Would you try this?

In the very near future, you’ll be able to have a conversation with an AI version of yourself that looks and sounds exactly like you. It will be like talking to a clone of yourself on FaceTime. It’s impossible to overstate just how much severe mental illness this will cause, and…

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 16, 2025

I wouldn’t. Not for any principled reason but because it’s boring.

I agree with Matt, though, that for people without a strong sense of self and those with narcissistic injuries this will be both irresistible and damaging.

AI will mean more stratification and more people trapped in a favela of body and mind.

A very flawed person can create amazing art, generate crucial ideas, and do something very worthwhile for others.

Conversely, all art, ideas, and worthwhile things were created by very flawed people.

Because all people are flawed.

I can’t believe some moron journalist pestered Trump with questions about the Tucker – Fuentes interview. Seriously, a podcast interview from all that time ago is so urgently important?

I’m disappointed in people.

Another little productivity hack is that the time on my computer is always set an hour ahead. Every day I receive a nice jolt of surprise when I realize I have an extra hour.

Milwaukee is such a decent place. At the airport, there’s a large used-books store where you can buy great literature for the flight instead of the usual overpriced magazines and motivational reads.

My haul:

If you aren’t reading Wallace Stegner yet, you should start. He’s phenomenal. I’m reading his The Angle of Repose, and I plan to clutch this collection of short stories to my chest while I’m reading the novel. Two Stegners at once, what can be better?

Loving your country means loving its literature. Stegner is some of the very best in American letters. He’s also a fascinating person, married to his wife for 59 years in a profound relationship that inspired much of his writing.

There’s more grading today, and this gave me a chance to listen to more Tucker. It’s fascinating that every show, every topic is led towards the idea that there should be a civil war. “This country can’t stay whole. The states are too different. The political factions are too distant from each other ideologically. How can we stay one country? We are clearly no longer one country. We are too different. These conflicts can’t be reconciled. We are too different. We aren’t one country.”

Everything else—the chemtrails, the mustachioed nun, the conspiracies—are background for this one idea advanced with the relentlessness of a metronome. Civil war, civil war, civil war.

I’m very glad I listened to several shows in a row because it’s easy to miss what’s really happening otherwise.

The grift is absolutely shameless. Musk’s X algorithm puts a post with 200 likes as major news because the post is pro-mass migration.

I’m very low-engagement on X but I routinely get way over 200 likes. It’s really not a big deal to get this number of likes on the platform. You can say “so true” in response to somebody’s tweet and get several times the engagement of this stupid post about Dubai.

I don’t get promoted by the algorithm, though.

I have never felt more understood:

I even remember what the essay was about: a denunciation of the horribly socialistic and twerpy Mexican author Elena Poniatowska. I had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and got an A+ on it but the horror of that moment remains engraved on my brain.

So I listened to two 2-hour shows by Tucker Carlson and, OK, don’t judge. I had six 15-page research papers to grade. I have scared the students away from even winking in the direction of AI, which means I have to correct every article, accent, and conjugation. To be able to do it in one sitting (while I’m at a conference where I’m one of the organizers and trying to write an urgent article and managing the department in little breaks between events), I have to listen to something. Not a work of literature, obviously, but something that will keep me on point.

Yes, I have a weird brain that requires me to listen to something in a different language from the one in which I’m grading.

And so what I have to say is, Tucker is a very talented dude. Talented. The shows are great. He’s completely nuts, of course, but so talented. It’s a pity he got bitten by that demon. Because this talent plus a moderately sane message would be really powerful. He interviews complete duds and manages to make them sound better and more interesting than they could ever hope. One interviewee was some Armenian lady, embarrassingly coarse, but Tucker made her sound almost kind of not terrible.

I’m upset with that demon. The demon robbed us.

On the positive side, I finished my grading. In this one course. I have two more to go.

People, I most seriously recommend breaking up your projects in small bits and dedicating 30 minutes a day or so to each project. The moment I started doing it, I stopped flailing and feeling stressed. I cover a bit of each of my projects every morning, and there’s a definite feeling of advancing on all of them. The panic and the stress are gone.