Show Notes
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?
Fact Check: At some point Sam says he may be, at age 79, the oldest staff reporter at The New York Times. He is not in fact the oldest. Also at some point, Nayeema says Sam is a spring chicken. Sam is not, in fact, a chicken.
Be sure to get Sam’s book, appropriately titled, “Are They Dead Yet?”
ICYMI - last week’s SGDQ Episode was all about how **AI could kill us all** so today’s on how we’ll be remembered, and how we choose to live, is particularly timely….
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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 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?
Nayeema sits down with Serena Kerrigan, who left a salaried job and a self-described “Nepo Baby Lite" lifestyle to become an influencer (slash "icon"). Six years later, she’s built an empire: an IG live show that led to a TV deal with Peacock, card games, merch and a new book, "Let's F*cking Date".