Useless “The View,” and Dangers of ChatGPT "Erotica," with Walter Kirn, and Tragedy of the Kardashians

Summary

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After Party with Emily Jashinsky (MK Media)

Episode: Useless “The View,” and Dangers of ChatGPT "Erotica," with Walter Kirn, and Tragedy of the Kardashians

Date: October 16, 2025
Host: Emily Jashinsky
Guest: Walter Kirn

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Emily Jashinsky welcomes writer and editor Walter Kirn to discuss the week's most provocative pop culture and political stories. The conversation covers the changing norms in political media, the dangers and absurdities of AI-generated erotica, the status of American journalism, a government spy scandal, and the existential cost of the Kardashian brand. With sharp commentary and witty banter, Emily and Walter dissect key trends shaping society, media, and culture.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Zoran Mamdani’s Fox News Interview and Political Pragmatism (03:47–09:01)

• Emily recaps Zoran Mamdani’s (NYC Democratic mayoral nominee) recent Fox News appearance, highlighting his focus on affordability over hot-button cultural topics.
• Mamdani repeatedly pivots from controversial issues (like Hamas or Netanyahu) to affordability, which Emily calls a “pretty smart tactic.”
• Insight: Emily views this as a model for “left-wing populism”:

  “The best you can do in those situations, because the culture war is that brick wall for a lot of people.” (08:02–08:15)

• She contrasts Mamdani’s approach with other Democrats, such as Hakeem Jeffries, who respond to Trump's provocations with accusations of racism, calling that a political misstep.

2. The Media Blackout of the Government Shutdown (10:49–15:33)

• Brendan Buck’s critique: Print giants like The NYT, WSJ, and Washington Post are largely ignoring the ongoing federal government shutdown.
  • Walter attributes this to the lack of partisan advantage:

    “No, it's clear there are no points to be scored talking about the shutdown and so they're pretending the game's not happening.” (11:58)

• Emily and Walter note that older shutdowns were media firestorms but now seem “invisible” unless they cut through with major political consequences.

3. “The View,” Cheryl Hines, and the Theater of Media Gatekeeping (15:33–22:00)

• Cheryl Hines’s appearance on The View sparks a discussion on media condescension, with co-hosts acting as arbiters of fact.
  • Walter delivers acerbic commentary:

    “When somebody starts a sentence with respectfully, I reach for my gun.” (17:09)

  • He describes Sunny Hostin as a “bad actor” regurgitating sponsor-approved talking points, creating “an IV drip” of consensus opinion.
• Emily: "It just encapsulates a lot of the important trends in our politics and our culture right now very well, because you have this sort of self-appointed arbiter of capital F Facts..." (20:08–20:41)

4. Regional Perceptions of “Making America Healthy Again” (MAHA) (23:53–28:04)

• Why MAHA resonates differently in the middle of the country:
  • Walter: “The middle of the country is where the patients are, and the coasts are where the pharma executives are.” (24:37)
  • Skepticism about the health industry is stronger where people lack healthcare access and see less return on health spending.
  • Emily highlights pressures on political figures who challenge the status quo, especially in healthcare.

5. The AI “Erotica” Controversy and ChatGPT's Expanding Boundaries (33:20–40:25)

• Sam Altman's controversial AI announcements: ChatGPT will soon allow "erotica" for adult-verified users, but with opaque boundaries.
  • Emily: “Who the hell is Sam Altman? And ChatGPT to determine which users are having mental health crises and which ones aren’t?” (34:43)
  • Walter worries about sanitized, diagnostic AI profiling, file-keeping, and the ambiguous “erotica” category:

    “I hate the word erotica. As a writer, I'm disgusted by it... It has a sort of aroma to it, one that puts me off.” (34:43)

  • Both see echoes of the dopamine-hacking logic in social media and political discourse—a world “drowning in political erotica.”

6. AI's Assault on Human Creativity and Journalism (40:25–46:26)

• AI-generated content surpasses human output:
  • Walter: “Destroys the language after a while. AI is a leveler and a hollower out of language. It tends to shrink in its vocabulary, studies have shown, and shrink the vocabulary of those who partake of it.” (42:22)
  • He warns about journalism shifting from informing people to training AI: “They are installing opinions and... preparing [articles] in order to be consumed by machines.” (45:29)
  • Metaphor: AI’s recursive output is like a “xerox of a xerox of a xerox” — error-prone and meaning-free.

7. The "Dumbing Down" of Culture: Late Night Then vs. Now (48:12–53:33)

• Comparing Johnny Carson–era late night/Robin Williams' Shakespeare bits to now:
  • Walter: “The miraculous and infinitely surprising thing about the American mind is that it can always get dumber.” (49:21)
  • Emily laments younger generations being “cheated” of access to the cultural canon, and the fragmentation of shared knowledge.
  • Walter: “The ability to be together in knowledge is what makes a society, and that's what is obviously changing.” (53:33)

8. Spy Scandal: Ashley Tallis & Vulnerability in US Security (56:19–63:21)

• Ashley Tallis, a prominent think-tanker, is charged with espionage for leaking classified military information to China.
  • Walter: “When you realize that somebody at that level is a traitor and that they're a specific traitor giving away specific military information… you go like, wow, this could be everywhere.” (59:28)
  • Emily observes how Tallis was embedded in DC’s elite policy circles, making his betrayal both shocking and plausible.

9. The Kardashian Tragedy: Fame, Family, and the Social Internet (66:05–end)

• Emily segues alone into a critical reflection on Kim Kardashian’s Call Her Daddy interview and the gutting cost of fame by inertia.
  • Kardashian family built wealth by “selling their personal lives,” a model their children can’t escape:

    “It will never make for a happy life... Now what we're seeing is the next generation who are building their lives on a house of cards.” (66:05–69:00)

  • She draws parallels with everyday users:

  “If you grew up with social media on your smartphone, you're kind of trained to sell your personal life…for likes and replies and all of these different, these dopamine triggers, essentially.” (69:00–69:50)

  • Emily concludes: “It's inertia. It's the way that they live now, and it's really, really sad.” (70:40)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On The View’s Tone and Expertise:

  “When somebody starts a sentence with respectfully, I reach for my gun.” (Walter Kirn, 17:09)

• On Media Ignoring the Shutdown:

  “No, it's clear there are no points to be scored talking about the shutdown and so they're pretending the game's not happening.” (Walter Kirn, 11:58)

• On AI Diagnosing Users:

  “Be very afraid, America, because you're gonna... be diagnosed by Sam Altman and ChatGPT without you knowing it.” (Walter Kirn, 34:43)

• On Social Media’s Impact:

  “Everything is porn. Everything about politics and culture on social media is porn.” (Emily Jashinsky, 38:54)

• On Writing in the AI Age:

  “AI is a leveler and a hollower out of language. It tends to shrink in its vocabulary...and shrink the vocabulary of those who partake of it.” (Walter Kirn, 42:22)

• On Celebrity and Inertia:

  “Now what we're seeing is the next generation who are building their lives on a house of cards.” (Emily Jashinsky, 68:00)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:47 – Zoran Mamdani’s Fox interview
• 10:49 – Media silence on the shutdown
• 15:33 – Cheryl Hines vs. The View
• 23:53 – Medical populism: MAHA
• 33:20 – ChatGPT “erotica” and Sam Altman
• 40:25 – AI vs. human writing
• 48:12 – Late night TV and cultural literacy
• 56:19 – Ashley Tallis spy scandal
• 66:05 – Kim Kardashian, influencer tragedy

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Tone & Style

• The conversation is fast-paced, witty, and informed, with Emily balancing journalistic skepticism and pop culture savvy, while Walter brings a sardonic, literary viewpoint.
• The episode ranges from sharp media analysis to rueful cultural commentary, always with an undercurrent of humor and mischief.
• Emily’s solo closing segment carries a note of sadness and cultural critique, in keeping with the show’s purpose: wide-ranging, big-picture conversation you won’t hear anywhere else.

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For those who missed the episode, this summary delivers the big arguments, the best quotes, and the cultural flavor of a sharp, freewheeling podcast.

Transcript

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[Emily]

Hi everyone. Welcome to afterparty. We have a great show for you lined up tonight. The legendary Walter Kern and one of the guests that I've wanted to have on for so long is joining us tonight. Could not be more excited to have Walter here. So we'll bring, we'll get him on in just one moment before I bring Walter. And just as a Reminder, subscribe on YouTube. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And as a reminder, if you happen to be around San Antonio, Megyn Kelly is coming to San Antonio on October 24th and Glenn Greenwald and I are so excited to join her on on the San Antonio stop of the Megyn Kelly Live Tour. So if you are in the area, if you're interested in getting tickets, Megan Kelly.com is where you can go to get those tickets. Get them before they're gone. They are selling fast as you can imagine. And that's already coming up next week. I'm so excited. I've never been to San Antonio before. It's been on my list of places to go for a very long time. So if you too want to join us in San Antonio, I'm so happy. I couldn't be more happy. Paradise with Glenn on this tour. So we are coming to San Antonio October 24th. Megangallian.com if you want to get tickets for that show now just in the last several hours, Zora Mamdani, Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, joined Fox News Martha MacCallum for a long interview. I would say it was about 30 minutes and man was it interesting? So we're going to talk about all of that really wild story about a spy who, who or an alleged spy, I should say, who seems to be in some real hot water according to new charges that were just filed. We're going to talk a little bit more about late night television, about chat, GPT, rolling out erotica. Erotica. That's a good story. We'll have all of that, all of the details for you. Maybe not all of the details, but the relevant details we'll have. And then of course, Cheryl Hines made a stop on the View. Made a stop on the View. If you haven't seen these clips yet, I'm so excited to get Walter's reaction to them. We're also going to be talking about the total media blackout of the government shutdown that's now in its second week. And of course, I can't resist talking about Kim Kardashian joining Call Her Daddy. You know, we had to talk about that story. But first, let's start with Zoran MAMDANI Joining Martha McCallum on Fox News the Story. Just a couple of hours to go on the eve of the big debate coming up between Curtis Sliwa and Andre Cuomo and of course, Zoran Mamdani himself. Before I roll this clip, I do just want to say, well, here, let's, let's roll the clip. I'll get to it after the clip. I'm going to take a little bit of a victory lap. So let's go ahead here and roll the clip of Zo Ron Mamdani on Martha MacCallum earlier this evening.

[Zoran Mamdani]

You know, I want to take this moment because you spoke about President Trump and he may be watching right now. And I just want to speak directly to the president, which is that I will be a mayor like Mayor Adams who will call you to figure out how to stay out of jail. I won't be a disgraced governor like Andrew Cuomo who will call you to ask how to win this election. I can do those things on my own. I will, however, be a mayor who is ready to speak at any time to lower the cost of living. That's the way that I'm going to lead the city. That's the partnership I want to build not only with Washington, D.C. but anyone across this country. I think it's important because too often the focus on the needs of working class Americans, working class New Yorkers are put to the side as we talk more and more about the very kinds of corrupt politicians like Andrew Cuomo who that delivered us into this kind of crisis.

[Emily]

All right, a couple of things here. First of all, just the fact that he went on Fox News, this is where I'm taking a little bit of a victory lap. As somebody who has interviewed Zoram Hamdani, one of the things I've been saying over and over again, for example, when he went after Donald Trump hard after winning the primary, I said, actually, you know what, the best thing for Zohra Mamdani to do would be to invite Donald Trump to have a conversation with him. As deep blue as New York is, it's also a very pragmatic city. It's a city of pragma, we'll put it that way. Of course, it's a city of everyone, ideologues, pragmatists, eccentrics like Curtis Levi himself. But it just when Zoram Hamdani, I interviewed him in last November, he was talking, as he did with Martha MacCallum here tonight, about discussions he's had with Trump supporters. When he goes into Queens, when he goes to the Bronx and talks to people about why they supported Donald Trump, he comes back to affordability over and over and over again. And that's a message actually that works very well on Fox News because guess what, it's a message that works everywhere. Now, Zahra Mohammedani did not just convince the Fox News audience to support him. There's, there's no question that the Fox News audience is not suddenly coming around to Zoram Hamdani. But what he just proved with this interview is that he's capable of sitting down and having conversations like a normal human being. I will say this is a slicker version of Zoram Dani feels like a, dare I say, media trained version of Zoramdani. Not quite as off the cuff, not quite as spun, instantaneous and sort of conversational as other versions of Zohra Mamdani that may predate this Fox News interview. But obviously he's in the closing days of this campaign, on the eve of the debate and he's up double digits in the polls. So he probably wants to play it safe. All that is to say bringing this question back to affordability is what he did when Martha MacCallum asked him whether Hamas should disarm. This clip is already going viral because he said some people are taking a little bit out of context. But basically what he said was my concern. I don't have an opinion on Hamas or Israel. It's being taken a little bit out of context saying he didn't have an opinion on Hamas. Now, is it pretty easy to say, yes, Hamas should disarm? This is a version of the answer that he gave during the primary when he was asked if he would be willing to go to Israel. He said, why would I go to Israel? I'm the mayor of New York City. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing him, but just in the same way with this interview, he said, I care about affordability. Affordability, affordability. It's a pretty smart tactic. Not saying he knocked it out of the park. I don't think that's the case. But I think the broad contours of the sort of future of left wing populism are there for the taking. When you listen to his handling of cultural work questions. For example, McCall pressed him on his pledge to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if Netanyahu steps foot in New York City. And again, he brought the question back to affordability, tried to bring the question back to affordability. My big point here is that is the best you can do in those situations, because the culture war is that brick wall for a lot of people. And so to the extent that you can avoid it or skirt it or jump over it, then Zoram Hamdani has a leg up on many other politicians, for example. Lastly, we were talking about our friend, of course, friend of the show, Hakeem Jeffries, just a generational talent, of course, the other week when he was asked about the sombrero memes that Donald Trump was applying to him and Chuck Schumer in the early days of the government shutdown. And he immediately invoked racism and many other Democrats did as well, which is, from a purely political standpoint, a completely insane thing to do when you have an opportunity on a silver platter to talk about health care costs, to spend one second. Calling something racist that is not racist and is a joke and politically foolish plays right into Donald Trump's hands. And it's something that Democrats should have Learned better than 10 years ago. 10 years ago, probably. So we're seeing the evolution, the, the example. Mamadani is there for the taking. And we'll see, we'll see if Dems will take it. On that note, let's bring in the great Walter Kern, who is of course editor at large of county highway and co host of America this week with the equally legendary Dems, Matt Taibbi, who we're wishing a speedy recovery from his concussion. Walter, thank you so much for being here.

[Walter Kern]

It's great to be here. I mean, it's only 8 o' clock here in Montana, but It does feel late. It gets very dark. There are no bright lights. And I like this after party thing because usually I podcast in the morning and now I can let it all hang out.

[Emily]

Oh, yeah, this is totally different than a morning podcast, Walter. I have to start, by the way, by thanking you because not just thank you for being here tonight, but thanking you because I think a County highway subscription is greatest gift I have ever given my father. I got it for him for Christmas a couple of years ago and he cherishes it. So thank you.

[Walter Kern]

Where does he live? Where does he live?

[Emily]

Wisconsin. Good old Wisconsin.

[Walter Kern]

Where in Wisconsin?

[Emily]

About an hour west of Milwaukee.

[Walter Kern]

Okay. I'm from Minnesota, so I have Wisconsin, you know, in a detailed roadmap printed inside my brain. County Highway. The whole idea, just for those who don't know what it is, is a national newspaper. We call it America's only newspaper. It exists only in print. It's written entirely hand. There is no AI content. And our idea is that there's more of America than Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and New York City. In fact, everything that matters about America is between them. The audience for Los Angeles, the money that gets invested in New York and the voters who bring people to Washington. So we actually think we have our priorities straight. And for us, a story that happens in Toledo or an hour outside Milwaukee is as important as a story that happens in Times Square. Because stories are stories and they can happen anywhere. And the best ones often happen in the middle of nowhere. So that's county highway.

[Emily]

And that's why he loves it. It's a beautiful product. So I would encourage anybody who loves a print product. And even if you don't love a print product, you will when you county highway go subscription. It's so beautiful. Well, they're actually, let's start right there because I noticed this post from Brendan Buck, who formerly worked on Capitol Hill for Paul Ryan. He. He observed that there's a virtual shutdown, a virtual blackout of media coverage of the government shutdown. He called him, put F2 up on the screen. Super interesting post today. He said, here's a telling sign of where we are on day 15. There are zero stories about the government shutdown in both the print New York Times. We're just talking about print and the print Wall Street Journal, Washington Post to May wrap this thing up, folks, is what Brendan Buck said. But while there, there are a million different ways we could analyze this is it that these small papers, small relative to what they once were, but you know, they're still pretty powerful. Is it that their audiences, their elite audiences aren't interested in it? Is it that nobody is really interested in the shutdown? What do you make of that observation? Because it's, it's fascinating. I don't think it would be the case if we were two weeks into a shotgun shutdown where Republicans were the ones that withheld the votes for the passage.

[Walter Kern]

No, it's clear there are no points to be scored talking about the shutdown and so they're pretending the game's not happening. The fact is, shutdowns are hard to perceive for a lot of Americans anyway. I mean, I live near national parks and I suppose if I went down there, I might not be able to. Maybe I'd get in for free. Maybe I wouldn't get in at all. I'm not sure. But. But other than that, in my neck of the woods, you don't know what's happening unless you're in certain situations when they're not reporting it. It's really not happening. Which is the strangest feeling because in the past when I worked at political magazines like say, the New Republic or whatever, we'd make a big deal out of them. We'd end the world. It. But the longer Americans go without a government, the longer many Americans might not want one anymore or feel perfectly comfortable with a smaller one.

[Emily]

Yeah, the point scoring observation is so interesting because that's usually, as you said, that I was thinking that is usually what the coverage is. It's usually food banks for the troops or national parks being shut down or whatever the case may be. There has been some of it, but not nearly the drumbeat we usually see if it's a Ted Cruz generated or Kevin McCarthy generated shutdown. The vibe is completely different this time and it's not something you can super easily quantify. But I feel like it's one of those things where if you told me I was wrong about this, I'd be like, what do you mean? It's so obvious. We all sort of intuitively know that.

[Walter Kern]

Well, you're a serious person and I'm a semi serious person. And I wonder, do we earn extra interest when we're not spending? You know, maybe we should go a little longer and just sort of build up a war chest of interest or short term investments, move in and out of the market real quickly. Yeah, it is odd for it not to be a football this time. It is odd not to be reading the human interest stories of the suffering or the injustice of it all. But those papers aren't what they used to be. Either, because that all involves reporting and it can't be purely pulled out of the wires. And so I'm sure they said that's not in print, but there are stories on the Internet. You know, little, little stories are coming in. They just don't want to showcase it. That's, that's all that I can tell.

[Emily]

Were you writing for the New Republic during the Clinton shutdown, where we now know he started his affair with Monica Lewinsky?

[Walter Kern]

Walter no, I was writing for Time magazine back when. And, you know, Time would also make a big deal of these things. But it's funny, you know, Time magazine was a broad based mass appeal magazine that was supposed to be right, left and center. And you know, the Washington Post, the New York Times, less so, the Wall Street Journal are now niche regional papers. I'll say, as the editor of county highway, niche regional ideolog hidebound papers. And like you say, it's the dog that isn't barking. And sometimes that's the big clue in a mystery.

[Emily]

Actually. Yeah. On that note, I wanted to ask you a little bit about this exchange that Cheryl Hines had on the View, which is also a pretty niche project these days, actually. It's, it's, it's hardly representative of all the different perspectives. It's representative of every perspective from the Upper west side to the Upper east side. Maybe a little Tribeca mixed in. Walter this is Cheryl Hines, the wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Joining the ladies of the View just yesterday. And we'll bring in a great tweet you posted. I was going to say X post, but I think it's probably still appropriate to say tweet right afterwards. So this is S2. The problem, respectfully, is that your husband is the least qualified Department of Health and Human Services head that we've had in history. I do not. I think that's a very dangerous, dangerous. Why is he less qualified than an economist? I think he is less qualified than.

[Kim Kardashian]

He spent his career studying toxins, studying.

[Emily]

People'S health, fighting for one guy who.

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Was using Roundup for his job.

[Emily]

He has also spread a lot of misinformation, a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion. And I think it's, it's just a very dangerous. I say it with the utmost respect. Some of it's good and some of it's not. That's.

[Kim Kardashian]

Listen, we all have different views.

[Emily]

Yes, Walter, I think the most important takeaway from that is it was all said with a lot of respect, just the utmost respect throughout.

[Walter Kern]

When somebody starts a sentence with respectfully, I Reach for my gun. I mean, there's no word that causes me to cringe or get aggressive more quickly than respect. Respectfully, she should show respect because she's her inferior, frankly. She doesn't know anything about the history of the Health and Human Services Department. She probably thinks it has to be run by a doctor or a chiropractor, I don't know. But Kennedy, having spent his lifetime in court on these issues and having seen them from all sides, is in fact probably one of the, the more qualified in history. He's certainly one of the most passionate and I think visionary. I'm a supporter of what he's doing. I think that this was a, this is an elephant that has been rotting in the jungle for a thousand years and nobody has gone in and give it, given it an autopsy. And that's what he's doing. He's looking to see what's been done badly, what's not being done at all and they're pretending to do and what, what could be done. And it's not chaos at all. That's the pejorative word for change. It's not misinformation. That's the pejorative word for new or suppressed information.

[Emily]

Right. You posted on X. Sunny Hostin, however, is the most qualified co host of the View in history. And there's no worse insult than that. You said that respectfully.

[Walter Kern]

Well, respectfully, respectfully. You are so qualified to be a View co host that I can't think of anyone else, these being the qualifications. You're able to take a superior tone with people who are vastly more intelligent and knowledgeable than you. You're able to say things in a sort of personal view, like woman to woman way that is actually completely insulting and inappropriate, but is done, you know, by policy on View. I mean, it's just us women talking. Sometimes I've thought when I was in hotel rooms or stranded during blizzards and the View is on the television for some reason, you know, in the breakfast room where you make your waffles, that it's a conspiracy to create misogyny where there isn't any.

[Emily]

A well orchestrated conspiracy. I don't, I don't think anybody could actually do it that well. That makes me think it's not a conspiracy.

[Walter Kern]

The set is confounding the one we just saw. They're somehow hovering above the treetops like, like, you know, a UFO tea party. And it's disconcerting what where they think they are, but they obviously think it's somewhere lost, lofty, which is Just the best comedy ever.

[Emily]

But, you know, it just strikes me that this exchange is so, it just encapsulates a lot of the important trends in our politics and our culture right now very well, because you have this sort of self appointed arbiter of capital F facts who happens to be Sunny Hostin, a co host of the View, somebody actually with no expertise. I mean, she's an attorney. She has no expertise in the field of health. And here she is talking to the wife of the Health and Human Services secretary about her husband, about another attorney.

[Walter Kern]

Another far more successful, high profile and accomplished attorney who's worked on these particular.

[Emily]

As you just mentioned, worked on these particular issues for basically the entire course of his career, unlike Sunny Hostin. And she has the sort of audacity to talk down to Cheryl Hines. And Cheryl Hines just, I thought, made mincemeat out of her. And I don't think Sunny Hostin saw that coming. There was just this arrogance, but also a blindness. She didn't expect to be owned as well as Cheryl Hines owned her in that moment.

[Walter Kern]

That's because Cheryl is that paradoxical thing, a real actor, meaning she's actually good at being an actor, which means she's probably good at other things too. Sonny, however, is a bad actor who attempts to seem like a serious, thoughtful person, but whose views are fed to her through some sort of, you know, either earpiece or laser beam or something because they, they are an IV drip. They're identical to the views of her sponsors, the, you know, everyone in their audience, the other people on the set, and you know, that exact slice of that party that she is speaking to.

[Emily]

There's a great Chomsky clip. And I was talking to Glenn Greenwald about this the other week where he's in this conversation. I think it's a BBC or Channel 4 reporter. And Chomsky, the guy asked him, you know, you think you talk as though we get our talking points handed to us by Big Pharma or these industry groups. And Chomsky says, no, I don't think you need to do that. I think the reason you're sitting where you're sitting, the reason you have the job that you have, is because you agree with them. You don't need anybody to hand you talking points. And again, it's just so remarkable to see that dynamic from people like Sunny Hostin who think of themselves as free thinkers, who think of themselves as, you know, challenging authority because she stands up to Donald Trump. I mean, I don't understand how you justify that in your own mind. If you're Sunny Hostin.

[Walter Kern]

I'm in the truth telling phase of my life. I'm in the what the hell phase. I've been a journalist and a writer and various sorts of things. Screenwriter. And I've been in rooms and I've been everywhere. And I'll tell you that it's a combination. It's not that Sunny Hostin can automatically generate consensus views, does indeed have talking points. They do indeed have editors and producers. She does see sheets of paper, they do sit in meetings, they do go to parties together and so on. And after a while it becomes second nature. Chomsky's right. But what they do have a real fine tuned and very conscious sense of is when they've strayed beyond the boundaries, when they've, when they've hit the electric fence and they learn like, you know, they learn like livestock that are fenced in by electricity not to even go near the thing. And so their ideas are the ideas they're left with, which are precious few and very repetitive.

[Emily]

Well, I also am eager to get your take on why Maha in particular plays so differently between the coasts. I mean, actually, Maha plays pretty well just about everywhere. It's extremely controversial. And as someone in the news business, when you're following it day to day, there are various controversies. But sort of the 30,000 foot big picture question about, quote, making America healthy again is, is really well received if you're between the coasts. I think it plays better than the media realizes just about anywhere. But especially outside of these legacy media headquarters, it plays very well. And Walter, you talk about this lag, you cover it a lot. Why is that?

[Walter Kern]

Because the middle of the country is where the patients are and the coasts are where the pharma executives are. And if you draw one of those sort of bomb maps, you know, like a blast circle map around, you know, Johnson and Johnson, Route 1 in New Jersey and various other centers of the radiation maps, medical and pharmaceutical power. You, you'll find that within the inner circles, MAHA is very unpopular, if not a terrible outrage to mankind. When you get out toward Montana or the middle of the country where people, how can I put it, they naturally ration health care. You're not living next to a hospital like you are in New York City all the time. You might, if you're in certain parts of Chicago or Minneapolis or whatever, but you know, so, so you don't have time, you don't live next to a hospital, you kind of got to get bang for your buck. It's time consuming and you aren't living in a world in which medical concerns are professional, of professional interest to you. Your only interest is in your own health. And you're also out where the food is growing. And you have a natural sense that there's some relationship between what we eat, what we do when the sun is shining and how active we are and our health. Whereas if you're crouched on a subway or in a, you know, absolute commuter relationship with, you know, a big corporation, you might not. So I think people who are kind of at their ease and at their leisure and living regular lives would like to believe that when they spend money on healthcare, they get something for it and at least doesn't make them sick. There's also a skepticism about doctors in a place like Montana, you know, you're always having to decide whether to drive down, you know, two hours to get to one and whether it's worth it. So there's a realism out here, here. And, and I think that realism has taught people that for all the money that we spend on this and for all the advertisements you see on TV and the non stop bombardment for drugs you can't pronounce, they look around and go, why am I not? And why are my neighbors not healthier than we are? And why are and why are our kids not healthier?

[Emily]

Right. It's common sense. Well, lastly on this topic, Walter, I was listening to the new Tucker Carlson Alex Jones interview today and there was a lot discontent between both of them about Donald Trump getting the booster, announcing he had gotten a Covid booster. And then I'm thinking about Sunny Hostin versus Sheryl and the View. And it's just a reminder of the immense pressures to return to the status quo that are going to confront either party, but especially the Republican Party. Whatever happens after Trump or continues to happen during the Trump administration, there's a lot of, a lot of pressure on Trump himself, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. People like Cheryl Hines, just to, just to go revert to the pre2024 status quo on American health. Are you optimistic that that status quo will successfully be disrupted in the future? Continue being disrupted in the future?

[Walter Kern]

Yes, I am. Moves have been made in the first year of the Trump administration that I didn't think would be made ever. Maybe things have been said, testimony has been given. A guy I know, Toby Rogers, gave almost epic and disturbing and I think historical testimony about the childhood vaccine schedule in front of Congress. We're questioning things that went unquestioned for decades. And there has been talk about the pharma hold over TV advertising, which really is so large and so I think pernicious, that there is no way to rerun the COVID pandemic without wondering how it would have gone if these companies hadn't controlled 60, 70% of the advertising budgets of the news shows that we're reporting on. Covid, it's got to be the battle of all time, because next to the defense industry, really it is the healthcare industry. And in terms of gdp, in terms of the greater economy, it's, I think, much larger. That is the foe of foes. I don't think they're going up against them just in order to go up against them for the sake of the fight or, you know, out of some eccentric Don Quixote like quest to bring down giants. I think it's because there are real problems and the inertia and the momentum of that industry, its ability to lobby, to not answer questions, to push things through, to hire people in and out of government and then put them back in government is almost unmatched in commercial history. So that you get anywhere with it is pretty astonishing, especially in government, which I don't think is very successful at reform in the last few decades.

[Emily]

That's an understatement. Well, we'll be back with Walter Kern in just one second. First, of course, I have to read my big pharma ads. I'm kidding. We're talking about Mazda chips here, people. Did you know chips and fries were once cooked in beef tallow until the 1990s when corporations swapped it for cheap seed oil. Now, those oils make up 20% of the average American's daily calories and are linked to inflammation and metabolic issues. Somehow, of course, like we were just talking about, all that stuff got sold by people with power as quote, healthy. But Masa chips is flipping the script. They use just three ingredients. Organic corn, sea salt, and 100% grass fed beef tallow. No seed oils, no fillers, just bold flavor and serious crunch. Strong enough to scoop guac without crumbling. Snacking on Masa is a whole different vibe, and it really is. You feel satisfied, light and energized with zero crash bloat or that gross, sluggish fog. Beef tallow is the secret sauce. It keeps you full and focused, not mindlessly munching. And it is so good too. My favorite flavor, I think it actually might be churro. It's so, so good. If you're ready to give Masa a try, go to masachips.com afterparty and use code AFTERPARTY for 25% off your first order. That's masachips.com and code AFTERPARTY for 25 off your first order. And if you don't feel like ordering online, that is fine. Masa is now available nationwide at your local sprouts supermarket. So stop by and pick up a bag before they're gone this Halloween.

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[Emily]

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[Emily]

We're back now with Walter Kern, who's of course editor at large of County Highway. Make sure you're subscription. Can I do.

[Walter Kern]

Can I do something that's probably never done on these shows and probably will never be done again, which is endorse the ad you just read?

[Emily]

I love that. They're good, right? They're good.

[Walter Kern]

Oh, my God, they're great. And they're not all smashed up in the bag. Every. Every single one of them is like eating a, you know, a whole sculpture. I love the damn things. And if I. And if by brown nosing with your sponsors I ever get a free bag, I'll be the happiest man on earth because that is a great job you have where you can promote something that's actually that awesome.

[Emily]

No, thank you. Well, they legitimately are so good, and I hope they send you back, because I couldn't believe it. The first time I ate them, I was like, these can't be real. I thought it was a joke. They actually are meal.

[Walter Kern]

They're a meal. My wife and I slip in and out of a room where they are open, pretending we have something else to do and grabbing.

[Emily]

Let's actually stay on this point, Walter, because this is. All right. So maybe, maybe this is what Sam Altman is talking about when he says that ChatGPT is going to allow people to produce adult erotica. I think he's talking about producing videos of people eating chips. Delicious, delicious chips. This is an actual news story Sam Altman announced yesterday, quote on a post on X said in December, as we roll out age gating more fully and as part of Our corporate quote, treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults. And then after people were like, hey, what the hell's going on with this? Sam Altman responded just a few hours ago. He said, okay, this tweet about upcoming changes to Chat GPT blew up on the erotica point much more than I thought it was going to. As though he is genuinely surprised by this. He says it was meant to just be one example of us allowing more user freedom for adults, and goes on to say, it doesn't apply across the board, of course. For example, we will still not allow things that cause harm to others, and we will treat users who are having mental health crises very different from users who are not. I'm just going to stop right there, Walter, and get your take on this, because I read that line and I say, who the hell is Sam Altman? And Chat GPT to determine which users are having mental health crises and which ones aren't.

[Walter Kern]

Oh, they're already doing that. I read a lot. I read a lot of stories about this. They have all sorts of diagnostics. Be very afraid, America, because you're gonna. You're gonna be diagnosed by Sam Altman and Chat GPT without you knowing it. And because I'm privy to things like the Twitter files and my friend Matt Taibi's reportings on what goes behind the scene at these companies, the file on your sanity, or lack of it, exists and will be added to. And let's just hope it's never hacked or used inappropriately, which never happens now. I hate the word erotica. As a writer. As a writer, I'm disgusted by it. It's a little better than lavatory for bathroom. It's not much better than exotic dancer for stripper, but it has a sort of aroma to it, one that puts me off. Off. And I wonder what they're talking about, honestly. Are they talking about me making a movie of myself and then sort of augmenting it with, you know, cartoons, partners? Are they talking about me? Me putting in my face and that of someone else who I hope has given me permission and creating some kind of scene? I'm not sure what he's talking about. And it's like hearing. How can I put it? It's like hearing animals fighting behind the door of an apartment. You don't want to open the door. Nothing is going to happen that's good after you open the door. And I can't imagine anything good after turning on the erotica GPT mode.

[Emily]

Yeah, well, I Think maybe the only person who can is Sam Altman. But I mentioned Tucker a few moments ago, and people should go and watch his interview with Sam Altman, because I think it's one of the great interviews that Tucker has ever done. He presses on this point, actually, where Altman, in this very post I just referenced, Altman says, quote, we are not the elected moral police of the world in the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries. We want to do a similar thing here. But of course, he's already drawing the line somewhere. And this is what Tucker pressed Sam Altman to explain is where are you deciding is an appropriate line to draw? He said, I think one of their conversations was, okay, so if you're in an African country, are you not allowed to say things against. Against gay marriage in a country where opposition to gay marriage is very high? And Sam Altman had clearly never thought through that question before. So, Walter, it just continues to be puzzling and concerning that they are rolling out these policies with massive implications and consequences for society.

[Walter Kern]

Well, so I read somewhere, and I don't know if it's accurate that GROK already has such capacities. I've not been exposed to any of it. But the reason I hate the word erotica is, of course, because it's a word for porn. And porn, if anyone is exposed to it and or has been in the last few years, is a many splendored and very dangerous, often, very often very dangerous thing because it verges on fetishism, and fetishism converge on violence. And violence can be portrayed as sexy rather than dangerous. And you don't. You don't really know where any of those boundaries are. Sam doesn't. He's going to try to lay them down, but he'll lay them down according to what his users want. Ultimately. I mean, it's a consumer product. It's not a service of the US Government. He wants the damn thing to be addictive. He wants it to be mesmerizing, and he wants it to be easy, easy. And that's what he's in the business of providing. And how that will translate into, quote, erotica, I have no idea. And like I say, I want to find out as much as I want to find out if I can stop the dog fight the next department, because I just feel it's a danger zone. Is it inevitable? Probably.

[Emily]

And, you know, this is. With Altman, you just think like, he. He's the one drawing these lines. He's the one making these decisions. He tries to offload them to Say that it's society's standards, but the proof is in the pudding, which is the last 15 years of social media that has saturated us. We are literally drowning in political erotica every second of every day now. Everything is porn. Everything about politics and culture on social media is porn. And it's. To your point, it's what the user base is. It's what they think that the dopamine triggers in the brain stem.

[Walter Kern]

Exactly, exactly. If you get behind the scenes with these people, it takes about five seconds to realize that they see human beings as biological robots and they see themselves as button pushers on those robots. And though they talk about morality and they talk about boundaries and that sort of thing, all that is for the regulators and, you know, the moralists in society. What they're really trying to do is get you addicted, keep you addicted and make your addiction survivable such that you can keep up with it.

[Emily]

It's like fentanyl, right? Yeah.

[Walter Kern]

Yeah, that's right. You don't want. You don't want. You want to. You don't want to kill the customer, but, you know, you don't want. You don't want them getting bored either. And so you have to play this game of enticing them with stronger and stronger come ons while you're. You do this PR dance of boundaries and limitations.

[Emily]

Yeah, and I. This is. We can put F5 on the screen. This is a chart from Axios that the headline on the chart is share of articles that were written by humans or generated by AI. And if you're listening to this and not looking at the screen, basically it's. It's outpacing. So right now, AI generated articles, you can see this massive gap until about 2024. So very recently when it starts to close to the point where now AI generated articles have outpaced human created articles. And Walter, you are a writer. This. As am I. This. Does this scare you? Because I have to say, I feel like some of the AI stepping into writing stuff is overhyped from my perspective, because the creativity isn't something that can. The human creativity is not something that can necessarily be replicated, but certain things can. What do you make of this?

[Walter Kern]

Well, if you know anything about writing, it has a hard time taking the first person point of view. In other words, it has a hard time pretending that it's seeing things, feeling things and experiencing things. It can simulate that, but that will always be sort of transparent and corny in its case if you know it's AI because, you know, it didn't happen. What it's good, what it's good at is pretending to be objective. I'm not saying it's good at being objective or that it writes well, but it can, it can pose as a explainer or a, you know, summarizer. And the truth is that most of those articles they're probably including are really boring financial articles. Summaries of the weather and things like that, which frankly humans maybe shouldn't even be forced to do at all. And in the first place, we're going.

[Emily]

To think of it as like the triangle shirtwaist, like you're, you're over there in the mines writing about the stock market.

[Walter Kern]

Exactly. But, but, but, but all that being said, of course I'm concerned because here's the problem. Destroys the language after a while. AI is, AI is a leveler and a hollower out of language. It tends to shrink in its vocabulary, studies have shown, and shrink the vocabulary of those who. You partake of it. And the other thing it does is it, you know, that thing of making a xerox of a xerox of a xerox and suddenly you have a black blob. Well, AI is kind of the opposite. It takes a xerox of something simple. And then after doing, after running it through AI and running the AI article through the AI, it comes up with what they first called hallucinations, but which are also called wild inaccuracies and like implausibilities. So it compounds its own errors and its own, its own imprecision to the point where it just flies off into space. And it's my hope as the editor of county highway and as an old fashioned writer who takes a year or more to write a book, whereas really you can plug that thing in and get one out in five minutes. It's my hope that it will collapse on itself like some science fiction monster. And there's reason to believe that it is in many ways. There's a lot of academic study going into this so called dead Internet theory, which is that the whole thing will start to eat its own droppings, basically, to use another agricultural metaphor, until the point it just sickens and falls apart over.

[Emily]

Yeah, I mean it's a vivid but useful metaphor. And you're a great novelist, Walter. And I think on the efficiency that drives what ChatGPT or Grok spits out. And of course then it's going to limit language, of course then it's not going to pull in interesting ways from different sources. And I'm just like the Marshall McLuhan theory of the media. When people's interaction with the written word starts to be prompts, which aren't the worst thing in the world. But you're asking this giant machine to explain something to you and it's pulling all of the different writing from society and eventually to your point, it becomes that type of self licking ice cream cone or whatever metaphor you want to use. How fast? I mean, what is the timeline on how quickly this could all, all fall apart potentially?

[Walter Kern]

Well, it's an asymptotic curve, as they say, as the pretentious people say, so that it could happen startlingly quickly. And, but, but, but the bigger problem to me with AI writing is that it has to train on something originally, you know, until it gets to the pointer.

[Emily]

Kern novels. Yes.

[Walter Kern]

Waiting, waiting for that anthropic check that they promised a few months ago.

[Emily]

You gotta get your MASA check tips, I think.

[Walter Kern]

Yeah, I think I gotta fill out some forms or something to get it. But I, I will say this more and more. I see in journalism, the audience for pieces is not the reader anymore, but the AI. They are installing opinions and they are installing accounts of events that are orthodox and they are prepared in order to be consumed by machines such that they then harden into conventional wisdom. And that is a weird effect that the thing is having where you go, like, they didn't write that article for people to read. They wrote that article for Wikipedia and for, you know, chatgpt to turn into a petrified bone of our future skeleton of knowledge.

[Emily]

Which is amazing because these LLMs, I mean, who knows what these LLMs are doing in 20 years. People right now are making money by doing what's called like AI training or AI modeling. Like that, not modeling is the wrong word. But this actually came out with one of the big Israel stories in the last couple of weeks that actually Israel was hiring people who could help place certain language that would be more likely to show up in generative AI responses. Like, people are already making money off of this. And when folks look back on our writing from 20, 25, 200 years from now, if God willing, the planet is still here, they're gonna be like, what the fuck was this stuff?

[Walter Kern]

You know, why is it, why is it Israel that always gets tagged with doing something that everybody else in the world.

[Emily]

Oh, I'm sure we're doing it too. I mean, I'm sure we're doing it. We've been, we own Wikipedia.

[Walter Kern]

We've been doing it for ages. I think they're probably doing it in France. England, Germany, Saudi Arabia and you know, Japan too, frankly. Oh yeah, but, but maybe Israel's doing it better. I have no idea. My, my point is this, that we begin to act like machines in order to please the machines and we begin to, instead of asking questions now, remember how questioning things was sort of thought to be the, the sort of essence of intelligent, skeptical, you know, know, adult life. Making prompts is very different. Prompts is sort of like praying. It's sort of like coming up with prayers, you know. Dear ChatGPT, give me XYZ with this on the side in this fashion and so on. It's, it's, it's, it's wishing rather than analyzing.

[Emily]

Actually, let's talk about this post you reacted to. It was a. So someone was circulating a clip of Robin Williams on Johnny Carson in 1991 where Robin Williams is doing this masterful Shakespeare riff it would be wildly unusual to see gracing the broadcast airwaves between the hours of 9 and midnight these days. Of course. But Walter, you reacted to someone who posted basically a version of what I just said by saying we are looking up from the bottom of a cliff now. And in the same way, I mean, I was reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death over the weekend and he's reacting to television. He's reacting to Ronald Reagan in the mid-80s. And in the same ways ways television, late night television even was seen by many people as the dumbing down of the American mind is possible. As beautiful as some of these relics of the late night television era were, Walter, that this was somewhere on the continuum of the ultimate dumbing down of the American mind.

[Walter Kern]

Well, listen, the miraculous and infinitely surprising thing about the American mind is that it can always get dumber.

[Emily]

Do not underestimate.

[Walter Kern]

I mean, you think you down to the third sub basement, but you realize it goes all the way to the center of the earth. Now we can only grade our lives on a continuum and we can only grade history in terms of change. But the fact that a comedian, Robin Williams 1991, who probably started on Johnny Carson as some, you know, young, you know, newcomer could be asked by Johnny Carson to do some Shakespeare stuff and then, you know, obviously they know what's coming up on the show. But get up, do it, grab laughter and entertain the tens of millions of middle American that were in his audience. An audience of a sort that doesn't exist anymore. You know, not fractured, not cut up, not bubble wrap, but one big giant, you know, pacific to Atlantic audience with the expectation that they'll be Entertained.

[Emily]

Wow.

[Walter Kern]

I mean, that's, that's a, that's, that's a loss for literacy. That's a loss for sort of the presumption of intelligence by. It's a loss for.

[Emily]

Just.

[Walter Kern]

In terms of the hosts, I don't think Sunny Hostin would even think of prompting someone to do Shakespeare.

[Emily]

What about Kimmel?

[Walter Kern]

Kimmel might, if he was well trained. But you know what? Shakespeare is now, you know, know, the deadest of the whitest of the menace of the most males. And so it would, it would be some kind of fodder for protest the next day if he brought out Shakespeare. I think it really is a measure of how far we've come. But it reminded me also how long Johnny Carson lasted in 1991. Yeah, his hair is white. So is mine. The guy is totally on his game.

[Emily]

Game.

[Walter Kern]

He's, he's, he's, you know, alert.

[Emily]

Ratings are peaking, actually.

[Walter Kern]

Yeah, he's right there with Robin Williams. The fastest, most, you know, dazzling improvisational mind on earth at that point. And the audience is there with it. I was like, wow, we were quick once.

[Emily]

You know, it's, it's sad in so many ways because I'm like public school educated, 90s, early 2000s. And when I. I spend time with some of my friends who got, like, classical educations, had conservative parents who were prescient and put them in schools where they were, you know, or homeschooled them and were teaching them the Western canon in a way that, frankly, I think my parents expected public school to do. And I realized how cheated so many young Americans and young Westerners are of this incredible canon, of this incredible heritage. And I feel like this is a different language to somebody who's 17 years old now. If you showed them that Robin Williams clip, It's really a different cultural language.

[Walter Kern]

Well, it might be if it were broadcast as widely as Johnny Carson. There are certainly groups and pockets of people who probably know Shakespeare better than any of us did back then, even if we were interested, because the Internet does allow you to go so deep and to pursue your interests so, so intensely and endlessly. So I don't like to be a complete, you know, Jeremiah about all of this, but at the same time, it's the, it's the, the notion that we could all be linked and laugh together that I'm missing. We'll leave for Stones. Yeah. The average literacy might rate, might be the same if you take the. If you take the people who are on the Internet all night reading about every aspect. Aspect of Shakespearean. Scholarship and the people who know nothing about it. But the ability to be together in knowledge is what makes a society, and that's what is obviously changing.

[Emily]

One more. I keep beating this dead horse, but it occurred to me, this Neil Ferguson essay in the Free Press recently about what we lose when we shift away from writing, that maybe we have this period of human life, of the human species between, you know, the Reformation and now where the written word is dominant, that it doesn't. That's not an aberration in a sort of neutral sense. That's an aberration of something that's actually really helpful. Because reading and writing trains the mind in different ways than images and videos and pictures. And when I'm thinking about the question I asked you initially, which was, is this on a continuum? Actually. Actually, that's interesting, because here you have Robin Williams on a television show referencing literature.

[Walter Kern]

Well, let's remember something. Shakespeare was barely written down. I mean, there exist manuscripts. They're put together from actors, notes and other things. But, you know, people in those days heard Shakespeare, and the actors once, maybe they had read a script or been trained in it, you know, went by memory. And those plays were done in a whole different world. There were not a bunch of Shakespeare paperbacks in the back pockets of the people in that audience. The written word, though, becoming a mass phenomena, really only happens in the 19th century, you know, in America, for example, you know, and. And it starts probably with the Bible and other common books, Pilgrim's Progress, things like that. Then the novels and the serial novels that appear in magazines come about. So mass literacy, and not just mass literacy, but mass familiarity with certain works of art and so on, is incredibly recent and also strangely fragile. We don't know after how long it took to get up that mountain, how easily the boulder might roll off the mountain or go over the cliff. As I say, I think just in the two years or three years of COVID under education, we lost tens, hundreds of thousands of kids to lifetimes of at least low reading skills, sometimes no reading skills. And that is, for me as a writer, the tragedy of a lifetime. Because however our health and our politics might have been affected, our ability to recover and to think our way through things was also affected, and perhaps in a way, at a time or a window in children's lives that cannot be repaired.

[Emily]

Well, on a hard pivot here, Walter, I did want to talk about this Washington Post report. It's not just the Washington Post. We have the charges from the Justice Department in front of us on the case of the alleged spy who is just charged with violating the Espionage Act. His name is Ashley Tallis. I'm going to read a little bit from this Washington Post story because you and I were both posting independently about this today, interestingly enough, which is one of the reasons I wanted to chat with you about it. The Post reports that Telus was charged with unlawful retention of national defense information for which the maximum sentence is 10 years in prison. So I went and looked up Ashley Tallis today and found all kinds of articles that Ashley Tallis had penned in journals like Foreign affairs, writing about India, China, nuclear weapons. So the Post goes on to say a naturalized US Citizen who was born in India, tell us had a top secret security clearance through his dual roles as an unpaid senior counselor, State Department and contractor with the Defense Department's Office of Net Assessment, which is a think tank within the Pentagon that Hexitha says he wants to abolish. According to the FBI affidavit, US Officials had been investigating Talos for years. Years. He was spotting spotted having dinner with Chinese officials in Northern Virginia and at least four occasions from 2022 to last month and was overheard discussing Iranian Chinese relations, the U. S. Pakistan relationship and emerging technologies such as AI. According to an FBI agent in the court filing, Telus arrived at a dinner in 2022 with a Manila envelope that he did not appear to have upon departing. And at a dinner last month in Fairfax, Chinese officials gave Telus a red gift bag, according to the document. Just a couple of more details here. A so officials are saying that Telus just within the last month printed hundreds of pages of classified records at defense and state facilities in the D.C. region, including more than 350 pages from a document that bore markings showing it was classified at the secret level and contained risk sensitive information from a foreign government that had been obtained. Guess what? Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance act, also of course known as FISA, that document's title indicated that it dealt with U.S. air Force tactics, techniques and procedures. And a separate 40 page document marked secret that tell Us allegedly printed the same day concerned military aircraft capabilities. Okay, so, Walter, I am.

[Walter Kern]

Instinctively those last two things are what scare me the most.

[Emily]

Okay, so explain why. Why?

[Walter Kern]

Well, very specific military information about air defenses and air capabilities is something that your client can only use for a certain amount of time. And when they get it, it might be tempting to take advantage of it depending on how good it is. You know what I mean? In other words, if you're seeing a vulnerability in something as specific as air defenses or you Know, even attack capabilities, you might be moved to do something while you have the fresh stuff, you know?

[Emily]

Right.

[Walter Kern]

So, so that scares me. But the other thing about this story that gets me is that when I told it to people who now, I, I've never served in the military and I, I don't live in Washington. I haven't been part of the coverage government. But this guy moved very smoothly between NGOs, like the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, you know, he was quite a figure. He's not some, he's not some frustrated guy in an office. He, he was out there making the scene at the, at the black tie dinners, you know, giving the lectures and so on. Very smooth person. And you would think a satisfied or fulfilled person. You know what I mean? Like when you realize that somebody at that level is a traitor and that they're a specific traitor giving away specific military information, they're not just trying to be smart and have a lot of stuff at home that they can use for their essays or whatever, you go, you go like, wow, this could be everywhere. You look around and say, every man in a tux at this party, every woman in a gown could have a completely other life.

[Emily]

Yes, he. And I pulled this up on the screen. And for folks who are listening, I did a Google of Ashley Tallis today. I'd never heard of him, but if you are in sort of Washington think tank circles that deal with Asia policy, you've almost certainly heard of him. He, he's prominent in that respect. So here is an. An excerpt from a Carnegie Endowment where he was a fellow. Their page now says he's on administrative leave. I believe, if I'm remembering from today correctly, they describe him as serving the U.S. government during the George W. Bush administration, where he was intimately involved in negotiating the US Indian civil nuclear deal. Go to. Last summer he wrote in Foreign affairs, what are China's nuclear weapons for? Go to. Earlier this summer, actually, this was April of 2015, he co authored for the Council on Foreign Relations revising US grand strategy toward China. And obviously he had just written things in recent runs, recent months as well. But this is somebody who is accused of spying for China, who in the last decade had been writing for the Council on Foreign Relations about China policy. It's really, really, it's really shocking, Walter. Even if I think both of us are intuitively skeptical of claims the FBI makes in court these days. They have him printing out documents.

[Walter Kern]

Well, that shows you that the culture of sort of lazy security is pretty alarming. If he's able to do that he also gained access to computer networks that are pretty high level, apparently. And, and, you know, really didn't seem to have much trouble at all gathering information. It's unclear if he did it for money. We don't know anything about alleged payoffs or bribes. But the thing about spies that's interesting is that they sometimes, particularly at this level, have ideological motives. In other words, they disagree with the drift or the direction of government or policy or, you know, what the State Department or Defense Department are thinking right now. And they are sometimes setting up sort of alternate, few alternate futures, trying to get a multiverse version of a parallel world to come into being. And my sense is maybe that's what this person was doing, that he thought he was smarter or more advanced or sophisticated than those around him. And he was. I wouldn't be surprised if he felt very justified in it, not just like some grubby spy who wants a new Mercedes 80s.

[Emily]

Walter Curran, you've been so generous with your time tonight. I hope people, if they haven't already subscribed to county highway and checked out your great podcast with Matt Taibi, they do so appreciate it. Walter, thank you for being here.

[Walter Kern]

Emily. This has been a blast. Anytime.

[Emily]

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[Emily]

I like to talk a lot about the political doom spiral we seem to have found ourselves in, but there's another doom spiral, and it's more of a personal one. I don't have a catchy title for it yet, but it's one that the Kardashians, among many others, have found themselves in. Although the Kardashians are the masters of it, I'll say that at least Kim Kardashian went not the masters, the pioneers of it. Masters. The wrong word. It implies some type of intentionality. And I think actually at this point point, one of the arguments I'm going to make is that it's inertia and it's a very kind of tragic inertia. So we have some clips of Kim Kardashian on Call Her Daddy. She just did call her daddy. The famous Call her Daddy. She sat in the very seat that the one and only Kamala Harris occupied ahead of actually just around this time last year. Kim Kardashian, of course, a much more natural fit for Call Her Daddy than Kamala Harris. But we have a few clips and just I'm going to go ahead and roll dealer's choice on this Because I think they're all really interesting. So let's start with one clip here of Kim Kardashian on this latest edition of Call Her Daddy. Can we talk about the state of you and Kanye's co parenting? Yes, we can talk about it. She's sitting across from me, and she's on a podcast.

[Kim Kardashian]

What do you think co parenting with Kanye west is like?

[Emily]

That's a good answer. Well.

[Kim Kardashian]

It'S not easy, but, I mean, I. I raised the kids, you know, full time. They. They live with me, and I welcome a great, healthy relationship with my kids and their dad, but I also protect them when, you know, it's time for that. And it goes in waves and phases and.

[Emily]

And it's.

[Kim Kardashian]

It's, you know, a lot of work.

[Emily]

But when was the last time Kanye saw the kids? Parenting is a lot of work.

[Kim Kardashian]

Whenever he'll call for them and ask. It's probably been a couple months since we've heard from him. You know, he lives in all these different countries, and I send them and, you know, to Saudi Arabia and Italy and Japan and all over the world every time he has asks. I've never once denied it.

[Emily]

H. So the Kardashians. I'm not as as much of a Kardashian connoisseur as I once was, of course, but the show Keeping up with the Kardashians, which, again, I'll use the word pioneer. It. It pioneered this new famous for being famous model, right? In a very meta sense of that era of smartphones and paparazzi. At the time, really, it was those digital cameras. But Kim Kardashian, of course, was in those paparazzi pictures of. Right? It was Paris Hilton back in the day when Perez Hilton was peaking and was sort of famous for being famous. We had pictures blanketing the blogs. I mean, this was really. She was really a celebrity of the blogosphere, the celebrity blogosphere of the all, and turned that into a reality television show where, for the most part, the three sisters who starred in the show were grown adults. And it was about their lives as small business owners. What was the name of their original store? Oh, my gosh. Was so funny. But that is what started. That's what the stove. The show started as was the three sisters as grown ups. And it became what sustained these gargantuan lifestyles. And that means your entire lifestyle is predicated on your ability to sustain that level of wealth and fame. You have to keep giving something to the press. And as you have your own family, you then bring children into that Children who have absolutely no choice in the matter, unlike you. Maybe it's arguably sort of like Kendall and Kylie, who weren't a big part of the first show. And the. The first show was very light. If you go back to early Kardashian episodes, they're very light. They were like Brady Bunch style, 30 minute comedies, essentially. And that changed around. I'm gonna sound like a real loser here. Like season one, like 4ish. As the show started really mining serious personal drama that comes with fame and wealth and for. For, of course, entertainment value. And it's what they had to sell. It's. Of course it's what they had to sell. They were on reality television. It would be foolish not to sell it. But now their entire lifestyles are all based on this house of cards, right? It will never make for a happy life life. And now what we're seeing is the next generation who are building their lives on a house of cards. It seems to me like Courtney Kardashian is somebody who's acutely aware of this and tries to at least think about giving her kids more of an option. But Northwest, Did Northwest ever really have an option? Probably not. And I think it would be impossible to argue that the pressures of fame are not making them mentally less healthy. Maybe that was a double negative. Let me put it this way. It would be impossible to argue they are healthier. They're living healthy and fulfilling lives because of the way they make their money. And again, all I'm saying is this is inertia because Kim Kardashian, in the interview with Alex Cooper there, clearly doesn't want to divulge everything. Clearly has some sense of shame, whether or not that's sincere. She knows. She knows. I think this is actually what made the Kardashians compelling television to begin with, is that when the show first started, they were fairly normal. They weren't, you know, average all American people. They weren't really a Brady Bunch, but they were relatively normal. I do think Kim Kardashian knows that there's something very wrong about talking about all of this. Something unhealthy about talking about all of this in ways that her children will always be able to see and remember and in ways in which the world will dissect their most intimate family dynamics for their children to always revisit it. I don't think anybody thinks that. Good. That's good. But I think she's convinced herself, and many celebrities, frankly, have convinced themselves that you can compensate and balance by providing your kids all the money that they'll ever need, all the opportunities, access to success that they'll ever need. But I don't think ultimately anybody thinks this is a. This is a good system. They may have convinced themselves that it's a good system. But we have the next generation now, and I'm not talking about Kendall and Kylie, although they've also. Kylie, of course, has ushered in the next generation, too. But I mean that that era of aughts, reality television, which was scandalous at first, even like the real world was scandalous at first, we're now seeing particularly the mold that the Kardashians set. We are now seeing the next generation cope by trying to fit into that mold. And it's inertia and it's inevitably building their lives on a house of cards, and there's nothing you can really do about it. It's almost like being a royal. You are inevitably born into royalty and that brings with it pressures. But in the case of a modern reality television celebrity, or probably more appropriately referred to now as an influencer, whose entire influence and influence, and what's the right way to say professional value, is based on selling their personal life. What choice are you giving your children? What choice are you giving your family? By the time you get to that point, you try to shield them, them as much as you want, but it seems like inevitably everybody ends up selling some version of their personal life who's in the sort of influencer sphere, the sort of lifestyle, personal influencer sphere, because that temptation is too strong to resist, and especially if you're a Kardashian. But it's just something to think about. I mean, I know lots of people have always thought about how Mason and Northwest were going to fare, and everybody always had sort of a. Oh, you know, a pessimism about what it's like to be born into tabloid fame in, at that point, the 2010s. But we're fighting that out right now. And look at Kim Kardashian, who is, I believe, in her early to mid-40s and feels like she clearly feels like she has no choice and is doing it. Shouldn't seem too unhappy about it. She's doing it. It's inertia. It's the way that they live now, and it's really, really sad. And. And the reason it's, I think, maybe relatable to everyone on a bigger scale is that if you grew up with social media on your smartphone, you're kind of trained to sell your personal life, not for money, although that option exists. There's Some polls that have come out in recent years showing just like how many members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha want to grow up to be influencers. We'll see if that sticks. But you're trained to put these bits of your personal life onto these literal, like use them as products for these social media companies to mine the data and sell, but also for you to get likes and replies and all of these different, these dopamine triggers, essentially. And so to some extent, we're all trained to see our personal life for gain. And, and what social media changes about that is it's literally gamified. Like people who designed casinos, helped design these dopamine chasing social networks. And it's not normal. And I worry that people who are the age of Northwest, for example, don't understand that's not normal because they don't remember a world before that. And it changes the way we see the world. It changes the way we see people in our lives. And the Kardashians are just a really macro, a really magnified version. And there's, there's no real comparison between the average person and the Kardashians, of course, but on some fundamental level, we all sort of grapple with the same conundrum. On that happy note, how wonderful was it to have Walter Kern join us live at 10pm this evening. Thank you all for joining us live at 10pm this evening or where at whenever you're listening to it, wherever you're listening to it. We have so many, many wonderful listeners and viewers who catch us the next day or maybe even the day after. Remember, Happy Hour comes out on Fridays, so send your questions to emily@doublemakecare media.com or over at Afterparty Emily on Instagram. And don't forget to get tickets to Megyn Kelly in San Antonio on October 24, where Glenn Greenwald and I will be joining her. We are so excited about that. Happy hour drops on your podcast feeds Friday night. So subscribe on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast, subscribe on YouTube. We'll be back here next Monday with more after party.