Omnishambles Live with Aidan Walker

On Feb. 28, a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, was struck three times during school hours. The roof collapsed, killing between 175 and 180 people—most of them girls aged 7 to 12. The U.S. eventually confirmed it had hit the site. This week, Cy takes Virginia (and you) deep inside Project Maven—the Pentagon’s AI-powered targeting system, how it was built, who built it, and why the school was just the tip of a very bloody iceberg. What we cover: * The origin story: Marine intelligence officer Drew Cukor in Afghanistan in 2001, blind on the battlefield with nothing but Microsoft Office and Google Earth, and his two-decade obsession with solving that with technology. * How Palantir—Peter Thiel’s data company, bootstrapped with CIA venture capital—became the backbone of the most expensive targeting system in U.S. military history. And why they nearly didn’t make it. * What a kill chain actually is, why compressing it was always the point, and how layering large language models into Maven took targeting from 20 targets a day to 5,000. * The Millennium Challenge war game of 2002 — a $250 million exercise where a retired Marine general sank the U.S. fleet in 10 minutes. * How Pete Hegseth gutted the civilian harm teams, fired the JAGs, and eliminated the “roadblocks”—the people whose job was to check whether a school was still a school. * And the fundamental question underneath all of it: is any of this actually making us safer, or is the product never really the point? Thanks for listening to Omnishambles! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.

In this episode, Virginia and Cy explore the power of propaganda, the psychology behind war, and the cultural narratives shaping American and Iranian perspectives. They analyze recent propaganda videos, the role of culture in conflict, and the societal impact of patriarchal violence. Subscribe to receive new episodes at omnishamblespod.substack.com!

In 2025, Nate Cavanaugh—a 27-year-old college dropout and tech entrepreneur—was handed control of the U.S. Institute of Peace and told to cut it apart. He had no government experience, no expertise in diplomacy or foreign affairs, and by his own account in a now-viral deposition, nothing informed his judgment except his judgment. Within days, a man named Mohammad Halimi lost his job, his name was amplified to 222 million Twitter followers as a Taliban sympathizer, and his family in Afghanistan was abducted and beaten by Taliban security forces. In this first episode of Omnishambles, based on a recent post by Cy on her Substack, Cy and Virginia ask how this could possibly happen. They trace how institutions produce “desk killers,” drawing on Hannah Arendt, scholar Gitta Sereny’s interviews with Nazi perpetrators, and Dan Gretton’s research on organizational killing. Then they turn to what Silicon Valley has added: not just the conditions for desk killers, but an explicit ideology that celebrates them. Listen now on Spotify and Apple. Thanks for listening to Omnishambles! Sign up now to receive our weekly episodes.

Welcome to Omnishambles! Subscribing is free! On this episode, Virginia and Cy discuss why Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney just gave a eulogy for neoliberal capitalism at Davos, and what comes after the fiction falls apart. We discuss: * Why Carney’s Davos speech was the diplomatic equivalent of taking down the communist party slogan from the greengrocer’s wall (Václav Havel would be proud) * The surprisingly dark connection between Horatio Alger, Jeffrey Epstein, and the extractive core of the American Dream * What H-Mart Gate revealed about proximity to power, model minorities, and who gets to be Cassandra * Why we need to stop asking powerful people to change themselves (because they won’t) * Mass transitions, rubber bands, and the moment before the grid snaps * How level three maintenance techs have more power than your congressman (and what that means for resistance) * Direct action vs. endless petitioning: where the real pressure points are in a failing system * Cy’s wild career arc from coding on Andy Warhol’s software to working inside GE as it collapsed to becoming a perfumer because smell can’t be digitized Plus: why hope means accepting that the future is dark (impenetrable, not doomed), the wealth defense industry as target, and what it means to finally stop living by lies. Thanks for listening to Omnishambles! Subscribe for free to receive new weekly posts.

Welcome to Omnishambles! Please subscribe (it’s free!) She’s in the Epstein files. It’s fine. She’s fine. This week, Virginia and Cy are back together to dig into Virginia’s latest piece for The Nerve—Carol Cadwalladr’s new media venture—and it drops some bombs. Virginia recently discovered she appears in the Epstein files, thanks to her time as a client of literary agent John Brockman and his organization, Edge. You know, the “intellectual salon” secretly bankrolled by Jeffrey Epstein. The one with no women, no cameras, and a whole lot of evolutionary psychology. Totally cool & normal stuff. Virginia takes us inside how it happened—the pick-me dynamics, the billionaire dinners dangled like bait, the former Playboy Club office—and what it means that so many of the people we were supposed to think of as The Serious Thinkers were, it turns out, neck-deep in all of this. We get into: * How Virginia ended up in the Epstein files (and the surprisingly upsetting moment she realized it) * John Brockman, Edge, and the intellectual-salon-as-grooming-operation pipeline * The “pick me” trap: why smart women signed on, and what it cost them * Social Darwinism dressed up in a blazer: the eugenics project hiding inside prestige science * Why the books on the front table of Barnes & Noble were always kind of b******t * Atomized ontology vs. relational ways of being (yes, we go there — and it rules) * What getting out actually looked like, and why it felt like finally being able to breathe * The emergent systems that might—might—give us a future worth having New posts each week! Free! And right to your inbox.