New Year, Same Ol' USA
The Bugle
The Bugle
4.8 • 6.7K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week’s Bugle is a US Special, hard not to be at the moment. Kick starting 2026, Andy Zaltzman joined by Nish Kumar, and Nato Green try to navigate their way through what might be the worst start to a year since, well since 2025.
🇺🇸 USA's Capture of Maduro: Andy, Nish and Nato, get their teeth into the breaking news of the US's capture of the Venezuelan president.
🇺🇸 Even More Trump News: Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to do… even more of whatever it is he’s doing now. As we delve into his plans and reasons for taking Greenland.
🇺🇸 The Tragedy in Minnesota: Finally, we touch upon the tragic events that unravelled in Minnesota, and try to, like the rest of the world, make sense of it all.
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Produced by Chris Skinner, Laura Turner and Harry Gordon.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Bugle! Audio newspaper for a visual world. |
| 0:15.0 | Hello, Buglers, happy new year and welcome to 2026. I'm Andy Zaltzman back in the Northern Hemisphere and this is |
| 0:24.3 | issue 4,364 of the bugle, the world's premier source of verifiably unverifiable truth and lies. It is |
| 0:32.4 | the 12th of January and joining me today to discuss what has frankly been a disgrace of a year so far. |
| 0:39.9 | It's, I mean, it really should be ashamed of itself. |
| 0:42.5 | It's not even a fortnight inn. |
| 0:44.7 | From London, Nish Kumar, and from San Francisco, NATO Green. |
| 0:49.9 | Hello, both. |
| 0:51.1 | Can I still say happy New Year, given that the year's not that new anymore, and it's certainly not fucking happy. |
| 0:57.1 | Listen, I'm under normal circumstances. |
| 1:00.2 | I'm very happy for people to say Happy New Year throughout January. |
| 1:03.8 | You know, I sort of increasingly have no time for people who build their personality out, saying things like, |
| 1:08.3 | oh, you can't keep saying happy new year and things like, |
| 1:11.7 | oh, die hard actually is a Christmas film. |
| 1:13.5 | No, I don't care about you. |
| 1:15.1 | You're ultimately in irrelevance. |
| 1:16.9 | But yeah, happy new year, given the start to this year, it feels pretty fucking sarcastic. |
| 1:25.7 | I think, like, what I've been thinking about this week is that our the human nervous system is not evolved to endure the amount of stimulation we're taking in at this point. |
| 1:40.4 | Like the number of like the human nervous system did not evolve to have access to real-time information about what every single head of state in the world was doing to make everything worse at the same time. |
| 1:57.4 | Like, you get 35 notifications on a device all of, like our nervous system was evolved to live in a village with 14 people and take a day and a half to weave a basket out of leaves. |
| 2:10.9 | With no AirPods, even, no headphones, just weaving a basket out of leaves. |
| 2:18.5 | Humans are evolved to have the patience and the calm and the focus that it takes |
... |
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