TRASHFUTURE - You Have Selected You, Meaning Me ft. Archie Woodrow

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Archie has been following the ups and downs of Your Party, and gives us the inside story on where it all went wrong organisationally. Then, we read another article about AI intruding into people’s lives and making them horribly uncanny. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

So I just do the normal podcast introduction? Yeah, I would say just do the normal podcast introduction. Okay. Riley, you've been taking too long to do the normal podcast introduction. Hello and welcome to an episode of Trash Uch, your favorite podcast, which I am launching unilaterally due to the existence of of a sexist boys club determined to delay the launch of the podcast. I am your host and sole host, November Kelly. However, be assured that Riley Quinn and St. Kiswana, 100% behind me on this one.

You just can't hear them right now because I'm talking over them. Yeah, I'm releasing a video now that's all about how TF will continue. The laughs will continue. I'll keep doing startup segments at some point in the future. Thank you, Nova, for welcoming all of our listeners to TF. Absolutely. I'll see you in court, you seg fuck. And I also want to welcome our guest, first time, long time, I think. Archie Woodrow, one of the premier chroniclers of the foibles of the British left and an editor at Prometheus Journal and recent publisher of an article for Novara on exactly, I guess you could say, what the fuck happened with your party?

So, Archie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So I guess I'd like to start with a question, unless Nova wants to interrupt me to do the bit again. Oh, I will be doing that, but not at predictable intervals. You know, it's just going to happen as in when I feel like it. So Archie, here's my question. What the fuck happened?

Good question. Let's say this. The listeners, we've talked about this as often bemused outsiders. We've looked at the various launches, the various sort of internal, like the fighting between Corbyn's team and Sultana's team. Yeah, I guess if I had to find like an origin point for this, it's like, where do these two camps come from, right? Who are Corbyn's people?

Who are Zara's people? And sort of like, how do we get these like two houses are like indignity or indignancy? Yeah. So, I mean, the first answer to that is, I think the idea that there's two camps is a bit of a simplification in the first place, although not that there's not an element of truth to it,

but it is more complicated than that. Is there like a third camp of like a guy just like the people who actually just support a guy called Steve to run your party? The way I put it in Prometheus, I put it into actually sort of four camps that have aligned into two blocks. But even that's potentially simplification. I think really the the roots of it go back to 2024 when the sort of discussions about starting a new party were centralised in an organisation called Collective. which some of you may remember. And collective was largely run by people who were close to Corbyn, either through their roles in Corbyn's office in the Labour Party,

such as Carrie Murphy, who used to be as chief of staff, or through the Peace and Justice Project, such as Pamela Fitzpatrick, who was one of the directors of the Peace and Justice Project. and basically, by most accounts, things in collective were not very effective and not very democratic and unnecessarily secretive and it wasn't really working. Also, they had the problem that the whole point of it was trying to encourage Corbyn to start a party and Corbyn didn't seem that keen on. Actually, I don't have the full ins and outs of exactly what was Corbyn thinking exactly what

the inside story was in 2024. Most of my research, I've sort of focused on the stuff more. more in the last year. But so, I mean, the place my story kind of starts in the Navarra article is that in, I think it's off the top of my head, September 2024, there's a meeting of collective that goes very badly because somebody leaks to the press saying, Jeremy Corbyn has attended this meeting where he will announce that he's going to launch a new party. And then very quickly you have Jeremy Corbyn clarifying that he's not going to

to launch a new party, and that wasn't his intention of the meeting. Can I jump in with a question, actually? What is it that made him so reticent to start a new party when for so long there was such a dearth of elected left-wing figures in the sort of aftermath of, like, Starmer? I can't pretend to be an authority here, because like I say, I've not researched in detail what the conversations were going on back in, you know, between 2019 and 2024.

Most of my research is focused on what's happened in the last year. I mean, a lot of people think it's to do with the fact that he was in the Labour Party so long that he's got a sort of deeply ingrained sense of loyalty to the left of the Labour Party and that therefore he always would rather have rejoined the Labour Party than started a new party. But I can't swear whether or not that's true. I suspect there's an element of it actually that his real loyalty is to his constituency activists, a lot of whom will have been in the... And, you know, if you think about his history, he's been MP there for donkeys years. And for most of that time, the base to which he was accountable to was the Islington Local Labour Party. But it did strike me that Corbin as the kind of man of the hour was always a strange choice, because I'm old enough to remember when the socialist campaign group, the left of the Labour Party's kind of like hope for the future was John McDonnell running for leader back in the day. And Corvin was always this kind of like, you know, backbench radical, which I thought he was.

he was suited at that, and I think all of the qualities that made him good at that. Yeah, and that's sort of an accident of health. Because the reason McDonald didn't run in 2015 was because he had a heart condition or something. So he was basically worried that he'd have a heart attack from the stress of being leader, which, I mean, given what happened, I mean, that's probably quite likely. And then also, you know, there was a thing about it just being Jeremy's turn, because I think, I forget exactly the details, but I think Diane Abbott had stood the previous, time. I think McDonald stood the time before that, and they didn't expect to win. So it was just,

oh, well, we've got to put up a left candidate whose turn is it? And so then this is, I think this is important background, especially again for American listeners who might not be as O'Fay with this, which is that he's, this guy is catapulted into the leadership position, sort of by an accident of health in history. And, you know, a lot of people do their utmost to try to get him over the line. But, you know, we are rat-fucked into oblivion, of course. And, you know, this, this also explains a little bit of why getting your party going was such a sort of long process, why it took so long to actually do. Yeah, and I think that's also the thing that's important there is, in the sense that he's a leader, it's as a figurehead. Like, he's not like

the next Lenin, right? He's not someone who's got, you know, really detailed ideas of this is exactly what we need to do and everyone needs to do what, what I tell them. It's very much, you know, a voice for the movement and I want to lift up the voices of the grassroots activists, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is a useful role in certain ways. I think it's part of how he was, I think, both his strength and weakness as Labour Party leader, because it meant he could be a very unifying figurehead for the broad left, but it also meant that he wasn't a very decisive source of leadership, and a lot of things sort of descended into a fight between different factions and advisors

in his office in the parliamentary party, in the shadow cabinet, in the trade unions, in momentum, etc., fighting over who actually gets to set the agenda. It's interesting how much the people around Corbyn sort of like evoke like a lot of the worst behavior of the labor right as well, just in terms of the kind of like constant factionalism and the group chats and the bullying and the sort of like betrayals. It really like, I know Corbyn said, you know, not covering ourselves in glory, but this feels sort of like almost indistinguishable in places. Yeah, well, that's because it's not the culture of the labor rights. It's the culture of the Labor Party. and actually even more broad than that and if you talk to anyone who's worked in Parliament

there's like bullying is clearly indenic across the whole of it and some of that is to do with the way it's structured with, you know, there's no HR department or MPs just sort of control their own little staff team and there's no one to appeal to, but also you don't want to appeal to anyone because you're on a shared political project together so if you complain about something, you're also

undermining the thing that you're working for and also there's an element of it that links to the Labour Party and the Labour Left's link with the trade unions. Obviously, a lot of Corbyn's support was in Unite and a lot of his key allies were in Unite. Some of them are now some of the key players in your party. Obviously, there's currently a massive investigation into alleged corruption around Unite. But also more broadly than that, like these are people who have been fighting quite brutal, factional fights against the right for decades, not only in the Labour Party, but also in their trade unions.

So it's this sort of odd double-edged sword that like the ruthless faction fighters from parts of the Labour Left from Unite in some ways maybe the only thing that allowed Corby to become leader and to sort of safeguard him in that position, but also were arguably responsible for a lot of the dysfunction. I mean, Carrie Murphy, who comes up a lot when you talk to people, both about what was happening in Corbyn's office in the Labour Party and what's happening now in your party, is sort of an interesting figure, because although a lot of people portray her as this very ruthless, fractional, operator and the source of all kinds of problems, the flip side of it is that a lot of people will say, well, Corbyn's office before that was totally dysfunctional, and Corbyn wasn't sort of decisive enough to be a leader, so he'd just be sort of wandering around saying anything to anyone. And you needed someone. really sort of strong and decisive like Carrie Murphy to just sort of get things in order and to stop him being pulled around by anyone trying to, you know, get some influence in the office. Yeah, she made the Corbyn's run on time. Well, that pretty much, yeah. So this is the situation we're going into it with. And I wonder if we could even say that we have a bit of a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis

in that we brought a lot of that culture from British politics in general, but the Labour Party specifically into the thing that is trying to fight the Labour Party, which is causing many of the same problems that made the Labour Party so ungovernable. Yeah. And I mean, I touch on this in the Navarra article. I go into it in a lot more detail in the leaders who don't lead article I did for Prometheus. So I mean, I could go on about this at length. But I think one of the big things is that in the Labour Party there's like a culture of secrecy

that you don't do the politics out in the open. You pretend, you know, you're a broad, united church, everyone puts on a smiley face in the open, even if it's, you know, goulds from the Labour right who, you know, you want to kill each other. But in public, you sort of put on some vague show of unity, which means that political differences don't really come out in the open. And all the real political fights and factional fights happen in secret and in private negotiations between MPs, between trade union leaders and between various sort of insiders and advisors and bureaucrats. So basically, with this in place now, let's talk about the factions that emerged in your party and how we got to this incredibly public breakdown that resulted in like threats of reporting one another to the ICO or lawsuits and so forth. Right. So basically, to start with 2024, everyone's in collective. A lot of people are getting pissed off with the way that it's being run, partly because it's a lot of people perceive it as being very sort of top down and undemocratic controlled by Carrie Murphy and her key. allies. But also there's this specific thing of people leaking to the press that a new party is, you know, Corbyn's about to announce a new party. Then he has to clarify, he's not. Andrew Feinstein's about to launch a new party. No, he's not. Which from what I understand most people think it's Pamela Fitzpatrick specifically who's responsible for the briefings, although obviously I can't

confirm that. And so in September, basically a group of them break away. I think it's largely at Schneider's initiative that this happens, but it includes Jeremy, Corbyn himself, which is a slightly confusing thing in the narrative, because it sort of puts him in both factions. Man of ultimate decision-making ability. Well, yeah, I mean, one person I was talking to said, you know, been quite involved at this at the national level, said the way they saw it. It was just that, like, Corbyn doesn't want to tell everyone what to do and make the decision.

So he convenes a committee to be the voice of the movement to tell him what to do. And then for various reasons, I mean, partly because he's just not someone who's good at running a committee. It breaks down or one side of the committee doesn't like it and he wants there to be a consensus. So then he invalidates the committee that he convened and starts another committee and then the same thing happens about three times.

God, look at my parliamentary left dog. I'm getting rounded up and taken to a stadium. You know, when they said of Stama that he knows how to share a meeting and it's not a skill everyone has, they were kind of right. He just also doesn't know how to share a meeting. Yeah, no, exactly, but it is an important skill.

So Corbyn Schneider, Jamie Driscoll, Andrew Feinstein, Salma Yakub and a few others split off. And on the one hand, this new group that they start, which ends up being called the MOU group for Memorandum of Understanding, because it's sort of united around a little document that they draft saying, look, we're all here on a shared common basis to try to work out how to start a new party. Sturring. And so in some ways it's an improvement because they're sort of, starting it on a slightly clearer political basis and they're, you know, having some clearer internal processes and so on. But also it's even more secretive than collective was in the first place. There's also an element of it that, so I think a lot of the people, like Corbyn himself,

but also Feinstein and Driscoll, very disillusioned by the way that Collective was going and it led them to some extent to be disillusioned with the whole idea of the party, which is why at that point you get various public statements where they stop talking in those terms. and start just to, oh, well, we need local community, independent grassroots, but in often very vague terms that you think, what does that even mean? So partly this MOU group is a sort of, I think, an effort by Schneider and a few others, partly to, like, redirect that discontent back towards the direction of a party. And so by January, that group has convened, it's got its own internal processes,

and Jamie Driscoll has written this very long axioms document that's supposed to be the sort of principles and basis of it, which to me it's bizarre, they never published it, because it's quite an interesting document. English socialism, localized entirely within one PDF file on your computer. No, exactly. May I see it? Well, not on anyone's computer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's exactly like, and this is something that recurs throughout the whole story. My understanding is basically that committee fails to make much progress, and part of the problem is, although supposedly they had like, you know, proper. processes and governance structures and processes for decision-making, which was supposedly agreed at meetings in which Corbyn was present and, you know, seemed to accept that those were the decisions and the accepted processes. I mean, I've had some people say, well, him and several other committee members probably never read any of those processes. But so there's a, basically, I think a lot of people involved have this sense that it's not getting anywhere that you think

you've made one decision. And then someone says, oh, well, I'm not sure Jeremy's very keen on that. And then it gets reversed. So part of the dynamic here is that it's sort of supposed to be a collective project, but also it all hinges around Jeremy Corbyn because he's the only person with a big enough personal profile to break through Britain's, you know, two-party system. So he has this sort of effective veto power. Also, one of the things that seems to come out of a lot of this is he's not always the clearest communicator. So there does sometimes seem to be a bit of dispute as to exactly what does Jeremy think. And, okay, he's not expressed clear disagreement with something, but does that mean that he's not. comfortable enough with it to go ahead with it.

You know, when I was reading your article, I got the sense that, like, really, the way that his role in this group is much like a kind of constitutional monarch, where, like, lots of, he has the legitimacy, and then lots of people are interpreting what they think his will is to advance their own agenda. I think that's exactly what it was like in the Labour Party as well. I mean, Max Shanley and Steve Freeman and others have talked about social. monarchism and the sort of the sense that it's court politics of a party king. And you do see, and even the fact that you've got like Corbyn's wife,

Zara Sultana's husband, Adnan Hussein's sister turning up to these like national level meetings. It is very much like the sort of monarchical court politics. I'm just reminded, Riley, do you remember when we did left on, when we did left on Red, we read Richard Kapushinsky's the emperor about highly slassey and there's this there's this bit

I do you know I'll just come right out and say it the King of Kings liked weak courtiers right it just it feels like that again

where it's like it sort of like a weak court is one that is you know one that gives you the kind of appearance of collegiality it doesn't give you a lot of headaches and you know

quietly it lets you kind of burnish yourself a little bit but in this In this case, it's like that week, because he's so dependent on the people around him to, like, constantly be coming to consensus, that means that there's very little sort of collective decision. There's very little collective decision-making power to break the faction. Yeah. No, exactly. And also that there's often, it's not very clear. I mean, like I say, he doesn't always seem to be very clear communicator. And you have different people sort of claiming to be speaking of him. So one of the ways that the fractional split starts emerge is. is that there's, I don't know exactly the dates because, like, it's all sort of private meetings that aren't minuteed and so on. But there's a series of private meetings, I think, in May or early June of this year, between Corbyn and Zara Sultan, although also with a few others present, including their spouses. Which, why, though? But you may well ask. You may well ask.

I do. And also, just in particular, throwing into this kind of rather feebral mix. of, you know, like weak king, weak court. We also have Zarasultana who, a woman who I firmly believe is at this point in the timeline seeing in her head that one illustration of like young Napoleon at officer school with the shadow being cast on the wall behind him. Yeah, so you have these private meetings where they float the idea of co-leadership. And again, they're not minuted as far as unaware. So it's hard to know exactly what happened there.

But some people involved say that they thought at that point, Jeremy Corbyn agreed to co-leadership, whereas other people don't think that that's what he agreed to. And some people think he signalled his openness to the idea and others are not so sure about that. This is the last guy in politics I knew who had this communication style. I say, I knew like I knew the guy. The last person in politics I've been counted with this communication style was the emperor Hirohito. The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage. And everybody comes out of that room with a different idea of what the fuck he meant by that.

Yeah, I mean, also, not to sort of hammer it too much, but like, I don't know, I grew up on stories around, you know, sort of my, a lot of my, you know, my sort of religious background is one of like a split between various factions over what, like, a certain charismatic leader may or may not have said. And the fact that, like, that still hasn't been resolved. So, I, you know. It has been reported with a reliable chain that Corbyn said that he was, like, down for a co-leadership, you know. Yeah, I imagine there's a lot of, there's a lot of like, well, there must be some people that are just like, oh yeah, this isn't actually like an authentic Corbyn quote. It's been doctored and like, you know, overtime and it wasn't really written down properly. It was just remembered. The thing is, it's very difficult because the kind of classical English that Corbyn speaks is not familiar to most people's modern language.

You have to get your area for it. Yeah, I mean, this comes about most clearly in the meeting where they actually vote about the co-leaders. where, I mean, maybe we're skipping ahead a bit if you want the full faction story, but just on this point about Corbyn's sort of weird, unclear utterances. And again, here, I've interviewed quite a number of different people who were present at the meeting. I've also read the minutes of the meeting, and I've also read the full, like, WhatsApp chat archive of the organising committee that it was a meeting. And so you have this meeting to discuss and vote.

on these two different proposals for leadership structure, one of which is about co-leadership, one of which is about having a single leader and one or more deputy leaders, although there's also a bunch of other stuff in that paper, but not worth going into now. And in fact, I can pull up the exact quote of what he said according to the minutes, which, so, oh, you know, sorry, it's even funnier than, sorry, I forgot how good it is. So they have this long and quite interesting, and maybe a bit superficial, but a perfectly reasonable civilised discussion about the two different leadership models. And it gets to right near the end just before the vote. And someone asks, well, what's Jeremy's view? And Salmi Yakub, who's chairing the meeting, observes,

Jeremy has not put his hand up to speak, but it is important to hear his view. So invites him to speak. And what he says, according to the minutes, which, although a few people I've spoken to who were at the meeting from both sides of it, think that it does roughly reflect what said. He says, thank you for the discussion. We need to be based in grassroots activism around the country and communities. How do we deal with the existing independent groups? Potentially we'd need a federal structure. We should not found a party about not being labour, but founded on a positive message. I've had a bad experience of deputy leaders with Tom Watson. I have affection and admiration for Zara and happy to work with her in any capacity. There are pros and cons

to sole deputy co-leadership or collective leadership approaches. I want us to have a democratic inclusive party which gives hope, inclusion and opportunity to people. So, I mean, if you just take that at face value, it sounds like he doesn't mind that much that, you know, there's pros and cons to either and literally says happy to work with Zara in any capacity. But having spoken to a few people,

including people who like you know Corbyn very well and have known him for years and worked in his office and so on they'll often when explain the narrative on the anti-Zara side is basically that everyone knew that Corbyn didn't want co-leadership and that Zara pushed ahead with it and announced it unilaterally even though everyone knew Jeremy didn't want it from the minutes of the meeting it sounds like he didn't voice any objections to it and indicated that he was happy with it

if it was what the meeting wanted. But you talked to people who were there or who have known him for a long time and some of them, not all of them, but some of them will say, oh yes, but this is Jeremy and you know how he is. And everyone who knows Jeremy

knows that he wasn't happy and even though he didn't, you know, say it in a completely explicit or direct way. Yeah, once you've been working for him for like 20 years, you'll learn that when he says, I'm happy to work with you in any capacity, what he means is over my dead body,

will I work with you in any capacity? He's just too shy to express that. One of the odd things with, I mean, there's a number of different ways. I mean, I don't know Corbyn personally. I've only, you know, met him briefly a couple of protests or whatever. But if you look at all the different events and accounts of things and the minutes and et cetera, et cetera, one way that you can interpret it all is, oh, he's just a bit indecisive and it's all a bit dysfunctional. One way you can look at it is that, you know, his advisers and people like,

Carrie Murphy, are sort of pushing him around and claiming to speak for him, but actually they're pushing their own agenda and using his weakness to do that. But there is actually another less charitable interpretation of some of it, where it does look, you know, you could almost read it as Corbyn being like really, really passive aggressive. And he's not, and perhaps that he's not willing or able to explicitly say that he's got a problem, that he doesn't want to do something, he doesn't want to work with anyone. And then he just waits until after the and then says to Carrie Murphy, you know, will someone rid me of this turbulent priest or whatever the thing is? Just doing the like, no, it's fine. It's fine. Nothing's bothering me thing. I swear the fucking got.

Well, the thing is, right, what happens is we went into this meeting, right? And the people who have reports of that meeting is first there was this woodcutter who went in and just happened to observe a meeting between like a samurai and a woman. And then also there was. I was going to say, do you think I think Jeremy Corbyn needs to read Polysecure. I think all of these people needs to just stop for a bit, is what I think. Well, I mean, I have heard that apparently Roger Hallam has a theory that the problem with the left is old men who don't talk to their mothers and don't know how to communicate. And, I mean, based on some experiences in local groups as well, you do start to wonder if there's

that, you know, that we need some sort of group therapy to address this. But sorry, going back to that meeting and Corbyn's communication start, the other thing is that, so there's a bit of like dispute and confusion as to exactly what happened in that meeting and exactly what he said. Because if you look at the WhatsApp messages from the organising committee, I think while the meeting is still ongoing, one person says, oh, it's very rushed. Corbyn asked for no vote, but we have moved to one. And then Corbyn says in the WhatsApp, I did suggest a group to take us forward, not a vote today. Now, nobody had spoken to remembers Corbyn saying that out loud in the meeting, but a couple of people, their recollection or their interpretation of it is that what happened is he didn't say it out loud when asked directly for his opinion, but that he posted it in the Zoom text chat saying, oh, you know, maybe this is rust, maybe there's not enough consensus, maybe we need to have further discussion. Which, I mean, to be fair, it's true, like, clearly there was not consensus from what was going on, and it did cause everything to fall apart.

So, he's in some ways, he had a point, but he seems to have said it on the Zoom text chat and it got lost, rather than saying it in a way that people could hear him. If you look, I did, I did make my crucial objection to you doing this in white text at a one point font size that I've appended to this kind of like second to last page in the margin. Yeah, I made my objection to this particular course of action in like the disclaimer voice on pharmaceutical ads. By the way, I'd want to be a co-leader. To be fair, to be fair to Corbyn, because I mean, this is all sounding quite negative on him. I mean, the other aspect of what's happening and why it all falls apart is basically because the process is like stupid and rushed and doesn't really make sense. And so they they, so to go back to the like wider narrative. So they set up this Memorandum of Understanding Group at the end of 2024.

It's not really getting anywhere. They end up trying to expand the committee, partly to try to get Corbyn to sort of commit to it more if it's more representative, more inclusive, also includes some of his close allies like Carrie Murphy and so on. Having committeement issues. So they expand the committee to have Zara Sultana on it, Carrie Murphy and some of the others from Collective. I think at this point they also bring in Leanne Mohamed Marksa Walker

and a few others Oh yeah and so they put together that committee so they're called now the organising committee they put together in mid June

and they have like their first meeting within a week and say oh yeah we want to launch the party on I think it's 28th of July

which is like a month away and I mean I've got somewhere here one of their leaked like minimum viable product project management spreadsheets, which has got like the list of all the things they thought they needed to have ready for the launch is, you know, one year strategy, the name, a staff team, a membership system, social media strategy, logistics for rallies, just illegal stuff, draft constitution, code of conduct, strategy for local groups. All this different stuff that they basically gave themselves a month to put together

when they had a committee that had only just been put together. Half the people on the committee didn't know each other, didn't know each other's politics. There's clearly no, you know, like massive differences on basic issues about what should be the structure of the party, what should be the politics of the party and so on. So they have that meeting. They vote on the co-leadership proposal. 70% of people vote in favour, including the four independent MPs who have since fallen out badly with Zara.

And then apparently at the end of the meeting, Zara says immediately after the meeting, I'm going to announce my resignation from the Labour Party. And then she not only announces her resignation from the Labour Party, she also announces her co-leadership. And like the first anyone hears of this is like something like half an hour or an hour after the meeting ends, she gets added to the WhatsApp group and posts her tweet in it.

Let's go. False end. But sorry, to go back to my in-defense of Jeremy point, Corbyn's then immediate reaction to this in the WhatsApp group because he says, what on earth are we supposed to be doing? No discussion on the politics or structure or democracy of our new venture and now a public announcement with no consultation, which is pretty reasonable.

It was kind of insane to say, let's launch this in a month before we've got consensus or even had real discussion about such fundamental questions. It is. On the other hand, not to sort of like leap to Zara's defence here because I'm not necessarily a fan either, but you do get the kind of like group project vibe here. And I think reading the kind of reading between the lines

of sort of what Zara has said and what she's done, I keep getting struck by the feeling of like, well, I like the way I'm doing it better than the way you're not, right? And it seems like there is a criticism from that side, which is not unwarranted, even if the actions have been bizarre and sort of unilateral of we will wait forever to do nothing under the organisation. Yeah, that's definitely a big, big part of it,

that a lot of people involved are just getting very frustrated, that there's constant delays, that it seems to go around in circles, and they're just, oh, we're just going to be trapped in these secret committees that are just going backwards and forwards and not getting anywhere, and that therefore a unilateral announcement will get, although it's not so clear to what extent that is a defensive Zara personally, because, I mean, unless there's further secret negotiations before that I'm not, which is possible, but at least as far as I'm aware, she only really comes into the story in sort of May this year.

So she's only been, as far as I'm aware, directly involved in it for a couple of months before she does the announcer. It's people like Feinstein and Driscoll and so on. So this is how, I think we've sort of moved the pieces around the board and we understand who's acting and how and why these like big splits happen. And I think it's the same kind of dynamics that lead to an uneasy truce between the two sides, where it's like, okay, well, you'll control the mailing list, I'll control the finances. And again, like, because it's so factional, there's, again, this feeling that, like, Zara's team is being iced out. And then we get to that second relaunch where we, where then we see sort of the lawsuits come in or the threats of lawsuits. I mean, obviously, if you threaten to sue someone that doesn't go down well, and if you, um, accused people of being a sexist boys club publicly. They don't like that. And if you call out their sort of staff as an aides publicly by name, people don't like. And I think also, again, I don't know the full details here, but I think the impression I get from a couple of people, more or less plugged in is that there was some quite nasty arguments going on between them

in the MP's WhatsApp groups. But I don't know the full details of that. So I think by that stage, there was like an enormous, enormous amount of animosity privately between the people involved. I think also part of it is by this point, nobody involved on Corbyn's side trusts Zara at all. And they think she's like completely a loose cannon, completely unreliable. And the other dynamic of it, which I didn't really include in the article because there's not, wasn't space and there's not really much that's on the public record. But if you talk to anyone involved, particularly on Corbyn's side, another aspect of it is that, Sarah's husband seems to be like her main advisor and one of her main sort of negotiators. And he's not popular.

You know, there seems to be sort of mirror image of the problems a lot of people have with Carrie Murphy, although actually the way some people I've heard spoke about him, it sounds the tension. But it's all, again, it's not very much on the record about exactly why people dislike him so much. So at that point, I think Corbyn's team like just are sort of scared of a project that involves her and her husband because they just think they can't be trusted. And whereas on the other hand, Sultana, you know, said, well, you know, the committee voted for

co-leadership and now I'm being completely iced out. And also that on Zara's side and, and more broadly, people have the impression that basically people like Carrie Murphy and the sort of faction around her, who lots of people already didn't trust and have lots of reservations because of how things went in the Corbyn years or in collective. And so they just think, oh, well, this clique is going to take over and lock everything down and give all their mates, the top jobs, and lock down the democratic processes. And it'll just be like the Labour Party and the problems there all over again, or all the problems like in similar to how it happened in momentum when the sort of democratic processes got shut down.

I do sort of have a question here, just to sort of tie this up, which is, does any of this seem reparable to you? Or is it just sort of like terminally in the mire of this kind of like like let's say musical differences? I think in terms of the personalities the impression I get is it may be irreconcilable. It sounds like there is like a note, particularly between Zara and the four independent MPs. It sounds like there is

like enormous, enormous ill will on a personal level. I think with Corbyn, and Sultana, there's also like a really deep feeling on both sides of sort of betrayal of trust. And also then the issue of Carrie Murphy is a particularly big one because like she's very, very close to Corbyn personally and has been for a very long time. But now her and Sultana are like mortal enemies. And I mean, also in some ways it's like Sultana coming in with the condition that Corbyn's closest aid has to be got rid of. So obviously that starts by putting Carrie Murphy on the defensive against Sultana. And then also one of the things that escalates things is after she does the announcement,

there's then all these various leaks. And in the WhatsApp group, she directly accuses Carrie Murphy of being the source of the leaks, which actually, from what I can tell, isn't true, probably. And I think, you know, Carrie Murphy was on a plane when it happened. And if you talk to the people who sort of understand the details of how this press stuff works, because it probably wasn't even anyone in the organising committee, but Zara thinks that it's like a personal, hostile briefing from another member of the committee against her.

And so then when other people are like trying to say, oh, well, you know, why can't we all just calm down and try to de-escalate? And then because Zara is so angry about the leaks, she won't respond to that. And so it all just sort of spirals from there. And then, you know, everything we've seen happening with the legal threats on both sides. and also the fact that people's spouses are involved in the arguments as well. I mean, we can't help.

But obviously that's on the personal level. One would hope that you might have a party with structures and democracy and other people involved such that it might be able to function despite the personal relationships of a handful of individuals. But, well, that remains to be seen. You sort of ask, as anyone on the left, why would you bother? Why would you sort of like run into this burning house? It's sort of like, I think the temptation for anyone, looking at this, looking at sort of like, whether it's sort of Corbyn responding to a straightforward sort of organizational question with a sort of like allegorical poem, or whether it's Zara sort of like, you know, tweeting something devastating to the entire project and then throwing her phone across the room, or, you know, Adnan Hussein going insane about trans people on Twitter for three days, you just think, why bother? Why handcuff myself to this? And I still don't know that I've heard an answer.

answer from anyone, really. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a very good question. The basic answer was always just because there's about 500,000 people who will join whatever political party Jeremy Corbyn joins. But I don't know that that's completely true anymore because I think this process has been so dysfunctional and so toxic that I don't, I mean, we don't know what the membership figures are for the new relaunch. I don't think, at least unless there's been something today, they've not announced it.

A lot of people, I mean, I've not been able to get a clear answer on this, but a lot of people have been speculating that it hasn't been announced because the figures are not very good. And I mean, I get into this at the end of my article, but the prospects for a democratic process to build it and to have a democratic constitution at the end of it, I think look very, very pessimistic. For one thing, just like two months is a very short time to run a democratic process. I mean, if anyone's been involved in any, like, significant, or even just like a local organization that's got a hundred people turning up to its meeting. Doing a seat. democratic process to deliberate on like, you know, found fundamental constitutional

and political issues. Very difficult to get that done effectively in two months, let alone with tens of thousands of people and particularly when there's so much chaos and dysfunction at the top. And, you know, they've, they announced this very vague plan for the process where they're supposed to be some sort of online portal and some sort of regional assemblies and some sort of national conference based on sortition. And some of it sounds like, positive in the abstract. But whether or not it's meaningly democratic, A, depends on like really key details that they've said nothing about. Obviously, they've not published any of these details. Nobody I've spoken to seems to know the details. I suspect it's quite likely the details don't

exist, even with the best will in the world. If you're rushing together a process like that in two months, it's probably not going to be very good. So if Carrie Murphy's the only person who knows what these processes are who was signed off on them, then it's not really about Carrie Murphy personally, because the point is you'd need to know and trust Carrie Murphy personally to have any faith in the process. You'd have to trust her as a individual to be, you know, impartial and non-factional. And also you'd have to trust her as an expert in designing democratic processes. And maybe she is both of those things. But for anyone who doesn't know her personally, if the information's not published, we can't really know and I don't see how anyone

can trust the process. So I'm very worried about where things go. I suspect it won't be very democratic. I suspect the constitution we get out of it won't be democratic. And I worry the party will have enough momentum to sort of keep going, but not enough momentum to be particularly good. And then we'll have the left split between your party and the Greens. And the whole thing will just be a mess is my worry. What do you call an act like that? Because they still haven't chosen a name. Trash future. Thanks so much. All right. Well, so I'm going to throw to back to us for the back half of the episode, I'm sure that Nova will have found something fun

to talk about. I'm going to be relatively quiet. Hmm. Hmm. Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to, I'm going to throw to myself by just kind of like groaning in annoyance and hope that I pick it up in the future if I remember to do this bit. So here we go. Oh.

Well, what a frustrating, wonderful interview with Archie Woodrow from Camden Friends of Palestine and Prometheus. You can go and find all of his work on Prometheus or on his Twitter account, which is Samurai Apology. And, yeah, we hope, of course, for your party to become less frustrating in future. but we have to do an abrupt change in tone because Riley's going to go very quiet and Nate's been here the whole time.

Nate, how's it going? I've heard that my voice is indistinguishable from Riley's to many people. I find that actually discriminatory against Americans. We are way more annoying than Canadians and you should recognize the specific tells that indicate to you

that you're hearing a completely born and raised American. Riley is polite. I am a dickhead and I can never stop talking. So learn the differences between our voices I'm doing very well, though. Thank you for asking. Yeah, well, thank you for joining us. And, of course, Assange, thank you for continuing to be here on the same recording that we definitely did, like, back to back. Yeah, I just, I did get rid of my baby vote.

So, like, that is an interesting way of phrasing it, Hussain. This is why it's so difficult to have children in this economy. And so it's just, you always have the demands of work trying to, like, entice you to just get rid of your baby. Yeah, no, no, dead ass is so, it's so true. Yeah, go on. So it's around things out. I have a reading series, and this is from Futurism, and it's by Maggie Harrison Dupray, and it's entitled, Chat, GPT is blowing up marriages as spouses use AI to attack their partners. So I think we're going to really get like a nice cheery kind of segment out of this one.

We'll all go home feeling a lot better for having talks about this. Well, also, because all three of us are fully spouse maxing all the time. So this is absolutely the perfect environment. Yeah, so statistically one of our marriages is going to blow up because of AI. I'm like spouses Gayorg. I'm, I've got like more spouses than the rest of the podcast put together at this point. And that's just, I'm increasing the odds. The law of large numbers means that something like this will happen to me.

I'm terrified. I have only ever used ChatGPT for one thing with this in this general wheelhouse. And that is some of the really dumb visual K, like anime, pretty boy. dating simulator things, had a thing with whatever model of chat GPT they did where you can basically get them to start quoting Wikipedia at you

in character. And so I would have them summarized films or like I had one tell me about the first time they listened to the ex album Los Angeles. I had one tell me

about the France Watrefour film Day for Night and it's so fucking stupid. When I try to imagine how you're spending your evenings, I don't know that I would have come up with a like

the bonsai buddy Bishonan explains like XTC albums to you but you know what I'm not here to judge basically I saw people sharing it and talking about it and I was like okay what the fuck is this and I would have assumed it was like a thing you had to pay and it wasn't

like it may be now who knows and I was like this is so stupid but like my brain immediately went to sort of chaos mode of like okay well what if I just start pulling stuff that's completely out of the normal sort of like meet cute dialogue and just start asking it to pull the sort of like the spark head, like...

Like, yeah, so, so, uh, I want you to talk about hearing John Doe and Exine Servenka singing on Johnny Hit and Run Pauline. And it, it, it actually would, but it was, it was like, I don't know, there, there's something so uncannily weird about how, like, substance-less it is. Hmm. Just, just the kind of, like, online pretty boy tells you the anarchist's cookbook recipes. Well, I mean, I guess what it comes down to is that, like, it's bad writing. Like, it's really unconvincing, like, incredibly cliched, incredibly formulaic writing when it does, like write things at you when it does dialogue at you. It's, it's summaries, but it are are pretty

banal and just kind of like like slightly dressed up Wikipedia like verbatim. But what is funny is when like the characters are programmed to have sort of like turns of phrase and tells and like kind of like expressions or stock reactions, it forcing itself to work those into like a depiction of the Franco Prussian War or something like that is very, very funny to me. Like, but it was funny for about 15 minutes. That's a significantly healthier use of AI than this. So let me get into it. A husband and wife, together nearly 15 years, had reached a breaking point, and in the middle of their latest fight, they received a heartbreaking text. Our son heard us arguing the husband told futurism. He's 10, and he sent us a message from his

phone saying, please don't get a divorce. What his wife did next, the man told us, unsettled him. She took his message and asked chat GPT to respond, he recounted. This was her immediate reaction to our 10-year-old being concerned about us in that moment. The couple is now divorcing, which you don't say. I do like the way that this is written because when, what his wife did next the man told us unselfastity, that could have been

so many things. That could have happened. What happens next will shock you? What happens next will shock you? Yeah, like, we're sort of back to BuzzFeed 2015, baby. That's like really good SEO. Chat GPT unsettles husband by perfectly reassuring child in perfect family,

That's right. But also, like, yeah, imagine if the wife, like, texted her son just being, like, stay out of our business, like, you know, continue playing your sort of, like, radicalizing games. Yeah. I told you, Johnny, I won't be impressed with you or show you any kind of love until you try and shoot a right-wing influencer. Yeah, and the son's name was Charlie Kirk, too. I think the thing for me is just more that, like, I understand when people are doing things for, like, work or whatever, when there's a, like, language barrier, but the idea that you immediately go to, I mean, we haven't even gotten to the article, you immediately go to a large language model to respond to your child. Yeah, having it outsource the parenting and have it tell your kid, like, what you've noticed about your parents fighting isn't just brilliant. It's also insightful, M-Dash.

Here's some things you could do. Yeah. What have you fucked it up, though, and you still have the dating simulator loaded, so it starts talking about fucking more fun in the real world, the second ex-opt. I had a really rough childhood. Anytime my parents would argue, I would go and ask this, like, online Yowie guy to, like, give me advice. And to me on, it wasn't bad, but it just felt a little formulaic.

Yeah, I do like the idea of, you know, a young boy's only friend is, like, a Yawi cartoon character, powered by a weird AI. What I was going to say in a more serious note was actually, like, the whole proliferation of chat GPT in parenting circles is super, super common. And, like, I was a member of, like, a couple of parenting groups in my area, when our son was born and it was more just because like

the people that like we did antenatal classes with were also part of this group so it was more like we sort of joined just out of a sense of oh it would be nice to kind of see other parents and a lot of the group chat I left the group in the summer

because it just came became like a bit too much but like parenting culture is already very very weird and a lot of it is to do with like it's intersections with internet culture anyway right like I feel like parenting influences have really sort of like made quite you know they're like fucked up

in so many ways that we've talked about on this show and I've talked about on, like, other shows and everything. But, like, there was this point in the summer where every time there was this kind of dispute over, like, parenting styles, someone would sort of come in to be like, well, I asked chat GPT and this is what they said, as if it was like this definitive, like, I'm going to win the argument by asking the computer to sort of come up with the answer. That's sort of going to be a theme for the rest of this. Yeah, and, and it's just like, I like, it's very scary, like, to sort of outsource like your

because, like, for us, it was mostly just like, oh, okay, should you feel? your children nothing but like Ella's kitchen like pouches, like the people who don't live here, it's sort of like ultra-processed kind of baby food that, you know, some parents use and some people don't. Should I feed my kid like death stranding MRI? That's right. And so it's like a lot of it was very like practical rather than sort of emotional. But I was sort of thinking, well, if you're going to begin your parenting journey, so to speak, by like asking the computer how you should raise a baby, that doesn't, that's scary enough as it is. But it's also like, I can understand where parts that come from. But like outsourcing your emotional

labor. For a 10 year old as well. Outsourcing your parenting because that is fundamentally what parenting is it's about developing this like emotional kind of relationship with your child. Outsourcing that to the computer like fucking hell that's insane. What's really

what's really weird about this is I think the specific like change in affect of like I parented this like child for like 10 years and then chat GPT came out. So like in the article the husband and sort of says, you know, they've been together for like, you know, 15 years total, two kids, ups and downs like any relationship.

In 2023, they almost split. They end up, like, reconciling. And they have two, like, good years. And then he sighed the whole chat GPT thing happened. Over this past summer, arguments they'd worked together to resolve years ago came suddenly and ferociously roaring back. What he eventually realized was that his wife had started using OpenAI's chatbot to analyze him and their marriage,

holding long, drawn-out conversations over text and the chatbot's phone-like voice mode feature. What was happening, unbeknownst to me at the time, where she was dredging up all of these things that we had previously worked on and putting it into chat GPT, he said. I am really weirded out by this. I think the two things you've said so far that really get me

is, I mean, the first is commenting about the parenting side with a child that age, like the idea that they would want, I mean, the pretty appropriate thing would be generated from a prompt, from my machine versus like you acknowledging your child and talking to them like I'm going to be real with you like my child isn't 10 but I've taken care of 10 year olds before and if a 10 year old were really worried and said that I wouldn't text them back I would go and talk to them and give them my full attention because like that's what they need in the moment like that so the idea of doing it like oh the computer will do a better job than me it's also like you as a 10 year old

are now competing for attention with the kind of like sycophant computer that can give like its users all the attention they want you know you know there was a story years ago. And it's not the same thing, but I feel like it, to me, it kind of occupies the same kind of like, you have failed so massively in a moment here that you'll probably never recover. And it was the story of basically, I remember reading about this. I can't remember for the person it was their partner or like if it was a news story. I don't think it was a news story, but people were sharing basically that dad frustrated with eight-year-old not doing his chores or not stopping playing computer when he was supposed to finally got so mad and fed up with, that he decided

to just go in when his son was at school and delete the entire Roblox world he had been building for years and it was unrecoverable and then realized what he had done and it was completely unrecoverable and it's like yeah your kid's never going to trust you ever again like you have fundamentally violated that that child's trust in a way that like yeah they're never going to trust you again and I think like this in a moment when like you're worried your parents are going to get divorced like maybe the kid didn't know that it was Chad GPT who knows but to me like it's just it's like I don't know it's like all right time for us to critique other people's parenting but like fucking come on man also just on the kind of marriage level like the the husband sort of says uh and admittedly

this is kind of one side in the sense that one of them is talking to to futurism and the other is talking to chat gpte right but uh it says as his wife leaned on the tack as a confidant meets journal meets therapist he says it started to serve as a sick authentic feedback loop that depicted him only as the villain i could see chat gpt responses compounding he said and then my wife responding to the things chat gbt was saying back and further and further and further spinning. It's not giving back, it's not giving objective analysis. It's only giving her back what she's putting in. Their marriage eroded swiftly over a span of about four weeks and the husband blames chat TVT. My family is being ripped apart, the man said, and I firmly

believe this phenomenon is central to why. I can recall being on AOL in the 90s and being these things are like fill in the blank sort of like rants and denunciations that kind of read like polemic philosophy essays but made no sense at all because they didn't have anything about this. It was like this person is the paragon of evil, but it doesn't say why. That's what this kind of feels like, like imagine you just, you got 1997-ass BVS fill in the blank text to basically yell at your spouse with. It's got about as much substance. Well, speaking of yelling at your spouse, the second sort of, because this is, this is an article of like sort of two anecdotes broadly. And the second one of these is, is much worse, I would say, not least because it's

about a lesbian breakup, which some of you will know from experience, that's, uh, it's, it's, you know, Western Front versus Eastern Front, right? you're going through things very differently. Shut the fuck up. Oh my God. Genuinely,

some of you would choose voluntary celibacy after a single lesbian breakup. In this case, yeah, I was going to say,

imagine two people who know as much about the Battle of Kursk fucking going, facing off like it's the Battle of Kursk. So in one chaotic recording futurist obtained,

two married women are inside a moving car, there are two young children sitting, the backseat. The tension in the vehicle is palpable. The marriage has been on the rocks for months, and the wife in the passenger seat, who recently requested a separation, has been asking her spouse not to fight with her in front of their kids. But as the family speeds down the roadway, the spouse in the driver's seat pulls out a smartphone and starts quizzing chat GPT's voice

mode about their relationship problems, feeding the chatbot leading prompts, the results in the AI brow beating her wife in front of their preschool-aged children. I mean, this is just straightforwardly abusive, no? It's, it's... Yeah. One thing I was also thinking about hearing these stories is because obviously like the way in which

chat GPT and these types of like large language models work is like basically through mass data scraping, right? And I don't know whether you guys have ever like got on to like some of the subredits like the I am I the asshole subredits or like mostly it's stuff. There are a lot of like subredits which are just like

you know, relationship advice, marriage advice or these type of stuff. And they are largely ways in which one side of a relationship or one side of like a marriage kind of like explains a problem. It has like a bit of a reputation among some of the subredits

because like the answer that is often given is just break up with them. And like some of the answers are really, some of the questions are really upset because you know some of the original posts are like oh I've been married to like my partner or I've been with them for like a really, really long period of time and this thing has happened

and like you know I caught them sort of like, I don't know like for example like looking at porn or something like that and like there will be like answers underneath these things as being like break up with them they are like irredeemable your relationship was a lie to begin with and I do wonder

whether like these like AIs have sort of gotten all that data and so they're sort of programmed or at least like hardwired to like give you that type of response which is to say that like it's not to necessarily say that like they're wrong in the sense of like

chat GPT or like these LLMs are kind of ruining relationships because I do think that like that is true it's it makes them very easy to lead right it's if you if you kind of put your thumb on the scale if you ask it, like, should I break up with my wife? Or, like, is my wife being, sort of, like, abusive to me?

It's sort of, like, it's a very agreeable technology. I guess the point I'm also trying to get to is, like, the internet and, like, internet culture has sort of shaped relationships, like, very weird, like, very kind of, like, strange ways for, like, a pretty long time. I guess it always has. But, like, this isn't sort of, like, an unprecedented phenomenon in the sense of, like, even in the pre-AI period, like, you know, there are people who, sort of are kind of like writing into like message boards, podcasts, like YouTube videos and

everything. Do not write into our podcast about your relationship. Yeah, don't, don't. Please, don't write into us. Like, you know, just, just, just don't. Like, for obvious reasons, is please don't. And I guess the point I'm trying to get to is that, like, the idea of, like, getting nuanced relationship advice from the internet has kind of always been a farce anyway. But you've now got, you've now got that coupled with, like, society sort of telling people that, Oh, yeah, like chat GPT is like a definitive source for information. And because it sort of collects so much data and makes a rational in the middle decision, like, apparently, it means that like the most neutral response that you will ever get is from a computer.

And also like add that like, you know, you can access chat GPT immediately, which means that you can use this stuff passive aggressively. But it's like it's not that different to like writing into like a subreddit to basically say, but yeah, like my wife and my husband is like horrible and mean and like, you know, doing it in such a way where like you know that you are. sort of like eliciting sympathy, but also doing it in a climate where like, I feel like relationships in general have become a lot more transactional, like, you know, I think part, when we think about like the crisis of loneliness, for example, a big part of it is like, well, the fact

that we've seen a lot of relationships in general just develop or like take on a transactional element just by the nature of like online mediation. Romantic relationships are like no different from that. Yeah. Well, in this case, it's like genuinely kind of like a kind of abuse, like a force multiplier in this sort of like lesbian battle of curse crime. I'll finish the story because it's real bad, right?

After funneling her complaints into chat GPT, the driver, because they're still driving at this point, the driver asks the bot to analyze the prompts as if a million therapists were going to read and weigh in.

This story also has another example of why you don't want to be in a lesbian breakup, which is the phrase, uh-oh, the worst person you know just learned therapy language. The responses you've described

would likely be considered unfair and emotional harmful by the majority of marriage therapists, the chatbot responds at a loud volume, while mirroring back the same language used in the prompt with flowery therapy speak. It offers no pushback, nor does it attempt to reframe the driver's perspective. At one point, the chatbot accuses the wife in the passenger seat of engaging in avoidance through boundaries by requesting that they not fight in front of their kids. It goes on and on with Chachievt monologuing, while the wife it's being wielded against

occasionally tries to cut in over its robotic lecture. The spouse prompting the bot, meanwhile, mutters a proving commentary. That's right. Mm-hmm. See? Please keep your eyes on the road. The wife being lectured by the AI pleads at one point. I didn't know that John Federman had transitioned, but you know what?

I hope she's very happy. I was going to say, you know, everyone told me that it was going to be a mistake to enter into a polycule where the third person was the text of speech voice from TikTok. And you know what? They were all correct. But I guess the thing I would say to Hussein's point, I think is really valid here is that like there's also so much of this just dumb propagandizing, you know, PR hype around this selling chat GPT and, you know, in particular and large language models in general as like the the apotheosis of knowledge processing that like all human knowledge is there. And that like the degree to which it's treated as definitive because I mean, I guess if you consume stuff in the news, the way it's reported in, you know, you call it general media and then also all the PR, yeah, that's the impression you would get. If you don't know anything and you don't know how fucking wrong it is or how banal or overgeneralized it is, yeah, you might think that. But I think it's very

surreal to me to think of people doing this. I mean, I guess in a way because some of these things, you know, like you said, they are so obviously led from the prompt and they don't push back. But then also I think about Hussain's comment about weird internet advice. And, you know, I'm a bit older and I can recall a line that stuck with me that's haunted me throughout my entire life where someone on the radiohead fan forums in 2000 asks if they should break up with their boyfriend because he didn't like radio head and he couldn't actually love you if he can't understand something as deep and emotional as radio head and I never thought I mean on one hand I'm glad that web 1.0 disappeared because if that web 1.0 shit from the forums got absorbed into a large language

model then like god knows the kind of advice they be giving people I guess it's the difference between having that kind of bad advice and having that bad advice on dial? It was just as stupid then when it was teenagers in the year 2000 on fucking, you know, web 1.0 forums but there wasn't this push to describe stuff with a similarly

banal and not applicable analysis as like the best analysis you can possibly get. It also wasn't there all the time in the same way. So like, for instance, this same couple, the wife who is, you know, sort of like begging her her wife to like, you know, keep her eyes on the road while she's driving,

says, we were arguing a lot, we'll be up all night and I would assert a boundary or say like, I don't want to have this discussion in front of the kids or I need to go to bed, she recounted. And my ex would immediately turn on chat GPT and start talking to it and be like, can you believe what she's doing? Her ex would carry out these conversations with chat GPT on speakerphone, she added, within earshot so she could hear everything. My ex would have it on speakerphone and then have it speak not to me. It would be in the same room, she recalled.

And of course, chat GPT was this confirmative voice being like, you're so right. Today, the former couple together nearly 15 years is in the midst of a contentious divorce and custody battle. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, part of me wants to make a dumb joke

once again about, like, you know, leaving open the dating simulator that's talking about, I don't know, fucking Jules and Jim and winds up, you know, inserting bits about early Francois-Fo films into this thing about why you should break up with your lesbian wife.

But like, I guess to me, it's like, what's so interesting here is, it's grim, is the idea of like, actually boundaries or abuse, as I completely disrespect a normal human boundary of don't be yelling at your phone 24 hours a fucking day. Like, it's insane to me. It just seems so, and it feels like such a, like,

snapped fingers happened out of nowhere thing. There's one guy in here who is, like, is already divorcing his wife, but after he moves out, his wife started to send him strange AI-generated messages that, through an unfamiliar blend of spiritual and therapeutic language, drew a portrait of himself in their marriage that he says he didn't recognize.

When he first read them, he said, he wondered whether his wife had joined a cult. The couple is now engaged in ongoing custody litigation. Today, the man's soon-to-be ex-wife communicates with him about everything from court matters to childcare, almost exclusively through peculiar sounding chat GPT-generated text. I struggle to understand the idea that you would so casually and unerringly outsource every thought you wanted to communicate to someone you need. know in real life to what basically amounts to like the matrix pods for graphics cards. Yeah, well, it's, it's kind of like infinite jest, right? Like, you can just kind of, it's, I mean, yeah, it's the fucking entertainment.

It's the, it's the fucking entertainment. It's just like, you stare at it just, you just shouldn't piss yourself and starve to death because it's this, you know, fucking like psychic communication of your mom saying, I'm so sorry over and over again. It's like, oh my God. The other thing worth noting is that everyone, at least, in this story. And this is not to sort of say, because we've covered stories on this show before about like people kind of using chat GPT for like fairly benign reasons and outsourcing their

communication to like very, very intimate things, even to people that they love. In this instance, it's like, all of these people seem to kind of have been on the road to divorce anyway or like we're sort of in the process of doing so. And it does make me think that like, well, I wonder in those situations where it's just like the person that you were sort of the most intimate with emotionally, you now no longer want to sort of have to deal with. And suddenly this like technology comes in, of which one of its many promises and one of its many over promises is that, oh, like, if you don't want to talk to this person, the machine can kind of, like, do that for you. And then as you kind of continue to do that, it's like, oh, it can also make you feel

really good about yourself. And the thing about, like, a divorce is that, like, you know, even the most amicable ones are ones where, like, one party, at the very least, like, wants to feel like they were in the right, you know, but they, like, they tried their best to save their relationship. And they tried everything that they could, including asking the computer, but, like, what their neutral thought was on it. And so, I do wonder whether this is actually sort of part of like, it's less to do with like them kind of being infrauled by the machine in and of itself, which is not to say that they're not. It's only just in the context of what we know. And more to do with like them kind of

attempting to feel good about themselves by sort of saying that oh yeah, like even the computer thinks that I'm right. And you can't, you can't argue against the computer can you? You can't debate the computer. Which like number one, I guess you can because it's like, well, if the other person also asked chat GPT. Oh, God. Yeah, that's not in the article, but that's, that's a horrifying prospect is two people arguing with each other via their phones. Yeah, and I imagine that probably will happen fairly soon and we will talk about that on this show and we'll like still have our head in our hands as we talk about it. Yeah, because I guess one of the things that we talk about with like AI and like the sort of

culture that it induces is one that it like it accelerates the culture of like frictionlessness. The idea that like you should never be uncomfortable in your entire life and that ranges from like you should never have to like pick up a meal from a restaurant all the way to you should never have to talk to you, you know, you'd never have to talk to your, like, horrible 10-year-old that's telling you to, like, stop fighting because they're trying to watch Charlie Kirk videos on YouTube. You know, my stupid chud 10-year-olds, who I don't respect enough to on. If you were just given that kid your time of day, he wouldn't have decided to get on top

of the fucking medical school building at Utah Valley. But I think it is just like that thing about, like, well, a big part of life is, like, having to have uncomfortable conversations, right? And having to sort of, even with people that you don't like, and even with people that you once loved and you don't like anymore, right? Like, those are big conversations that you sort of have to have in person. You should have in person, right? It's like a healthy, it's like, it is the healthier way of living, even if it feels

intimidating, like, anxiety inducing. But instead, like, when you have this machine that's basically been marketed as like, oh, we can do this for you. And we can also make it feel fun by telling you that not only are you right, but you're an incredibly special person. and you know, you should have never been betrayed like this or whatever. That probably is appealing to quite a lot of people, yeah. Yeah, it genuinely, it feels like it can kind of like give yourself like narcissistic personality disorder

just in the sense that like it's a really like important and worthwhile experience to feel guilt, to feel shame to have like, I don't know, to have like said or done things you've regret, right? And if you always have your phone telling you, no, not only were you right to do that, But that's, that was amazing that you did that. Yeah. And I mean, also, like, being in a cultural environment where, like, shame is something that isn't encouraged or, like, not, encouraged is not the right word, but, like, shame is something that you are sort of told to actively avoid, right?

And that, you know, and as we know, like, being all, like, all of us being, like, former forum posters, you know, and, like, obviously extremely online variety in the 2000s or whatever, it's like, you can never admit that you're wrong, right? Because if you're wrong. Never back down, never log off. Then you get down voted. So you never back down and you never log off. And I think the thing that we're seeing, not just with.

like this particular use of chat GPT, but I think just like normy online culture in general has definitely moved towards like the, I guess like the types of forums that we all experience where you have relatively normal people who lived what way seemed to be

relatively normal lives and were not sort of like addicted to the computer when they were in their teens or whatever are now sort of, they now have been forum pill to be like, I can never back down from this. I always have to be right.

I'm going to spend as long as I can with like chat GPT. Everything's computer. But all. also like, like if I admit that I'm wrong in any way, if I admit that I'm culpable for like any harm that I've done, particularly to someone that you once loved, right? Like if I admit that I've harmed someone that I once loved or that I still love, that makes me a bad person and I might feel shame in doing that. So I'm instead going to revert to the computer that will tell me that I'm a good person, but I was wronged in ways that I didn't even consider before. And I'm going to do it so publicly, but no one can sort of refute me on that because I can just say, well, the computer told me that actually I'm a better person.

person than you morally and intellectually, and I'm not hearing anything else about it. On one hand, I feel like, okay, this is basically like a slightly more advanced Microsoft Cliffy, and I don't think anyone would be like, no, actually Microsoft Cliffy says, I should deny all of your emotional agency. But I guess the thing about it is, I mean, maybe they did, but that's, I mean, I don't think it would be anywhere near as convincing. I would say, I mean, look, I'm becoming a parent, moving internationally multiple times, dealing with a lot of stuff. I've been with my partner almost 10 years now. There are a lot of times when things have been challenging. And I think to me, just was trying to put myself into the shoes of the

person who's not the chat GPT addict in these stories, I think the thing about it is, is that when you are struggling, especially like if you become a parent or when circumstances change and you know, it's very hard to be able to give each other your full attention. I think one of the things that you want is for the person to be listening and to hear you and you want to show that you're listening to them, you hear them and you're like you're actually paying attention to what they say. And that obviously becomes a lot harder with both like the requirements of jobs and stupid computers and your dang phones and also when you have kids and they're caught they don't care about what you want to be doing like they are going to do what they do but to me the point i'm

trying to make is that i cannot imagine a thing that would turn would curdle any feelings i had harder than someone not just like actively not listening but finding a way to use a computer to spew dumb bullshit at me to tell me that nothing that i say matters like i i i feel it's like normally with these things it's a slow burn and stuff and then eventually there's a blow up and you're like, okay, well, this was a long time coming. But that to me could be like an instantaneous, I no longer have any feelings and want to leave tomorrow kind of thing. I mean, not to say this is, I would ever expect that in my own relationship. But if I were in those shoes, like, man, because it's just like, it's like the, it's like the complete annihilation

of the idea that you have to acknowledge anything that the other person thinks or feels. It's insane. Just to just to tie this up, of course, open AI say like, we want to make it safer, but we still think that this is a kind of legitimate use case for the product is like asking about how you did nothing wrong in your relationship. And I think really just this, this world that we're seeing laid out in front of us of everybody getting more narcissistic, everybody getting kind of more abusive and being on their phones more to legitimize that. It really, I think this could be the technology that fixes your party. You know, this could be the thing that heals the rift between Jeremy and Zara. I mean, I was going to say it would be really, really funny in that recording of the

lesbian couple arguing, and then like, what if the chat GPT, you know, a third wheel in the polycule heard the one of the spouses say, could you please keep your eye on the road and the chat GPT responds? Actually, Subaru's can survive any head-on collision. So, what a, what a downer of an episode this has been. However, thank you so much for joining us on the bonus. Thank you so much for subscribing to the Patreon. I was going to throw in a little bit at the end about how the Guardian is like stealing Albit by selling T-shirts, except they're not even T-shirt. They're like hyper-luxury sweatshirts that have like fiercely independent hand stitch. Don't as hell.

In the meantime, Riley will return for the next episode and we will see you there. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Take care. Thank you. Start taking up