Show Notes
Suborno Isaac Bari cracked basic algebra before his 2nd birthday. He's now a 13-year-old college sophomore: will he have to move back in with his parents like so many college grads are doing these days? And does this genius worry about the job market?
Nayeema sits down with Suborno — who plans to graduate from NYU next year with a double-major in math and physics. And gets to the big Q: is it dumb to be smart in an AI era where we could just put our brains in a jar, outsource intelligence to machines, and power them with tokens?
Also on the agenda: Nayeema gets corrected on the transitive property (humiliating), whether math is a “construct” (and why that’s not an insult), why cheating has basically gone nuclear since ChatGPT, and Suborno’s surprisingly spicy three-point plan to reform American education. Is this kid running for President or what?!
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More from Smart Girl Dumb Questions
We’re playing you one of our favourite episodes: a conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin from January 2026. Nayeema asks: When did money become God? Are we due another market crash? What did we learn (or fail to learn) from the 1929, 2008 and other economic crises? And would they bail out OpenAI and Anthropic now — is AI the new “too big to fail?”
Seth Meyers joined Nayeema live at the Comedy Cellar, where she asked him about his greatest failures (very few), whether he has a nemesis, and what’s actually funny in a world where the news is a meme and the meme is now news.
We asked Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning Godfather of AI: what happens when AI gets smarter than us? Can it unlearn bad behaviours? Break out and release a model that even Sam Altman acknowledges is dangerous? Under what circumstances can we trust Sam, Demis or Dario? And is the Trump administration and US government at all equipped to handle this moment?
Nayeema sits down with Sam Roberts, the New York Times obituary reporter who’s studied some 120,000 years of life while penning obits for everyone from Washington’s most powerful people to Hollywood’s most famed vet and … Jesus Christ? So what has Roberts learned studying this much life? Who even gets an NYT obit? How do they handle scandal, mistresses or secret babies? Which is the meanest obituary Sam’s ever drafted? And is 92 the new … 82?
Nayeema sits does with journalist Kevin Roose, who has covered tech for 15+ years and wrote *the* book on the AI race, to ask if this latest AI panic is just a way to drive up trillion-dollar IPOs and regulatory moats for Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Also on the agenda: Do we need bunkers? What actually went down with the Hugging Face attack? If we’re in an AI war with China, why are we still sending Nvidia chips there? And with AI is coming for our brains, is now the perfect time to get a glow up and/or looksmax?