Can Russian AI get thrown out of Windows?

Buglers, to celebrate our 18th birthday, we are doing a special hot potato survey of our audience.

We're asking you all kinds of questions about the world and we're going to see what we can interpret from all of that.

Who knows?

It could be pretty fun.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and find out more.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4356 of The Bugle, the world's leading and only audio newspaper for a visual world for 18 consecutive years now.

I am yet again, Andy Zaltzmann, almost 650 full episodes in a row, that has been the case.

And I'm here in Bugle News Headquarters, also known as the Shed of Immutabilitous Factuitionary veracitastic truthliness.

That's what it's called.

Here in London, where once the mighty albatross feared to lay its eggs, which actually still remains the case, they've not really adapted to urbanization as well as some other species, the antisocial, feathery bastards.

You mean nothing to me.

Joining me from all parts of the known world, firstly, in Australia, it's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Alice.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

It's a delight to be here.

How's Australia?

Just generally, a pretty good, occasionally deadly, generally complacent, politically speaking.

Well, let's see if the United States of America can match up to that.

Joining us from there, it's Hari Kondabolu.

Hello, Hari.

Hello, Andy.

I'm not going to ask how you are.

Well, I appreciate that because you know the answer.

Yeah, I know the answer.

And, you know, it's one of these British conversational quirks that

we're trying to move beyond.

I'm depressed, Andy.

I'm depressed.

Thanks for asking.

You're right.

How much of that is to do with the New York Mets collapsing in the second half of the season?

Oh, you son of a bitch.

There's no reason to bring that up right now.

There was no reason.

We weren't talking about sports.

Okay.

Yes, that doesn't help.

Can I ask a question about sports?

Yes.

When you have this kind of sort of team that is famous for doing badly and your life is full of despair and overwhelm and

all of that and they just sort of keep doing badly and it makes you feel bad, you know, it is

because it's sports, can you, is it a possibility that you could just stop giving a f?

I don't think that is a possibility.

I mean, they might be trying to develop some sort of medicinal cure for

sporting obsession, but I don't think they're anywhere near it yet.

I mean, it's one of the most complicated challenges in science, I think.

I mean, you're essentially describing an abusive relationship, and

it's hard to get out of those sometimes.

I mean, but can you not just pick a better team?

Is that not part of the no, you can't just no, no, there's loyalty,

yeah?

That's a very Australian attitude towards looking at things, Alice.

Very Australian.

We are recording on the 14th of October 2025.

And exactly 18 years ago today,

as we record, give or take a day or two possibly, a revolution in human broadcasting began.

And no, I'm not referring to the first episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

I do remember that first episode well.

I was very disappointed in it, to be honest.

I thought it was going to involve coaching tips about how to watch the ball, not the bat, when wicket keeping, standing up to the stumps, to both spinners and medium-paced seamers, perhaps stuff about the alignment of the hips and shoulders to keep your weight going back towards the stumps, when to move the balls down the legs, hide, that kind of stuff.

Maybe they got into that later in the run, but I never watched it again.

It was the publication date, according to the internet, of episode one of the bugle, 18 years ago today.

And we are, yeah, I mean, that's

a significant chunk of, you think the world is only, what, 6,000 odd years old?

That's actually quite a high percentage of the entire history of uh

bugle is legally an adult in the us

it is yep i expect you buglers to treat that information with uh respect and dignity uh you can join us for

wait andy you have just lined up 1 000 buglers to deep fake their fan fiction idea of the bugle now doing an only fan side this is

to be honest quite early in the bugle's existence we did get sent a piece of fan fiction involving me

and John Oliver.

And aspects of it I've never fully been able to erase from my mind.

Popping that portal again.

That's the only way

you know you've made it, Andy, is when people are doing fanfiction about you.

So anyway,

our 18th birthday live stream live show is on Sunday, the 26th of October.

It will feature the aforementioned John Oliver coming to us live via The Wanders of the Internet from New York.

It will also feature Alice and Nish Kumar, who'll be joining me live at the Leicester Square Theatre in London.

Tickets to the live stream live show

are

available via thebuglepodcast.com, where we have also launched our first annual hot potato listener survey.

I've been reliably informed by Chris, the producer.

Also, our premium tier voluntary subscribers will be sent an amazing new thing

very soon.

To get the amazing new thing,

quite nebulously phrased by producer Chris, you must be fully signed up by the end of this month to receive.

Anyway, to mark the 18th birthday of the bugle,

our section in the bin today, as always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin, is a quiz about the year 2007 with a very special prize at the end.

Three multiple choice questions.

And if you get all three rights, you win the prize.

So, question one: In our year 2007 quiz, which of the following events took place in the year 2007?

Was it A, the Visigoths sacked the city of Rome?

Was it B, Shakespeare writes his smash hit, high school, teen, Romtraj, Romeo, and Juliet?

Was it C, scientist Albert Einstein invents the Bucking Bronco?

Was it D, the first ever issue of the Bugle podcast?

Or was it E, Justin Bieber was elected high emperor of Canada?

So that's question one.

Question two:

The first issue of the bugle in 2007 coincided with what sporting event?

Was it A, the rumble in the jungle between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman?

Was it B, the 1985 World Snooker Championships?

Was it C, the 2007 Men's Rugby World Cup final?

Was it D, the first ever ancient Olympic Games?

Or was it E, the Battle of the Sexes 2, in which world champion pole vaulter Brad Walker of the USA took on Diana Igali of Hungary, the reigning Women's Olympic skeet shooting champion in a hybrid pole vault skeet shooting contest, which she won disconcertingly easily.

A, B, C, D, or E.

And your final question.

In 2007, John Oliver teamed up with me and E.

Zaltzman to do the Bugle podcast.

But what American topical comedy show was he also working on at the time?

Was it A, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart?

Was it B, Sean Hannity and the Chipmunks on Fox News?

Was it C, f that shit with Abbott and Costello?

Was it D, What's Going On by Marvin Gaye?

Or was it E, Butt Naked and Off the Leash with Maddie and H?

The former secretaries of state, Albright and Kissinger, let it all out in every concealable, every conceivable way.

A show renowned for some of the most inventive strategic placement of houseplants.

Anyway, the correct answers.

In order to win your prize, you've got one more second to answer.

The correct answers were D, The first issue of the Bugle podcast took place in 2007.

The second one was C, the men's rugby rugby World Cup final of 2007 took place at the same time, and it was the daily show with Jon Stewart option A for question three.

If you answered correctly to all three,

you have won the right to buy a ticket to the Bugle's 18th birthday live stream live show via the bugle website, thebuglepodcast.com.

Congratulations.

It's the only way to see and hear the entire show.

We'll put highlights up.

But if you want the full extravaganza, you will have to join us on the live stream live tickets at thebuglepodcast.com.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week: peace in our time.

It's all over.

The entire history of conflict in the Middle East is over.

3,000 years of conflict has been brought to an end single-handedly by American President Donald Trump.

There has been much celebration at the return of the 20 living Israeli hostages.

Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have also been returned.

And fingers are crossed that, well, that no one was crossing their fingers when when they signed the deal.

Just have a quick look at how things are going during the early stages of eternal peace.

Just checking a few.

Let's not worry too much.

There's bound to be glitches.

There are bound to be glitches.

So, Hari, I know you're a huge fan of

the concept of global peace for all eternity.

This must be very exciting times for you.

Oh, yeah, it's totally going to last.

I don't question it at all.

But that's good.

I mean, look, man,

Trump is taking all the credit for it, in addition to taking credit.

Well, we can talk about it later, but he's taking credit for a lot.

But his statement read: We seek tolerance, dignity, and equal opportunity for every person, ensuring this region is a place where all can pursue their aspirations in peace, security, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, faith, or ethnicity.

We don't even have that in the U.S.

Like, what is he talking about?

Also, I'm going to hope the intern who wrote that got a sandwich.

Yes.

It doesn't feel like words from

Trump's own

pen.

No, it doesn't have the word beautiful and nice in it.

Well, he did.

I mean, the bit that I enjoyed about his statement was a new and beautiful day is rising and now the rebuilding begins.

He said, he praised regional leaders, tick-tick, and he said, rebuilding is maybe going to be the easiest part.

We know how to build better than anybody in the world.

And I just don't think he understands what

rebuilding means in the context of like a post-war situation.

This is like the people who think we don't have enough hospital beds is a problem of not enough actual beds rather than not enough nurses and staff and resources and facilities.

And they just suggest buying some cheap mattresses from Ikea to fill the gap in the hospital system.

Rebuilding isn't just a matter of cheaping out on your contractors and throwing up some literal buildings.

It's, you know, helping deeply traumatized people who have defined themselves as enemies against a force of evil because the nature of war requires competence to see the enemy as purely generative of morally distorted subhumans.

And those people have to then move towards healing and the kind of peaceful coexistence where they can bear to send their children to the same primary schools and get a cupper at the same cafe.

Like you cannot underpay the kinds of contractors who can get that built.

It needs to be a wholehearted commitment to peaceful coexistence on both sides in a world where you can see what you all were saying about each other on social media mere weeks ago, and you know, entire neighborhoods have been flattened.

You know, it's not just about some drywall, Andy.

Well, yes, Alice, but it's those kind of

rather

antiquated views of the complexity of the logistical challenge of rebuilding somewhere that has been devastated by war that has held this species back for thousands and thousands of years.

And if you just simplify things by saying it's over and everything's fine,

that means you're done.

It means it's finished and everyone can get on with whatever's next on the to-do list.

He's declared that the 3,000 years

journey to peace in the Middle East, in the region has been achieved.

And look, I hope he's right.

I hope he is.

Imagine the kind of moral maths we will have to do if he is right.

Like if Trump has brought peace to the Middle East that lasts a thousand years, can we give him just a little bit of Americo-fascism as a treat?

Can we have just a little authoritarianet built into just one wing of the White House?

A thousand years of flourishing secular and inter-religious harmony in that war-torn reach.

Surely that buys you at least six months of disappearing enemies of the state.

I'm just saying, we have to figure out what the exchange rate is.

Yeah, I guess.

I mean, there's always, there's always, you know, the maths and the small print

to be dealt with.

I mean, I guess the thing is, if you are ending 3,000 years of conflict, as Trump claimed that he was, and who are we to question a historian of Mr.

Trump's ilk and caliber?

It does suggest that it might be worth waiting more than 24 hours to see if the eternal peace thing is going to pan out quite as eternally and peacefully as

would be ideal.

I mean,

it is, yeah, obviously, that these are these are early stages,

and Trump is not always renowned for,

I think it's fair,

the time span of his kind of political attention and interest.

So it's going to be a challenge to keep him interested in this.

It requires a combination of real estate opportunities, a reward system, which could be anything from

prestigious international prizes, which we'll talk about more in a moment, actual trophies, goodie bags, t-shirts, special stickers, whatever works.

And we need to leverage his innate fury.

Now, if he can be persuaded that the woke want a one-state solution and the continued oppression of Palestinian people in their own homeland,

then the world could benefit from him.

So it's incumbent on all of you in the woke community to get out there and start vocally supporting Netanyahu.

And so

consider that

invocation issued.

Trump does have a plan for governance, which is interesting.

At least there's that.

His plan is a group of Palestinian policy experts will rule Gaza, but the local authorities would be supervised by a so-called board of peace headed by Trump and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

So they are literally describing a puppet government.

A puppet government overseen by two men who are board of peace.

Yes.

I mean, the Bugle has long called for Hamas to do the decent thing and resign and ideally f ⁇ off.

But they don't seem to be picking up that particular baton yet either.

There's some talk as well that Benjamin Netanyahu might take this opportunity after Trump's sort of characteristically rambling speech in the Israeli parliament

yesterday.

Some talk of Trump reinventing himself as

a beacon of peace.

Now,

that's quite a stretch.

That is a stretch beyond Olympic level gymnastics.

You know, Netanyahu reinventing himself as a man of peace, cooperation, compassion, and understanding.

But, you know, who knows?

We live in strange times.

Stranger things have happened at sea, I think.

Well, one stranger thing has happened at sea.

And actually, when I think about it, that thing was in a Salvador Dali painting and it was on land.

But anyway, let's not, let's not, it's not completely possible.

And after all, did Hannibal Lecter not, in the space of just a few short years, transform from a cannibalistic serial killer into an eloquent anti-slavery advocate,

passionately striving for a more equitable world, before subsequently then also becoming the head of a religion and the emissary of God on earth yes he did well I mean Anthony Hopkins played Hannibal Elector then he played John Quincy Adams in Amistad and then much later on one of the two popes and the two popes so it's basically yes I'm saying it's it's not impossible

well Trump has urged the Israeli president to pardon Netanyahu of corruption charges I look to be I don't think the Israeli people are going to pardon Netanyahu for driving them into this hole, let alone the people he's been dropping bombs on.

I think what Netanyahu Netanyahu right now can be a unifying force of everybody hating him quite a lot.

I think that's his real function.

Keir Starmer was quoted as saying, and this shows that whatever else we've lost in this country

here in Britain, we still have understatements in our national

golf bag.

Keir Starmer described the Gaza peace as, quotes, no small challenge.

And I think that is an extremely British way of

putting it.

The White House is quite annoyed that Trump hasn't already been given the Nobel Peace Prize that was given to the Venezuelan opposition leader this year.

And

the Nobel Committee is on blast, as the youth no longer say,

for not giving it to Trump this year.

But I think, you know, this is the carrot.

This is the carrot that has led him to declaring peace in the Middle East.

Hold up up for next year.

You might stop him declaring war on Portland and trying to deploy nukes at woke.

You know?

Yes.

Well, this is, I mean, it is a really weird.

And, you know, the White House have criticised the Nobel Committee for not giving Trump the prize.

Trump has expressed a kind of characteristic level of peevishness

about it.

I mean, it is a bit odd.

You would have thought that...

you know, creating eternal peace in the world's most troubled region would be prize enough in itself itself for most people.

But Trump evidently, even at his advanced age, retains a level of insecurity that needs the kind of external validation that only the Nobel Committee can provide.

He was beaten by the Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Carina Machado, to the Nobel Peace Prize.

What gave her the edge over Trump?

After all, Machado has never once brought about eternal peace in the Middle East, whereas Trump has done so once and forever.

So you would have thought he might have picked her at the post.

Her citation from the Nobel Committee

gave her the award for, quote, her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Now, given that Trump went 0 for 1 in achieving a just and peaceful transition from democracy to democracy

not that long ago, she might just have the edge on him on the transitions score.

Looking at the info around this year's Nobel Peace Prize, 338 candidates were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize of 2025, 244 individuals, 94 organisations.

The nominations deadline,

in terms of why Trump might not have achieved the Peace Prize

for

achieving, stroke announcing the Middle East peace, the nomination deadline was the 31st of January.

So he was just a week and a half into his presidential reign that will, of course, bring about eternal peace, not just for the Middle East, but for all humanity and the universe.

Exactly who those nominations are, incidentally, is not in the public domain, but the Nobel Committee will divulge the not very short list of the full 338 candidates in just 50 years' time.

That's according to

its rules.

They publish the shortlists 50 years later.

So do tune in for issue 6452-ish of the Bugle for an exclusive update, assuming we don't jump another 3,700 odd episodes in numbering like we did once before.

The shortlist was then whittled down in February and March.

Then there was an advisor review phase from April to August and the vote just before the announcement.

So it is possible that one of the reasons Trump did not win this year was that during that shortlist prep phase and the advisor review phase, he was doing things like advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, posting joke AI videos of himself and Netanyahu partying in a luxury hotel, a holiday resort built on the war, strafed and death addle wreckage of Gaza, sending his own military into his own city, slashing aid programs with the aim, stroke, intention, stroke, not giving a shit in this of destabilizing fragile regions of the world, and pardoning and

releasing violent insurrectionists in America, which did not entirely scream, give me a peace prize.

And at that crucial phase of the vetting process, he might just have come up short in a few of their KPIs.

And the swimsuit round, he always

lets the nerves get to him just before the catwalk.

I mean, both Putin and Netanyahu give Trump credit and says he deserves the peace prize.

Putin and Netanyahu.

That's pretty impressive.

You can't argue with two inveterate, hardened peace fans like them

to know

what is

a true man of peace.

I mean, who else?

Who else thinks he deserves it?

The ghost of Henry Kissinger?

Who, by the way, does have a Nobel Peace Prize even after

ordering the bombings of Southeast Asia.

So the Nobel Prize is kind of a crock of shit, to be fair.

Yes, I mean, that is, I guess, one of the key subjects in this.

Not only Henry Kissinger, but his ghost also has a Nobel Peace Prize as well, interesting, yes.

I mean, if it comes off,

I guess, you know, if, and like you say, we can't judge, because he's declared it will be eternal.

We can't really judge it until the very end of time.

And I think there'll be quite a a lot of admin going on then with the

rapture and all the associated paperwork that goes along with that as well.

But we will have full updates on the bugle over how the Middle East

peace eternity pans out next week, next month, next year, and in 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 1,000 years' time, and of course, at the end of all eternity.

Communications director of the White House, Stephen Chung, said, there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will.

So he's confused.

I was about to say, is he reckoning him with Superman?

Like

the man struggles with

stairs.

I mean, I don't know.

Yes.

And quite public.

I mean, we talked about this on, I thought it was last week or the week before when

he very movingly talked about the difficulty of going downstairs in front of the assembled might of the U.S.

military.

But,

yeah, I mean, also, I mean, if he's that good at moving mountains, you would have thought you would have been able to finish his wall by now, but evidently, that's slightly outside

its range.

Maybe he's too focused on the moving of mountains and

not on actual logistics.

Anyway, as I said, we will have full updates on the Middle East situation for the rest of all time.

And, well, fingers crossed, like I said, that

peace does miraculously appear.

AI news now, and well, another week, yet more evidence of the

takeover of life by artificial intelligence, a topic which we've

we seem to come back to alarmingly regularly

now.

But I guess that's inevitable after I outsource the

content management of the bugle to an AI bot online.

So,

well let's start let's pick up on the the latest from uh Tilly Nor, the world's favorite uh AI actor.

Um Hari I mean that Tilly Nor has been all over the the media uh romantically linked with Bradley Cooper, speculated upon as a possible bond girl, bond villain and bond cast in a 49 episode TV version of the Beatrix Potter story, the tale of Mrs.

Tiggywinkle involving some graphic hedgehog on hedgehog violent and a sex scene you'll simply not be able to unsee.

But AI intimacy coordinators were on set during the AI filming, and yes, that was an AI prosthetic hedgehog appendage.

She's been romantically linked with James Cromwell.

She's been cancelled for a controversial comment that included controversial comments about the controversy regarding her comments she'd made about gender, the Middle East immigration, the Covid crisis being a hoax, racist cats, the Saudi influence in professional golf, the earth being flat, and whether to put cream or jam first on a scon.

She also called for peace in the ongoing spat between Francis Drake and the late former 1970s England scene bowler, Mike Hendrick.

Still some glitches in the AI, it seems.

And she's been romantically linked with Shirley Temple.

So does she really represent, Hari, the threat to all human creativity that many people have suggested?

Yes.

Yes, she does.

Yeah.

And also

there's a threat to something greater.

Like if we're replacing actors with AI, who's going to wait tables?

That is a very good point that no one has really.

I think you might be the first person to pick up on that.

The social impacts of this technology.

I wonder how many male executives and directors are going to leave the industry now that they can no longer sexually harass actresses.

It's like, this is what I got in the game for.

Well, I mean, you say this, and yet she has, I mean, not existed for three weeks now in the public eye, but she has been in the public eye for only a couple of weeks, and already she has been leveraged into the culture wars with various Manosphere heads saying she's the last virgin in Hollywood

because nobody can have

intercourse with her, which makes her morally better than all the other actresses who are also not having sex with them, but have that as a choice

rather than a default manufacturer's setting.

I mean, and I'm just hearing, actually, she has been cast as the lead in a new film, The Last Virgin in Hollywood, which is due to our screens in eight seconds' time.

I auditioned for that.

I mean, this is the thing.

These AI debates keep coming back round because it is pivotal to the PR of this technology, of these large language model technologies, these generative AIs, that everybody constantly be wringing their hands about how big and ruinous the technology will be.

That is a deeply important part of how they're selling it to us all.

It must be big.

Quick, buy stocks in it.

It's like, but it is optional, you know, it's like people going on onto television with hammers, hitting themselves in the heads with hammers and saying, if we keep hitting ourselves in the head with this hammer, it will change how we engage with the world forever.

Like part of the debates that are going around about things like privacy, copyright, general abuse potential of things like chatbots, they are.

They have the option of turning the dials on that.

They're just doing this.

They're leaving all of these laws on the table because they want to get as much controversy as possible, far more than just a bunch of generated 10-second cartoons would get on their own.

Even if, you know, like with Sora 2, you can now see yourself jumping into a volcano literally as well as metaphorically.

It's part, it's a feature, not a bug, is what I'm saying.

All of these controversies.

But I guess it's that just the

commercial potential of this technology, that we could soon be living in a dream world utopia scape in which Marvel can produce a new superhero movie every 12.8 seconds.

That's only just outside the world 110 meters hurdles record, where every household in this world could have a Timothy Chalamay and or a Rhys Witherspoon of their choice somewhere in their homes, where the gaps between film and sequel and sequel and unnecessary and creatively moribund subsequent set of sequels and then blatantly commercially driven and artistically vacuous spin-off TV shows and soul-stripped, spiritually deflational remake of the original can be reduced from years to days, maybe even mere hours, or maybe even using some kind of quantum shit to before the process has even started.

I mean, what if AI can make a Christopher Nolan film before Christopher Nolan not only makes it, but even thinks of it, that then also includes the actual Christopher Nolan film that hasn't yet been made as an inverse metafilm within the film that's only visible to the characters in one or both of the AI and genuine Christopher Nolan films and contains an infinite number of alternative endings, none of which appear in the film, but all of which are simultaneously different and the same depending on whether the universe you see them in does or doesn't exist in either or neither of the derivative composite reversions of the seed film.

Where then?

For however many Christopher Nolans there are in existence?

Christopher's Nolan, infinite and refracted.

I have a five-step course for actors on how to act in a way that is irreplaceable by AI if you're a if you're a burgeoning actor out there in the world desperate to defend yourself against the predations of imaginary people.

Number one, act in completely unpredictable ways, speak with a variable pace and intensity, unanchored from norms of any kind.

Number two, be ugly.

AI bases its idea of what people look like on an aggregated database of all people's hottest, self-flattering selfies with which the internet is disproportionately peopled.

So why don't you just be interestingly ugly?

Consider it.

It's been done by a lot of people.

Have and use the full range of your upper lip mobility.

No AI has fully managed to replicate upper lip nuance.

They do a lot of these ones.

Like

a Ponce villain,

a British upper class villain in a crime movie.

Probably ideally a perverted British upper class villain.

That's what you want to be modeling your upper lip acting on.

No matter the film or play or what character you are cast as, paint a photorealistic butthole on your face.

and then any data that AI harvests from your works is censored from its own mainframe by the built-in content management automation algorithms.

And then

number five, as long as you put the cucumber in the

well, there you go.

I mean, I'm scared, Andy.

Like, Indian people just got on TV like three years ago, and now we're going to be replaced by AI.

And as you know, I am sensitive to animated representations of Indian people in the media.

If I see a Tillwinder Norwood chattergy come out, you better believe I'm making another documentary.

You could save humanity, Hari.

I mean,

you have a proven track record in removing things from the screen.

You could destroy AI.

I mean, you joke, Hari.

But there is an AI satire show on Russian state television.

There you go.

We are about to be entirely like it is very bad, but to be fair, so are we.

Like, it's not true.

It's very clearly mostly lies, but again, I don't know what we're going off.

I'm questioning how good that AI is for that Russian show, because they released a statement saying the AI-generated news host released a statement saying, my task is to select all the political nonsense of the past week and fit it in your heads like candles in a little box.

What the f what is she?

Candles in a little box?

Candies.

Does she mean candies or di was it candies?

I think it was candies.

Oh man, I'm going to be replaced by AI if I can't.

Well, I mean, the good thing about doing satire on Russian state television, if you are

merely a c a combination of ones and zeros is that they can't throw you out of a window quite so easily.

They could throw you out of windows, I guess if that's the operating system they use.

But anyway.

I guess it does raise the philosophy.

This all raises a very important philosophical question when you think about how humans have evolved

as a species.

Are we not all, when it comes down to it, just AI devices melding, churning, recoddling and emittancing the words, thoughts, ideas, techniques and precedents of all those who went before us?

So is this not just

an efficient sizing of the existing?

No, it's not.

But there are compromises on the table.

One is.

I don't know about you, Andy, but I'm an anxious tarsioid in a bra.

That's.

Compromises that the AI industry is contemplating at the moment include that AI will only replace shit actors, and there will be an annual licensing test for all actors to see whether or not they deserve to be replaced with AI.

Also, that'll only be able to use out-of-copyright

material, but with an extended 2,400-year limitation.

So, AI will only be able to speak in the pure classic Greek of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

I used my degree.

I knew it was well.

In other, well, similar related news, on a sort of more positive note, South Korea has been using a holographic police officer to fight crime.

This life-sized hologram of a police officer in central Seoul is projected every two minutes between 7pm and 10pm

in a busy park.

And police say that crime rates in the area have dropped by over 20%.

since the

sporadically appearing holographic police officer has been installed.

I mean, this, I don't know quite what to make of this.

Is this a positive story?

Or does it show how as a species we've just gone soft?

If we can be so easily dissuaded by a bi-minutely hologram, is that not more evidence of how weak we've become?

Not that long ago, we would still have had the courage, and I'm going to say it, gumption,

to commit our crime, to say steal three potatoes, an apple and a ball of wool, even if we knew we could place the death penalty or worse, deportation to Australia.

But now we just give up in case a hologram tells us we're naughty.

This is not good for me.

To be fair, I think right now in human history is the least scary time to have the projected hologram of a police officer as a crime

deterrent.

You try that 200 years ago and you'd have like

some serious,

serious...

quashing of the spirit of the local criminal.

I mean, it's just putting sparkly paper on skyscraper windows to keep birds from flying into them, right?

This is a modern scarecrow because apparently we are stupider than birds.

I mean, that's great.

He's sort of like

Robocop, but intangible and non-sentient.

So basically, the opposite of RoboCop.

But you know what they say, Andy?

A cab, which is all cops are barely luminous projections of state anti-anti-social propaganda.

I mean, it's like I always say, the only good cop is a holographic cop.

I've said that for years.

I also, I mean, they're near bars.

This scarecrow is near a bunch of bars.

So I would imagine people are out drunk and all of a sudden see this and are like, ghost cop.

No, it's a ghost cop.

But if it works this well, it does make you think what other methods could be trialed, you know, just just having hidden speakers playing police sirens randomly throughout the day or like flashing blue lights appearing all over the place, driverless police vehicles, riderless police e-horses.

I think that could definitely work.

Inflatable giant police pigeons that hover above crime spots and drop a load of pigeon crap on any criminals detected perpetrating or even thinking about perpetrating the crime.

I think what might be the most effective though is if, you know, it might need another little bit of evolution of the technology, but if you can make a holographic god appear in the skies,

I think that could that is what our species has been waiting for.

Is this a policeman I see before me?

His handle towards my hand.

Animals news now.

And

Alice,

lions are apparently beginning some sort of de-evolution to once again become the sea creatures from which all life on land originated

billions of years ago.

Just bring us up to date with the latest step in their journey.

Yes, Andy, this is a group of Namibian lions who, due to their local habitat running out of food, have been forced to retreat to the

not-so-far not-so-far-away beaches, becoming the first ever maritime lions.

And

marine,

they're fishing, they're doing quite well for themselves.

Apparently, they're quite happy, but I don't need more to worry about at the beach, mate.

I live in Australia.

There are enough things to be keeping an eye out for on the beach with my kids.

You've got to check for blue bottles, stinging jellyfish, sun cream, riptides, sharks.

I'm in Queensland now, so crocodiles.

I go to the beach every afternoon with my children.

And now you're telling me me that I have to keep a wary eye out for Mufasa on the dunes.

It's being sold to us as a story of like beautiful resilience that these desert lions have left their traditional hunting grounds and are now on the Atlantic coast.

Look, I don't know if I'm.

I don't know if I should be saying this in a way that can be clipped and put out on artificial intelligence platforms, but like, go back, go back home, go back to where you came from.

I mean, it was either that or learning to talk and ordering a hamburger.

So they went with the easier route.

I mean, it is, it does have a knock-on effect.

The main lioness of this sort of gang is capable now of killing up to 40 seals in a single night.

Oh, my God.

Which kind of chop is the

only good story?

Well, it depends if you're pro-lion or pro-seal.

And you've got to make a choice these days.

You can't sit on the fence on this one.

And it's, you know, good to seek out a balanced diet because, presumably, eating seals and zebras is better than just one or the other.

Ideally, they'd chuck in a bit of fruit and veg, but Rome wasn't built in a date, was it?

And we have to remember as well how difficult it is for lions to find food compared with humans.

As you said, they don't have the advantage of delivery apps.

They don't have the kind of microchip tagging technology and drone footage that allows humans to keep track of where all the other animals are.

So they have to use more old-fashioned techniques like roaring really loudly and being able to tear a wilderbeest limb from limb without any help or equipment, which, believe me is no easy task, Bugless.

The number of times I've tried that and that I've only been successful on three or four occasions.

In other animals news, Alice,

Australia has lost its only shrew.

It brought the tally of mammals extinct in Australia since 1788, and I can't recall exactly what happened in 1788 in Australia, but 39 species have gone extinct

since then,

which is leading the world in species.

I mean, I guess the thing is, you say it in those terms.

Australia, as we've sort of discussed earlier in the show, is an innately competitive sporting nation.

You've basically turned it into a medal stable now.

I mean, the rest of Australia's species must be shitting themselves.

Yes, Andy, there was a lot of applause among the sexists of Australia until they realised that it is not just a nagging woman, it's a small, long-nosed insect-eating mammal.

And we lost it.

We lost our last one.

We no longer have any shrews in Australia.

It's, I mean, this is a deeply depressing story, but allows me to get on a hobby horse, which is that I don't think anyone in Australia should have a cat.

And I know many people in Australia who are very nice and who have a cat, and I don't think they should have that cat.

I don't think we should have cats in Australia.

They destroy all of our shrews.

You know, I feel like the shrew has got a bad rap due to the taming of the shrew in Shakespeare, the original Enemies to Lovers

romance story.

But it,

like, these are, it's such a storied part of our history, the incredible species that we have as a result of having broken off from the main body of Pangea earlier than a lot of other land masses.

And we have this really unique

ecosystem.

And I just feel like, and also no cows,

cows, and also sheep.

If you're in Australia, don't have a cat and only eat kangaroo if you're gonna eat red meat.

Uh, that's my hobby horse.

Come at me.

There's definitely a man in Australia in an unhappy marriage who's like, Are you sure they're all extinct?

Am I right?

I don't know.

Australians don't sound like that, right, Alice?

Look, I don't

close enough.

Close enough.

I'll give you, I'll give you a point for effort.

Am I right, Johnny?

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

Don't forget, in just not many days' time, we will have the Bugle 18th birthday live stream live show beamed around the universe from the Leicester Square Theatre.

It will feature me, producer Chris, Nish Kumar, Alice Fraser, and from New York, John Oliver Tickets via thebuglepodcast.com.

Do join us to make this the biggest live stream in human history.

Brackets for any Bugle live show.

See you all there.

They're also available online via my website, tickets to my tour extension.

My Australia dates are very nearly, very nearly confirmed for the third consecutive week.

And

do come along.

I'm doing shows in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney.

Exact dates and venues, TBC very shortly again.

Hari, anything to plug?

Oh, yeah.

I have a new special that I'm going to be filming in Chicago, Illinois on November 15th, and it's at the Den Theater.

And I would love to see Buglers there.

That's on November 15th.

Before that, Boston, Massachusetts on October 16th.

Walnut Creek, California, October 17th.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 19th.

Denver, Colorado, October October 30th to November 1st, LA, Los Angeles, November 2nd, New Orleans, D.C., Brooklyn, all

round out the year.

I'd love to see Buglers there.

And these are all Bugle strongholds, all of them.

So I feel good about this.

Alex.

You can get the audiobook of our Passion for Passion now on almost all audiobook platforms.

It'll be up on all audiobook platforms in the next week.

So please either pre-order it there or get it there wherever you listen to your audiobooks.

If you listened to Realms Unknown last week, you will know why buying the audiobook is the only way I'll ever see any money out of this book.

So

I know you can listen with your ears.

Why not listen with your ears to my audiobook, Passion for Passion?

And also join my Patreon, patreon.com slash Alice Fraser, where I run salons and writers' meetings.

And we have a nice community over there.

So that's about that's about all I've got to plug.

Just additionally, regarding my Australian shows, I mentioned the cities they're going to be in.

The dates will be before or after cricket matches between Australia and England that will be happening in those cities.

So, do come along, Buglers, and I will confirm,

definitely confirm the dates on next week's Bugle, which will be the last bugle before our 18th birthday show, to which you will all be coming via the live stream.

See you all then, and we'll speak to you next week.

Goodbye.