The Bugle - The Bugle UNCUT

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Join us for a too hot to handle episode of The Bugle, where producer Harry has selected a hand full of clips deemed too spicy to make it the first time round. From AI destruction to even more news on the celebrity wedding of the year! Andy is joined by regular hosts Josh Gondelman, Nish Kumar, Alice Fraser and Nato Green as we go behind the curtain of The Bugle Uncut. Thank you for listening, and we’ll be back next week, and remember you can help us stay alive by donating at thebuglepodcast.com if you liked this why not check out The Bugle's sister podcasts The Gargle and Realms Unknown. 🎧 Support The Bugle! Become a Team Bugle subscriber for bonus episodes, exclusive video editions, and the righteous satisfaction of funding satire:http://thebuglepodcast.com Produced by Chris Skinner, Laura Turner and Harry Gordon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

newspaper for a visual world. Hey, buglers, it's producer Chris here. I'm not in our regular podcast studio, but where there's a will, there's a wake to do an intro to the show. Now Andy's not here. He's been on holiday. He's watching the cricket.

He's possibly doing one of those two things right now. So here I am to introduce the latest sub-episode from the bugle, which has been carefully put together. Now, the modest producer Harry has said by me and Harry, but really it's all been producer Harry. Essentially, a bunch of clips that was,

so spicy when they were first recorded by the bugle co-hosts. We couldn't put them out. They were so risque. They were so dangerous. They were so politically charged. They were so longer than the hour that we already had been planning for, that we had to hold them back for a moment like this. So you're getting this, especially just you, no one else. It wasn't ready before. It's ready now. On this week's episode, we have bits of course from Andy, from Josh Gondelman, from Alice, from Nish, and probably someone else who's written on my phone down there, but I'm determined to keep looking at you and not down at the screen.

Health news now. Well, buglers cancel that high-intensity zumbarobic yoga boxing cross Pilates session. It turns out that all you need for a rip-bod and a functionally royal lifespan is a little bit of culture. According to new research, engaging with culture can be as good for your health as physical exercise. A weekly dose of culture has been linked to aging 4% slower

So basically the likes of Jane Fonda and Joe Wicks have been wasting everyone's time for all these years and we'd all have been much healthier if we'd just sloped out on the sofa with a bucket of popcorn watching 1970s art house movies pickling sheep in tanks of formaldehyde and thinking about who'd win a poetry slam out of John Milton and Miley Cyrus.

But this is hugely exciting news, isn't it? For those of us who can't really be asked to do very much in terms of exercise, that yeah, just basically a bit of culture and we'll live forever. I was just going to say, someone who's considering, you know, I'm getting a little older, slowing down a little bit, I should really consider joining a gym. And now I'm just going to subscribe to Disney Plus. I was going to say, I knew this already.

This is not a surprise to me because sitting through a bad burlesque show can make you feel like you lived a thousand lifetimes. And I do think it also explains why Hollywood stars look so young. It's not extensive cosmetic surgery. It's just all the ambient arts and culture in their proximity. But here's the question that I have. What's the threshold for arts and culture that counts? Do I have to attend the opera to reap these anti-aging benefits? Or can I watch a YouTube compilation of skateboard tricks?

What? If there's music in the background, second follow-up question, does it still count if that music is ska? Is this a lot to consider? Well, I'm going to help you out with that, Josh. I haven't read the granular detail of the research because I've been too down busy watching plays. but the research found, and I'm very much paraphrasing here,

that spending 20 minutes looking at a Vincent Van Gogh painting of some pretty flowers is equivalent to running a marathon in a wetsuit and flippers, whilst going to see Bungle in the Jungle, the new stage adaptation of the never-broadcast episode of the 1970s-stroked British kids' TV show Rainbow that resulted in a shootout between Pablo Escobar and Zippy and George, briefly becoming the most wanted drug barons in the world. Going to see that of the theatre is tantamount of paddling across the Atlantic on an inflatable walrus.

So, and Nish Kumar's next stand-up tour show will make you live forever or your money back. That's now legally buying. Andy. Andy, all walruses are inflatable if you blow them hard enough. Also in, well, in New York, since we were last talking to you, buglers, the wedding of the millennium so far, of all places.

Madison Square Gardens, who says romance is dead? Taylor Swift, the pop star and American footballer Travis Kelsey, chose the most romantic possible venue for their wedding. I mean, there's 20,000 capacity at Madison Square Gardens. I think they only sold a thousand tickets, but if they'd filled it. Whoa, whoa, whoa, Andy, let he who is without sin. Okay? let he who is without sin.

We have all at some point in our lives overestimated our appeal in a specific place. For Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey is Madison Square Gardens. For me, it's the King's Hall in Blackburn in 2022. A gig to which incredibly tickets are still available in spite of the fact that it happened four years ago. I mean, I think in terms of proportional capacity,

about a thousand people in a 20,000 capacity. venue. That puts the swift Kelsey marriage very much in line with my debut Edinburgh show also featuring John Oliver. And the capacity was I believe 56 on that

occasion. But look, if you've got 20,000 people coming to your wedding, the meat and greet line would have been a complete, even if you only give people 30 seconds each, that is an unbroken week of small talk with no pee breaks. That is on your special day.

Josh, I didn't see the full guest list. Were you amongst the celebrity invitees or not? I was not. And the celebrity invitation coverage was really big, right? They had entertainment journalists camped out taking pictures. It was Bradley Cooper was there and Eric Stone Street from Modern Family. Stevie Nix and Paul McCartney both performed. We know that, right?

We don't know a lot. We know Adam Sandler served as the officiant. Attendees had to sign pretty strict NDAs, which I know were effective, because I personally know half a dozen people who are at that wedding, and not a single one of them will answer my text asking if Sandler did the voice. His remarks is like, oh, a terrorist whiff, congratulations. Did he do the voice? It's all I want to know.

I see you have decided to get married. I didn't quite act at that at my wedding. I didn't have Stevie Nix. I did have Alfie Joey, comedian friend, doing a set of Sinatra songs, which was absolutely fucking fantastic. We accidentally had a Michael Jackson impersonator.

Excuse me? Accidentally. Yeah, I have only questions now, Josh. It's a long story, but essentially the guy that we would have, that we paid to walk our dog when we had to go, we both worked in offices of the,

time, but that doesn't exist anymore. And he was also a DJ and he lost a bunch of work because there was a fire at a venue. And we said, well, why don't you DJ our wedding? And he said, I also do Michael Jackson. And Maris said, we'll see. And I said, let's do it. What aspect of Michael Jackson was he impersonating? Was it the music?

Great question. I have all the answers. So my wife, Maris, said very gently, you know, the way you make me feel is on our wedding playlist so that's pretty good and he was like noted and then uh three quarters of the way through the reception he said uh ladies gentlemen i have a surprise for the bride and the groom which was not true he told us he was doing this already but it really did put the guests on edge because normally the DJ is not in charge of surprise he put on a red jacket and a silver glove and a plastic fedora and then queued up billy jean and did what i would call a b minus moonwalk and did a

A plus job of confusing everyone in the room. And then dangled a child out of a window. He did all the stuff except the line. Yeah. Can we just say, in terms of Michael Jackson and children, dangling them out of the window is the thin end of the wedge. That is a distant silver medal. It's very rare that a child dangling out of a window is a best case scenario.

You go, oh, wow, that kid's in plain sight. So more AI news. Alice, you brought our attention to this story that it turns out that the financial foundations of AI might not be quite as rigorously strong as you would have expected them to be. Were you someone who'd never learned anything about the entire history of human economics? Well, Andy, I think the problem for AI is that in order for it to be as successful as it needs to be to justify the expenses of its training and running, it would need to be more successful than anything has ever been. And the people who are charging in charge of the charging of it forward into the future are fully believed that it will be more successful than anything has ever been. And in order to execute on the vision that they have, they are borrowing enormous quantities of money now. banks are no longer willing to lend them as much money as they say they're going to need to make it as good as it needs to be because in order for it to be anywhere near returning on investment,

it would need to be more successful, for example, than email by about a hundred times. So the big tech companies are turning to the bond markets for these staggering sums to finance these data centers that are predicated on data centers. So if you are running AI searches now, you're running it on data centers that were built years and years and years ago. But now they are building data centers for predicted demand that has no anchoring to any real demand that exists. They raised, I think, $45 to $50 billion. They need to raise this year alone, Oracle. And they want to build capacity for their cloud customers, which include places like META,

NVIDIA, OpenAI, TikTok, XAI, and so on. they are planning on spending those $50 billion and not sure how they're going to get any of it back. Banks cannot lend them that much money because they are constrained by regulatory capital requirements and they cannot justify the position by any bank. They have an enormous quantity of debt, Oracle. So they're backing them by bonds. Investors have lent billions of dollars and backing it against like a windowless wear. house whose entire business plan is to stay completely full of other people's chatbots for the next

20 years. The financial source underneath all of this is Larry Ellison, who's the co-founder of Oracle, he's one of the richest people alive. His money also funds David Ellison, which is who's the chap, who is Paramount Skydance. They're buying up Warner Brothers Discovery. If they managed to do that deal, the Ellison Empire will include CNN, HBO, Comedy Central. They already include CBS, Looney Tunes, DC Comics, and Harry Potter. So when that bid wobbled, it is all entangled with these staggering sums that are now put up against unbuilt server farms.

Vertical integration, I think, is what they call it. Vertical integration reaching its final form. The company that hosts the AI writes the news about the AI will soon own the cartoon rabbit that's teaching the children about AI. It looks like a pyramid scheme if the pyramid is balanced upside down and his point is resting on Larry Ellison's bet that he can keep lying. fast enough that his Pinocchio knows will grow long enough to become a lever with which he can move the future of the planet. And that's the AI news. And so I think if I'm interpreting what you said right with the HBO thing, that does mean that John Oliver will soon be a non-fungible token in a bin somewhere in Wisconsin. The story that you're telling is one of global import.

But for me, it is close to home because all the AI companies, the stuff is happening here in San Francisco. Like if you drive into San Francisco right now, every single billboard is advertising an AI company. San Francisco was one of the most expensive cities in the world that open AI and Anthropic just went public. And as a result of that, San Francisco has become like, massively more unaffordable. Like there's story after story about how people can't get housing here anymore because of the cash of AI. But at the same time, like we have the Waymo's, the autonomous vehicles all over the streets

of the city that keep creating having problems. So like there was a power out. Just the other day, there was a power outage. Some lights, street lights went out. And the Waymo stopped in the street because it was dark. And it caused a traffic jam that affected. the entire Bay Area. So it's like we are getting the,

there was a, there was a Waymo that was attacked by vandals and the police reported the waymo as the victim and not the person who was trapped inside the car at the time. So it's like, it's very weird to be like in the midst of this grand and incredibly stupid an ill-conceived experiment that Alice is describing in a way that makes our daily life a little bit less bearable in San Francisco. I guess the news that AI is not based on sound economic foundations is not entirely surprising,

given that our economic foundations themselves are not based on sound economic foundations. And money is essentially a collective mind trick. Nothing is made of anything nowadays, so you can't even melt it down and hide it in your cellar anymore. And if we suddenly start expecting everything to make sense, all of everything will collapse. So this is just where we are.

We have to deal with it. When it comes to the debt, I guess when debt gets that big, it becomes everyone else's problem. So if you are the company, you might as well just keep piling it on. I mean, data centres at the heart of this story, have changed a lot.

It's got to be said since the great days, for example, of the Great Library of Alexandria, one of the OG data centers from the 3rd century BC. Very different now. Now they are, basically, the collective functioning of humanity depends on these places.

is these mysterious pulsing, glowing, humming, whirring, throbbing, alien vulnerable metal megabrains, speed pondering our entire futures. And I'm not comfortable with that. I'm not comfortable with that, Alice. My question for you is, did those Dutch tulips die in vain? That's what I want to know.

The answer, Andy, is yes. Unfortunately, all tulips die in vain. There is no tulip god. The tulip god was killed by fungus, the god of fungus. They had a beef going back centuries. I'm blaming it all on the good. gods, Andy. I'm going full odyssey. This is my new form. Everything to be blamed on the mysterious

actions of all gods. Yep. Chilups don't have souls. Sorry. I've laid my atheistic cards on the table on the bugle over the years. But if I had to choose a religion, I think the ancient Greeks are the ones who got it closest. Basically, the gods are all c-ons and you've just got to home for the best. Space news now. And, well, we might not have to worry about what life is like on Earth for much longer because scientists have discovered an exoplanet just 49 light years away that might possibly theoretically be kind of inhabitable if you don't mind living on a place that weighs as it's four five point six times as heavy as earth presumably with attendant issues regarding the strength of gravity that go along with with stuff like that for me that's a big issue the gravity is the

key thing on the inhabitability of planets you've got to practice your squat sandy well the difference and gravity, Alice, is the impact it will have on sport. You know, will cricket, cricket has been calibrated to work with the gravity we have on Earth. Will it work as well if gravity, I don't think it will work as well. If gravity's six times, you know, or three times more or whatever, then you're going to have to recalibrate the entire game. It's going to be much harder to hit six as well.

So I just don't think young viewers who are brought to the game by balls flying into the stands, they just might lose interest. you know, with tennis. I feel increased gravity. I mean, could that help serve volley tennis? I don't know. I don't think it will. I think it's going to make the ball dip even more.

So, yeah, who knows? I mean, Snooka would make it, I mean, it could have a huge impact on snooker as well. But anyway, what's, you are our future of humanity on exoplanets correspondent, Alice. So what are we got to look forward to on this place? Well, I think the main thing is that it is potentially, the closest thing we have ever found to having a planet

that has a kind of atmosphere and oceans that would be possibly conceivable to contain or support life. The planet is called LHS 1140B and it's a relatively rocky planet which is to say it's like hardcore rock and roll.

They've only found very sexy things there and a lot of drinking and trashing of hotel room. The scientists are very excited about it, but we should bear in mind that light years are very far, and we are not going to be able to fire all our billionaires there anytime soon,

which makes it less interesting. So they didn't detect helium, which is apparently a big deal. But apart from that, it's all pretty exciting. They looked at other planets. They didn't detect. atmospheres on that. They've ruled out false positives. They are almost sure that this is the thing that they think it is, bearing in mind that they are the scientists who are the only people

who could prove or disprove the thing that they know. And it's 49 light years away. So if you look at it through a special telescope, people are wearing massive trousers and or really tight trousers, depending on what kind of trousers they liked at the time. There you go, Alice's friend from the left, the bugle advocating if you want an action item figure out a way to catapult all of our billionaires to LHS 1140B

there's your to do for this week's bugle I couldn't get over the fact that the scientist in the study was named cherubim I'm concerned about what the seraphim have to say about habitable life on other planets

also liked that data showed that helium was escaping the planet atmosphere into space. And I was sort of momentarily tickled by the idea that we eventually get there and discover that there is life on the planet, but because of all the helium, they have squeaky voices. And that seemed fun to me. Anyway, we'll have full details on human efforts to inhabit LHS 1140B at some point in the next 10,000 years. They have discovered over 6,000 planets,

orbiting single stars dotted around the universe. So far, not even a tourist brochure, let alone an inhabitable human commune desperately fighting for survival against local flesh-eating aliens and a clunky metaphor for earth-based politics and society. So I'm not holding my breath. Still a long way away. There we go. Short but sweet.

That was some really good stuff, right? I don't know why Harry cut them out. I mean, frankly, Harry, you need to sort this out. They should have all stayed in the show. This is not good enough. Please sort it out. Now, I said it at the start, I'll say it again. Please support us.

Go to the buglepodcast.com and find out about us, be our kind benefactors, and you even get to send me special messages.