The Vulcan Neck Bench feat. Seamus Malekafzali
Middle East correspondent Seamus Malekafzali returns to discuss the possible closure of the Bab-al-Mandab strait by the Houthis, why an $80bn Saudi defence budget Saudi can’t stop them, and how the US and Israel started something they couldn’t stop if they wanted to… and how this makes every fake Saudi arts or sports or tech washing project more worthless than usual.
Check out more from Seamus here!
RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here!
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Comments (35)
And if a flying cybertruck Crashes into us
+1 Nova for sneaking an Iain Banks reference in Curious if that was conscious, or if “outside context problem” has been in her head so long that it’s always within arm’s reach
Could just be the latter. I know that the phrase "copper taste of fear" isn't far from my lexicon after reading the Expanse books.
It's so funny to be embarrassed about Shadow Doge as vaporware when your podcast has had a dubious subscription tier for months, maybe over a year now.
The Helpers of God literally doing God's work.
All china has to do to get even more ahead is just not massively fuck up and overextend like Russia and the US are. Just kick the Taiwan can down the curb and dominate for the next 50 years.
I completely forgot about shadow doge, it would be increadible if that game ever existed
The thing Nova said about chemotherapy is partly true. One key element of the story is that the first treatments that were made of nitrogen mustard only worked temporarily. The first patient had symptom relief and died later the same year. The first cure was made by a guy who noticed that children with leukemia got worse when you gave them folate vitamins and so developed "anti-folates." All this to say, if AI helps us to better understand cancer, it will be because it has made things worse.
Hey, it's been effectively closed since Iran won the war months ago. Recent "glut" was directly due to trackers changing their metrics. I love your show, but you guys are talking about this almost like it’s something that is going to happen in the future? Not quite critical enough. It’s already happened. That 20 to 30% of global trade is already shut off. It has been for quite some time. So mechanically from here, things will proceed in a pretty unpleasant fashion.
What if the future rapped, and it was really problematic about it?
The new jumping tesla assumes it can jump-pass me without getting blapped by my new hilux inspired civic with a doohickey bolted to the roof
not only has character ai fallen but the coreweave founders are cashing out lollllllll
Thank you Hussein for the very funny thoughts mid-story
Alternate episode title: Air-cucked by a modded Nissan Cherry
Plan on getting car-murdered like the practical yet whimsical driver I am (by a 1993 RHD Japanese kei van)
There is currently a huge boxing match set to take place in Riyadh with both the Saudis and the boxer stuck in the world dumbest game of chicken where neither wants to cancel the event, but secretly hoping the other does. It’s resulted in a bunch of weird press releases where each is praising the other for their bravery in continuing to go through with the event.
A corollary to "Is that good" with Ed Zitron is "Is that a good assessment of the situation, Seamus" with Seamus Malekafzali
Do you think they came up with the smoking thing of their own volition or did one of them get bribed by a tobacco industry rep?
Tbf there is a second tesla roadster but it's in space
Nova says that Hussein is the Camus of podcasting and yet it’s Seamus whose guest appearances always kickstart an existential crisis
If they really were confident in ai they would swap those cigarettes with freezing their disembodied heads to be attached to future Tesla-bots
There's talk around the water cooler that the roadster demo used magnets, not fans, to drive upside down
That suction line makes zero sense in a vehicle that has any ground clearance whatsoever. God, can you imagine driving over roadkill with that feature turned on? It'd be like the Dalkey Atmospheric Railway rat situation but aimed solely at C suite dorks.
l think this is the 3rd or 4th time Nova has referenced Sam Altman "stepping into his Koenigsegg and driving off" before l realized that Koenigsegg is a car and _not_ an oblique, Germanified (Königsegg) reference to the Behelit from Berzerk.
Sam Altman’s whole schtick of “people should accept the bad stuff about AI so that we can have the positive benefits” except the only benefit is that he gets a Koenigsegg.
Takeaway: read the book Oilcraft According to the author, the 1970s OPEC embargo is a myth, never actually enacted, only Iraq imposed an embargo, and the oil crisis was the culmination of things that had been coming for a long time and had started to be studied by the Johnson administration
Yeah the “embargo” was a symbolic thing for Arab governments to sell to their publics while also serving as a convenient scapegoat for both the Nixon administration and Western oil companies, most of whose concessions in Arab governments had been recently nationalized. The *production cuts*, however, were real—but those were driven by economic factors as much as anything, at a time when dollar inflation had already been increasing, what with the end of Bretton Woods (which was itself inevitable—turns out it’s hard to run massive budget deficits on a fixed exchange rate with a balance of payments crisis and your post-war economic expansion having ended). Of course that was stabilized during the Ford administration by the so-called petrodollar agreement, which was “all that Saudi oil money is very liquid continue to pump that shit back into our economy dawg thanks!” aka, “petrodollar recycling.”
Why do billionaires always want to be birds or moles?
Because it would be unseemly for them to admit that they would like to be puppygirls.
Taken out by a perpetually barrel rolling flying reliant robin.
Trabuchet (Trabant-Trebuchet) as a precision weapon
elon gave the game away about the flying car when he mentioned building a custom track for it at the factory - its just going to be paying a fortune to "drive" it (sit in the computer controlled car) on the track, supported by engineers , doing one mediocre stunt, like all of the supercars that only let you do track days with them
Can't afford a bunker, so I'm moving to Montreal to live in the underground malls there to avoid flying cars. It's going to be Metro 2033, but with poutine.
Isn't the God Hole a cornerstone philosophy of Dennis Reynolds?
Gathering the TF hosts together like assembling infinity stones.