Latest / BangTail Kitty with Kevin Michael Kirwan / Maris Kreizman On Israel and Gaza and Your Next Great Read

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Maris Kreizman On Israel and Gaza and Your Next Great Read · BangTail Kitty with Kevin Michael Kirwan

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think the idea of Israel definitely belongs to the Jewish people.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: But Israel doesn't belong.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: The state of Israel, the the the the actual land that it exists on, that does not belong to the Jews.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Does, you know, in your opinion, does Israel, as it stands right now, um, the physical thing itself, that geographical place, does that belong to the Jews?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's the short answer.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: But so hurt people hurt people.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um Dr.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Abdul El-Sayed.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is that his name?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: What the fuck's his name?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: What is it?
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to do that.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Abdul El-Sayed.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: So hurt people, hurt people.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Abdul El-Sayed said that uh recently with regards to a uh shooting at a temple, at a Jewish temple.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then he backtracked.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, no, you know, I didn't I didn't mean that I should have focused on the tragedy, I shouldn't have focused on retribution or or whatever.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: But that's, you know, I I fucking hate that.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Have the courage of your convictions.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: He absolutely intended to say what he said, and he believed what he said, and then he realized it wasn't going to play well with the broader audience and it wasn't going to work for him and his campaign for the Senate or whatever the fuck he's running for.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and he backtracked and he tried to do damage control.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And you see that all the time.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: People that lack that ability to stand behind the things that they do believe in.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it when they make that accident and they actually show you who they are, then they know they're like, no, no, no, no, no, don't look behind the curtain.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: I I want you to see this facade, this thing that I'm creating for you to believe in.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want you to actually see who I am.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Politicians do this constantly.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: They tell you one thing during the primaries when they're talking to their base, they tell you something else during the general election when they're trying to talk to the rest and trying to convince people they're not really who they are.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's all bullshit.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, tell me who you are.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me what the fuck you believe.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: And let that I'll respect that way more than I'll respect that kind of shit where you say something and then you back off from it.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we have Maris Kreitzman with us today.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: She's fantastic, she's a phenomenal essayist.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she writes for a lot of different publications.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: She's got a great book out um uh of essays that she's written, and she's very outspoken.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was never a very religious Jewish person.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: I, you know, went to temple on the high holidays a couple of other times I was about mitzvah, but it was never a real important part of my heritage, except that I was told that my parents, parents, and all of the people that they knew and loved were in dire danger.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're not survivors, but like that entire generation felt like rightfully so that every that the that Germany wanted to kill them all.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so it took me a long time um of reading.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Reading really opened my eyes to so many different things, even the fiction.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Isabella Hamad's book is is a great start, as is um Rachel Kushner has an essay collection um from the 2010s, in which she goes to um to Israel and reports on what she sees.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what she reports is nothing like what was reported to me.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so then I had to go back and think like was this on purpose?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, did I just or am I just missing something that everybody else knows?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of feels like it was on purpose.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was absolutely intentional.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: All of this was intentional, it's propaganda.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's the it is the Western powers that conspired with the Zionists to establish Israel in the first place back in the early 20th century to drive the Palestinians off the land, to steal this country from the Palestinians, and to hand it over to the Israelis and then to wall the Palestinians up in basically what are little more than concentration camps.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and on top of that, then you have the ongoing propaganda campaign to convince everybody that this was the right thing to do, that Israel, the Israelis are the noble uh people in this cause, and that the Palestinians are nothing but terrorists.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: The dehumanization of the Palestinians is so difficult to swallow.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we'll talk a little bit about it later, but there's a wonderful book called The Hundred Years' War on Palestine.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful in the sense that very informative and it humanizes these people in a way that someone like myself, who grew up in this propaganda campaign uh from the time I was a little kid, uh, up until now, you've we've always been taught in this country that the Israelis are are the noble people.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: They're the ones that reclaim their ancestral homeland, that there's something that we should respect about that and treasure about that.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we've never been taught the other side of it, the actual true story behind what happened.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um so I I do think, though, that the idea of Israel belongs to the Jewish people is the way I think about it now.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now that I've educated myself a little bit on this, but I don't think that the physical land that Israel sits on belongs to the Jews.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that's Palestinian land.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: So um I'll ask you, does Israel belong to the Jews?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's the short answer.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I do I do like what you said about the idea of Israel.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like I understand that my homeland is probably some former stedl in whatever Russia, Ukraine, whatever blob that is now.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't feel very connected to that.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I understand the yearning for wanting that kind of community.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: What I do is I've lived in New York for the past 25 years.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: I am a New York Jew.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is my homeland.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I feel like people get me and I'm accepted.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's been really incredible to meet so many other Jewish people who are speaking out and feeling really invigorated by the ideas of Judaism for the first time in my entire life, um, putting them into action.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: There was an Israeli politician recently crowing about the gallows they were building to hang Palestinian dissidents, a complex of gallows where they were going to do public execution of these people, and how those laws only applied to um to the Palestinians and not to to Israeli citizens.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it is right out of the Nazi playbook, and um it's so odd.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Coming out of the Second World War, uh cries of never again, uh largely the um global community was behind the idea that we could never stand by and watch this sort of thing happen again.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: And now you see the Israelis themselves, uh, the Jewish state perpetrating this on another people gleefully.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh it is dystopian, it is uh it's not beyond difficult to watch, but the cognitive dissonance of a people who have watched their ancestors go through this and to turn around and inflict it on another innocent population.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how the fuck does the Jewish community reconcile that enormous divergence?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: From reading both Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, which came out two years ago, I believe, and Molly Crabapple's most recent book um about the Jewish labor bond.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um I came to see that hurt people hurt people.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not a good justification, it's just a fact.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's I never realized the scale of it though, that an entire generation of Jews was terrified for their safety and livelihoods and therefore um position themselves over everyone else around um in modern times.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And um it that's that's a really tough pill to swallow.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm busy as fuck all the time.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's never not like six or seven things I should be doing in addition to the one thing that I'm doing at any at any given moment.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's difficult for me to to sit down and and read a book these days, but I make the effort.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in the middle of uh Sonny Rollins died.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Sonny Rollins died about three or four months ago, and it just sent me down that rabbit hole.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody that I love like that goes, and I find myself just consuming everything that I can about that person.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a wonderful novel, it's huge, it's 800 pages written by Aidan Levy called Saxophone Colossus, which is also the title of a wonderful album by Sonny.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Go check a saxophone colossus out and go check out the bridge.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Anything really I'd say before the mid-60s was Sonny.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: Sonny's a Bebop sax player, um, came out of that era back in the the 40s and and continued on um almost, you know.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think he stopped playing uh publicly 10 years or so ago, but that guy played forever.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that stuff in the late 50s and early 60s was his was his Jimmy Jam.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I love that uh that era of Sonny.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Go and listen to that stuff.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I've been reading his novel, I just haven't made it through.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: I guess the the point that I'm trying to make in a long-winded form is that the thing's huge.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's 800 pages in my defense, and it has taken me almost eight weeks.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just about done with it now, and and and I I want to go back and read it again.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'll probably do a slow read through it after this and just a few pages here and there because it is so engaging and it is such an interesting story.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't have the time to read that stuff anymore.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so many people aren't reading uh um as much as they once did.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: They do they do a study um each year, they do a survey where they reach out to households and they say, How many books did you buy in the last year?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And more and more households are aren't buying a single book.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: 40%, close to 40% now of households in this country don't buy a single book in the course of a year, which is absolutely mind-blowing to me.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Jesus.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, don't choose ignorance, is is I guess what I would say.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: If you're not reading, you're not expanding your mind.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, reading social media feeds, which is largely just AI algorithms being shoved down your throat, is not reading.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I know you read.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: I know you read two to three books a week because I did my homework and I read your reviews.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, to me, that's that's you know, that's amazing.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: How the fuck do you read two to three books a week without because as a writer, you have to have about four or five different irons in the fire at any given time if you're gonna pay your bills.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is it's very difficult to make a living as a writer.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Very few are those people that you see consistently on the bestseller list that are making millions of dollars per books.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the unicorns.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Most most people in the business that we're in are out there with every side hustle you can think of trying to make a buck to make a living at this.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a tough, it's a tough thing to do.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And to to be able to do all that and to still consume that many books is amazing to me.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: How do you find the time?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so there are a couple of things.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: One is that I read one book a week and then listen to one audiobook a week, and that counts to me.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have a dog who likes to go on long walks, and so that is a great way to listen to a book.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the other thing I should I always like to mention is I don't have kids.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: All of the work that I see so many people doing who in publishing is on top of so many other distractions from their families.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I just have a husband and a dog, and uh I am pretty lucky that I get to spend my time sort of how I want to.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: You see, that makes sense.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: I do have kids, and and it is it is time intensive, and a lot of times you don't even think about that because they're such an integral part of your life.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of the other things you don't really think about with kids, or I don't as much as I should, is what you shouldn't fucking say in front of them.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cock, sucker, motherfucker tits.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's an old George Carlin bit called the seven dirty words.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Those were the seven words supposedly that you couldn't say on television.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's back in the 70s.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: That cat was fucking funny.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um he was, you know, Richard Pryor level funny.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: And Richard Pryor did a bunch of stupid fucking movies later on in his life, but when he was on his stand-up game, that was one of the funniest guys you'll ever see in your life.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: That was Leave You Breathless with Laughter, kind of funny.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: He was that, his stand-up was blue as fuck.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: Every other word, much like me, that came out of his mouth was was fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: But he was so funny.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh uh Gary Chandling, oh man, what a loss that was.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: He was he was the same way.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Those those some there's some people that can say anything and make it funny.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Sadly, Jerry Seinfeld is one of those.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: He's a funny fucking guy.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: I saw his stand-up routine probably 10 years ago.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: This was before I knew anything about him, before he had a chance to kind of speak his mind and and um taint, I think, his legacy and and people's perspective on him.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: He's a huge, huge supporter of the state of Israel, and he is right out at the forefront of that movement to dehumanize the Palestinian people and um has compared them to the KKK, has compared uh their movement to the KKK, has actually ranked them below the Ku Klux Klan.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Jerry Seinfeld's a massive piece of shit, but I did see his stand-up routine at one point, and that's he's just one of those cats that can say just about anything and make it funny.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's that's you know, that's a real talent.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: But George Carlin was one of those guys.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits was his big bit.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he had a lot of other stuff, but that one was really, really um, you know, that was one of those memeable things back in the day, if memes had existed.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it got me to thinking about words just in general.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: When I was young, I read a lot of adult level books.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, from the time I was a kid, my dad was giving me these books that um were aimed for people that were much, much older than me, and I loved them.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of historical fiction, a lot of literary fiction kind of stuff.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you see a ton of words you never heard spoken.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody speaks a lot of these words to kids, obviously.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would never hear them pronounced.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Years later, years later, 15, 20 years later, I'd I'd hear somebody say one of those words, and I'd go, that's how that's pronounced, kind of a thing.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so if you're just a reader and you don't, and these days you have Google and stuff to go and you can go and uh and and and look up Rapacity, or you can go up and look up oligarchy or bailiwick, which is a great word uh that I'm gonna use here later on.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Try to fit that in.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Watch for that.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you couldn't do that back in the day.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: So so it's always interesting to me now to hear that.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I just like words in general, like words like wistful.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: What a bitching word that is.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Serendipity is one of my favorites because it represents that anything is possible kind of uh feeling, which I I totally did.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Cacophony was one that I didn't uh know how to pronounce when I first read it and took a long time for me to hear that.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you hear those words later on and you go, whoa, what?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: So anathema.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: I saw in one of your and I in my head when I read it, I read, I thought, oh, that's anathema, uh, because I've heard it pronounced since, but for a long, long time to me it was anathema, um, not anathema.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I think words are fascinating.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: I like that kind of shit.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: As a writer, as somebody who's uses words to paint their picture, that's you know, that's the palette we work from.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I like to talk about words.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: I guess with audiobooks, I'm not a big audiobook consumer, but uh, I guess if you if the person who's narrating it knows what the fuck they're talking about, right?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: They would probably get the pronunciations right.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that would kind of fix that, although that's kind of audiobooks are kind of cheating.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I now listen to a lot of audiobooks, and that really does key me into the fact that there are some words that I've never really heard spoken aloud.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: I can't think of a good example right now, but I'm always finding them.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then of course, uh the flip side is I'm finding words that are pronounced wrong too.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: So here's two words pronounced correctly, uh, and way worse than shit, piss fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, or even tits.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Which really tits.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Tits was my dad loved the expression sucking hind tit when I wasn't when I wasn't meeting the standard he was looking for.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so that one seems pretty benign.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, artificial fucking intelligence.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: So fuck AI.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we're gonna talk about AI.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, we're gonna talk about AI.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that'll ever do a podcast where we don't talk about AI to some extent.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: You can't not not talk about AI these days because it is so pervasive and it is uh is insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives in in a very destructive way, I believe, in most instances.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: My wife was talking with my wife recently, and she took the other side of this argument to try to point out all the great things that it could do.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I mean, it it doesn't take that much imagination to realize all the wonderful things that AI could do, but it's not going to, because the people that are developing it are doing so with no constraints and they have no moral or ethical constraints.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they don't have that built-in um uh gate to stop them from doing the things they shouldn't do.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's just full speed ahead.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Bill Gates wrote uh an essay here a month or so ago about this, and and and you have to listen, no matter what you may think of him as a person, um, and I think I have a less caustic view of him than some people do, um, because of his philanthropy.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yes, nobody's perfect.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: You can point out all kinds of bad shit about the guy, but but at the end of the day, I will say this about him.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: That guy knows the nuts and bolts, right?
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: He knows he can code like a from what I understood about him, he is brilliant.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't just manage a business, a la Elon Musk, who doesn't know jack shit about anything, but he can manage a business, right?
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'll give him that.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: But Bill Gates actually knows his shit.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he wrote an essay which basically said, here's all the wonderful things AI could do, but it ain't you, it's not going to have the opportunity because here's all the horrible shit that can come out of it, and the people that are controlling it are directing it in such a way that this is what AI is going to mean, uh, just in general to society.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then we bring that down to this microcosm of what we do as writers, uh, and we it we look at not just our own personal perspective on on whether or not we would use it, which I would never fucking use AI.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: I would never use it in a creative sense.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I would never use it even in in some of the ways I see some people who are writing nonfiction and whatnot using, hey, I use it to parse this material, I use it to, you know, um, to to sort through these documents and that kind of thing to do research for me.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: I just try to stay away from AI in general.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: But there are some authors out there who are embracing it and who are um saying, yes, I use it in a creative sense.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: I use it as a springboard for ideas.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'll write a chapter of my novel and feed it through an AI entity, and then I'll I'll I'll go back through it after the fact and polish up what the AI has done with my original draft.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, AI is writing a great deal of your novel.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: You're no longer a writer.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're collaborating with an artificial entity that has pirated the fuck out of everything out there that's on the internet and every piece of human knowledge, everything that makes us humans, every novel that's been written, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, I mean, all of that stuff is available out there, and all of that stuff is being harvested and pirated and scraped off the internet constantly and resynthesized and regurgitated and vomited back out onto us by these AI, um, these LLMs.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And anybody that thinks that that's not Armageddon coming from us, that's fucking, you know, matrix-level shit that's going on already.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: And this shit is in its infancy.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: So fuck AI, Seven Ways from Sunday.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so for writers, you know, you we bring it down to our little bailiwick.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: And um and to me, when I see people using it and using it, that's it's bad enough if you're lying about it.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you're using it surreptitiously and trying to hide it, well, I guess at least you have some shame.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: But the people that are doing it openly are pissing me off.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: You're fucking over yourself and the entire human community.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Your gains are going to be that long because pretty soon AI will not need you.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I don't know, maybe they're trying to get there as while they can, but um it's an enormous fuck you to those of us who are actually doing the work and who would never ever in a million years use AI.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: What a fucking betrayal.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that we are accomplishing right now is shaming people a little bit into um not using AI to create.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think uh a big Big distinction here is that large language modules have been trained on other people's work.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so anytime you're using an LLM, you are using a plagiarized uh system.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that to me is a deal breaker.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: That to me means that predictive text is just not something you should be using.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um I don't know what we're gonna do.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: I the the thing that keeps me up at night is there are so many authors who are excited to write their own stuff.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are others who maybe want to trick us, maybe want to trick their publisher.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think we're equipped to tell the difference.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: I I worry about, you know, if an agent submits a novel that they think is really good, and an editorial assistant reads it and recommends it.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's their job to try to distinguish if this is real or if this is not.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so the ones that are getting caught, um several big book deals, and I read about one, I think it was two and a half million dollars, and I don't know, I think it was a multi-book deal as well.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: They were, I mean, it had made it all the way through the process.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: This guy got an agent, they'd chopped it around.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think there was a bidding war, it made it, it got picked up by one of the big five publishers.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: They got all the way through the process, and it's a long process, a long vetting process to get to the point where you're gonna sign the actual contract.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And they were right there.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they were literally the pen was descending down onto the paper, kind of thing, before they said, no, we think this how we they they thought it was AI generated.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: They ultimately said no, this novel that everybody wanted, that everybody loved, that all these people have read.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: We have finally decided that it was AI written or AI assisted.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they pulled the plug.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: This there's been multiple stories like this, but I'm thinking of one in particular that happened um recently.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought to myself, how did it get that far?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: How the fuck do you get that far down the line with something like this before you realize that it is uh it was either AI generated or at least AI assisted?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you know for sure?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: If it's that hard to figure out, if it's that hard to know if it was AI assisted, um, how can you be positive as you pull the plug on it?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Or are you just doing it on the off chance?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we think it might be, and we don't want to get caught up in that.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it it's such um it's such a difficult uh balancing act to try to not reward the users of AI, but at the same time to not penalize people who are just really good fucking writers and you happen to think that it's AI.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how do you know?
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: Who the fuck knows?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Who's making these decisions and how are they making them?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I the the AI detectors are AI themselves.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't like I and and I do I actually don't know.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think people in book publishing are constantly feeding their work through these um AI detectors.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I but I do think that right now we're working on good faith that most people when they sign up a book or at least most publishers in their contract say this work is original.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if you attest to that legally, uh, I think I think they can believe you.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what happens towards the end when publishers suddenly drop a book.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: I do know that there are about three or four big cases uh in the past couple of months, and every single one of those authors was a person of color.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think that the only people getting away, almost getting away, with using AI, um, are a certain group of people.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: The whole idea that people of color are being penalized disproportionately or exclusively, uh, and that and that we're not seeing uh white people um being being put through the same level of scrutiny and facing the same consequences is something that's totally believable.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, anybody that thinks that that's not what's happening is is delusional, and they're living in an alternate universe.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: When we see what's going on with with this administration, with the purge of women and people in color of color from the military, from governmental positions, um, when we see what the Supreme Court and the Republican Party are doing as they reinstitute basically a new Jim Crow era, uh, when they take us back to the dark ages, and and and I I've seen multiple, multiple, and they've been purging the military in general of anybody that's not going to be loyal to Trump, and that should scare the Jesus out of everybody.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: But they've also, as people are coming, there was a whole thing where people were coming up for promotion.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: They had a list of people that were due for promotion, that had recommended for promotion, that had served honorable careers in the military and were they were ready to get up to that next level and all the things that go with that.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're talking about more responsibility, more pay.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's like any job, you know, you always want to climb that ladder, you always want that next thing and all the benefits that come with it.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: And these people had earned that and they'd served our country honorably and they were due for promotion, they were ready, they were deserving of promotion.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was Heg Seth went through and they just nixed all the people of color and all the women.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: I they don't even hide it.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: They just no, you're gone, you're gone, you're gone, you're gone, you're gone.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: All that's left are all the white guys who are MAGA heads.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't know that it it so when I see that somebody says, well, it's the people of color that are disproportionately getting targeted when we look at all these AI stuff, of course, of course it is, of course it is.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: How could that not be in the world that we live in?
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and God, everybody just falls into line.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so if that's what the literary industry doing is doing, and I always thought the literary industry, because of what we do, because it's creative, because it's all about allowing people to experience different perspectives and allowing people to immerse themselves in things that we might not necessarily personally believe in, but everybody has the right to explore within their own mind anything that they want to.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Long as you're not imposing your shit on me, uh, I'm fine with that.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's what freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought is all about.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: If the literary industry, who I think should be at the forefront of the movement to protect that, are complicit in trying to limit those voices that are getting out there.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: As a writer, how could that, how, you know, that's just like the worst possible fucking scenario, and I believe every bit of it.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't surprise me in the least.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't know, everybody's just falling into line.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, where's the resistance?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: Where's the resistance in general to not just the literary business doing this, but the fucking country as a whole doing this, the MAGA heads doing this to us?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: And even though that's less than half the country, dictating to the rest of us what our lives are going to be like and quashing our our freedoms, um, uh robbing us of all the things we were raised to believe were uh inherently our rights as human beings, and we're just letting them get away with it.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't know.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's uh it's toothless.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh any any resistance in this country um is is it's not feudal, it's just unrealized at this point.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and what a shit show.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's my take on that whole fucking mess.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh okay, a great book that everybody should go by.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Something that you've read recently that just blew your mind, and you said, man, this this is the one people should go and buy this book.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is so funny, like laugh out loud, funny, and then so incredibly, incredibly dark at the same time.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just in awe of how he managed to do that.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Maris, Maris Kreitzman.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for coming on.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: This was really, really fun.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where can we find you and uh what do you have going on?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: What should people know about?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I have a newsletter called The Maris Review.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you go to themarisreview.com, you can sign up.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: I write about two books every week um because I love it.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you can also find me on Blue Sky.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at Maris.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you dug the episode today, please like, follow, subscribe, ring the bell, do whatever you have to do on whatever fucking platform you're watching this on so you can find your way back to us for the next one.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then jump over to my Substack and take a look at my writing.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a novel over there called The Cavitation Chronicles.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm writing it as I go and releasing it in serial form.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: It comes out on the first of each month.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: The first chapter is already up.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: That first chapter is free just to see if you dig it.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's dark, it's dank, it's funny, it's profane.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's a sci-fi space run.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: 15th of each month, short stories drop.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: I've got some of those already up, some of those are free as well.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: I write essays about music, I write essays about writing, I write essays about anything I feel like writing an essay about.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: You can also find an excerpt from the existential awakening of one particular Mexican girl, which is the current novel that I have out.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: That was released by Between the Lines Publishing about six weeks ago.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: It is kicking ass out there.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: The reviews are off the charts good.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so pick up a copy of that.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: You can get that at Barnes and Noble, you can get that at Amazon, uh, pretty much anywhere you can get a book.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we will see you guys on the next one.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: This music you hear coming in is uh Uncle Dave and the Juju Beans.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: This song is called Cumberland Road.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's off the it's only rocking the stupid album.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: The whole album kicks it out, but this song is fucking great.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: So check this out.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: And uh come back and see us next time.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: Ciao ciao, adios.