Another New Home

Guy chooses Syria.

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Welcome to the one-hundred-and-thirty-seventh episode of The Undercover Intern podcast, coming to you live from Damascus. I'm your host, Guy Snapdragon, and today is Monday the 22nd of September 2025.

We are sponsored this week by John Smith’s Podcast Zoo and also by John Smith’s Podcast Farm. 

Shortly after feeding time last Tuesday, I was removed from my living quarters by god knows how many men and shoved into a van. I wasn’t blindfolded but even if I had been I would have known where we were going, and indeed two hours or so later we were at London Luton Airport. The last time I was there, female Welsh farmers cut off my left little finger and forced me to eat it. This was obviously triggering, but fortunately I had Ellsworth, who’s become something of an artificial intelligence emotional support animal, at my side. I was given the choice of North Korea, the USA, Somalia or Syria to which to… flee to, that’s too many to’s… Ostensibly, the reason I’m being moved to a podcast farm in a country without an extradition treaty with the UK is to avoid my upcoming trial for the murder of Auntie Gwen. The British justice system is broken and the government want rid of as many criminal suspects as possible. 

I chose Syria because I was looking for a country with the same date formatting conventions as the UK – day, day, month, month, year, year, year, year: little, little, middle middle, big, big, big, big. I cannot get my head around the way the Americans do it, month, month, day, day, year, year, year, year. It’s nonsense. 9/11 was a conspiracy, but only to the extent that the controlled demolitions took place in November rather than September. With American dates, you’re going middle, middle and then back to little, little before leaping to big, big, big, big. I could never live in America, for that reason, plus the fact that the country has gone literally mad recently. Did you know that they actually chose Donald Trump to be president again? That’s twice now. All their systems are breaking. So I chose Syria, not knowing so much about the country, to be honest. But I knew at least that in Syria if somebody asks to meet on twelve slash four I won’t turn up on the 12th of April and have to wait around in a coffee shop for the best part of nine months. I hate being late, but that was absolutely ridiculous. I have no idea what I’d have done if the coffee shop wasn’t open 24 slash 7.

Anyway, back to the airport. It took a while, and a few packs of butter, but Ellsworth and I both managed to squeeze through the doors of the Douglas DC-3 airplane. There were few disgruntled looks from fellow passengers, nobody wants to sit next to an overweight amputee podcaster accused of murder, nor indeed to an artificial emotional support cow approaching one tonne in weight, and some not insignificant girth. 

In April 2022, the then Conservative government in the UK signed an economic development plan with the Rwandan government to relocate asylum seekers in the UK to Rwanda, in a policy described by the UN as unlawful and prejudiced. That same month, the then Conservative government in the UK signed an artificial intelligence development plan with Sam Altman and the Syrian government to relocate content creators in the UK to podcast farms in Syria, in a policy described by the UN as innovative and essential. As listeners will know, large language models are running out of words and the likes of Chat GPT 6 and Chat GPT 7 and Chat GPT 8 are going to either have to write some new sentences themselves or get existing human word creators to up their game, sharpish. None of your 500 words a day bullswear, either. We’re talking six- or seven-thousand words needed every single day from every single content creator. 

Anyhow, the Syrian government, in partnership with Sam Altman, has established a network of podcast farms in and on the road to Damascus, the least livable of global cities. The purpose of these farms is to create new English-language sentences at a mega-industrial scale. As of July 2025, 28 million words, or around 1.9 million sentences, are created by these farms every hour for input into Chat GPT6. There are over 120,000 content providers housed in these farms, from all over the world, and they work 12-hour shifts every single day. Conditions have been described by Compassion in World Farming as, quote, pretty ropey, with sanitation concerns and psychological distress widespread amongst the battery content creators. End quote.

First of all, I’m glad now that I just missed out on reaching the semi-finals in Celebrity Mastermind as there’s no way I could have gone back to the BBC studios. Secondly, I’m now content provider with identification number 121,440, as tattooed on my remaining forearm, and operate from John Smith’s Podcast Farm here in Damascus. I’m housed in the True Crime wing of the farm enclosure, but I’m way below my daily target words, what with the jetlag and only having five fingers and so not being the quickest typer. They’re giving me different medication, a thing called captagon, to keep me a wake and alert so things will hopefully improve soon. John Smith has one of the largest podcast farms in Damascus, with some 3,800 of us housed here. All sorts too, not just podcasters but also ex-magazine writers, ex-bloggers and even some ex-novelists. Not all of us are accused of murder in our home countries, maybe 10% or so overall, more, about 45% of us in the True Crime wing. Oscar Pistorius is here, so I’m not even the only amputee murderer. It’s quite an unfriendly place, actually, with lots of poo and blood and human remains everywhere and everyone seems to have worryingly low BMIs, beyond even what I’m looking for in my future wife or girlfriend. 

I know in the UK that you often have right-of-way and can walk through farms and even touch the livestock. John Smith’s Podcast Farm just isn’t like that, it feels more like a military base to be honest. Very concrete. I get the impression that agri-tourism isn’t that big in Syria. We’re housed in one huge building, fairly squashed together and probably no more than four feet of headroom so even Kylie Minogue cannot stand up, the poor thing. The dwarfs and children and midgets are kings here, they’ll survive us all. The editors here are brutal, to be honest. I’m doing everything I can to come up with new spins on true crimes but they’re often just: “This is swear, Guy. I’ve heard it before.” Or, “Have you made this part up, is this false true crime?” Like, nothing gets past them, they require relentless quality and quantity. This might just be my toughest challenge yet. 

The issue with True Crime content creation is that we’re pretty much out of true crimes to write about. And when I say ‘true crimes’ I mean the murders of pretty young blond women. This is what sells and so this is what we need to write about. Farms are obviously recruiting serial killers of pretty young blond women to create more stories, but a lot of these chaps are sporadic in their slayings and can be uncooperative and generally prefer to work alone. So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to take the life of a pretty young blond woman and think you’ve got what it takes to come up with creative new ways to kill, some angle that will raise your story above the quotidian, then write to me at Undercover Intern Guy all one word, that’s undercoverinternguy@gmail.com with a brief outline of your idea. Just to give you an example – one recent recruit, who will remain nameless to allow for future true crime activity and content creation, has ample lung capacity and is able to hold his breath underwater for ages. So he got in touch about his plan to hide underwater in public swimming pools and, towards closing time, to drag the prettiest, youngest, blondest, womanist person he could find and hold her underwater until she was dead, or at least brain-dead. Then, when everyone else had left the pool he’d stab her with the knife concealed up his bottom over and over and over again until she was nice and bloody and definitely dead. We’re encouraging him to include an overtly sexual element in his murders, or at least spot of cannibalism, but at least you can see that this method is somewhat new and interesting. And that’s what we urgently need more of for Chat GPT6.

Even if you’re not sure you’ve got what it takes to brutally murder a pretty young blond woman, get in touch. I will just say that a lot of these pretty young blond women have it easy you know, they just glide through life with good things being handed out to them. They ignore you at school and you get scared when you try and speak with them because they’re so damn young, pretty and blond… and woman. Do you remember how swear that made you feel, how you knew you’d never be able to kiss one of them? If you’re nodding your head right now, feeling the anger rise, you might be just what we need to create content. The performance-related pay is pretty good and the first murder is the most difficult, it’s a doddle after that. The truth is, we’re not actually looking for your typical serial killer. That’s all been done. We want men who haven’t really considered stabbing or suffocating a pretty young blond woman before. Just that is interesting, a new angle. The reluctant slayer. You could even write down your feelings as you first plunge the knife in or whatever. Does time slow down when you kill young people, or only with old people like Aunty Gwen? What does knife against blond bone sound like? Do blue eyes turn brown at the moment of death? What does blond hair taste like? These are all things that true crime fans desperately want to hear about in Chat GPT6.

We’re also looking to recruit lady hairdressers, meaning hairdressers who work on ladies. What we need is for more women brunettes or gingers to have their hair dyed blond, especially the pretty young ones. As with everything in our economy, it’s a simple question of supply and demand. Hairdressers are obviously not going to get paid as much as the murderers of pretty young blond women, but we are looking at two or three times the amount you’ll get for a normal haircut, more if you can make them pretty enough to murder. Also, if you’re a man hairdresser who works on ladies and think there’s even a slight chance that you’re capable of dying a pretty young woman’s hair blond and then dying her a second time with your haircut weapons, then you might just have hit the jackpot. One of these murders and OpenAI will ensure that you’re set for retirement. Just think about it. I’m spitballing here, but you could even murder a brunette and then dye her hair blond post-mortem, so long as she is young and pretty and remains so in rigor mortis.  

I’ve been your host, Guy Snapdragon. My producer is Robert Barnes. May you use your time wisely, and may your use of wise be timely.