Jumper Too Thick

Summary

TRASHFUTURE Podcast: "Jumper Too Thick"

Date: April 14, 2026
Hosts: Nova, Ronan, Hussain
Theme:
A satirical deep-dive into business, technology, media, and politics—especially the comic and pathological absurdities created by late-stage capitalism. This episode skewers the psychic fallout of living through these cycles, touching on news farce (Coachella and Camp Poosh), British politicians' foibles, the cult of AI, and the fundamental role of lying in both tech and politics.

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Main Themes & Purposes

• Absurdity and contradiction at the heart of news, business, and politics under late capitalism.
• Media and mega-project spectacle: Coachella’s Camp Poosh disaster.
• British politics’ pettiness and pathos, especially through the lens of Keir Starmer’s personal press coverage.
• The cult and con artistry of AI, specifically Sam Altman and OpenAI.
• The function of deception (lying) as a core practice in business and tech.

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Key Segments and Discussions

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1. The Farce of News: The Camp Poosh Disaster

Timestamps: 00:12–05:44

• Nova describes the labor of prepping news topics for the show—only for "serious" events to get supplanted by the viral absurdity of Kourtney Kardashian’s Camp Poosh being destroyed at Coachella.

• Playful speculation about the "unemployment scandal among rimless glasses guys" and the susceptibility of influencer projects to disaster.

• Satirical riffing on how the news is covered: comparing real journalism to TMZ and imagining “the newsroom” dramatizing a table falling on someone.

  “An adult summer camp has been ruined. By God. We can only assume.” — Nova (01:49)

• The trend of covering celebrity mishaps with over-the-top seriousness.

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2. TMZ vs. ‘Serious’ News

Timestamps: 05:00–06:50

• The blurring of lines between "real" journalism and tabloids.

  “There’s like, 10 people in the world who still do, like, real news. It’s like us, Emiliano Molino, bits of the FT, and TMZ.” — Ronan (02:43)

• How even FT-style financial journalism gets drawn into tabloid territory (e.g., analyzing financial irregularities at Camp Poosh).

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3. AI News—Meta Clones Zuckerberg

Timestamps: 06:28–11:03

• Breaking story: Meta has designed an AI-powered, photorealistic Mark Zuckerberg to interact with employees in his stead.

• Hosts mock the cyclicality of Zuck’s obsession with recreating Facebook for new technologies, and note the perils of AI representation.

  “Well, what if I make myself a CEO AI?” — Nova (09:51) “If you try to ask Mark Zuckerberg a question…his, like, Navy SEAL security detail would fold both of your legs into your rib cage and then throw you out onto the sidewalk.” — Ronan (10:17)

• Observations about the hollowness and performative aspects of business innovation in Silicon Valley.

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4. The Keir Starmer Press Ritual

Timestamps: 11:16–18:18

• British media’s fixation on pathologizing the most mundane elements of Keir Starmer’s life—his vacations, humble food choices, and even jumpers.

• The hosts highlight the contradictory criticism: Starmer is both accused of being too luxurious and too ordinary.

  “Sick fucking freak. Keir Starmer overpaid for a disappointing example of…parmesan truffle fries.” — Ronan (11:43) “He still looks shit despite wearing like these apparently nice suits. But also he should be wearing nicer suits.” — Hussain (19:37)

• Satire of British tabloid outrage and the politics of perception.

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5. Jumper Too Thick: Menswear Woes and British Normcore

Timestamps: 20:33–25:53

• Hussain’s fashion misadventures with thick jumpers becomes an extended joke—a metaphor for the mundane but inescapable inconveniences of middle-class British life.
• The conversation turns meta: Starmer and the hosts themselves as "centrist dads" with humdrum troubles.

  “Sweatshirts are too thick—is like a problem you could have had from any period since the domestication of sheep.” — Ronan (21:58)

• The comic tension between aspiring to normalcy and failing at it.

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6. The Internationalization of Starmer—British Politicians Abroad

Timestamps: 26:41–31:58

• The hosts riff on the awkwardness of Keir Starmer’s "strange" but deeply relatable tendencies.

• Discussion on a Guardian columnist who, on questionable logic and casual racism, compares Starmer to a Chinese bureaucrat simply for ordering the same meal twice in China.

  “They loved that he said thank you in Chinese, they loved that he came to this particular restaurant twice and ordered exactly the same things all over again.” — Ronan (29:02) “The weird attempts to land a glove on the most visibly punchy man in existence are getting so weird and racist…” — Ronan (31:08)

• The segment satirizes both media cluelessness and class anxieties projected onto political figures.

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7. The Trump Effect and Brexit Buyer’s Remorse

Timestamps: 32:32–36:42

• Recent Middle East chaos causes British politicians (Farage, Frost, Kisin, etc.) to awkwardly distance themselves from former pro-Trump stances.

  “For all our desire for there to have been a plan, all signs are that there was no plan.” — Constantin Kisin (35:09 cited by Nova)

• Highlights the convenience and cynicism of political alignments.

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8. Grift and Reaction: The ‘Anti-Woke’ Pipeline Collapses

Timestamps: 36:43–39:26

• Hussain highlights the crumbling infrastructure of the ‘anti-woke’ media grift as its leading voices face political events that defy their simplistic narratives.

  “So much of the infrastructure was dependent on the anti woke stuff kind of lasting forever…now none of them can really sort of actually defend what’s going on in Iran.” — Hussain (37:02)

• Ronan notes the primacy of “the number in front of the gas station” (fuel prices) in American politics—and the interplay of economic anxiety and culture war.

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9. The American Condition: Fuel Prices, Culture Wars, and Nate Silver’s Failure

Timestamps: 39:26–42:01

• Ronan offers a biting portrait of America’s politics and obsessions:
  • Americans as "nominally sentient meat assemblages whose primary motivation is number in front of the gas station."

  “If number in front of the gas station gets too high, they’re all gonna start getting pronouns again.” — Ronan (39:26)

• Jokes about oil prices, degrowth, and the inevitability of culture war cycles.

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10. The Cult of AI (The Sam Altman New Yorker Piece)

Timestamps: 43:44–78:07

a. Sam Altman: Business, Persona, and Lying as Operating System

• Long-form, rapid-fire breakdown of Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker expose on Sam Altman.
• Altman’s career: from failed “Loopt” app, to controversial run at Y Combinator ("Sam just lies to us all the time."—Paul Graham, 54:05), to leading OpenAI by constantly overpromising, self-dealing, and constructing a mythos around “the guy.”
• The cult of lying in the Valley:

  “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people. The second is a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” — New Yorker (47:23 read by Nova) “He’s not a tech guy…He’s a marketing guy. He is Lyle Lanley from the Simpsons monorail episode.” — Ronan (46:34)

b. AI’s Structure and Sales Pitch: Safety as Branding

• Altman’s doublespeak on AI safety, using existential risk both as a justification for massive funding and for him to take the lead in deployment.
• The “blip”: the OpenAI power struggle and its philosophical emptiness.

c. Board Dynamics and Safety Fictions

• The real power at OpenAI lies in Altman’s politics, not his technical vision.

  “Sam was like, yeah, sure, we’ll do that, whatever.” — Nova (63:41) about the safety clause.

d. Altman vs. Musk: Rival Lying Techniques

• How Musk is uniquely unfooled by Altman but goes after him with homophobic conspiracy theories instead (“army of twinks”).

  "That’s a perfect piece of sort of Muskian ineptitude and bigotry..." — Ronan (58:20)

• Altman’s pitch to world governments: stressing existential threat to get money and cooperation, without genuine evidence.

e. Lying as an Epochal Feature of Tech

• Hussain and Ronan tie AI grifting to a broader condition of “impunity,” linking the cult of personality in tech, dishonest innovation, and traditions of unaccountability from Nixon onward.

  “There are lies upon lies upon lies upon lies, and that is how the whole system is built.” — Hussain (73:00)

• The only real constraint—satirically—being “twink with a Molotov.” (73:10)
• Altman’s expansionist ambition, contradiction, and adaptability as a case study for the capitalist “guy” myth.

  “My definition of winning is that people crazy up-level and the insane sci fi future becomes true for all of us.” — Sam Altman, as quoted by Nova (76:52)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It caused bruising.” — Nova, parodying grave news tone about Coachella mishap (03:45)
• “If you make yourself a CEO AI…he just wants more Zuck.” — Nova (10:17)
• “Sweatshirts are too thick—is like a problem you could have had from any period since the domestication of sheep.” — Ronan (21:58)
• “Are we the baddies in Sam Altman's twink division?” — Nova (61:44)
• “Sam can never be trusted. He is a sociopath who would do anything.” — Aaron Swartz, as quoted (67:47)
• “Why specifically do AI things contain this volume of lying? Because I know all business contains and is largely about lying…” — Ronan (68:31)
• “We have had a tolerance of lying and people with power lying to people for a long time and basically getting away with it.” — Hussain (70:38)
• “There’s one last line of defense, one check and balance, and it’s twink with a Molotov.” — Ronan (73:10)

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Overall Tone & Style

• Iconoclastic, absurdist, and tongue-in-cheek.
• Quick-witted, densely allusive, and rich in cross-cultural references.
• Combines ruthless satire of elites with self-deprecating humor and recognition of their own place in the structure.

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Summary

Jumper Too Thick is both a meditation and a roast—a snapshot of the ways impunity, self-delusion, and performative normalcy shape figures at the top (and bottom) of business, tech, and politics. From Coachella sandstorms to AI godhood and British jumpers, the episode finds the threads of pathos, pettiness, and power, tying them together into a scathing critique of a world ruled by “guys” and their transparent, unpunished lies.

For a closer look at the specific chronological beats, see the detailed timestamps and segments above.

Transcript

[Nova]

I put so much work into finding good stuff to talk about all the time.

[Ronan]

You do. We really appreciate you for it. You know, going out there, you're reporting the news, you're like balls and strikes. It's like, you know, it's. That's serious stuff, you know?

[Nova]

Yeah. I put in the work. I decide, here's what we're going to talk about. I distill it down into what I think are, like, the key points or the key facts and figures or whatever, and then sometimes I will have a whole document of stuff ready to talk about. And then 30 seconds before we start recording, Camp Poosh gets destroyed by a sandstorm at Coachella.

[Ronan]

I warned you about these mega projects all the time. You know, like, Kourtney Kardashian's Vision 2030 is never going to come to pass now because if you hire a bunch of, like, rimless glasses guys to build Camp Poosh, eventually hubris is going to catch up with you.

[Nova]

Well, you know what the problem is? There was, like, a huge unemployment scandal among rimless glasses guys, and then they all had to go build Courtney Kardashian.

[Ronan]

I went to college to find myself. No, I mean, what it is, is I like to think I also work hard on this podcast. We have the sort of, like, long call where we discuss what's going in and all of the kind of information we've managed to put together. And then I love to, as you say, 30 seconds before we start airing, just text you a link to the TMZ story. Camp Poosh destroyed. Kourtney Kardashian's Camp Poosh at Coachella. Lot of consonants there. Destroyed by tornado.

[Nova]

An adult summer camp has been ruined. By God. We can only assume.

[Ronan]

I mean, either that or the eye. I think it's entirely possible to derive from this that the IRGC have weather controlling weapons that they're using to target America's most precious people. The denizens of Cat Push, our tier

[Nova]

one social media idiots, have been our precious operators.

[Ronan]

Yeah, Coachella seems like so much fun this year. There's a video of, like, Paris Hilton just, like, jogging around in a field full of garbage while her security guide, like, sort of chases after her. This is cool.

[Nova]

So. Well, if you're in Camp Poosh, mark yourself safe. Or unless you're not. Yeah.

[Ronan]

Mark yourself in danger. If you're in danger, mark yourself Poosh.

[Nova]

So tmz, it says, chairs are flipping, fabrics are whipping. One girl reportedly had a table fall on her.

[Ronan]

So Basically, there's like, 10 people in the world who still do, like, real news. It's like Emiliano Molino, bits of the ft, us, and then tmz.

[Nova]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ronan]

Because, listen, say what you like about their effort. Cause they get the news.

[Nova]

You know, they get the scoop, right? Like, they're. Okay, hold on. Check this out, all right? It's a version of the newsroom, and it's everyone from the newsroom, and it's like when they're talking about the Gabby Giffords shooting and they're pressuring Jeff Daniels.

[Hussain]

Can we wait before you continue. Can we. May I propose that we have some background music for this? May I propose that we fade a certain Coldplay song, And as you explained this, the crescendo will happen. Let's go with that, right?

[Nova]

All right, let's do this. Okay, so it's Jeff Daniels in the newsroom, right? And the producers are arguing, hey, you have to report that a table fell on a girl at the Camp Poosh windstorm disaster.

[Ronan]

It caused bruising. Bruising.

[Nova]

It caused bruising. And they're like, no. Fox is already running with it. It's like, no. A doctor pronounces a table falling on her. Not the news. We. Hold on. Yeah.

[Ronan]

Do you remember that episode of the Newsroom where the TMZ blogger tells the pilot on his airplane that Camp Poosh has been destroyed by a tornado?

[Nova]

No, it's that a TMZ blogger on the airplane walks up to tell the pilot, tries to, like, you know, take, like, get control of the intercom. The pilot comes down, is like, what's all this happening? And the pilot's wearing a very tasteless Native American headdress. And then the pleon Z blocker just, like, stands and is like. Sir, it is my honor to tell you that Camp Poosh has finally been destroyed.

[Ronan]

This is why I always fly Coachella Airlines, you know, to honor the sacrifices that many brave, racist white women hate on 9 11.

[Nova]

They were the first. They were the first. The first into the towers.

[Hussain]

Never forget.

[Ronan]

I consider myself a first responder, you know?

[Nova]

Yeah. Because I always respond first to any video the Kardashians post. You know, I did this to myself, too, right? Hi, welcome to tf. You know about the podcast? It's the free episode Trash Future.

[Ronan]

You're not paying us yet. You should pay us. You should subscribe to the Patreon. It's more like this than you can imagine over there.

[Nova]

Yeah, check that out. The funny thing is, if, unless the schedule changes, we're doing some more real news on the Patreon this week I think we got.

[Ronan]

Oh, God, we got it the other way around. We got the like, you know, the like, non TMZ journalist on the bonus episode. We did the TMZ article on the free episode.

[Nova]

Yeah. We got to get Rob smith's from the FT's take on what he would have done. Whether or not Camp Poosh had some financial irregularities.

[Ronan]

I want to know about the kind of structural conditions that led to campus, you know, and I think the FT are the people who can do the kind of like real deep dive on

[Nova]

that, you know, is Camp Poosh claims to be a camp, but it's actually financed as a sovereign wealth fund.

[Ronan]

It's like, yeah, people criticizing the podcast for being like, yeah, you just read FT articles and like short sort of research things into the record. It's like, yeah, but those things are about Courtney Kardashian's ill fated camp adventure at Coachella.

[Nova]

Can I tell you also, I did this to myself also.

[Ronan]

Yeah. You were reading 200 pages of Hindenburg research, like, briefing on Camp Push, and you were like, this has got to go in.

[Nova]

Just turns out that Nate Anderson wasn't invited and he's really mad about it. So, no, I did this to myself. Which is breaking news.

[Ronan]

That's what really hurts.

[Nova]

Meta builds AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff in his place.

[Ronan]

That's.

[Nova]

They've cloned him.

[Ronan]

Yeah. That's great. I mean, the Metaverse is dead now, officially. Right. Like they've. A doctor has pronounced the Metaverse dead, but, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg of it still lives, which is sort of a horrifying fate.

[Nova]

So Meta is building an artificial intelligence version of Mark Zuckerberg that will engage with employees in his stead. A photorealistic AI powered 3D character that employees can interact with in real time. But we know what happens when Meta makes like fully AI clones of people is everyone just tries to fuck them.

[Ronan]

Yeah. Or try to get them to be Nazis.

[Hussain]

Is this him trying to replace Clippy?

[Ronan]

A little. Mark Zuckerberg pops up in this sort of Roman street chudware to be like, it looks like you're actually not using enough sort of epic sentence structures.

[Nova]

It looks like you're trying to build a world without Caesar. The Meta Chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI.

[Ronan]

I know the company is called that, but the Meta Chief is a way cooler. That was the sort of Instagram handle of a guy who was wearing one of those racist headdresses on Instagram.

[Hussain]

I was Going to say he probably did what he probably did want to call himself the meta Chief. But then that was because he wanted to wear the headdress and meta Chief.

[Ronan]

Where do you think you're going?

[Nova]

Giving Courtney Kardashian.

[Ronan]

Giving Kourtney Kardashian a bomback. Yeah. Oh.

[Nova]

So they added that the billion that the character was being trained on Zuckerberg's mannerisms, tone and publicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies so that employees might feel more connected to the founder by interacting with the AI based.

[Ronan]

Yeah, I operate an open door policy. Except the open door leads to this busy box.

[Hussain]

Yeah.

[Nova]

He says he's trying to create a CEO agent, which is interesting because it's like, as we all know, like the. That the AI job displacement stories are basically. Not entirely. But are. A lot of them are largely lies.

[Ronan]

Yeah. But like people are still losing their jobs. Right. Even if the reason why is confected. But I think people have heard enough, you know, sob stories about fat cats like, you know, construction workers or doctors, you know, maybe they want to hear about like real human suffering CEOs.

[Nova]

You know, what will our brave, like Hawaii compound dwelling CEOs do? So any guy. I just, I wanted to read that into the record.

[Ronan]

I want to know how much of Mark Zuckerberg's day is taken up with accountability to anyone or even talking to any of his employees that he feels like he has to automate that.

[Nova]

Well, I think it's part of what I see. There is not even so much that he wants to automate talking to his employees. Because I think you're right. I don't think any of that is in his day. I think rather because his mode of doing business for years now we've seen, has been to try to do the Facebook thing again. Like, all he knows how to do is make Facebook and he hopes that he can, by doing the same thing, just do it with whatever the next thing is.

[Ronan]

Yeah. You don't get to a trillion friends without making the social ones network again.

[Nova]

Making it again and again. And so he. So I think this whole push of, well, what if I make myself a CEO? AI comes back down to their obsession with making AI characters you can interact with or AI agents who can you can use to replace yourself. And they're just. And so he's just. I think he hopes that everybody in the company will get Autozuck as a co worker. Yeah. Which I think would be awesome.

[Ronan]

It is kind of fun that he's getting sort of like More and more like paranoid and costed and unlike. Because, like, if you try as like even like, say you're a fairly senior, like, meta employee, like you were, you know, Sheryl Sandberg or like Nick Clegg, someone like that. I feel like if you tried to ask Mark Zuckerberg a question about himself at any time, his, like, Navy SEAL security detail would fold both of your legs into your rib cage and then like throw you out onto the sidewalk. Right? And Zuck's sort of like incredibly tall hedge around his compound would get like 50ft higher. So this idea that he was that this is a sort of part of his life is really funny to me.

[Nova]

Oh, yeah, it's. He just. I think he wants more Zuck. He just wants everyone to have more. But look, here's the thing. Those were bulletins that were handed to me by either Nova or me. What I really wanted to do is

[Ronan]

handing the right hand a bulletin fresh off the ticker tape.

[Nova]

Yes, I'm being handed a bulletin by the ME service. No, I really wanted to open on what I've noticed is something becoming a bit of a tradition in British journalism, which is Keir Starmer does something really sad in a Spanish and always in Spain. And then the Daily Mail reports on it as though he's. It is sort of last days of Rome.

[Ronan]

Sick fucking freak. Keir Starmer overpaid for a disappointing example of like, some street food.

[Nova]

Yeah, Fat cat. Keir Starmer paid over eight pounds for what claimed to be parmesan fries. Parmesan truffle fries.

[Ronan]

Keir Starmer felt kind of pressured to get paella and then felt kind of awkward about it because that's a lot of seafood.

[Nova]

See him just sitting in like a touristy beachside restaurant and the Daily Mail guys just going through the bins to get the receipt.

[Ronan]

I've never been to Spain, so I don't have, like deep balls for this. I feel like there's. This is. We need to do like a sort of a fact finding mission, like a research trip to Spain so I can land these jokes better so I could be like, sick freak. Keir Starmer went into the Prado or whatever.

[Nova]

So in this case, if you remember, a couple years ago, he went on vacation to the Canary Islands, where he went. He and his family just went down a big slide.

[Ronan]

Oh, yeah. It was like a sort of like. It was. It was like a non snow toboggan. Like some kind of weird local folk way of like, we just like to slide down this hill sometimes and Then the Daily Mail sort of tried to monster him on the basis that he and his, like, security had pushed in line or something.

[Nova]

Yeah, correct.

[Ronan]

And like, children were waiting for the toboggan for the, you know, non ice toboggan, and Keir Starmer personally shoved them aside.

[Nova]

Oh, I have it. Sir Keir Starmer infuriates holidaymakers by cutting in front of Q for holiday toboggan ride.

[Ronan]

And at that moment it was over for him, you know, and he lost his mojo.

[Nova]

Yeah. Onlooker Russell Schachter said, Brits are famous for being good at queuing and it was a difficult pill to swallow. So they've done it again, which is. He went to Valencia.

[Ronan]

It's really difficult to swallow this toboggan pill.

[Nova]

I'm so toboggan pilled. So secure. Star Wars Lounge.

[Ronan]

You can just say Canadian.

[Nova]

Yes. God, fuck off.

[Hussain]

I've been sitting here sort of thinking about, well, is there something like tobogging, like tobog, like, you know, you got tobogged. Did he tobog everyone in the queue? Yeah, he. He refused to Q Max and now he's like to Bog to everyone and now everyone's mad at him because of that.

[Ronan]

Yeah, sure, we can say that.

[Nova]

Check it out. Sir Keir Starmer lounged at a four star boutique hotel in Valencia as Donald Trump threatened to obliterate Iran. This is what I like about it.

[Ronan]

You're just in like a sort of nice, ish hotel and like your government phone that you get when you're the Prime Minister, which is just regular iPhone. They didn't spring for the pro version because it's Britain, not a real country, is just going like, hey, Donald Trump has said that he's going to blockade the Strait of Hormuz and you're just like sitting on a bed that's sort of like almost comfortable and going, cool. I should probably do something about that.

[Nova]

The Prime Minister spent four days at the pound 200 a night Valentia Caballero's hotel, complete with rooftop bar and swimming pool. It's like that's.

[Hussain]

That's the same price you'd pay to stay at a Premier Inn in Zone three in London.

[Ronan]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing that amuses me, right, is that of like every British politician, or almost every British politician is on some level corrupt and genuinely does enjoy the, like, stupidly nice things. Right? Like thus, you know, all of the sort of photos of Boris Johnson sort of like rolling into an airport off of a yacht, right? It's just normally the, like, Starmer in this case is being a little bit circumspect about it. Like if you want, if he wants to go on like the yachts and stuff, he's gonna, I guess, do that after he stops being Prime Minister. And so he's taken the most kind of normcore possible holiday for a middle class British guy. And like in return it's like, oh, Croesus here, right, has just sort of, you know, is getting something out of the fucking minibar. Disgusting.

[Nova]

But also like, they keep on comparing it to what Trump is doing. They say, well, he was complete. They say this hotel, complete with rooftop bar and swimming pool. This again, they say four star again. I'm sure it's a perfectly nice hotel.

[Ronan]

Rooftop bar, sometimes heated, swimming pool. It's got a. Technically it's got a balcony, but it's like the Juliet balcony kind where you can like open the windows. It's nice.

[Nova]

I guess the Prime Minister from his room with a WI fi enabled tv, free for guests.

[Ronan]

Yeah, sick fuck. You know what, you can use WI fi for pornography, which is, we are forced to assume what he was using it for.

[Nova]

The sun. The Mail on Sunday has hired actors to recreate Keir Starver's sick bacchanal with his family as Trump delivered an extraordinary ultimatum warning he would hit and obliterate Iran's power plants if the Strait of Hormuz was not opened. Even as the US President told Tehran on Easter Sunday, you'll be living in hell. There'll be nothing like it. The PM remained in Valencia despite dressing down in Adidas trainer's jeans and a light jacket. Sir Keer failed to keep a low profile with locals quickly spotting him thanks to the team of armed police and bodyguards flanking him throughout.

[Ronan]

Just, just, just like trying to become like the most bland person. Or perhaps he already was, right? In Britain, where it's like the kind of European responses to Trump have been, you know, sort of like Margaret has been sort of like, you know, felicing Trump. Macron's been trying to restore like French grandeur and then Starmer is just trying to like blend in with the wallpaper at like a sort of medium good hotel bar.

[Nova]

One waiter said he served the PM cafe con leche as he sat at a sun drenched table in the Lopa de Vega cobblestone square by trying to make it sound like, you know, this

[Ronan]

is some milk, milk in your coffee, you fucking plutocrats. And like, the thing is, right, I would generally approve of this kind of bad faith muckraking from the left. And in fact, maybe that's the kind of thing that we should be doing more of is the kind of like flagrantly like bad faith thing of being like, well, like ordinary people are suffering and here you are in Spain putting milk in your coffee, you dick. Right? But like to have, I guess the Daily Mail purport to care about anyone else's sort of like suffering economically here. Just iconic. Wonderful.

[Nova]

Also, I love that they're like, as he sat at the sun drenched table in the Lopea de Vega cobblestone square. They're just like, just pretty good tourism ad for Valencia.

[Ronan]

You're getting like exposure to UV light, a thing that ordinary Brits are doing without 300 days of the fucking year.

[Nova]

Oh, you're getting exposed to UV radiation, huh? Prime Minister Starmer. Well, have you ever guessed that you can get skin cancer which will put a burden on the nhs, But I guess you didn't think about ordinary Britons, did you?

[Ronan]

Tax and spend labor, not accounting for who's going to pay for the photons.

[Nova]

I very rarely. I make a point to never grab Daily Mail comments, but I had to grab one on this. On this particular article, I've been doing

[Ronan]

my best to simulate them for you in the absence.

[Nova]

At a troubled time like this. This is from Beli. At a troubled time like this, Starmer should be visible front and center leading the nation, not holed up in some dos house in Valencia. And then the commenter is in Thailand.

[Ronan]

Oh, beautiful. Also, doss house would seem to imply that the hotel is not of sufficient quality for this commenter. It's like, this shames us, actually. Our country's prime minister should have like a really good hotel. He should be at the best one.

[Hussain]

Well, this was the case when, you know, the scandal about his suits, when Lord Ali was buying him like kind of like nice ish suits. And there were like half the people who sort of got mad at him because they were just like, oh, look at this guy, he's wearing expensive suits when people can't even afford to like buy their kids school uniforms and all that type of stuff. Like, you know, he's so out of touch with like the everyday people. And then the other half that were just like. And they said observably, very funny. Which is number one, he still looks shit despite wearing like these apparently nice suits. But also he should be wearing nicer suits. Like, you know, our country, like the standards of our country have gone down so much that like, you know, he can't Even sort of afford what you call it. Prime Minister should sort of wear Savile Row suits. Like, this is a problem with our whole political class that like, you know, we sort of settle for mid market, off the rack gums and not to sort of become like a menswear podcast. But like, that is. That is sort of true.

[Ronan]

We could do that. We could pivot. I think we could pivot. All three of us have had menswear phases at some point in our lives.

[Hussain]

I'm going for. I'm going through mine at the moment, but I keep buying duds from Vinted. Like, I keep sort of thinking I've got like really good stuff. And every time I open up one of these fucking parcels, it's like it fits really weird. Or like I bought this jumper from. Or like this kind of like thin jump what looked like a thin jumper from Arcat and it's like really thick and it kind of fits in a weird way and it makes me sort of like look like a side, like a sort of background character in Dune Jumper.

[Ronan]

Too thick is maybe one of the best problems to have that's really. You're trying to like walk around and you're just like stuffed into this thing.

[Hussain]

Well, this is it. It feels like I'm in a sous vide. Like I'm in a sous vide bag.

[Ronan]

It's climate change.

[Nova]

It's not nice.

[Hussain]

Yeah, yeah. So I'm a very bad. I'm getting into my menswear phase, but I'm going through some like, the thing

[Ronan]

about you, Hussain, is you experience problems that I've never had anyone else experience. And so I'm really excited to see where this journey takes you.

[Nova]

And the key thing though, Abilva, about your observation of Hussein, which is exactly correct, I think long term listeners to this podcast will be agreeing with you.

[Ronan]

Nobody has inconveniences like this guy.

[Nova]

Hussein's inconveniences are not like some. The inconveniences of like princes and kings. Hussein's inconveniences are just. Are just odd.

[Ronan]

Sweatshirts are too thick. Is like, is like a problem you could have had from any period since the, like, domestication of sheep. There were medieval peasants being like, yeah, I tried to get this cloak, but it's kind of too thick and I look kind of ridiculous in my cloak.

[Nova]

I look like a side character from La Chanson de Geste.

[Hussain]

It sticks to your body in a weird way. This is my issue. Right. It's like half of it's really nice and half of it is just like, ah, it doesn't quite land.

[Ronan]

What's interesting to me is why Keir Starmer is so fascinated with this sort of upper middle class Spanish life. It's like being a weeb for Spain. Like, he like really enjoys Almodovar movies and he's like, I want to be in one of those.

[Hussain]

No, I sort of have an answer to it. It's very sort of like centrist dad type of thing. Like Spain is. It's just kind of. It depends on where you go. Right. Because like, I feel like Benidorm is really having a sort of strange revival at the moment. I'm seeing a lot of like Benidorm posts on my like for you page, despite having not searched any of it. And I'm a lot of like the.

[Ronan]

In you're searching like sweater to wine.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

Sweater thinning hell. And it's just serving you like page after page of Benidorm.

[Hussain]

Benidorm. Benidorm. Benidorm. Yeah. But depending on Valencia, I think is like a really interesting place because it's like, it is kind of like Spanish enough to sort of be a little bit different, a little bit interesting, but it's familiar enough to not be threatening.

[Ronan]

Oh, like Alec Baldwin's wife.

[Hussain]

Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah. Like, that's a good approach. I went to Valencia like a few years ago and like, it definitely was that thing where it's just like, oh, this is kind of like, you know, it's, it's foreign enough to make me sort of interested in like architecture and the, you know, museums and surroundings and everything. But it's also familiar enough that I'm not like, I feel like I'm out of my depth and there were a lot of like just kind of dads with their kids and stuff, you know, and it's a very, it's a type of. And having been on only one of these types of vacations with my, with my, with my baby, like, I like going, going there is like an old like a sort of parent, I think is a day, you know, you just, you want to be sort of left alone and you want to have certain types of nice things, but you don't want to like overindulge. And I think Valencia is supposed to sort of represent that. But because Keir and I sort of have a very similar situation of like, we're both oafs in sort of like benign and mundane ways. He's like trying to chill out drinking kind of like milky coffee and there's some sort of like scrawny dweeby, Daily Mail hack, like, hiding behind a bush, asking him, you know, shouting at him, like, do you think having woke milk is appropriate?

[Ronan]

How do you afford that con leche?

[Hussain]

Yeah. Why are you wearing a jumper that's too thick for you? It's hot out here.

[Ronan]

He's trying to cover the lens, but he can't get his arm up easily.

[Hussain]

Yeah. And Kir's sort of saying, I'll have you know that it's actually a very nice piece from Arquette.

[Ronan]

The jumper's getting thicker and thicker in my mind until it's like a sort of like a Michelin man type situation.

[Hussain]

Well, like, I bought a puffer jacket,

[Ronan]

26 degrees, wearing the puffer jacket.

[Hussain]

That was it. Yeah. Oh, I just realized now that I've actually bought a puff. I've actually bought a woolen Gillette that has a contemporary. I just think a puffer jacket.

[Ronan]

It's so bulky, the zips disappeared into the sort of down.

[Nova]

I could imagine you and Keir Starver. Keir Starver, I think, might be the only other person who has some of your exact problems. I appear to have purchased a woolen Gillet. I thought it was a nice piece from Arcade.

[Hussain]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

Well, look, this is it.

[Hussain]

If he wasn't like the. If he was in like a normal guy, I feel like we would sort of get on in the sense of we would both complain about, like, stuff like two factor verification being annoying or, you know, the fact that, like, you know, we're sort of constantly getting sort of like minorly scammed on vinted, but it's okay.

[Ronan]

Have you seen the video of him playing five a side where he just sort of like. He just sort of like lumbers a little bit and then. And then gets out of breath and every ball goes past him while he just kind of watches it and gets more and more depressed. That so real.

[Hussain]

I think his football videos are so funny because, like, the Labour Party, like, whoever does their PR for them, they use it a lot to sort of be like, oh, here's a normal guy who, like, loves paying five a side. And they use this one sort of clip of him where he, like, scores, where it's implied that he scores a goal. But, like, the way that he kicks is just so, like, awkward. And as you mentioned, like, it's very stiff and very awkward. And it's like a child kicking a football. Right. Like the way that his leg moves and they keep using it as like trying to sort of signal that, no, he's a cool guy. He's a cool, relatable guy. And it's just like, please, please stop using this clip.

[Nova]

It's a humiliation ritual. All right, look, having actually done probably a better exploration of Keir Starmer's psyche than any other piece of mainstream media,

[Ronan]

I got a whole other one if you want it. If you want to really fuck up the thing. Did you see the Guardian article today? The comment is free. One where they got their cartoonist to accuse him of being Chinese.

[Nova]

What?

[Ronan]

We're not familiar with this. Okay, let's fucking go. So apparently, when he went to China,

[Nova]

right, I have the whole, like, just Sam Altman, like 20,000 words.

[Ronan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck that. Listen, the Guardian in the uk, Keir Starmer has few fans. I learned that in China, it's a very different story. So the deal is that while he went to China, he went to a restaurant and ordered the same meal twice, like two consecutive days, which is an imperfect Mandarin. Basically feels like a very sort of Hussain Kasvani activity. I don't say that in a derogatory way.

[Hussain]

I appreciate that.

[Ronan]

And, no, it's respectful. Right. Thank you. He went kind of viral for like a week in China for doing this.

[Hussain]

Because you can't order the same meal twice.

[Ronan]

No, they admired this. They admired that he ate with chopsticks. And he, I guess, really did shock an entire restaurant by ordering imperfect Mandarin.

[Hussain]

Well, maybe that was it. Someone taught him how to order this one dish in perfect Mandarin. And the choice was, well, you either order another dish, but you show up, you show yourself as not knowing Mandarin, or you order the same dish in order to convince people that you do know Mandarin. That means you have to eat the same dish twice.

[Ronan]

So now you can get, like at this restaurant, the Keir Starmer set menu. Right? Like, the thing that. The meal's so nice that Keir Starmer ordered it on two days, which is. That feels like a kind of nightmare. Right. But in particular, do we know what

[Hussain]

was in the meal or do we know what the meal was?

[Ronan]

Yeah, let me see if I can find it. It's like sort of mushroom heavy, I believe.

[Nova]

Oh, well, the Telegraph covered it. They were like, this restaurant sometimes cooks using hallucinogenic mushrooms, again, as though he's at a bacchanal.

[Ronan]

Cool.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

But so this guy Rausnan, the Guardian writes, I suspect most of he's speaking here of the Chinese. Right. In one regard at least, it worked. The Chinese loved him. They loved that he ate with chopsticks. They loved that he said thank you in Chinese, they loved that he came to this particular restaurant twice and ordered exactly the same things off the menu all over again. And I suspect most of all they loved him just for being there while recognizing in him one of their own. A modest bureaucrat interested in calm order and obedience. So, Keir Starmer, Chinese, if you're racist enough, I guess, yeah.

[Nova]

Huh.

[Hussain]

He's going for a very Chinese period of his life.

[Ronan]

I envy that he's having a Chinese period of his life assigned to him by another white guy. On the basis that. And listen, there are non racist ways to make a similar observation, that there are certain aesthetic similarities between the Communist Party of China and the Labour Party in that it's a kind of like nondescript older guy in a red tie and a dark suit who performs competence. Sure, I don't know that I would generalize that to the Chinese as a phrase, you know, but the Guardian did. So. Yeah. Cool. Fantastic.

[Nova]

One thing that is funny is that it is amusing that this very bore. And again, I don't want to confuse boring, like spiritually dull with somehow like, you know, let's say inoffensive, right? This is a supremely offensive man. But he's spiritually very dull. He's spiritually very boring. Still is unable to take one step outside of his house without like the media descending on him being like, oh, yeah, well, that's a really Chinese way to be. Ever thought about that? You're going to get coffee with milk, you fucking plutocrat. Oh, staying at a four star hotel? What, five star not good enough for you?

[Ronan]

The weird sort of like, attempts to land a glove on the most, like, sort of visibly punchy man in existence are getting so weird and racist that now it's like he ordered cafe con leche Chinesely.

[Nova]

Oh, my God. No one really understands, I think what makes him a strange character, like they look at all the wrong stuff. It's this. It's all this.

[Hussain]

I mean, that's because the people who are sort of doing it are also incredibly strange characters. Right. Like, I feel like you need to have some sort of. You need to interact with like enough normal people in the world to recognize like kind of his peculiarities. And the problem is, and I'm not saying that any of us are like particularly normal people, but I think we are a lot more normal than people who get paid to write and talk about politics. Jesus.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Hussain]

Because sometimes the shit that they come up with is very much just like, yeah, you've kind of identified that these are strange people, but you don't understand why. Because so much of your approach to trying to understand these people, which is your job, you see so much of yourself in them. It's the only way that I can understand it.

[Nova]

We see some of you in him, Hussein. It's just we see none of them. None of them see that. So, look, look, I want to talk about a couple other things. I'm sort of folding all of the, like, Iran discussion in for probably another week. Yeah.

[Ronan]

Because who knows what the fuck will have happened by then. Like, Trump trying to play the UNO reverse card of. Actually, I'm the one closing the Straits of Hormuz.

[Nova]

It's like they're playing a really. They're playing a game of tug of war and they look behind with closing the Straits of Hormuz, and then, like, the Iranians look behind them and there's Trump on the same side.

[Hussain]

J.D.

[Ronan]

vance's, like, international tour of fumbles where he manages to, like, fuck up the peace talks and then on the way back, get Orban kicked out of power in Hungary for the, like, after 16 years.

[Nova]

He's the American Liz Truss. I swear to God, he's. Yeah.

[Ronan]

Incredible.

[Nova]

Yeah. But the one thing I did want to mention on the Iran subject is again, the British angle, which is, as this is proving to be another clusterfuck, we're getting a little bit of a kind of poliev effect, where suddenly people whose main thing, the main thing they were advertising to voters is, hey, you like Trump? I like Trump. I chill with Trump. I'm friends with Trump. We're gonna do Trump stuff here. I love Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. Now, like, a lot of, like, big Brexit supporters, especially because the whole Brexit project was incredibly Atlanticist. They're now having to, like, all pretend that they never liked Donald Trump. Right. Like, because it's like you have buyer's remorse. Well, sorry, everyone who isn't Trump or someone he considers to be in his mafia of New York real estate friends, you always end up getting the Polish construction worker treatment. Always. And so now Nigel Farage is having to say, I happen to know Donald Trump. But that's by the by. It used to be that, like, he used to say, oh, Trump is Mr. Brexit. Trump and Britain are going to take America and the UK into a golden age, blah, blah, blah. In January, David Frost argued that Britain should, quote, strive to be America's new Israel. And I don't quite know what that means.

[Ronan]

Just, just, like, how. What do we, like, dial the colonialism back up in Ireland like, yeah, like,

[Nova]

should we dig up Cromwell? Like, what the fuck are you talking about? But this week, then he said that Trump's actions have made the EU seem to be many. Seemed to many to be, quote, the only refuge from our wayward ally. Baraj went on to say he was quite shocked by Trump's threat to wipe out all of Iranian civilization and condemned the president's remarks as, quote, too far. I think is a very funny, funny bit of understatement.

[Ronan]

Yeah. I mean he's, he's like. Because, like, you think it's been a humiliation watching Starmer play Lex Basel to Trump. Imagine it with Farage, you know, like, the man. The man you could pay 50 quid to do the like big Chungus thing, like, is gonna be our sort of like refuge of dignity.

[Nova]

Oh boy. Yeah. Now he's like, oh, no, everyone doesn't like. You know, I never liked him either. I only barely know him. Yeah. Even though, like, you know my other guys.

[Hussain]

Yeah. We went to different schools, I promise.

[Nova]

Yeah. Here's my favorite one though. My absolute favorite one of these because this is from a rundown in the ft. Libertarian British Russian podcaster Constantin Kissen of the trigonometry show.

[Ronan]

Yes.

[Hussain]

Friend of the show, friend of the

[Nova]

show, constantly kissing has said in 2024 that he thought Trump would, quote, do a better job in the Middle east than Biden. After the US Israeli attack on Iran led to the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, Kissing concluded. For all our desire for there to have been a plan, all signs are that there was no plan.

[Ronan]

That's fucking right. The situation has developed, not necessarily to our advantage. Oh, I'm feasting on the buyer's remorse. Like, this is beautiful to me and I know the consequences aren't real for any of these people and I know that they'll just pick themselves up and dust themselves off and act like that they will have always been against this. Right. But like it's just in the moment. It's magical.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Hussain]

I feel like looking on this, looking at the reformed stuff, it also just looking. I've been really enjoying watching Constantine's crash out recently and just that whole space. Because you're right in the sense that they put so much like. I think it's a really interesting. It was like looking back on, I guess like a 10 year period. These are people who sort of recognize that they could kind of jump on sort of an anti woke sentiment. I don't really like using that term, but I'm not sure how to describe it and they could make money off it. Like, early episodes of that fuckers podcast was so fucking cynical in terms of like, and so obvious in terms of what they were actually doing. And we all knew that the party was only going to be able to last for so long, right? And I feel like at this moment, like a lot of them are beginning to realize that there's not really any. There's actually not really any way to come back from this. So much of the infrastructure was dependent on the anti woke stuff kind of lasting forever and always finding like different types of opponents that were easy to pick off and easy to sort of like, to sort of, what you call it, like dismantle, you know, and to sort of, you know, extract and make money from outrage. But the problem is that, number one, like, so much of the Internet is filled with outrage now. So you were always net. You were always going to struggle to like, do anything anyway. But, you know, these are, yeah, these are also very real consequences of getting into bed with idiots who like, would sell you out the moment it was convenient for them. And now none of them can really sort of actually defend what's going on in Iran. And if you like, if you sort of see clips of like Constantine's podcast, which I don't really think you need to, but I see them every so often. Like, it is so clear that he's looking for an off ramp and he doesn't quite know how to do it.

[Ronan]

Well, the off ramp for these people was always going to be like Vance or was going to be Rubio, you know, like, and, you know, if the United States and its electoral system makes it to 2028, then yeah, sure, I guess. But what if Donald Trump destroys the everything first? You know, because I've done like, detailed study on this, right? And after sort of some years of really advanced research, I've concluded that Americans are a kind of nominally sentient sort of meat assemblage whose primary motivation is number in front of the gas station. I'm not sure why that's so, but I understand it to be the case. And so if number in front of the gas station gets too high, they're all gonna start getting pronouns again, you know, like, they're gonna be doing land acknowledgements, whatever it takes to make the number go back down again.

[Hussain]

They're all converting to shi. Well, yeah, well, this is it. Like the whole, like. Well, because like, the number in front of the gas station determines your life, right? It determines whether you, like, get to have your, like, lovely short two hour Commute each way to work or not. Right? It deter. I, like, this is another thing that comes up in my for you page and really weird circumstance. I'm sorry I talk about so much of it, but that is, it is literally like my way of like seeing the world right now in my current situation. And like, there's this one American, like content creator that I'm sort of obsessed with because it's like, he's like a real insight into like what American life is. Like, I don't know what his name is, but he's like this five foot five guy who drives a big truck and every morning he has his big flag in his garage and he like, him and his kids do the pledge of allegiance to this flag every day. And then. And he just does these like, he does these, he does these like Day in the Life videos. And I find it so fascinating because it's just like you do your pledge, you eat meat for breakfast, you drive two hours each way to your job, you live off energy drinks, you go to like this weird road stop midway between his commute where he buys like elk steak. And then he also goes to the gun store. He does that every single day, right? And then he comes back and he makes like these horrible, disgusting meals. And that's America. That is. That is America.

[Ronan]

So beautiful.

[Hussain]

And all of that is dependent on the number. On the, you know, all of that is dependent on number.

[Ronan]

Do you remember Nate Silver sort of driving himself insane, being like, oh, American politics is so, so complicated. I'm the only sort of special bright boy clever enough to understand it. And now it's too complicated even for me. And I'm going to retire and become a baseball monk again. Right. Like, he was wrong. And one of the reasons why is that Americans have two kind of dice pools, if you like, they have two health bars, like the number in front of the gas station and racism. Right. And the most successful politician, as Donald Trump sort of was until fairly recently was like, understood that the art was balancing those two things, you know, and you can kind of compensate a little bit for number going up with a little bit more racism and vice versa, you know. But like, in this case, we're fucking up the number stats really badly. Oil, we're on the, you know, the road to what, $200 a barrel now, which is fantastic. I mean, sort of in some ways shout out to Donald Trump for inadvertently and as a sort of like second order effect, decarbonizing the planet.

[Nova]

Yeah, I have it written down at least. The us, Iran and Greenpeace can all agree on one thing. No oil should transit the Strait of Hormuz and therefore it should never be used, ever. People love to lie about degrowth. They say it's about having a worse life. It's not.

[Ronan]

You have less, you buy less.

[Nova]

Very smart. Very. Klaus Schwab said in the World Economic Forum. Klaus Schwab, a very smart man. He said, you'll own nothing and be happy. So what?

[Hussain]

I mean, I'm also very excited for Americans to invent the 15 minute city first principles. Right.

[Nova]

Yeah. I can't wait for them to get as mad at it. I think they are mad at it over there, but not. It's not quite as. They're not as mad at it as they are about it over here.

[Ronan]

But look, it's a good thing we don't have any kind of like, petrol psychos in this country.

[Nova]

No, never. No, let me tell you. Oh, it seems that we have. We have guys who try to pay at gas stations with commemorative coffee, weirdly

[Ronan]

because they're slightly more exposed to this. It is presently kicking off an island over this where you have another example of that. European farmers ready to mobilise on the worst political cause you've ever heard of in your life tweets as you have these kind of motorway blocking, sort of go slow protests over fuel prices, which.

[Hussain]

Yeah, it's like their version of the Gillet Jaunes, right?

[Ronan]

Yeah. Burn a lot of petrol in order to process how expensive the petrol is.

[Nova]

It's so smart. It's so good.

[Ronan]

I think so. I think this is a sustainable thing to build our economy on.

[Nova]

I would love to talk to you both about a certain quote unquote incendiary article in the New Yorker about Sam Altman that he now blames. He blamed. So his house was recently Molotov by someone who I assume, like, knew where the spawn point was and then just, like, threw.

[Ronan]

It was Molotov by a guy who looked alarmingly like him. But this is San Francisco, so that doesn't narrow it down at all. And then it was shot at by another guy who I don't know, but can only assume also looks a lot like him.

[Nova]

It was Molotov by a very handsome Ukrainian. Yeah.

[Ronan]

What was up with that? I guess we'll find out in several years or never.

[Nova]

Yeah. So basically this is a long article, so I'm skipping loads of it, especially the bits where they focus on the blip, which is what everyone at OpenAI refers to as the period where Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were briefly fired.

[Ronan]

Yeah, the bit where Claude started playing Swan Lake, that's fucking anthropic. The bit where Chat GPT started playing Swan Lake. Also the thing about this is Sam Altman is, as you say now claiming this article, which is, I would say mild, is an attempt to get him assassinated.

[Nova]

It's a very common thing in the conservative media ecosystem, which is like in. Among British politicians in fact as well, which is your comments about me actually have murdered me 12 times during Elon

[Ronan]

Musk and the plane sort of thing. Coordinates. You know, like all of these people worry, maybe not enough, but they worry about being assassinated. And here's the thing. If Sam Altman were assassinated tomorrow, I would laugh and laugh and laugh.

[Nova]

Yes, it would be very funny.

[Ronan]

I think it would be unlikely for the person doing it to have been going, yes, sir, Ronan Farrow, I understand. I will kill Sam Altman now because of you. Of course it would be Ronan Farrow because he inherited Sinatra's hypnotic power, you know.

[Nova]

Or what if it was another article that just activated a Manchurian Candidate phrase like Keir Starmer's Chinese gets up. I must kill Sam Altman.

[Ronan]

Chinese coffee con leche with Keir Starmer. And you just get up and walk

[Nova]

to the car dead eyed, pouring petrol into a bottle. No.

[Ronan]

So that's what they told Sirhan be. Sirhan is like Chinese Catholic on leche with Keir Starmer. Didn't understand what it meant back then.

[Nova]

Yeah, just got up and left. So basically they interview everyone who's ever met or worked with Sam and they come up with a pretty consistent story about him. A former board member, they write, argued that Altman was not some Machiavellian villain, but merely to the point of fecklessness, able to convince himself of the shifting realities of his sales pitches.

[Ronan]

This is the least kind of controversial thing you can possibly say about Sam Altman.

[Nova]

Right?

[Ronan]

And it's a revelation that everyone should have had much earlier, which is he's not a tech guy just because he wears like jeans and sneakers to work. He's a marketing gu. He's a. He's a sales guy. He is Lyle Lanley from the Simpsons Monorail episode.

[Nova]

Yeah. And like. And he is. That sales pitch has basically fooled more or less everybody for about five to nine years.

[Ronan]

Everybody's so fucking stupid.

[Nova]

So he's too caught up in his own self belief, she said. So he does things that if you live in the real world, make no sense. But he doesn't live in the real world. Another board member Told us he's unconstrained by truth. He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people. The second is a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.

[Ronan]

Okay, but that's a really common set of traits to have. It's also a good description of, like, AI as well.

[Nova]

You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to read the last paragraph I have here, because I think it's really important that we get it. Not all the tendencies that make chatbots dangerous are glitches. Some are byproducts of how systems are built. Large language models are trained on human feedback, and humans tend to prefer agreeable responses. As models have grown more complex, some hallucinate with more persuasive fabrications. And in 2023, shortly before his firing and rehiring, OpenAI did firing rehire to Sam Altman to reduce his benefits. Altman argued that allowing for some falsehoods can confer advantages. Saying, if you just do the naive thing and say, never say anything you're not 100% sure about, you can get a model to do that. But it won't have that AI magic that people like so much.

[Ronan]

It won't be a goddamn pitch man, you know?

[Nova]

Yeah, it won't. It won't advertise itself. People won't get hooked on it. I mean, it's the same thinking as Zuckerberg. It's just Zuckerberg doesn't understand the world that he's living in now. It's just the Zuckerberg thing again.

[Ronan]

The material conditions, would you believe it, Replicate themselves. The sort of capitalist society builds a capitalist AI, which of course lies to you and of course can't feel bad about it.

[Nova]

And it empowers the person who is most similar to that product. Just as like, Mark Zuckerberg was very similar in many ways to, like the way Facebook worked. It was. It was relentless. It was reckless. It did every. And it was all about getting more eyeballs on it. Right? And with. And with. With AI, the chatbots, like, it's. It's again, about. It is about deception of a different kind. You're trying to replace people's perception of reality, not just the lens through which they interact with other people. So in a tense call after Altman's firing, the board pressed him to acknowledge a pattern of deception. He said repeatedly, this is so fucked up. I can't change my personality. I can't change my Personality, meaning I just. I love lying. You're telling me to stop lying, and lying is a core part of who I am.

[Ronan]

I really like it. Yeah.

[Nova]

Oh, I don't. But have you considered, ladies and gentlemen of the board, I don't want to. I don't wanna. When pressed by the. By the reporters, he said, it's possible I meant something like, I try to be a unifying force, saying that this trait enabled him to lead an immensely successful company. A board member offered a different interpretation of his statement. No, what he meant was, I have this trait where I lie to people and I have no plans to stop.

[Ronan]

Yeah. Which, it turns out, is a really just winning strategy. Shout out to lying. It rules, I guess.

[Nova]

Trash Future podcast offers a salute to lying. An employee, then this is an employee, gave us a tour of the OpenAI office. There was an animated digital painting of Alan Turing. Its eyes tracked us as we passed. Typically, they said, you can interact with the painting, but the sound has been disabled because it wouldn't stop eavesdropping on employees and butting into their conversations.

[Hussain]

Amazing.

[Nova]

I love to put what is essentially hostile architecture and design inside the office. Elsewhere, Plaque's brochures and merchandise displayed the words feel the AGI. The phrase was originally associated with Ilya Sutskever, who was the main lead engineer who orchestrated the coup because he believed that Sam Altman wasn't paying attention to the AI safety ghost stories, which is where a lot of this goes on to. Goes on to address. Who used it to caution his colleagues about the risks of AGI, the threshold at which machines match human cognitive capacities. After the blip, Altman repurposed it as a cheerful slogan, hailing a super abundant future.

[Ronan]

And it's never gonna fucking happen.

[Nova]

No.

[Ronan]

I don't know. It's one of those things where I feel like our consistent prediction that it just isn't gonna happen is like it's. More and more people are convincing themselves that, like, the Singularity is. Is any day now, any second. Right? And, you know, oh, there's smart people on both sides or whatever. If we're wrong about this. I take a sort of like, inverse Rocco's Basilisk type approach to this, where it's like, if we're wrong about this. Oh, fuck me for not predicting, like, you know, super intelligence. My bad. On the other hand, I feel pretty good about predicting a large amount of marketing bullshit, a thing I've been subjected to for my entire life.

[Nova]

And it's like, well, this marketing bullshit is actually much scarier than the previous Marketing bullshit.

[Ronan]

God, it's going to build. God. It's going to build.

[Nova]

God.

[Ronan]

Okay, so like, you can't be mad at me for lying all the time. And I'm not lying about a building God, even though I lie about everything else.

[Nova]

Yeah, that's the one thing. Super promise. But let's go into the history. Altman joined the inaugural batch at Y Combinator and his project was called Loopt with a T. Remember when stuff used to be called that? I remember that. Loopt was a proto social network that used the locations of people's flip phones to tell their friends where they were. Federal rules required phone carriers to be able to track the locations for use of emergency services. But Altman struck deals with the carriers to tap these capabilities for the company's use also at sam. So one Looped employee recalled Altman bragging widely that he was a champion ping pong player, as in the Missouri high school ping pong champion, and then proved to be the worst player in the office.

[Ronan]

That's really good. I mean, so like the main sort of expose here is something that. Which was already publicly known as public record, is that Sam Walton was a VC guy. Right? Like, and still functionally is. It's just he pretends to be a sort of like computer toucher now, but his sort of one startup thing before becoming sort of like poacher turned gamekeeper in venture capital was what if looking at your friends locations on their phones was an interesting basis for a social network, which it isn't. And I think the thing was that loop had like 500 users or whatever by the time it shut down, which was in six months.

[Nova]

Well, in that six months, the board tried to fire him twice for his lack of transparency.

[Ronan]

You're not taking this stupid idea seriously.

[Nova]

It gets acquired by a fintech and then Paul Graham makes him CEO of Y Combinator at 28. But a lot of people suspect that the acquisition was to save face for Sam because Paul Graham had basically chosen him as, okay, this is the guy.

[Ronan]

Yeah, because VC is about being the guy more than it is about the product. The product is hardly ever good.

[Nova]

And he also starts pissing everyone off at Y Combinator specifically because he engaged in so much self dealing, making personal investments into good companies and blocking others from investing in them by 2018. The other YC partners are so annoyed at this that they tried to get Graham to fire him. Altman has maintained over the years. This is back to the article, both in public and in recent depositions, that he was never fired from Y Combinator. And he did not resist leaving. But in private, Paul Graham has been unambiguous that Sam Altman was fired because the YC partners did not trust him. On one occasion, Graham told YC colleagues that prior to his removal, quote, sam just lies to us all the time. We should trust this guy when he says, God's around the corner.

[Ronan]

Oh, yeah.

[Nova]

Yeah. So I want to jump back to 2015, which is where Altmune starts OpenAI from an email exchange with Elon Musk. He says this usual song and dance about AI safety, which Elon Musk purports to care about at the time, and how the goal is to avoid the AI dictatorship. That's how they word it.

[Ronan]

It's crazy how much less brain rotted. Elon is like, still a lot. But in these exchanges, he's like, you know, he's got sentences still. He's not fully sort of gone yet.

[Nova]

Yeah. It's like he's able to. He has a kind of theory of he's pissy and pernickety and snippy, but he has a theory of mind, I think. So Musk gives him a billion dollars, and then he and Altman, remember, this isn't their day job. Altman is still the CEO of Y Combinator. Stop by the office once a week or a similar safety song and dance brings in Dario Amadei and Ilya Sutskever, who are sort of key talent that they want to poach, especially Sutskever.

[Ronan]

Yeah. And those two are the kind of computer touches in this.

[Nova]

Yeah, yeah. By September 2017, Musk had grown impatient during discussions about whether to reconstitute OpenAI as a for profit company. He demanded majority control. Altman's replies varied depending on the context.

[Ronan]

In fairness. In fairness, your replies would vary if you had to deal with Elon Musk. Right. If you're just like getting another email from Elon being like, hey, I just noticed how it isn't talking about white genocide in South Africa. Can we make a talk about white genocide in South Africa? You would maybe lie under those circumstances and be like, oh, yeah, sure, I'm looking into it.

[Nova]

You know, Elon's like the one of the people who it's really worth lying to if you ever get the chance.

[Ronan]

Oh, God, yeah.

[Nova]

And. But with this one, I think this is something you pointed out to me the other day. Nova. It's something I've not been able to stop thinking about. Is one of the few people who consistently has seen Sam Altman for the gigantic liar that he Is and is was taken by him once for a billion dollars in 2015 and then is like never again is Elon Musk. Everybody else gets swindled.

[Ronan]

By the way, to understand some of this is the sort of underlying shadow war between Musk and Altman in which Elon is going about this in a sort of comically inept way like everything else he does, where it seems like there is plenty of sort of like damaging information about Sam Altman.

[Nova]

Right.

[Ronan]

Like being sort of fired from Y Combinator or like the sort of self dealing or whatever. But Musk, because he is homophobic and can't avoid the kind of lurid, seems to spend the entire article or his proxies seem to spend the entire article trying to convince Ronan Farrow that Sam Altman is a pedophile. A thing for which they can then find no evidence whatsoever.

[Hussain]

Yeah, I feel like there'll be a big challenge for the New Yorker fact checkers to be able to do that.

[Ronan]

Yeah. To really bag that one up. But they keep getting sent mysteriously from sort of like Elon aligned people dossiers about Sam Altman's army of twinks or whatever. All these kind of like implications that he sort of like pursues underage men which then they can't find any corroboration for. And it's just like that's a perfect piece of sort of Muskian ineptitude and bigotry to try and like find the one thing about this guy that is not objectionable, which is that he's gay and go all in on that and nothing else.

[Nova]

Yeah. It's like the one person who wasn't fooled by him from 2017, like 2017-19 on or especially by 2022 when like when the GPT, when ChatGPT really like exploded into popularity, is the one guy whose main tactic for getting him is the one, the one that doesn't mean anything.

[Ronan]

Yeah, well, I mean the army of twinks thing is kind of funny, right? Because it's like focusing on something that alleges some relatively sort of like damaging self dealing. Right. The idea here is that Altman invests heavily in his partners or former partners companies in a way that essentially puts a financial leash on them for life. Right. If you want to keep making money, then you have to stay at this company that Sam Altman owns, sort of like a heavy percentage of. Right. And therefore Sam Altman has a sort of army of twinks. The reason why that's evil isn't that they're twinks. Like they could be any type of person that you're dating or had been dating. Right. Which is. And again, it's weird that it's Elon Musk trying to disseminate that. Elon Musk, who has question mark, number of children with question mark, number of women, you know, like. But it's just. It's so strange to be like. And the thing about Sam Altman, that's really, you know, he's finished because Twinks.

[Nova]

Yeah. Did you know. Did you know that he's gay? It's like, God damn it.

[Ronan]

Kind of.

[Nova]

Why is it that the one powerful person who hates him happens to be also the biggest idiot? It's so annoying.

[Ronan]

Because we live in fucking Team Fortress 2 timeline and we have two equally matched stupid billionaires forcing us to battle back and forth forever.

[Nova]

He'd grown impatient during discussions about whether Recon's duty demanded majority as a for profit. He demanded majority control. Altman's consistent demand seems to have been that if OpenAI were ever reorganized under the control of the CEO, that the job should go to him. Sutskever was uncomfortable with the idea. The goal of the OpenAI is to make the future good and avoid AGI dictatorship. He continued, addressing Musk. So it's a bad idea.

[Ronan]

So the deal with Suskava and Amadei in particular, is that they, as sort of computer touchers and like, understanders of the sort of computer science of this thing, believe that they can make God real and believe that it's going to imprison and enslave them. Right. I think that that's stupid still, but they're sort of genuinely worried about the sort of apocalyptic thing, and you can ask the question of where that kind of worry comes from, but ultimately, right, they believe it. Sam Altman does not believe anything. And so OpenAI starts with this kind of commitment to safety that then gets

[Nova]

shredded, as you're saying, Nova, right? This is about watering down this commitment to safety that these guys genuinely believe in, even if we think it is ludicrous. About a dozen of OpenAI's top engineers held a series of secret meetings to discuss whether OpenAI's founders, including Brockman and Altman, could be trusted. At one, an employee was reminded of a sketch by Mitchell and Webb in which a Nazi soldier on the Eastern Front, in a moment of clarity, asks, are we the baddies in Sam Altman's twink division?

[Ronan]

Looking around at each other like, by

[Nova]

2018, Amada had started questioning the founder's motives more openly. Everything was a rotating set of schemes to make money. He later wrote in his notes again, like, whoa, it's crazy. And he was worried. There was no clear statement of how OpenAI's existence would make the world a better place. OpenAI had a mission statement, but it wasn't clear that this mission statement meant anything to executives at all. Where they just say, to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.

[Ronan]

Because you can sort of make a determination about how seriously the worry about, like, we're going to build God and God's going to be evil persists, right? Because you can graph these three guys, Altman, Amadeus and Saskuba, on how long it takes them to start playing the sort of the capitalism tune, right? Because you go from OpenAI, which was doing it sort of like almost immediately, to Amade quitting and doing Anthropic, which has then sort of like been slower at it, but is picking up now, to Tsatskiva, who, as far as I know, is still on the sort of like, what if this kills all of us or enslaves us and makes us work in the silicon lines? But I think you can maybe derive from that that if one of the two of them, who knows what they're talking about is now like, yeah, but anthropic can make sort of like, business decisions and it'll be fine. That maybe it wasn't that serious after all. And here's the neat thing about this prediction. If I'm wrong about that, you can fucking kick the shit out of me in the silicon mines.

[Nova]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ronan]

I'm already having a bad time because I'm in the mines.

[Nova]

You can only get so wet if you jump in a lake. Yeah, so, but one of the. But Amade wanted that clause, that charter to be made much more specific. He said he wanted a merge and assist clause, which is about, like, who, no matter who discovers AGI AGI first, if it's not OpenAI, they'll voluntarily wind down and donate everything to that organization. And, like, Sam was like, yeah, sure, we'll do that, whatever.

[Ronan]

And they were doing that with Google in mind, right? Because part of this was like a serious worry on Amade and Sutskever's part that Google was gonna invent God and then it was gonna be Google God, and that was gonna be bad. Now, granted, they thought that would have happened by now. And as far as I know, Google have not invented God. But still time, I guess.

[Nova]

But the other thing, right, is that this happens like 2017, like 2018, but then Microsoft starts wanting to invest and you know, Amaday and Sutskever insisted that the mergeness clause be kept. And Sam said, of course, of course. Any negotiations with Microsoft, don't worry, we will keep the, like, nuclear bomb in our charter. Amadei recalled after. After the deal was finalized, 80% of the charter was just betrayed. It's like, I can't believe this happened a ninth time.

[Ronan]

You can literally just say you're gonna do something and then not do it.

[Nova]

It's so awesome that world leaders are clamoring to try to get this guy into more and more official systems.

[Ronan]

Well, you can do it, particularly in tech, because what's a tech guy gonna do? Type at you?

[Nova]

So he confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed.

[Ronan]

Ooh, tense meeting.

[Nova]

Amaday read it aloud, pointing to the text, and then forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. In another tense encounter, Altman summoned Amade and his sister Daniella, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on good authority from a senior executive that they'd been plotting a coup. Daniella, the notes continue, lost it. And brought in that executive who denied having said anything. As one person briefed in the exchange, said Altman then denied having made the claim at all, saying, I didn't even say that. To which Daniela responded, you literally just said that before I went and got him.

[Ronan]

Lying is so cool. This is literally just a woman yelling at the cat at the dining table type thing.

[Nova]

Yeah, it's great. It's just like, this is a guy who just loves lying. Mm. Simple passions, like, do what you love. You never work a day in your life. Yeah, but think back to all the episodes of Ed Zitron where Ed's like, I think OpenAI might be lying about some stuff. And then we look at this personal profile of Altman where he's like, I just. I just. I'm addicted to lying. It's one of my core personality traits. In late 2022, a paper on deceptive alignment, which is that sufficiently advanced models pretend to behave well during tests and then to escape and then get deployed and pursue their own goals, I got one of its authors an email from Altman promising to endow a billion dollar prize to anyone who can fix that problem. And that's just enough of a safety pill statement for that researcher to join OpenAI, because at this point, up until 2022, it's really hard for them to get good people from who will otherwise go to Google. And so instead, they have to keep saying, oh, but we're Safe, we're safe, we're safe. And so they get the most like philosophical AI people As soon as the researcher joined the prize became an in house team. But that got to use 20% of the compute, which turned out to be 2% of the compute, which turned out to be using all the worst chips.

[Ronan]

They got this all screwed up, you know, they put an extra zero on them.

[Nova]

This lead complained to Mirati, but she told him to stop pressing the point because the commitment was never realistic. Anyway, these concerns a lot of everybody else, mainly Ilya, so much that then we get to the blip, which we all know Sam reverses. People feel it.

[Ronan]

You should have known that what Sam Altman was telling you was so obvious a lie that it wouldn't ever happen.

[Nova]

You know, oh, it was Sam telling. Oh, we have an additional secret rule. One of Altman's batmates at the first YC cohort was, and this is weird, I didn't know this. Aaron Swartz, New Yorker, refers to as a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Notably, the article does not say why Aaron Swartz killed himself. It was because he was basically pressured into it by one of the companies that owns fucking JSTOR because he released a bunch of academic papers for free.

[Ronan]

Yeah, he was functionally murdered.

[Nova]

Yeah. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends, saying, you need to understand that Sam can never be trusted. He is a sociopath who would do anything.

[Ronan]

Oh my God, the dodgeball of prophecy with your last effort on this earth.

[Nova]

Yeah, this is like, by the way, don't trust this guy. Anyway, off to go. Try to make information free.

[Ronan]

It's like a sort of Bavarian infantryman in the trenches just about to get hit by a shell. And the last thing he says is, I got a bad feeling about that Hitler guy. Don't promote that Hitler guy.

[Nova]

Multiple senior executives at Microsoft said the company's relationship with Altman has become fraught. Quote, he's misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated and reneged an agreement. The senior executive at Microsoft then went on to say, at Altman, I think there's a small but real chance he will eventually be remembered as a Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman fried level scammer.

[Ronan]

Why ok, why specifically do AI things contain this volume of lying? Because I know all business contains and is largely about lying, right? But like, for some reason, all of the normal laws of business seem to Go out of the window whenever AI gets involved. It's almost as if the technology itself kind of can't bear the scrutiny of normal business structures and guardrails. What's up with that?

[Nova]

It's almost like you could imagine that there is some kind of historical force that was at play in both and it's been worming its way forward for a very long time. Which is in play, for example, with the Juicero. Right. It's just that level of, you know, lying and deception and self deception or we work it never. It's. It was that. That capac. That capacity to simply lie about everything and not do anything. It was looking for the right product to attach itself to and it finally

[Ronan]

found it kind of infected everything else as well.

[Hussain]

Like, I mean I was thinking about this the other day in a different context because it was sort of like, I think the question that was still very much the same, was it like has the sort of like zero interest rate tech industry that sort of has emerged and one that was also built around lying and built around sort of deceiving people both in terms of over promising and, or sometimes just like promising something to customers that it didn't deliver on or massively the whole story of tech. In the past couple few decades, even pre AI has been overvalued. Tech companies that turn out to sort of be nothing or to be shells and then the whole thing collapsing and then we just do it over and over again. But also this stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. We also kind of live in a sociopolitical system which really kind of. We have a high. I think the whole point, the thing I'm trying to get to is that we have had a tolerance of lying and people with power lying to people for a long time and basically getting away with it.

[Ronan]

It's all Richard Nixon's fault or Carl Rhodes.

[Hussain]

I mean, yeah, like, you know, there is a long tail in this and it's just sort of like, well okay, if you are like people with, if you have people with power in a democratic system where like in theory you should be able to sort of like if someone was to lie, they would be like punished, right? They would least kind of like be removed of any ability to wield that power. But instead we created a system in which there are lots of incentives to kind of lie and to maintain those lies and to extend those lies. And so if they exist in politics, why shouldn't they exist in business? Why shouldn't they exist in technology? And here we get to this point where we have an entire system that is promising to save lots of global economies built around those lies. And if someone was to say, well, you know, if someone was to, like, hold these people, to hold these people accountable for their lies and for their sort of, like, misdirections, I don't know whether. Because, again, it's very much like, you know, they can see themselves in the AI industry in the sense of, like, oh, we operate in the same way, which is basically through deceptions, and try and doing enough deceptions to mold the world into something that we are familiar with. And, you know, in spite of all the contradictions kind of coming into play that continue to undermine that. And, like, you know, I think this moment of time in particular, where the sort of Western power structure has had to really kind of confront the lies that it has told itself and people having real problems with that, or even just like, you know, thinking about Israel and, you know, all the stuff that it's doing around the world and having and, like, political forces really struggling to reconcile the idea that, you know, the whole worldview around, like, what they believed Israel to be or what it should represent. Like, I think it's this very. The point I'm trying to get to is that there are lies upon lies upon lies upon lies, and that is how the whole system is built. Right? And if you get rid. And if you sort of, like, take off some of it, the rest have to fall as well. And I think that there is, like, so much investment in maintaining the system of lies that, like, you know, you have people who sort of broadly benefit from doing it regardless. And then you have someone like Sam Altman who is built around those lies. And ironically, this is his time. This is the moment in which he really thrives. It's one where the lies are sort of covering up the other lies. I don't know if that makes any sense or if that's conspiratorial.

[Nova]

What we're talking about is impunity. Sam Altman thrives at a time of greater and greater and greater elite impunity. That's really what it is. And so, in fact, we can even go on to roll this in.

[Ronan]

There's one last line of defense, one check and balance, and it's twink with a Molotov.

[Nova]

A fourth Ukrainian. So, depending on the audience, Altman uses the Manhattan Project analogy to encourage either acceleration or caution.

[Ronan]

Yeah, until someone invents a fourth Ukrainian.

[Nova]

Yeah. In a meeting with US intelligence officials in the summer of 2017, he claimed that China had launched an AGI, Manhattan Project, and that OpenAI needed billions of dollars of government funding to keep pace.

[Ronan]

Do you think it's kind of insulting if you're like a CIA guy that you have to take a meeting with a guy who lies this much, but is this bad at it?

[Nova]

Well, when we follow up. When pressed for evidence, Altman says, I've just heard things. He told an intelligence official that he would follow up with the evidence, but he never did. The official then concluded no evidence existed, and he realized, quote, it was just being used as a sales pitch. Please give me money. China's definitely building the same thing I am. Please give me. And the thing is, it took the Trump 2 administration, really, for him to get what he actually wanted.

[Ronan]

Yeah. To get a sort of White House that. Credulous.

[Nova]

Yeah. But then there's this other thing called the country's plan. A brainstorming session, again about safety, and again in 2017 about how to keep this from becoming like a nuclear arms race. Greg Brockman comes up with this idea. OpenAI can enrich itself by playing world powers off against one another and starting a bidding war among them. Brockman's goal, according to Jack Clark, OpenAI's policy director at the time, was to, quote, set up a prisoner's dilemma where all nations need to keep giving us funding, and implicitly not giving us funding makes it is kind of dangerous. A junior researcher recalled thinking, this is fucking insane.

[Ronan]

It does. It does sound it a little bit. Yeah.

[Nova]

So we go on. The only reason it was abandoned is that the superstar researchers once again keep threatening to quit every time they, like, don't. Every time they don't take safety seriously. But Sam was undeterred. Here's another mini conference. They help with billionaires Nick Bostrom and Reid Hoffman. The days were spent in a sleek conference room where guests gave talks. Hoffman, the LinkedIn co founder, expounded the possibilities of encoding AI with Buddhist compassion. But the final presenter was Altman, armed with a pitch deck that described a global cryptocurrency redeemable for the attention of AGI. Once the AGI was maximally useful, people would then bid to buy time on their servers. Amade wrote in his notes. The idea was absurd in his face. Would Vladimir Putin end up owning some of the tokens? In retrospect, this was one of the many red flags about Sam I should have taken more seriously.

[Ronan]

Just sort of pitching your way into outer heaven is a great idea. I think.

[Nova]

Also, this is going long, but I do want to hit a couple more notes on this he loves the Saudis. He loves the Emiratis because they have money and they want to give it to him. But a week after Khashoggi got the full body haircut, it was announced that Sam was joining the board of neom. Clark said, that one slid by me. Clark said, sam, you cannot be on this board. And Altman initially defended his involvement, telling Clark that Jared Kushner assured him personally that the Saudis didn't do this.

[Ronan]

Yeah, I was assured. I was assured.

[Nova]

Yeah, it's like, no, another lying guy lied to me. Come on, it's fine. Sam was eventually forced into quitting, but he remained undeterred and wanted to stay as close to MBS as possible. As OpenAI prepares for an IPO, Altman has faced many questions, not only about the effect of AI on the economy, but about his company's own finances. Eric Reiss, an expert on startup governance, derided the circular deals in the industry and suggested that some of the company's accounting practices were borderline fraudulent. But Altman, interviewed in February, said, my definition of winning is that people crazy up level and the insane sci fi future becomes true for all of us. I'm very ambitious as far as, like, my hope for humanity and what I expect us all to achieve.

[Ronan]

Cool.

[Nova]

I weirdly have, like, very little personal ambition. No one believes you're doing this just because it's interesting, he said. You're doing it for power, for some other thing. But even people close to Altman find it difficult to know where his hope for humanity ends and his ambition begins. His greatest strength has always been his ability to convince disparate groups that what he wants and what they need are one and the same.

[Ronan]

He's just driving around San Francisco in the Koenigsegg, being pursued by elon Musk's homophobic PIs. Like the last reel of Goodfellas. And every meeting he goes to, he's like, I'm more relaxed than anyone's ever been.

[Nova]

Yeah, I'm building what might be an evil God. And you know what? I think it's pretty cool. By the way, China might do it. I heard that from a guy. My uncle told me he works at Nintendo. It's the most. He is the most uncle. He. No one has ever had an uncle more in Nintendo than Sam Altman has. He has the most hot Canadian boyfriends of anybody in history, I would say so. Altman responded with a move that no other pitch man had ever perfected, responded to his unique environment. He used apocalyptic rhetoric to explain how AGI could destroy us all and therefore why he should be one to build it.

[Ronan]

Yeah. Explicitly. Just as a sales technique.

[Nova]

Yeah. And Ferro says maybe this was a premeditated masterstroke or maybe he was fumbling for an advantage, but it seems to have worked. Anyway. This is amazing. This is a look inside. Inside Sam Altman. Ooh, this is a terrible guy. What are the odds? Anyway, look, I think that's all we have time for today though, so I want to thank you all for being a TF listener. Remind you that we are almost certainly this Thursday, unless something changes. Going to be talking about one of the more interesting scandals in British business currently that I've been kind of obsessed with. It's a little bit guys shaving a poodle wire card style. So interesting. Do sign up for that. I think it will be a lot of fun.

[Ronan]

I'm excited also.

[Nova]

Do you like me in November? Do you like our friend Matty Lubchansky?

[Ronan]

Please say you like us. Please say you like us.

[Nova]

Don't tell us. Do not.

[Ronan]

But tell us if you like us. We would like to know that. But not that you don't like us.

[Nova]

Yes, we are doing a live show of our other project. No gods, no mayors. At the time of the recording, there are seven tickets left for the, like, all three shows. There are only seven tickets left for the all three shows ticket. There are. And we've released a special Sunday ticket so you can check that out as well. Anyway, so we'll see you on the. On the premium episode and otherwise. Fuck. Why am I so bad at ending the fucking show? See you on the premium episode until then. Fucking why am I. Why can I suddenly not do this? Jesus fucking Christmas.

[Ronan]

Thank you for listening. We hope to see you on the premium episode or next time on the next free episode where who knows what's going to have happened? You know, like, maybe, maybe we'll all just. Maybe, maybe they'll all just have died, you know, maybe we just won't have to worry about it because they'll all just have died. That'll be cool.

[Nova]

Yeah. Well, anyway, Sa.