The Bugle - Sorry Iran, it's Cost-No

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

This week, Andy Zaltzman is joined by Josh Gondelman and James Nokise for a satirical sprint through the week’s most surreal headlines.🇺🇸 Trump at the UN — the world’s most chaotic diplomat-in-chief takes his brand of bluster to the global stage. What did he say this time, and did anyone manage to stay awake?🐒 In Palau, macaques are making mischief—proof that not all international crises involve humans (though these monkeys are giving it a good go).⛳ And at the Ryder Cup, golf’s most polite competition turns into a not-so-polite chaos-fest. Who lost their cool? Who lost their balls? And how did it all go so very wrong?🎧 Support The Bugle! Get bonus episodes, exclusive video editions, and a warm glow of smug satisfaction: thebuglepodcast.com📺 Watch Realms Unknown on YouTubeProduced by Chris Skinner and Laura Turner. Herded by macaques. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 4,354 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 Sadiqon, 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.

us from New York, the city where dolphins fear to tread. This is 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, 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 man. Also joining us, someone who may now be about to throw his hat into the ring as mayor of New York. But currently in Scotland, someone who's attitude to dolphins remains a closely guarded secret. It's James Nekislo. Hello, James.

Andy, and as they say in Scotland, don't ask what's in the scam. I think it's fish. They never tell you. They never do it. 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. Yeah, I remember I was stopped and searched in New York actually, the one time I wanted a show in Manhattan. I had a season at La Mama Theatre, and I was running late because comedians. And I picked up some ginger nut biscuits, which is the 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 that it's not actually legal, is it, Josh, to stop in search these days. Oh, the Constitution says you were never supposed to be doing things. But, I mean, the rules are when you're beige and foreign in New York, stop for the people with the guns. Rudy Giuliani 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 adverts, which for Kiwis, I can feel Kiwi listeners right now just shrinking in on themselves because it's actually quite, there is a Jamaican person singing.

I want to point that out. 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

Well, I'm not standing for Mayor of New York But my dad was once mistaken for the Mayor of New York Because he looked a bit like Ed Koch And when he was in New York I think sometime in the 80s or 90s When that would have been He did get mistaken for Ed Koch on more than one occasion So that's my personal family link

to the Maryland of New York. So we've all got skin in the game. That's what we've discovered from this. 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 in on Canterloop Melons in episode one is absolutely sensational. The Time Swap History Pod, that's new. Celebrity Historians

Wendy Pimbush, Ernie Alsop, Side Hulloch and Hell of a 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 he'd been King of Babylon in Old Testament times? Would the Battle of Can I in 216 BC have gone differently if Billy Jean King had been head of the Carthaginians instead of elephant-in-adict, Hannibal, and vice versa for the 1970 Wimbled and Women's Singles Final? And what if 7th century Japanese Empress Jito had been Che Guevara instead?

Interesting stuff on the Timeshop History Pod. No idea. That's another one coming out tomorrow. Celebrity co-hosts Carball Whip and Petty Drevel 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 Oleg Pantifex from the hit YouTube channel 6 Second Slam in which they adversely critiqued things in 6 seconds Bunsen and Ola 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 insults, 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 sceptre twisling layabout and insult too towards Gephion the Norse goddess of ploughing and foreknowledge and the insults for Gephion is, as you're supposedly the goddess of four knowledge, you'd have known long ago that I was going to call you

a farming-obsessed loser, who can go shove an entire combine harvister right at where the sun don't shan shine. 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. Well, that to me is bang out of order. And you then made those four oxen son work in your ploughing business Nepo baby

well nepo oxen basically and then they ploughed 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 at Gepheon the Norse goddess of ploughing 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 ploughing Family show She'll call it Top story this week Oh no

It's another week Where the American President is the top story I apologize Yeah I'm thanks for getting down early 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 at bugle I am now pledging will be an entirely Trump-free zone but since we have Josh on who is you know it's very close with numerous members of the Trump administration I'm pretty well sourced I'm kind of the Maggie Haberman of the

comedy community you can bring us up to date with the latest in your president's remorse us drive to make everyday life easier for ordinary working Americans so you mean how this morning he declared a 100 percent tariff on foreign films

you see that I didn't see that no I missed that I missed that I mean I saw that you know he's 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 US 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 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

he the big couple big pieces of news from the past week he has Trump and 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 people 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 malto dextrin failing to say that word out loud and saying, you know what, it's the cool ranch Doritos.

There are people 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. 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 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 every verbal utterance or three, he sees a video of himself spouting in in in a name conspiracy theory that will ultimately only hurt his base and others and think close enough sounds like me let her rip and i think the answer is all of the above med beds do not exist but you're 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 um it's a twist i'm so sorry Is that, we're just speculating whether that is the original Josh Gonderman or a body double that has just been, uh, been returned to, uh, this is that, this is the Paul McCartney episode. This is from every episode of going forward. John, you play it backwards as Josh is dead. Yeah. Sorry about that. Tylenol, uh, we know here in the UK, uh, it's known as paracetamol. Um, and of course, So there was a joke when I was a kid.

And it explains what I think why, you know, Britain is just inherently a funnier country. The joke was why there are no painkillers in the jungle because of the paracetamol, whereas, you know, why there are no painkillers in the jungle because of the Tylenol, but it just doesn't work. It doesn't work on any level whatsoever. So I think that shows a 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 am not the guy to ask. The full version of the joke is why there are no painkillers in the jungle because the paracetamol, and also because all the animals have fallen down a rhinoceros whole 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 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 West 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 inverts. of quote marks, like air quote marks for that. Claiming a link between Tylenol, Paracetamol, 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 fucking 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 them credit for that, because science has been two elitist for too long for my life. I think a lot of people don't realize that the Earth.

Part of the reason the Earth was flat was because when its mother was pregnant, it took acetamol, which is the Tyronell of. 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 their drugs. You know, you can't just give it like fun normal names. You can't be like, oh, take this pill. It's called headache be gone.

And you're like, no, that should, that's like an infomercial type thing. And I guess on the plus side, Josh, 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, that theoretical link being at some point proved? It just feels, it feels too tenuous so far for American non-scientists and non-statisticians to grasp. There was also, I mean,

some suggestion of the MMR vaccine. Trump was suggesting could also cause autism. There was a study in Denmark that examined over 600,000 children and concluded that data did not support that claim. But the question is... And that study must have been so annoying to conduct. 600,000 kids. Get them to answer your medical questions?

Yikes. They must really care. Yeah. And can you trust Denmark? They claim mermaids. surreal. I'm just not sure 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. Before you, 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, want to come to my tour show, extended into 2026, March and April, dates on my website, and his awesome.com. 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. I mean, to go on for almost an hour when you're just supposed to be doing a tight 15. That's, I mean, that's pushing it. I could name some names. I know a couple guys. Look, we've all taken too many painkillers

and got on stage at least once in our career. This was 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, 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, like, it's like you can't even shop at places you definitely do not shop.

Iranian diplomatic core. like like what's like ban like banning millionaires from Target all right man I think I guess like where where even is the Costco

near the United Nations like where is that downtown Manhattan Costco that there might be up in Harlem on the east side yeah like where like where is it's not in the neighborhood 711s

not for you it on aha like It's such a bold like little a 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. 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 threat. Although I guess if your country's diplomats are buying in bulk while conducting official business, your state apartment is, to use the term of kind of international relations, kind of an 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 all 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, 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. We're worried we no longer share values, right? The U.S. 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. We've all been in writers' rooms, and it is wonderful when you see a policy which is clearly giving cocaine at 2 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 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 of 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'd try and franchise it. So there'll be some sort of plot test at the end of the moon landing. We were like, hang on a second. Is that Simul 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. Twelve 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 noughts in 26 years that's nought a thousand years i mean why is america declined so so strikingly as a as a moon force that's a good question and i just think america has like a been there done that a philosophy towards the moon on to the next you know we've been to the

moon and it's it's america you know and i think we're done going up to the moon polluting it, leaving our junk there, planting a flag. It's time under 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 America had dreams of going into space and making space stations.

That was the big thing as well, not just going to the moon. will have 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 in that and the area. 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 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. Yeah. 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 Well, it's interesting. I mean, statistically, the proportion of Americans who believe the moon landings were faked is the same as the proportion of Americans who believe Lord of the Rings is real. Read into that what you will.

Pacific News, James, as are a correspondent for the world's largest ocean. There's some fascinating stories from the Pacific, including one that you have been making a documentary about concerning macaques in Palau.

This, I read a little bit about this story. It sounds absolutely phenomenal. Yeah, 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 my

I think it was the moment I was interviewing the president of Palau, seriously, about monkeys that I went, I feel like Zaltzman'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 Angau. 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 in Palau. 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 this is a small island in the middle of the Pacific.

It 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 1,000, and there's thousands of monkeys from the original dozen or so that were bought over. And like anyone would do, I 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. Sure. 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 moments in a comedian's life when the United States military says they can't 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. The,

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 non-native species and 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 trick a bee. And trust them 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 a lot. The monkeys are outsmarting everyone.

Because it turns out collectively, a thousand monkeys can not only write a great novel, but also outsmart several 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 Rider Cup in history, the Rider Cup, a biennial talk. 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 date, having rejected my invitation on the bugle a couple of weeks ago to stay the f*** out of sport, imposed himself in 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 belated comeback. I mean, it seemed like it was quite a sort of New Yorkish atmosphere, Josh. I don't know if you followed it at all, but there was quite a lot of not entirely complementary language flung around in a

not entirely golfish manner. Yes, well, one of the emcees of the tournament had to step down over her participation in heckling European team member Rory Macaulroy. 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 the sport. right it's like okay no loud cheering and also of course no women those are the two rules even the men shush here 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 on a sport because it's 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, the emcee led a chant saying, f*** off, Rory. And obviously, we at the bugle would never countenance anyone directing any sort of f*** you or fuck off at anyone else. That's not what this podcast stands for. Justin Rose, another girl from the Europe side, was apparently heckled, and I quite like this,

with someone just shouted 1776, at him, which you know, it's nice to see a bit of history in a sporting slag. Look, 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 Deadwood, to be honest. But that's quite, to just heckle someone with a year from history. Look.

I quite admire that. Look, I think they're all innocent. 1776, that's something else. Maybe they just were trying to start a conversation about their favorite musical. It could be anything. F*** up, Rory, fuck, 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 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, I'm sorry to be contradictory, but this is, what that was, was a, um, an assertion of the uniquely American commitment to only learning one language ever. That's, 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. It's very hard to see. James, are you a golf fan at all? I know you like a lot of sports, but is golf one? I do. Look, I'm not a massive golf fan. I mean, obviously, like most people of colour, I cheered Tiger Woods until it wasn't okay to do so. Even though him continuously going for variations of the same white women

and was so coded to my father that I almost got, 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 crowbarred fact into the story, but worth always telling people. Look, I, the thing I found very funny is that I think, in the American mind, correct me from wrong, Josh,

but they still think, when they think of the European team, it's like the German or the English movie villain, Oh, yeah. You know, it's Hans Gruber. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, and this was like Shane Lowry and Rory Macorite. Like, I get, you're trying to do, yeah.

You're trying to, you're trying to get the, like, it's, it's like what happens when American Irish meet actual Irish, like, you're like in there, 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 trouble. He's from Belfast. Did you not watch a black and white film? Like, why would you think you can yell stuff at people from Northern Ireland and they're going to flinch in golf?

It's got to be, I don't even know if it cracks the top 20 of most arduous situations. Rory McElroy and Shane Lowry 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 Rider Cup next, which is the equivalent of looking at your six-foot-eight Samuong cousin and going, we're going to be nice. Because you know if those New York fans try that on in Ireland, 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've never moved past World War II

in their conception of the world. And they're like, which is tough because they have to be like, oh, Germany, those are the Nazis we hate, as opposed to the ones that we're currently looking 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, you know, a vocal minority of American golf watches

have long resided in the upper echelons of most annoying, stroke, impolite sports fans. And there was an interesting piece of scientific research and I've talked a lot about science on this show because basically every single golf shot ever played in a golf tournament in golf, America. Someone shouts, get in the hole. And this year's Ryder 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.

And discontinued by Elon Musk and Josh. 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 whole 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 McCray, 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 emphasize, says Professor McCrae McRour, 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 fair way 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 the hole

shouts says McRaw 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 tunneling work on major infrastructure projects or as a professional endoscopist. So I hope we've cleared that up. I think also, Andy, just for just for male golfers, you don't have to just focus purely on the hole.

Like, don't just... I do think it is important in golf to talk about the importance of for play. Boom, there we go. I stand with James. One other new story. The Women's Rugby World Cup finished on Saturday, England beating Canada in the final,

in front of a crowd of over 81, almost 82,000, much the highest crowd for a women's World Cup final. I think that 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, which 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. In terms of the attendance, across the tournament, 441,000, average 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.

And by 277, more people will be going to each match of women's rugby world cup. Rugby World Cups, and there will be alive in the world. And that shows, well, I mean, what a logistical challenge it is, James, for Women's Rugby to capitalize on there's going to need some huge infrastructure projects. Yeah, I had the privilege of actually being a bit of a reporter during the women's Rugby World Cup and spent some time with the Pacific teams. And 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. 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, you know, sharing of joy. And then I realized, really, I was just talking about football. That's, yeah, it's funny. I mean, the men's rugby is like, oh, the women have did, like, the vibes been so cool.

Like, they're so passionate and they cry and they, they get involved. And you go, oh, it's just football. It's literally, it's literally just that men's rugby remains one of the most emotionally repressed 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 opportunity is being given to female athletes and, you know, who've 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 by not knowing anything about either of them. So that, which is, it's not the equality you want, but it's the equality that we were 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. A sports editor of the

student paper, I used to report on the women's rugby team, which got a new thing back then in the 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, in 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 that it's pretty incredible now that like the word woke encompassing is 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 Zaltzman, who I've definitely met before. Uh, yes, uh, anything to plug, uh, Josh. Yes, please. Um, 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, uh, New York City most of the time, but, uh, no, uh, October 24th and 25th in New Orleans, uh, a 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's marvelous newsletter.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 enjoy this. Andy, 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 that the United States cannot do, which is defeat China

and Iran. 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. Don't forget the Bugle 18th birthday show on the 26th of October. Details of the live stream and linked to my tickets at the buglepodcast.com. My Zoltguise tour recommences next year, March and April. details at andes alden.com.

UK and I will have some date in Australia in well sort of late November to early January that will hope 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 October, go and see that and say hello from everyone at the Bugle.

Until next time, thank you for listening. Goodbye. 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.