Transcript: America This Week, Episode 78: "The Surveillance State is a Moody, Sadistic Child"

Walter and Matt recap an all-time limited hangout in the New York Times, the high comedy of Google Gemini, and Jerome Bixby's terrifying and prescient "It's a Good Life"

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you?

Walter Kirn: I’m good. I’m good. It’s getting springlike here in Montana, slightly, and I don’t know, I’ve started sort of emerging into the new year, looking forward to what I know is going to be the craziest year we’ve had in a string of crazy years. So I’m kind of prepping myself. I’m going to the gym, I’m eating right.

Matt Taibbi: You’re preparing for the apocalypse.

Walter Kirn: I want to be of use to my family in the difficulties that I’m sure are going to visit us all.

Matt Taibbi: They should have that at everybody’s local Y, like the apocalypse spinning class.

Walter Kirn: Exactly. It’s a great motivator.

Matt Taibbi: You’ll be running for your life.

Walter Kirn: And for some reason, I’m watching the rise of the Bitcoin price very carefully right now because I see Bitcoin as a proxy for anxiety in general. I think it’s finally settled in with the normie investing public, that it is digital gold. In this period what does anybody want but digital gold? The two things we like best digital and gold. And so as it soars to new heights and all this money starts flying into it, I get greatly fearful. I don’t know why.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, well, you can definitely feel the general anxiety levels inching up nicely all across the board and notably that anxiety is connected to many different things, not just one thing. And we saw examples of that this week. I guess we should start with, it’s not often that news begins in the press, and that is the news story that something came out in the news. But we had a very significant development, I would say, in the course of the last week when the New York Times in the persons of Adam Entous and Mitchell Schwirtz published an article called The Spy War, How the CIA Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin.