Transcript - America This Week, Oct 3, 2025: "Surveillance is Not Speech"

Quiet Skies, James Comey, and the blurring of bad thoughts and bad deeds. Plus, the surprise twist at the end of "The Fall," by Camus

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, so you’re in a place that I was a few years ago in the Bay Area. Actually, can we talk ... We can’t talk about that, right? We don’t want to talk about your location, do we?

Walter Kirn: Oh, I don’t mind. I’ll be out of it soon enough if the space lasers want to target me. And how do they know I’m telling the truth?

Matt Taibbi: That’s true.

Walter Kirn: I’m in a hotel near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, which I came to last Saturday night to attend a fundraising party for a movie script I’ve written called The Rash. Maybe we’ll show the trailer on here sometime, the teaser trailer. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but in any case, I went to a wonderful party thrown by a friend and attended by, let’s say, the Silicon Valley elite. It really was something like that, people with their fingers in advanced AI and cryptocurrency and all sorts of futuristic tech. And the point was to raise money for the film and to get together and talk about culture in general and how it might be turned in, I think, a more fruitful direction than our current spate of superhero movies and comic book-

Matt Taibbi: Remakes, yeah.

Walter Kirn: ... remakes and so on. And then what happened was that, due to various airline inconsistencies and errors, I couldn’t get out of here the day I was supposed to. And then I just decided I’d be a tourist. Why not?

Matt Taibbi: Why not?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, just get a nice hotel room. Mine is called the Alcatraz Suite, literally, which would be a good name for a movie, actually, The Alcatraz Suite.

Matt Taibbi: It would be, yeah.

Walter Kirn: And I can hear Steve-

Matt Taibbi: Like The Eiger Sanction.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, The Eiger Sanction, a Ludlum novel from the files of Robert Ludlum, now that he’s dead. See, that’s what you don’t realize, Matt, even after you pass from this earth, there will be the files of Matt Taibbi. “From the files of Matt Taibbi, all the unfinished investigations.” But anyway, one of my problems was you were called away on Monday-

Matt Taibbi: I was, yeah.

Walter Kirn: ... to testify in front of a congressional committee and a Senate committee, and I having prepared to do our live stream was forced to go out and seek the best San Francisco pizza, which I may or may not have found.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, do you think you found it?

Walter Kirn: Well, I’m not sure. I’m not sure what’s distinctive about San Francisco pizza.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I’m-

Walter Kirn: One thing I know about America is that there are more regional pizzas than you’d think. Detroit pizza, which I didn’t even know existed as having some a renaissance across America, the square, semi-deep dish pizza with the crispy edges, different than Chicago deep dish.

Matt Taibbi: Look, I’ve had it. I’m a strict Boston, New York, Philly chauvinist when it comes to pizza, so-

Walter Kirn: Really?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, but it’s okay. If you like other kinds of pizza, that’s fine with me.

Walter Kirn: Did you know, Matt, that there’s something called St. Louis pizza?

Matt Taibbi: I did not know that. No.

Walter Kirn: And what makes it distinctive is that it is made with processed cheese. There’s a kind of Velveeta-like provolone that they prefer in St. Louis to regular cheese.

Matt Taibbi: Well, that’s like the cheesesteak in Philly. You’re not really from Philly if you like cheese instead of whiz.

Walter Kirn: Really?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Okay.

Matt Taibbi: I think, yeah.

Walter Kirn: So anyway, I have yet to complete my full tour of American regional pizzas, but I had a Detroit pizza last night in San Francisco and I had a San Francisco pizza the day before that seemed not distinctive in any way. It just seemed like your regular brick oven thing. I’m tired of the brick oven pizzas. I don’t know why. It seems like a way to not give you much pizza by weight.

Matt Taibbi: Right, right. Exactly, exactly. It’s another ... Well, we’ll get to your booby trap capitalism theory in a moment. I just thought it was odd because you happened to be on Fisherman’s Wharf and I happened to be wearing my San Francisco Seals hat.

Walter Kirn: You are.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, which is a minor league baseball team that’s based on the animals that are right down the street from you.

Walter Kirn: I can hear them barking, which is certainly the technical word for the sound they make from my window. They kept me up last night, in fact.

Matt Taibbi: They are massive. They’re humorously obese animals. They’re really funny. And this is a classic baseball hat, so glad you’re there. Yes, not to spend too much time on it, I did testify in front of the Senate, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chaired by Rand Paul. Don’t want to spend a ton of time on it, but there are a couple of things that I didn’t explain terribly in the Racket story that I wrote about it. The committee has been ... As you know Walter, last summer, we had this brouhaha when it was uncovered that Tulsi Gabbard was on this list. And you might remember that nobody covered it. Snopes pronounced it an unconfirmed story, even though we had multiple sources, multiple whistleblowers, everything.

And so after the election, Rand Paul was looking for documentation about this program, which costs $200 million a year. It has never resulted in an arrest, never thwarted a crime. It doesn’t do anything except follow people at enormous expense and mark down things like when they go to the bathroom, right?