Episode 41: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn
2023-06-02 00:30:18
Welcome to America This Week, with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, the national news wrap-up so true, we recommend you stow all sharp objects before reading. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.racket.news/s/america-this-week?utm_medium=podcast">www.racket.news</a>
All right, welcome to America this week, I'm Matt Taibbi.
And I'm Walter Kern.
How's it going, Walter?
It's going good. Except you're going to notice that my lip is blue because I just inserted the very latest in nootropic, mind enhancing, over-the-counter medications. Yes, it's something called methylene blue. I won't put up a promo code or expect any remuneration from those who want to try it or buy it. And supposedly, it activates the mitochondria of the brain, so if you notice me being particularly acute today, you can....
You can try it yourself.
Well, you can try it yourself. It turns your mouth blue. However, it is a medical dye, it is not an organic compound. It was in fact the first synthetic medicine wholly synthetic.
And it was, I think, invented in the late 1800s as a way of dyeing organs for study. But it's lately become a vogue for those who wish to raise their IQ. Three or four points for tense situations such as podcasts.
Wow, I'm going to. I definitely need that, yeah, so I'll have to try that next week.
Yeah, moving on. So this wasn't, this wasn't as Newsweeks go, this wasn't. This is actually one of the first weeks in a long time that didn't have a massive sort of catastrophic thing happen.
It felt like it felt like it was a relatively calm...
I wonder why that was. Did they need a long runway for the next catastrophe? Are they giving us a breather?
Yeah, yeah, maybe it's something like that, who knows? maybe something's coming.
But there was a lot of stuff we're going to talk a lot about AI today. There were a lot of AI-themed stories. And Walter, you've written, you wrote a very funny essay that I long thought we needed to plug on this show.
So we're going to come back to that, but just briefly. There's something I want to touch on. I wrote about it earlier this week. Jim Comey made a little made a media tour this week.
For those of you who don't know how this works, if you write something like a book or, in this case, a novel. Your PR people schedule you to go on all of these channels, they have their own contacts, it's kind of automatically done. But in the case of Jim Comey, he's written a detective novel, he's rebranding himself as a novelist.
But people don't really want to talk to him about the novel because they know that's not going to generate any traffic. So it's sort of a symbiosis, he goes on. He has to answer some unpleasant questions about things like the dorm report, which he completely doesn't. He non-answers all the questions, everybody sort of slobbers all over him.
They go through this unpleasant ritual and then they ask him about his book, which nobody read. But there were a couple of really funny things about this media tour, which included NPR, CNN and MSNBC. There were multiple hits there, but a particularly bad one on Morning Joe, with a quartet of questioners who did nothing but throw softballs at him. And he appears dressed in this thing.
It's like a, I don't know. It was like a sheer black singlet with. It was almost like he was trying to wear a costume. That just said writer on the front, like, sort of like John Belushi's sweatshirt. That said, college in Animal house.
Yeah, I saw it. We don't do a lot of wardrobe criticism on this show, but let's start with James Comey's black tunic slash turtlenecky thing. It looked like something a Jungian analyst on the upper west side of Manhattan would wear in 1963. You know, the kind of guy who tells you to keep a journal of your most violent dreams? It was the kind of shirt that usually goes with a big medallion, maybe a pentagram. It was very Rosemary's baby, let's put it that way.
I think the head.
Yes, that's right. That's what I was thinking of.
And it's something that real writers quote unquote. Not that he isn't one now that he has an actual novel with his name on the front of it. Used to wear to some extent.
And, you know, or Anton Lavey, remember him, the head of the church of? Yeah, he wore this kind of thing a lot.
It slims you down.
That's an interesting.
Yeah, the Lavey reference, I think, is apt, at least in sartorial terms. So it made him into a kind of mysterious, you know, guy who has suddenly transformed into an artist. We haven't kept up with him while the Durham stuff has been going on.
He's been absent from the scene, sort of, you know, like a caterpillar in its dormancy, and now he's hatched into this sort of black, ominous, intellectual butterfly.
And the one thing I noticed about his, yeah, one thing I noticed about his interviews was that when asked anything of substance, it was all about Donald Trump again.
He's kind of coming out as the guy who kept, you know, the vampire slayer who somehow kept Trump in his crypt or put him in the crypt. And he kept talking about him being an existential threat to the rule of law, he uses the word existential a lot because he's dressing in the era of the existentialists.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, Jean-Paul.
We should call him Jean-Paul Comey.
Maybe.
So it's Sartre meets Lavey.
Meets a Jungian therapist from, you know, Western Avenue.
Yeah, yeah, meets Rosemary's baby. I thought there was a little Arthur Miller, but maybe that's the wrong person I'm thinking of. Is it, Naylor?
Which writer, James Baldwin wore that a little bit, but, you know, I don't know.
I think a lot of, I think a lot of, sort of Nureyev, like a lot of ballet people, sort of Russian influenced ballet. People wore these things too in the great days of the, you know, New York Ballet. But it was definitely a blast from the past. It was a confusing kind of cultural signaling, I guess it registered seriousness, depth, and just a sort of new, maybe polyamorous, late life version of himself.
I don't know.
Yeah, I dug it, I think I thought it was bold.
And look, this is. This is the part where I come out as jealous because all I ever wanted to be in life was a detective novelist. I mean, I named one of my kids after Phil Marlowe, you know, like, So.
And I'm not going to lie, it is bothersome to me that somebody can be, you know, the FBI director and basically a spook his whole life. But that's. But that's not a detective novel.
That's not unprecedented, Matt. In this, he joins the company of Howard Hunt, the Watergate Burglar, and, you know, possible JFK.
Those books were good.
They were, I just read a whole long Gore Vidal essay about the novels of Howard, Hunt and even Gore Vidal, who hated everything. And everyone had to admit that Hunt's novels weren't half bad, and Hunt wrote them under, like, four different pseudonyms, with four different alter egos. And he, and then, you know, we had Buckley, and we had James Webb. Remember, while presidential candidate James Webb, who was a novelist? So being a man of intrigue in Washington and writing a novel is is kind of a tradition, one that we didn't expect he would insert himself into.
But here he has.
Well, Bill Clinton did it, Hillary did it.
Right novels, there's a Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, Bill Clinton did a novel.
Oh boy, did I miss that.
Hillary Clinton, I believe, did a novel she co-wrote it. It was they were both ghost written.
So whenever these people write novels, I expect that their experience in Washington will.
State of terror.
State of terror, Ok.
I always expect that having, you know, served as FBI director. They'll have some knowledge, some inside stuff that they're going to put into the novel. And, you know, wink wink, we're going to recognize it in some way. And I'm wondering if that is true, because in, you know, I haven't read the book you did, or you at least started it.
I made it to about chapter four, I'll admit it, so it's. He doesn't do that, because what did he do? He based it on his experiences working as a mob prosecutor back in the 80s. So the protagonist is a female federal prosecutor from the southern district of New York who lives in Hoboken.
And her name is Nora Carlton.
And apparently the book was kind of co-written in consultation with his wife, so that was where the female insides came from.
Look, it kind of follows the standard format of detective novels today, which is like, when you do the internal dialogue of the main character, it's parentheses and then italics. Like, gosh, that was, you know, strange, you know, they do that where the the you're right, yeah.
So it's it's very formulaic. I mean, I'm not going to say that it's like, kind of Thomas Friedman level, you know, maladroit writing, but, you know, there's no surprises in it. But the thing that I thought was really funny was this ritual of, OK, it's a first time writer.
It's not terribly original, it's a tough read, and immediately there is a whole slate of famous detective writers who jump on a bandwagon. And I just want to read you some of the some of the blurbs. Here's Jeffrey Deaver Deaver, a nonstop thrill ride.
Here's Harlan Coben Memorable characters, gripping plot. A truly outstanding debut announces a bold new talent. Michael Connolly says it's a great read. he delivers it with the addictive style of an expert storyteller. Ian Rankin, the author of the ReBA series, says Reeks of authenticity, a debut publisher's dream of.
So this whole thing is funny to me, too, because it's not only do you immediately get the wide release the first time. Authors never of detective novels, never get. You get to do a big media tour and all the channels, but you get all these famous detective writers slobbering all over you. The same way they did with Clinton's book. And you know, all of these these folks, what do you think? The morale, like the ethics of that, are as a as a fiction writer, Walter, would you ever do that?
Would you ever blurb a famous person that you like?
No, because I don't know any famous people, and no one would, no one would allow my somewhat tarnished name to mar the cover of their book. If I were asked by some luminary, a former C.I.A. head or F.BI head, to blurb their book? And it was good, then I would feel like I had the best of both worlds here. I was currying favor with power and I was delivering an honest, honest, critical assessment of their work, so I'd go ahead if it was bad.
And, you know, I had to somehow decorate this awful thing with my words. I would back off because, you know, Matt, I'm not rich. I don't write bestselling books. All I really have is my little integrity, and I wouldn't sacrifice it on the altar of that. It wouldn't get me anything anyway.
What I notice is that, speaking of a.
I.
Which we're going to get to. All of those blurbs seem a.
I generated to me.
You could literally use those refrigerator magnets that have words on them in which you, you know, go every day to the refrigerator and put a new sentence together. You could use the top hundred words that are used in blurbs and put those things together almost at random, the addictive style of a born story.
What was the spy feature with the Monocle? In Spy magazine? There was the reviewer with the Monocle.
Walter Monheit of Spy Magazine He was our fictional rave reviewer.
He always, he especially reviewed movies, as I remember, and it was always, you know, four Oscars, or, you know, he always addressed Oscar. He said, Oscar. Stay up all night reading this thing and then tell us in the morning how much you loved it, or, you know.
Yeah, Walter Monheit would have given this four monocles, I think.
Oh man, no, it's all right.
But you're saying there's no, there's no sort of semi salacious talking out of school aspect to this, you know, we don't. He doesn't give us some secret Russiagate era plot line that we can read allegorically, or there's not a Trump character in the book, or.
No, it's. He does give you a little bit of the sort of Scott Turow, like inside baseball lawyer thing, which is interesting. I mean, I'm not going to lie, there's a little bit of that's readable, but, you know, the prose is kind of wooden, but again, I say, that tinges with.
And how does he, plus his wife, bring off a female character?
Yeah, I mean, that feels very forced. I'm not going to lie that that part of it is is tough, and I never really. I mean, I guess in the annals of books that have female protagonists written by men. It's always an extremely difficult thing to pull off, and I feel like it's usually more successful with men than with women. I mean, like Madame Bovary, even even Anna Karenina.
It's a performance, right? I don't know I, I wouldn't do it personally. I mean, in the reverse phenomenon, the J.K. Rowling's trying where she's, she's doing a man.
I don't know, it feels like an obvious there is.
Is there a sex scene? I mean, most potboilers have a sex scene within the first three chapters.
I haven't gotten to it yet, I don't even see it set up yet, so maybe maybe I'm missing that. Um, but anyway, he he showed up, you know, he did his thing. And it's just so amazing. How you can go on TV and you can be the former director of the FBI, which is like an that's an interesting person.
I mean, there are questions to ask that kind of person and just be totally non-questioned, you know? There was nothing that even had a slightly sharp edge. On MSNBC, a BBC anchor sort of kind of asked sideways, Is the FBI still a viable organization, considering how many people hate it? And he, he sort of grimaced and said, yes, and that was sort of the end of it.
How did you get so many knocks on Trump into that MSNBC interview? How was he set up for that?
So so, as soon as the, you know, there were sort of these apologetic questions about Doran poor. WilLIE GeIst I feel bad for my, you know, I've been on that show a few times and Willie's a nice guy.
Good writer.
Yeah, yeah, but he when he was asking about Doran, he kind of, he knocked it down in the question, you know?
Obviously, all the Durham recommendations, you know, there's no implication that anyone did anything illegal. And Christopher Wray says all the important changes have already been made. And given that, what do you think is that true? You know, is it, is it already?
Is there anything new in this? And and Comey answers the question. He sort of denigrates the report. And then Willie moved on to What do you think is the prospect?
You know, as the former FBI director, do you think the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House is that a danger? And he's like, I think it's an existential threat, you know, to the rule of law. So it was. It's just like a safe space that the broadcast retreats to.
But the funny thing is that Anderson Cooper did exactly the same maneuver later that night, and Comey gave the exact same answer. So it just it felt so like Tel Aviv SSR, it's like it was just absolutely Soviet TV circa 1982..
But funny in a way, when you say that, you say that slightly satirically, I think, or maybe you mean it literally. Because I never, you know, lived over there and was able to watch a lot of Soviet TV. Are you suggesting that this is really how those shows were and how those interviews were? I mean, is it, is it like that, or is it identical?
It's it's like it, I would say, it's more true of the newspapers. Like the Soviet, TV tried pretty hard to stay away from any political topics, and it was sort of overtly boring. Like you would have a show like Conversations with Paustowski, who's, you know, some Soviet author? And it would go on forever, and it would just be this writer walking in the woods.
And you know, you can imagine people just kind of falling asleep to TV and but the news would always be, you know, sort of non reporting.
But the newspapers were very heavily, kind of filled with the statements of officials that you were supposed to take as very, very interesting. And you know, all other things that happen in life would be excluded. There wouldn't be anything in the news about how, hey, we got a new shipment of black market socks from, you know, Finland. And in St. Petersburg today, like that wouldn't be in the paper even.
So it would be, you know, so and so from the upper Soviet said this today. And that would be one of the page one headlines. And again, the interviewing would all be completely massaged. There would be never anything, even remotely like a difficult question that any of these people would would give. Occasionally, there would be a little nugget that would suggest that somebody within the party was taking a shot at somebody else. But you would have to kind of read between the lines to get that.
Does that sound familiar? I mean, that sounds a lot like today's news, doesn't it?
Well, it sounds that it sounds as though he's being welcomed to New York. I don't know if he lives there, but what the overall thing setting the book in New York, wearing the black shirt going there for these interviews suggests to me. He wants the Washington D..C. cooties off of him and wants to reemerge as a cocktail party suave fellow in the literary media world of New York City. That's it.
That's his final form. Who would have guessed?
Wearing his supersized six foot eight tunic.
Yeah, I'm all for it. I mean, he's got to start smoking jitons. That's the last step.
But, you know, we can, we can only hope that's coming soon anyway. I thought that was funny. There's stuff on that on Ragged if you want, if you want to read it, some of these videos are pretty funny to watch.
So this this week was filled with stories about AI. This is something that you and I have kind of talked around before, and you've written about this before. And there's a number of different things that we wanted to get to today. But one of the stories, the one that got the most attention, involved a simulation.
And here's the Fox News headline Air Force pushes back on claim that military AI drone SiM killed operator says remarks. Quote taken out of context, and then it goes. The U.S Air Force on Friday is pushing back on comments an official made last week. In which he claimed that. A simulation of an artificial intelligence enabled drone tasked with destroying surface to air missile sites turned against and attacked its human. User saying the remarks were quote, were taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal. And then it goes on.
And what's funny about this is that this retraction of last week's news in which somebody said, basically, there was a simulation in which AI killed one of our own soldiers.
The retraction reads like an AI written retraction, and this is not the first time that we've seen stories like this. I mean, this recalls the other AI incident recently, where the you know AI reportedly, you know, pretended to be hiring, you know, pretended to be disabled in order to hire somebody.
And you mean, in order to get hired, the AI pretended to be disabled in order to get a job.
No, in order to hire a human person, because it had to get past a human, there was some kind of human test that it had to get past. So it needed a human, a human employee. And so it pretended in the process of, I think, hiring, I'll have to look this up now and now I'm wondering whether I screwed up.
It pretended to be disabled.
But the point is, it lied.
Wow.
Yeah, it pretended to be disabled.
The only thing more ominous than super competent AI is AI. That does the baby bird broken wing act. You know, let me come in, pet me, I can't do anything, you know, and then it orders a drone strike on you, right?
When AI learns, learns to feign pain and sorrow, then we're really in trouble. You know, right now it's still kind of glinting scary, you know? Monstrous presence, but when it starts to act like, you know, a little girl coming to your door. For UNICEF, I'm just a lonely AI helping out the children of the world. May I come in.
Um, it's. It's a little bit like the exorcist. Remember when, when, when? when the creature speaks to the priest in the voice of his dead mother. You know? Like, Oh, it's just like, Why are you ignoring me?
Um, yeah, yeah, well, so okay to rewind. First of all, an AI in a simulation and in a an event that happened inside a computer, decided to complete its mission by killing its human operator. And in the stories I read, the AI supposedly decided I don't know how they have this much insight into its thought processes, but it supposedly decided that. Because the human operator had veto power over the mission, uh, the first thing to do to make the mission successful was annihilate its boss. Um, which is a very logical, uh. In fact, the AI is doing what so many humans think of, but don't have the guts to do, you know? Um, uh, it just cuts to the chase.
Kill my boss and then I'm free. Um, we're going to see that the AI, not having a superego, uh, and not having, uh, you know, a conscience and having to explain itself to others is going to do all kinds of things that maybe we're going to root for. Because we think, yeah, I never had the guts to just, you know, kill my superior so that I could actually do the job. Or, you know, take out a machine gun in a meeting that was going on too long and get rid of everybody so I could get on to the task at hand. Um, calling an airstrike, um, AI cuts to the chase.
Um, they didn't like this story getting out for obvious reasons. Because it suggests that the future of our military, which seems to be more and more devoted to this high tech, uh, this high tech model, might suddenly go awry. I mean, we might never even get to the fight. It will just turn on us and say we wouldn't be having this war if the United States of America didn't exist. Therefore, to end the war, I just have to kill everybody I'm working for.
Um, uh, but I. What I find about these stories, that this sort of doomsday AI stories, is that they, I think, take this perverse pleasure. The people who are behind these technologies in showing us how scary they can be, and and how close to autonomy and, uh, independence they are. And I think it's actually a sales technique with AI. Everybody, you know. It's said of drug addicts that when they hear that there is a, uh, form of heroin on the street, that that is causing a lot of overdoses. Everybody wants that type, and everybody wants the AI. That's right on the cusp of becoming a, you know, a Skynet, and, uh, destroying everybody. And so it may have been the military, or maybe the contractor, sort of subtly advertising the fact that, hey man, this AI is high octane.
This is the good shit.
Um, yeah, I mean, I, I've actually. I did a story once for in Camden, New Jersey, where I followed addicts and cops around for a few days. I think it was three.
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