Acceptance

Guy realises that the end might be close.

Transcript

Welcome to the one-hundred-and-thirty-eighth episode of The Undercover Intern podcast, coming to you live from Damascus. I'm your host, Guy Snapdragon, and today is Monday the 29th of September 2025.

We are sponsored this week by John Smith’s Podcast Zoo and also by John Smith’s Podcast Farm. Please listen to, ‘Are You Going To Be Murdered Soon?’, a new podcast from John Smith and the makers of RedHanded, which explores the probability of you being murdered soon. Probably don’t listen to this if you’re prone to anxiety, especially if you’re a pretty young blond woman.

As a gesture of gratitude for our content creation, the Syrian government and Sam Altman this weekend treated all 120,000 or so surviving members of the podcast farms in and around Damascus to a celebration of Syria’s heritage. This consisted of four days of cultural, artistic and sporting events at the Abbasiyyin Stadium, here in Damascus. The stadium only holds 30,000 and has a bit of bomb damage and we obviously cannot stop writing for four days and so each content creator went for only one day each. This was done in identification number order and so I had to wait until yesterday for my turn. Imagine my excitement on hearing stories of musical concerts, theatre, football matches and fireworks. I couldn’t wait. The trip to the stadium was so exciting and the atmosphere when we got there was electric, I felt part of something beyond myself.

What I didn’t know is that Sundays are execution day in Syria. I’ll spare you full details, but I witnessed over 700 beheadings in the eight hours I was at the stadium yesterday. I’ll grant that the fireworks that accompanied the decapitations were creative and dramatic, but I couldn’t help feeling that I’d have preferred any of the other three days of the celebrations, even the one with opera. The decapitation situation in UK allotments is nothing compared to what’s happening over here. The list of beheading reasons are lengthy, but here goes: homosexuality; driving as a woman; insufficient podcast-farm content creation; murder; theft; being raped as a woman; getting a bit political as a woman; sexy dancing as a woman; spying; podcasting independently; military desertion; drug trafficking; kidnapping; public debate; laughing too much as a woman; loitering; treason; trying to marry somebody of your own choice as a woman; being a bad cook as a woman; looking a bit cheeky in public as a woman; other; trying to get access to healthcare as a woman; and getting ideas above your station as a woman. 

Speedway is pretty big here too, and there was a bit of that too. But that was overshadowed by the central purpose, which was to kill 700 people as efficiently and entertainingly as possible. The smell will stay with me for a while: petrol, blood, fear, tyres, popcorn, death and fireworks.

The part where they selected under-performing-content-creation-audience-members for beheading was pretty scary for all of us, I think. Luckily, there were at least 50 worse content creators than me and so I survive, for now.

I’m trying to be positive, and I’m sure that a few of the now-headless were bad people. But the ones who’d joined TikTok or jaywalked didn’t deserve to die, especially in such a public way. 

I’ll just add further that quote ‘Sam Altman adds salt into my air’ end quote is an anagram of ‘Syria can calm a storm’, give or take. Do you think that’s just a coincidence?

I saw Ben Ross at the Abbasiyyin Stadium – he was the beheading emcee and was in his element. The Conservative government are no longer in power in the UK, thankfully, but here is what happens when you export our problems; golf-course murderer caddies like Ben Ross become minor celebrities in autocratic countries in civil war periods. I know that the accusation of hypocrisy could be thrown at me – have I not also evaded justice in the UK for murdering Aunty Gwen? If you knew how I was living, you wouldn’t think that, trust me.

I’ve eaten so many chickens in my life, but until recently never really understood their struggle. The chicken—a living, sentient creature capable of complex behaviors, social bonds, and even rudimentary problem-solving—is reduced to a mechanism of production. Stripped of its essence as a being, it is redefined by the market as an "egg creator," confined to a space so small that its wings are rendered meaningless. Within the confines of the battery farm, the chicken's reality is one of perpetual denial. Its feet, evolved to scratch and feel the earth, press against unyielding wire that deforms and wounds. The absence of space is not merely a physical constraint but a psychological torment. Deprived of the ability to perch, dust-bathe, or forage, behaviors that are intrinsic to its identity, the chicken is locked in a state of existential frustration. This is a life lived in an artificial stasis, where the rhythm of existence is dictated not by the sun’s rise or the seasons’ turn, but by fluorescent lights and the relentless demand for production. Yet even within the bleak confines of the battery farm, the chicken's plight stirs a faint echo of resistance—an insistence that life, even in its most diminished form, cannot be entirely extinguished.

I’m still not meeting my content creation targets, and am almost out of time. I know what happens to content creators who don’t get at least 5,000 high-quality new words every day, and it matters not at all that I’m still Richard & Judy’s Podcast Club’s podcast of the month, nor that I have only one hand. Do you think that Sam Altman cares about this? Just yesterday, I watched Nobel Prize for Literature winner Jon Fosse slaughtered for not meeting targets and not using enough full stops. English isn’t even his first language, but it doesn’t matter. During his Nobel prize lecture, Jon Fosse said, quote, Something else, perhaps a bit strange, is when I write, at a certain point I always get a feeling that the text has already been written, is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I just need to write it down before the text disappears. End quote. I know that the text for my own ending has already been written, and that I’m very close now, and that all I must do is to live my ending. It feels passive, now. But I feel OK, honestly. It’s like I’ve had 40 years of being overwhelmed by the size of life, of not being able to find my place, but I no longer have to think about that and it’s a complete mystery to me now why I ever bothered.

As I sit with the certainty of my ending, I find that life, in its entirety, condenses to a single, luminous point. It is not regret or fear that fills this moment, but a quiet gratitude—for the ache of love, the sharp edges of loss, the fleeting mornings, and the nights that stretched infinite. In this clarity, death is not the thief I once imagined but a companion who waits patiently, reminding me that every breath was a gift I borrowed. And now, as I prepare to return it, I do so willingly, knowing it was never mine to keep, only mine to cherish.

My big regret is that I doubt I’ll be able to finish my book, Guy Snapdragon: The Unauthorised Autobiography of an Internship Pioneer. All of my words have to go towards Chat GPT6 and they all have to be true crime. My unauthorized autobiography was to be my legacy. But what right do I have to say how I’m going to go down in history? I should have the humility to recognize that nobody gets to choose their place.

I’ll keep doing this podcast for as long as I’m able, but I don’t know how much longer this will be, and episodes might be shorter because I’m so busy trying to reach my word targets. Just know that I love you and wish you well. I’m sorry that I was so wrong about so many things.

Jon Fosse, I’m sorry that I had to witness your beheading. I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach my remaining right hand.

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.