hopefully think I did say I'd hope they would be confirmed by this show but I'm very confident they'll be confirmed by next week partly because it's getting quite close to when I'm going to be in Australia.

Anyway, details on the website.

Also, NATO Green is doing the last show of his In the Darkest Hour tour on the 2nd of October in San Diego.

So if you're in or near San Diego on the 2nd of October, go and see that and say hello from everyone at Bugle.

Until next time, thank you for listening.

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.