Thanks, everyone, thank you for listening in.

I guess it’s true that everybody lies, or more accurately, everybody tells lies at one frequency or another. I see the world as divided into three categories:

1.     The intentional liars. These are the blatant ones, the true assholes, who basically know that something is not true when they say it, but they say it anyway because it gets them some advantage or another. Just as when you think of pedophilia, you now think of either Jeffrey Epstein or the Catholic Church, when someone mentions liars, a lot of people think, politicians. They tell a couple of kinds of lies. One is the flat-out thing that is not true and they damn well know it. The current president of the United States may come to mind, perhaps? The fucker is all over the place. Making stuff up on the spot, saying something he knows isn’t true, giving various different answers to the same question over a period of a few days, and the classic waffling that all other politicians do, that is, speaking words but not answering the question, or, one of my favourites, answering a question with confidence and authority, but the problem is that it’s not the question he was asked.

Another group of intentional liars are men who just want to get laid. I don’t think they dare say, for example, that the thing is 8 inches when it’s 4 at best and in dim lighting, but they flatter the woman, act nice when they generally spend their time swearing at the TV at videogames they happen to be losing, and overall use any trick or quip or joke or piece of language to get the woman to think that, Oh, my, he really likes me.

2.     The ignorant liars. This is when the lies are less stark, and the person may be somewhat aware that they are lying, or not aware at all, or somewhere in between where they’ve concluded that for the sake of their own convenience or someone else’s feelings, it’s better to lie. A few examples:

·        “And so I am pretty sure I did well on the interview even though it got off to a rocky start.” (The truth: he swore twice during the first three sentences of his answer to the first question, answered two other questions, I’m not really sure, but finished strongly with a defence of Game of Thrones as the best TV show ever made.)

·        “I’ll call you.” (This can range anywhere from a man she’s met to a business acquaintance from Calgary that she abhors.)

·        “No, no, no, it looks good on you.”

3.     The situational liars. These can be good people, trustworthy even, but they don’t like to look bad in front of other people. So they make shit up. I once had a handyman tell me that the squeaking sound I heard in my bedroom wasn’t from the laminate he’d installed, but was actually coming from the walls. Another one might be if you’re stopped by the police in your car, and you tell them that you’ve only had one beer when in fact you’ve had two, because you’re confident you can drive with just two in you and you’ve concluded that you don’t look sloshed enough for him to give you a breath test.

Lies are generally not a good thing. But, if you really want to get yourself in shit, start telling everyone the truth.

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I hate to bring up this topic—well, that’s the kind of lead-in you have with someone when you have some bad news to share, or more likely have some chastisement to hand out. Like, she’s your roommate but she’s not doing her share of the chores. Or some dude you met on the squash court at the YMCA is now crashing at your place for a while, and you have to tell him that not only are his showers not frequent enough, but “a while” has now just surpassed three weeks.

I want to talk about AI, or A1 as Linda McMahon calls it. I’ve been using it pretty regularly over the past couple of months and like many people I often use it instead of plain old Google as my search tool. I’ve used Google Gemini and ChatGPT, but not Elon Musk’s Grok, which seems to be chiefly designed so that you can create videos of young girls having sex. I guess he really misses his excursions to Epstein’s island.

The first thing I’d say is that we’ve had the internet since, what, the late 1980s, and it’s only in the last couple of years that the billionaires who build the search tools have realized that the optimum way of finding an answer to a question is not to slap a few keywords into a search box, and then be presented with 200,000 URLs for webpages to make your way through. Oh, and they were so proud of that single search box, having it sit there all by itself on the search page, all minimalist and promising the power of retrieving information. Sure, it looked great. But it was like a guy dressed in a thousand-dollar Italian suit and wearing eyeglasses that signalled that he was definitely smart, and then when you asked him a question he just printed out a stack of paper that went up to his knee, told you to pick it up and make sure to lift with your legs and not to hurt your back, and told you all you had to do was to go through each and every one of those links.

So, I’m not sure if AI is going to take over all human jobs or even eventually kill off our whole species (more about that later), but I consider the big improvement has already happened: some intern in a T-shirt and jeans figured out that since Google and others had access to all the internet or most of it, couldn’t they just give people not a fucking results list, but a well-organized few paragraphs with an actual answer. It apparently took forty years to figure that out.

So I’ve been using them both, ChatGPT and Gemini, to find information, and I give them both credit that they both admit that they do make mistakes. And I can confirm that they definitely do. In some cases, they act a bit like the liar I was talking about who makes up some bullshit story when he gets caught. An example … I’m a big fan of standup comedian Patton Oswalt, especially his earlier CDs (yes, they were CDs then), and one called Feelin’ Kinda Patton. I listened to that thing probably a hundred times and so I know it like an evangelical Christian knows the Book of Job (or as Linda McMahon calls it, the Book of Job [jawb]). I knew that the line about the bad neighbourhood he lived in in San Francisco was at the corner of “mug whitey and stab whitey,” and that after that he went on with his bit. Gemini insisted the line might have been from Richard Pryor and that there was a further continuation of the “corner of” piece.

Anyway, maybe that’s too specific. Let me just say, first, about whether it will take our jobs. I think that is obvious. Hopefully and probably not all of them, but there will be jobs lost the same way there are now that we have ATMs and self-serve checkouts. As for AI destroying us. Well, it has to be admitted that we deserve it. We’ve fucked up the planet like a metal band in a hotel room in the 1990s, and, well—I have to get back to lying, and more, again. There are some nice people on the planet (I personally know about a half dozen or so of them) but in the aggregate we are atrocious. Lying, money grubbing, warmongering, cheating on people we supposedly love, killing people, stepping on puppies, and on it goes. We don’t deserve to be here. Can someone work on that smart bomb again, the one that used to kill people but leave buildings intact, and this time make it species specific: kill all Homo sapiens, or Home sapiens sapiens as we’ve taken to calling ourselves, and just leave the dignified species like cockroaches and crocodiles and all the rest here.