Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we’re talking 60 Minutes, LLMs, sandwiches, great history class movies, and more.
Your letters:
Kevin:
With Bari Weiss hiring another columnist dipshit to lead another prestigious arm of CBS News, what do you make of the journalists hanging around there? You and the Defector group went through something similar and ultimately made the daring (and necessary) flip to owning your own site, so you have experience. Though I doubt we’ll see anything like that kind of decision with CBS, I wonder your thoughts on the whole thing from that perspective?
Let me just get everyone else caught up before I answer. Bari Weiss, a truly unremarkable woman who always follows orders from President Boo-ump by deed, if never by word, fired a bunch of top-level producers and correspondents at 60 Minutes, and then hired equally unremarkable pen-seeker Nick Bilton to run that show. When veteran correspondent Scott Pelley lit into Bilton at their first all-hands meeting, Bilton fled the room—presumably with his diaper filled to the brim—and then fired Pelley two days later. This past weekend, Pelley gave an interview to Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times, in which he detailed his new bosses’ treachery in even greater detail. Here’s one quote from that interview that rang all too familiar with me, and with every other Defector staffer who worked for Deadspin:
One of the things Nick Bilton said in that ill-fated email to the staff was that he was excited—I’m paraphrasing here—to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondents. And when I saw that, I thought, “They’re going to fire all of us, eventually.”
Seven years ago, Deadspin was purchased by a similarly incompetent bunch of corporate goons. What followed was a series of events that has been recapped many times before, and eventually we all walked off the job.
I was one of the last Deadspinners to quit. I was nervous about losing health insurance for me and my family, especially since I had no other salaried job lined up as a fallback option. Like everyone else, I knew Deadspin was living on borrowed time, but I was silently committed to playing out the string for as long as I could. It wasn’t long before I realized that idea was untenable.
So when I read about the dismantling of 60 Minutes, it reminded me of that bizarre limbo period of 2019, where we all knew the end was coming, while simultaneously hoping that it never would. There are marked differences here, of course. Deadspin was merely a popular sports blog. 60 Minutes is the most venerated, not to mention most popular, news program in American television history. But the dynamics feel awfully familiar. Pelley teared up multiple times in his interview with Garcia-Navarro, because he truly loved his job and never wanted to leave it. I never wanted to leave Deadspin, either, and I cried when I did.
I imagine that the remaining 60 Minutes correspondents—Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim—feel equally conflicted. They said they wanted to stay with CBS to help keep 60 Minutes alive, and I believe them. Work that long at a place and you feel some measure of ownership over it, even if you have no literal ownership. You feel responsible for its prosperity, because you love it just that much. I felt the same way about Deadspin, so I don’t think of the 60 Minutes holdouts as cowards or turncoats. I think of them as vulnerable professionals who love their work and simply wish to keep doing it for as long as they can. They know they’re doomed, but walking away from the best job you’ll ever have is hard. That’s true even if you have a lot of money and if, like Stahl, you’re well past retirement age. There’s also the matter of denial at play here, because Weiss and Bilton are so deeply, deeply unqualified for the positions they hold. Again I hand the mic to Pelley to explain:
Television’s not [Bari Weiss’s] thing. This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, “There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.” I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, “Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.”
That still gnaws at me, too. These media properties, as well as the entire country, are currently being run by people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. THAT is what pains me. I’ve worked my ass off to be good at what I do, and Pelley worked harder than that. Exponentially harder. You not only disrespect people like Pelley when you burn these places to the ground, you also disrespect—if not outright destroy—the remarkable body of work those people put together.
Because 60 Minutes was a great television show. It was the show that made me realize, back in college, that a well-made news program could be entertaining, even when it was about bleak shit. Now it will die, slowly at first, and then all at once. And, unlike a sports blog, 60 Minutes isn’t something that its former employees can simply up and restart on their own. That show takes an unfathomable amount of resources, money, and man hours to produce. Even if another network attempts to boot up their own version of it with the castaways, it won’t be the same show. It can’t be. Once Bari Weiss kills 60 Minutes, it’s killed for good. I’m betting that Jon Wertheim and his coworkers know this as well.
Pete:
At the beginning of each year, I show my World History classes Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It’s a quaint and low-stakes way of introducing the importance of studying World History, plus it has so many technologies and services that confound them, like public phones, gas stations that rent movies, and classrooms without screens, and it is most triumphant. We are at the merciful end of this year, and I decided to show the sequel, Bogus Journey. They believed it to be very bogus, indeed. Is there a better movie to celebrate the end of the year?
Dazed and Confused. Not even a question, amigo. First of all, it takes place in the past, which makes it history. Secondly, it also features many past technologies that would confound modern teens, such as cars that don’t have rear-camera technology, standard-definition televisions, and hazing. Thirdly, it’s the end of the school year, so who gives a shit? The best thing you can do as a teacher is give your students something cool to watch. The kids won’t complain, and neither will anyone else. My kids still have another week of school left to go after this one and they’re dragging. They have nothing left to give, and their teachers don’t, either. A June school day is basically an eight-hour study hall. I can’t wait for them to be set free so that we can all fuck off to the beach together.
Also, I saw Bogus Journey when it was released and remember basically none of it. I tried getting my own kids to watch the original and they were staring at their phones within the first 10 minutes. Tragic.
Dan:
With how critical you are of the current administration, have you ever worried about retaliation in some form? Not necessarily from Dear Leader, although we know how eager he is to go after someone that pushes back against him, but more so from his followers.
I’m not. I’ve been doing this for so long that I’m used to threats from trolls, racists, and Duck Dynasty fanboys. That shit comes with the territory when you’re a journalist, which I occasionally purport to be. You have to accept it. And you can’t be cowed by it, otherwise you’re only helping the bad guys. I have had family members express some misgivings about my open disdain for President Asswipe and the like, and I don’t want to cause them any more dread than they already feel. So I make an effort to not draw TOO many psychopaths my way but, at the same time, I’m not scared of the bad guys. I’m smarter than them, as is everyone I work with at both Defector and SFGATE. As are you. The only way people this incompetent flourish is through fear. Withhold your fear, and they cave. History has proven this to be true over and over again. So, with that in mind, I would like to cordially invite Pete Hegseth to suck my balls.
Jay:
Would you rather see your favorite local sandwich chain close, or be bought out by private equity and instantly become 60 percent worse? This recently happened to me (Dave’s Cosmic Subs, I’ll put ’em on blast). What was once an elite sub shop is now a shell of its former self: lower quality ingredients, signature sauce now all runny, a switch from Dirty brand chips (IYKYK) to basic-ass Lay’s, no free pickle, etc. I still dabble every so often, and it’s fine, but part of me wishes it would’ve died a noble death instead of taunting me with a shittier version of past glory.
Oh, the Dirty potato chips are clutch. I always enjoy those when I spot a bag on sale out in the wild. Anyway, I’d rather my local sandwich shop stay a sandwich shop, even if it’s a worse one. Because you know what happens if that joint closes entirely? That’s right: It becomes a Capital One branch. Why are there still so many bank branches being built? It doesn’t make any sense! We have electronic banking now! I know that Capital One wants to pretend that its branches are different because you can buy a stale Danish inside of one, but it’s still a fucking bank. Restaurants beat banks every time.
Of course, that means that I tacitly accept the idea of an elite sandwich shop being downgraded to a Subway. This goddamn country gives customers nothing but bad choices. Annoying. Now I want an Italian sub swimming in vinegar. Curse you, Jay.
Phil:
Why is it a faux pas to wear a shirt of the band you’re seeing live? I’ve always heard that you “don’t want to be that guy” but what exactly is that type of guy? It’s socially acceptable (and expected) to wear a jersey to a sporting event, but wouldn’t it make sense to wear a Metallica shirt to a Metallica show? I never understood why it’s considered such a no-no. Can you help explain this?
I cannot. All I know is that when someone told me it was uncool to do this, I made sure to never do it. Such is my fear of looking uncool. At 49. At a rock concert attended exclusively by other 49-year-old men. The only tangible reason I can give you for this rule is that wearing the band’s shirt to a show is boring. You’re already at a Metallica show, you don’t need to wear one of their shirts to make it official.
You know what I do think is cool, though? Seeing people in other bands’ shirts at a show. Like if I’m at that Metallica concert and I see a dude in a Mastodon shirt, I’m gonna think to myself, “Fuck yeah! Mastodon!” I’m crazy deep like that.
HALFTIME!
Paul:
Why do people who oppose LLMs still default to calling them “AI?” We need to accurately tell everyone that they’re incapable of thought, that they generate words based on arbitrary guesswork, and have been programmed to not write things like, “It’s debatable whether the Holocaust occurred.” I think the more we tell the average person the truth, the more we can fight Brin, Page, Musk, Zuckerberg, and the rest of those assholes.
This is a good point. The “AI” bubble has been, like so many things, a triumph of empty branding. It’s like real estate developers buying up land in a shit area and re-christening its post office address as “Harmony Landing” or whatever the fuck. Same deal here. Calling your fancy searchbot an “LLM” is dry and boring. Sounds like the name of a graduate degree that makes you no money. No one would give a shit about a company called OpenLLM. But when you brand that same product “AI,” you’ve suddenly found an easy way to capture the public imagination. Just as these bots steal intellectual property from every corner of world history, the marketing teams behind them have also traded on many of those same properties to co-opt the popular idea of artificial intelligence that those artworks helped cultivate.
The result is that a lot of people mistakenly buy into the idea of Claude being artificially intelligent, not just because it’s been labeled as such, but because they want to believe it to be so. That’s almost certainly one of the reasons why I’ve gone along in calling these LLM products “AI.” Part of me wants there to be AI. I certainly want cool future robots that speak as many languages as C-3PO. I want flying cars. I want aliens to land and chill with us. I’ve wanted these future visions made manifest ever since I was a child. Well, here’s some asswipe from Silicon Valley telling the world, “We made it for you!” Bingo bango, I’m ready to be had, same as everyone else.
That’s why I assumed, wrongly, that LLMs would prove genuinely valuable to the future world. Then I tested out all of the LLM bots and came away equal parts bored and underwhelmed. If these things really are intelligent, which they aren’t, they’re not doing anything terribly interesting with all of that brainpower. Certainly nothing worth the price of having your local elementary school bulldozed to make way for a new data center. So yeah, I won’t call that shit AI anymore. I also won’t call it slop because, as with our Brandy Jensen, that term gets on my nerves for some reason. I’ll just call them LLMs, because these deserve a name that’s just as forgettable as they themselves are.
Brian:
I’ve seen you rail against AI on Bluesky and in your posts. Are you against all AI? My son is special needs (autism), and AI helped diagnose him faster leading to earlier intervention. It also helps in his communication technology and tracking his progression. I can understand your disdain for AI as a writer and a creative person, but is your disdain for all of AI everywhere and if so, why?
This goes right to what I was talking about up above. Another great marketing trick the Altmans of the world pulled was to label ALL of their shit as “AI.” Stick that goofy sphincter icon in the corner of your webpage and OMG IT’S POWERED BY AI! But it’s clearly not one product. It’s LLMs, it’s LLM-powered web editors, it’s automated graphic design … it’s an entire suite of garbage, all of it mislabeled.
In fact, I’ll go ahead and just say that these companies have affixed the “AI” branding mechanism to otherwise basic internet products, just to make them scan as fresher to consumers. Now, as much damage as the digital revolution has done to society at large, I love me some internet. I wouldn’t have a lot of shit—my career included!—without it. So if, like Brian, you’ve had an “AI”-branded product help you, or your doctor, find vital information, that affection doesn’t need to apply to all “AI”-branded products, nor do you have to credit “AI” at all.
But if you do credit it to “AI,” or to your doctor using a diagnostic tool that someone branded “AI,” you’re playing into Silicon Valley’s de facto internet relaunch, and convincing yourself that at least some of their shit is technology you can no longer live without. It’s untrue. You have to allow for the possibility that, were ChatGPT to never have existed, someone like Brian here still would have found answers about his son’s condition through some other means. I swear I’m not trying to be pedantic. I’m so glad that you, Brian, and your son found the answers that you were both looking for. But give people the credit for it, not the machines.
Jack:
Is this a case of me just being old now, or has the sound volume in theaters become way too loud in recent years? Not sure when I first noticed this. Maybe five, ten years ago?
(Once again this may be because I’m older than you, but the movie Pressure, which you commented on last week, is actually pretty good.)
First of all, I totally believe that Pressure is a good movie, especially with that cast. I made a cheap joke about how its premise—the film is about the weather forecasting for D-Day—represented the bottom of the WWII movie pitch barrel. But I didn’t really mean it. I know how much the weather mattered that day, and I appreciate the filmmakers approaching the story from that angle, as opposed to whatever angle to it currently exists inside the empty head of Pete Hegseth. Also, commenter QualityContorl pointed out last week that WWII deserves to inspire an endless number of works, because it was the deadliest conflict in history and one of the most genuinely important events the world has ever known. They’re right, and I am now duly chastened. After all, the moral lesson of WWII—fascism is bad—seems to have been lost. Guess we have to keep hammering that point home for all the neo-Nazis currently occupying public office.
Now, about the loud theater thing. You’re probably not imagining it. Theaters want to show off their fancy new sound systems and, more important, they want to drown out whatever ambient noise the audience will make. You know how every showing includes a little PSA about how you should silence your phone and keep quiet during the movie? Americans don’t care about that shit anymore. They’ll gladly bring two screaming infants and an airhorn to the movie with them if they feel like it. Thus, chains have no choice but to drown them out.
Personally speaking, I haven’t had many problems with the onslaught. That’s not because I’m deaf (hearing loss makes loud noise more painful, not less), but because I like my shit loud. When I watch movies in my basement, I jack the volume up so high that my wife/kids will come downstairs to complain about it. The only time I really couldn’t handle the sound was at a screening—I don’t remember which film—where the pre-roll of ads was utterly deafening. I was in so much agony that I left the auditorium and asked one of the managers to turn it down some. They didn’t, so I basically hung out in the lobby until the pre-roll was finished. Fucking advertisers, man. They’ll stop at nothing.
Matt:
Have there ever been any discussions about doing a Why Your Team Sucks for college football? I feel like there’d be sooooooo much grist for the mill. In some ways, perhaps more than even the NFL teams. I’m sure Ray and Israel would crush it!
I’m sure they would, but there are a lot more college football teams than there are NFL teams, and doing 32 separate NFL previews is already a monumental pain in the ass. But hey, if you think YOUR favorite program sucks ass, go right ahead and send us an email this summer about why and maybe I’ll run it here. I’m not above crowdsourcing.
Smitty:
I noticed a couple years ago that the distinctive grill design on BMWs looks like Hitler’s mustache and now it’s all I can see when I pass one. Turns out BMW used to have regular-looking grills but introduced the Hitler-ish design in 1933, the same year he became the nation’s Chancellor. My question: Why has Tesla not introduced a yellow combover roof design on its vehicles yet? Or a really fat back end?
Huh, I never thought of the BMW grille as a Hitler ‘stache. I’d tell you that I can never un-see that going forward, but that’s a lie. It’ll still just look like a BMW to me. Besides, it’s not like I’ve ever had positive associations with the BMW brand name. People who drive Beamers around here are entitled pricks.
Email of the week!
Brian:
Earlier today my wife headed out for a girls’ weekend. Sounds good, a quiet weekend home for me with the dog, some beer and some rolling-the-dice-here Mexican food. I get the car cleaned (first time in way too long) then go pick up the dog from daycare. She is young with tons of energy, so we use the daycare to keep her energy in check and make sure she is well socialized.
We’re about 75 percent of the way home and the dog abruptly throws up, first on the dog pad thing, then down in the footwell. I’m driving so I can’t see it well, but of course it reeks. Get home without further incident and shove her into the back yard, then I take stock of the car. There is *so* much dog puke, and on inspection she has clearly been puking up dog shit.
I spend the next 45 minutes hosing down the dog pad so it can go in the washing machine and the floor mat so it can dry. Then I clean up the additional three puke piles she has created out back, and then I hose down the towels I used so *they* can go in the washing machine when the dog pad is done. I also have to scrub the car interior where needed.
I don’t have kids, and can confidently say this is the most disgusting thing I’ve dealt with since college. No real question, I’m just slightly shell shocked and my wife isn’t available to sympathize. It could have been worse! The dog could have rolled around in it or something. Still, shit seems like about the worst thing to throw up, and cleaning up someone else’s shit vomit seems really unfair.
I’m going to have one of those beers now, I hope your weekend gets off to a better start than mine.
I can guarantee that, friend.
Recommended
