This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omnishamblespod.substack.com

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.

Mentioned in this episode:

* Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, by Katrina Manson

* AlphaGo (Netflix)

* Millennium Challenge 2002

* Operation Spiderweb (Ukraine, 2024)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omnishamblespod.substack.com

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!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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.

Sources:

* “The Desk Killer Gets DOGEd,” Cy Canterel, Abstract Machines

* Cavanaugh’s Jan 23, 2026 deposition from the MLA, LHA, and ACLS lawsuit

* “How DOGE Left Mohammed Halimi’s Life in Tatters”, ProPublica, Aug 22, 2025

* Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”

* Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

* Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness

* Gitta Sereny, Web of Stories interview, pub. 2017

* Dan Gretton, I You We Them, 2019

* “Marc Andreessen: The World is More Malleable Than You Think”, David Senra interview, March 15, 2026

* “Meet the 24-Year-Old Trying To Disrupt the Intellectual Property Industry”, dot.LA, Jul 6, 2020

* “Body cam video shows takeover of US Institute of Peace”, NBC4 Washington, Mar 6, 2026

* The Third Man, dir. Carol Reed, 1949, scene

* Lancet study overview, and “Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis”, The Lancet, Jul 19, 2025

Thanks for listening to Omnishambles! This post is free so please share it with pals.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omnishamblespod.substack.com

This is the final episode of What Rough Beast—and the first of something bigger. We’re becoming Omnishambles: same commitment to getting inside what’s huge, opaque, and frightening. Wider aperture. No more holding back. Virginia and Cy are co-hosting from here on out, and the new show launches next week. If you want to come with us, subscribe (it’s free!) at Omnishambles—link below.

For this finale, Virginia and Cy are joined by Siva Vaidyanathan—Robertson Professor of Media Studies at UVA, author of Antisocial Media—to ask: when a bomb drops on a girls’ school in southern Iran on day one of a new war, who is the author of that decision?

In this episode:

* How AI-assisted weapons systems are being used in Iran — and why authorship of the strike may be genuinely unanswerable

* The thread from Palantir in Afghanistan → Gaza as AI laboratory → Iran

* Why the 70 days it used to take to make a decision was a feature, not a bug

* Deliberative democracy, the kosher laws, and putting a brake on zeal

* Why these tools are a siren song for anyone who doesn’t want accountability

This is the last episode under this name! We’ll see you at Omnishambles.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiaheffernan.substack.com/subscribe

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omnishamblespod.substack.com

Federal prosecutors alleged internally that the state attorney's office colluded with Epstein's defense team to engineer the 2007–08 plea deal — and we have the emails. When Congressman Thomas Massie stood on the floor of Congress and said the documents around that plea were missing from the DOJ's recent file drop, he wasn't wrong that they were hard to find. But Cy Canterel found them. And what's in them is worse than we knew.

In this episode, Cy walks Virginia through an extraordinary deep dive into newly released internal communications between federal prosecutors, the state attorney’s office, and Epstein’s own legal team, revealing not just how the infamous 2007–2008 “sweetheart deal” was constructed, but how it was systematically manipulated at every level after it was signed.

They cover:

* How Palm Beach police went directly to the FBI after state attorney Barry Krischer slow-walked the case — and why that’s nearly unheard of

* The “armada” of defense attorneys Epstein assembled before he was ever charged, including Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr, Jay Lefkowitz (Kirkland & Ellis), and local attorney Jay Goldberger

* How Epstein ghost-wrote his own legal defense — literally drafting language that ended up word-for-word in his attorneys’ memos

* The deliberate strategic recusal of prosecutor Lana Belalovic (who was married to Goldberger’s law partner)

* The non-prosecution agreement that shielded Epstein’s entire network — and how victims were kept in the dark by exploiting a loophole in the Crime Victims Rights Act

* The chain of judicial sleight-of-hand that moved Epstein from county jail to a minimum-security stockade — and into 12 hours of daily unsupervised “work release”

* The email in which a defense attorney memorialized a quote from Krischer on the day the plea was signed — specifically for “future pardon ammunition”

* The FBI financial records showing Epstein paid Dershowitz $2.5 million

* Carl Schmitt’s “zone of exception” as a framework for understanding how oligarchic power bends legal systems to its will

* The Bannon interview — and what Epstein’s blank affect reveals about the psychology of sovereign impunity

What Rough Beast is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiaheffernan.substack.com/subscribe

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omnishamblespod.substack.com

This week, Cy and I talk with Giorgio Angelini, award-winning filmmaker and architectural designer whose documentaries have a way of making you feel like you’ve been staring into the abyss, and then somehow leaving you with a little hope anyway. Angelini is the director and producer of OWNED: A Tale of Two Americas, which traced how postwar housing policy divided the country along racial lines; producer of Feels Good Man, the Sundance-celebrated documentary about cartoonist Matt Fury and the slow-motion alt-right hijacking of his beloved Pepe the Frog; and co-director of The Anti-Social Network, his 2024 deep dive into the platform machinery that birthed QAnon, Pizzagate, and the January 6th insurrection. He also scored the video game Red Dead Redemption, which is both extremely cool and, as you’ll hear, kind of relevant.

We discuss:

* How Pepe the Frog went from a lovable indie comic character to a designated hate symbol, and what his trajectory tells us about how meaning gets made (and stolen) on the internet

* The Epstein files and their surprising intersections with 4chan, hacker culture, and the absolute spectacular dumbness of powerful men who think they understand technology

* Meme magic: why the occultist John Michael Greer might be the most compelling theorist of how internet culture actually works

* Clavicular, incels, and the aestheticization of nihilism—a container with no content

* What the return of punk rock, the ICE protests, and a generation unashamed to give a s**t might actually mean for where we go from here

* And the only note we’re willing to end on: hardcore happiness.

What Rough Beast is a listener-supported publication. Please consider subscribing to help us keep this weird wonderful thing afloat!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiaheffernan.substack.com/subscribe

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

What Rough Beast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiaheffernan.substack.com/subscribe