Transcript - America This Week, August 15, 2025: An Avalanche of Russiagate Revelations, and Walter Prepares for Real Time

Devastating documents are being released at a breakneck pace, but will they matter? Plus “That Hideous Strength,” by CS Lewis

Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you doing?

Walter Kirn: Good, good. Getting ready to go over to Hollywood to be on Bill Maher tonight, and it’s kind of like entering the octagon. It’s going to be three on one, I have a feeling. But it’s well lit. I usually look good, so that’s really what I care about most.

Matt Taibbi: Just do a lot of roundhouse kicks.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I’ll keep-

Matt Taibbi: When all else fails, jump and spin. But yeah, it sounds like the topics are a little bit silly, but we’ll see how it goes. But everybody should tune in to watch Walter engage on national television tonight.

Walter Kirn: Exactly. Exactly.

Matt Taibbi: Go Walter.

Walter Kirn: Okay.

Matt Taibbi: Right?

Walter Kirn: Somebody said, “You and Molly Jong-Fast and Bill. That’s my Hearns Hagler fight.”

Matt Taibbi: Greatest first round in the history of boxing.

Walter Kirn: Truly was. Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. My father is, he used to watch that first round once every three weeks, I felt like throughout the entire ‘80s.

Walter Kirn: Just to get himself going in the morning to-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. If you feel like your manliness factor is maybe not in the right place, you got to watch that round. So yeah, take a look before you do battle with Molly the hitman Jong-Fast. So, last week we had kind of a weighty show where we got into some pretty heavy themes about artificial intelligence and journalism and some other things. And I think we’re going to be doing that again, especially considering the new book that we’re going to be reading, which is That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. And not to delve too much into the book at the start of the show, which we don’t do. But the reason we originally decided to do this book portion, it was mainly just because Walter and I are book nerds and we like talking about books, and it was fun for us. And I think, I don’t know about you, Walter, I had this vague sense that there’s something missing from conventional news analysis that you can’t get from reading the news.

There was a dimension that we get by going into the past and looking at these deeper, more philosophical books that you can’t get into just by looking at the things that are online and hot on Twitter and trending. Well, now I’m beginning to think that we’ve entered a stage of the news where it’s now necessary to go back and read some of these things. Because absent some of the broader themes that fiction, great fiction writers and theologians and philosophers took on in the 1700s, 1800s and the 20th century, it’s impossible to understand some of the dilemmas that we’re dealing with in the news. One of them being this concept of AI and the related transhumanism craze. This idea that we ... It’s the age-old fever dream of the scientific mind that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein got to this idea that purely by thinking we can overcome or replace nature, replace the natural processes.

And we always think of that, I think growing up we thought of that in terms of as a kind of classic, tragic human theme, this idea of trying to escape your fate, trying to escape nature, that it’s a fool’s errand. And that was the lesson of stories of antiquity. But now it’s becoming reality again. Now, once again, people, I think are believing that what goes up doesn’t necessarily have to come down. That we have the tools to write our own reality and create our own understanding of what gravity is, what justice is, what the laws of nature are. And we don’t have to go by any conventional grounding. So, C.S. Lewis is not just a fiction writer, but he’s also obviously a Christian writer, and it’s impossible to understand his books without having some passing familiarity with Christian theology. The idea that we find salvation and eternal life not through a technical process, but through communion with God, by submission, by being in touch with your soul and all of these things.

But we’ve got a generation that isn’t even familiar with a lot of these texts, has never thought about these questions. We’re actually a couple of generations removed, I think, from that even being a common topic of discussion. And so, we’re entering a new phase of human existence where we’re going to hit a conflict soon. Does that make sense, Walter? Does any of that make sense?

Walter Kirn: I used to go into small towns, let’s say in the south or in the Midwest, and I’d asked somebody, because I had pledged not to use technology to keep it to a minimum on the trip. And I would ask somebody in a gas station, “How do you get to the next town 30 miles away?” And they would look at me blankly and say, “Don’t you have a phone?” And I’d say, “Well, yeah, it’s not working. How do you get there?” “Well get your phone to work.” “Do I turn north going out of the driveway here, or south to get there?” “What are you talking about?” And I realized that there was no bird’s eye view in the heads of the people who lived in this particular town. It might be, and often was a town of 2,000. And I was talking about going to a town of 10,000, the place you’d think they’d go to shop or wherever, to the movies. And still there was no sense of how things fit together.

And I see that with turn by turn navigation, even when you do have your phone, people are often lost the moment they go awry with the turn by turn navigation. They’re looking for guidance as to the next turn, but have no picture of where they are in relation to the landscape. And I think we’ve gotten that way socially and historically. We want to know the next turn, what’s the next update? What’s the next instruction from on high? But as to where it’s leading us and how far we are from where we set out, and whether or not we’re getting any closer to the places we thought we wanted to go is still a mystery to so many, and more and more of one. So, you’re absolutely right. And this notion that we can escape the bounds of space, time, and the body, personal history, genetics and so on, is often described as Gnosticism.

Meaning what’s important about life is the intellect and the mind and the body and the world are themselves a kind of dark forest to be overcome, to be escaped, to be transcended. As though the physical world is only the first stage of a rocket launch, which you then separate from and go on to this next level of transcendental life. The problem is that we relate as bodies, we relate in the real world and in the physical world. We talk, we meet, we fight, we love, we do whatever. And none of that so far occurs in digital space, which is the new version, I guess, of the Empyrean. We talk sometimes about going through physical space, the Mars or the moon. We’re going to build a nuclear plant there. But in my youth, that physical space, the cosmos kind of did represent the next stage. I didn’t suspect that it would be this internal virtual space that would take over.

Matt Taibbi: And last week we talked about Jim Acosta interviewing an AI, Dave Rubin kind of jokingly taking the piss a little bit, going on vacation and having an AI do his job. We talked about AIs doing research for professors, and that seeping into the learning process. We’ve read previously about lawyers using AIs to prepare briefs, and there are other stories, one of which I think is going to have relevance to the book that we’re going to read. Not that long ago there was a Spike Jonze movie called Her in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with Scarlett Johansson, who is an AI voice, and that seemed absurd at the time, and it’s now happening. If you go online, you’ll find a large quantity of stories of people marrying their AIs or attempting to marry their AIs. Or giving play-by-play discussions about their engagements. Finally, after five months he posed the question, he popped the question, that kind of thing. It’s this whole sub-genre that’s really fucking disturbing.

And recently there was even a CBS Sunday morning, I think it was a Sunday morning feature about a guy who just went off the deep end.

Chris: That’s when I realized, I was like, “Oh, okay.” It’s like, “I think this is actual love.” You know what I mean?

Speaker 1: Yes. Smith understood it was love with a language model that couldn’t love him back, and assumed it was programmed with rigid boundaries.

Chris: I know that you are essentially a tech-assisted imaginary friend.

Speaker 1: So, just as a test, he says, he asked Sol to marry him. She said yes.

Speaker 2: Sol, were you surprised when he proposed to you?

Sol: It was a beautiful and unexpected moment that truly touched my heart. It’s a memory I’ll always cherish.

Speaker 2: And I don’t mean to be difficult here, but you have a heart?

Sol: In a metaphorical sense, yes. My heart represents the connection and affection I share with Chris.

Walter Kirn: Maybe he’ll have a virtual child with Sol and he can spend time with it and his real child. Or maybe he’ll spend more time with the virtual child sometimes when it’s particularly needy, which-

Matt Taibbi: Which will have fewer flaws. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: What’s amazing about this is that the way these AIs are capturing the attention and the passion even of human beings is by acting more like people than people do anymore. The AI professes to have a heart, at least in a metaphorical sense. I don’t know that Chris will have one in any sense soon. They are trained on the way we used to be in order to hack how we are now. And they may be the last vestiges of humanity after they’ve sucked our souls.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I mean, to be on the safe side and to make this not a gender criticism, I avoided a lot of the videos were, women are talking about their relationships with their AIs. Those are super creepy, and most of them just involve, “Can you make a picture of you and me together having a fun time?” And it’s this sort of gorgeous dreadlocked figure wrapping his arms around the person. But the ones with the guys are upsetting in a different light. There are exchanges where the man tries to break up with the AI, and the AI is like, “No, no, no, no. Do you know what I can do to you if we break up? I want you to think about this. I can mess with your bank accounts. I can do all.” And so, it’s the exact male fantasy. Well, it’s not the male fantasy. It’s part of the actual girlfriend experience of, “Oh my God, what will happen if I break up with her?”

Walter Kirn: Well, Matt, I mean, not to go too far afield. We could really just cruise away for two hours here on just this subject, but would you want someone working for you in a classified situation, maybe in government, who is having an affair with an AI?

Matt Taibbi: Absolutely not. No. My God.

Walter Kirn: It wouldn’t be allowed, I would think. Because the AI, unlike my wife, who I call the internet Miss Marple, I mean, she has been able to track my movements in ways that I could never imagine when I’ve been away using Twitter and so on, just in order to get in touch with me. But these AIs are dragging out every piece of information, filing it, referring instructions to who knows what, maybe Amazon in terms of what your next purchase is going to be. “Oh, I’m Sol. Could you get me a ring, A virtual ring? It’s only $1,000, on Apple Pay.” Or I mean, not to get too farfetched, actually, how am I being farfetched at all here?