The Ben Mulroney Show - Has Grok lost its mind? And the trans debate rages on in Alberta

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

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Try the Nashville Hot lineup at Pizza Hut. Your mouth will get it. at Pizza Hut. Your mouth will get it. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. It is Wednesday, July 8th. Thank you so much for joining us. And this show has been growing in waves, right? So when we first started, it was a radio show,

and then we added the podcast component. So at the top of a lot of segments, I would say join us on the podcast. And we're gonna be talking about the podcast. And we're gonna be talking about the podcast. And we're gonna be talking about the podcast. radio show, and then we added the podcast component. So at the top of a lot of segments, I would say, join us on all the podcast platforms.

And there was a streaming app, and I told you to do that as well. And then we added YouTube, which is why I'm staring down the barrel of the camera, although I'm very bad at maintaining eye contact with something that is not an eye. And so we said, join us on YouTube, just find us at Ben Mulrooney and enjoy the content

that we post all day long. But now we've added all sorts of social media channels. I believe that we're on X and on TikTok and on Instagram. And our growth on Instagram has been really significant quite quickly. And I thank everyone for joining us. The way I like to say it is you can enjoy, it's sort of like test driving the show.

You can watch a short clip and if you like that, then you can follow us on all those other platforms. But also what we wanna do is we want the stories that we talk about and we want the opinions that we put forth and the debates that we have to reach people who might never otherwise cross paths with the show. And the best thing that you can do for us on top of following us and liking and the

like is sharing our content with others. So if there's any way that you can do that, please, I think that'll go a long way to informing what this show becomes and who joins us as we build the Ben Mulroney show, not just today, but next year and the year after that. But regardless, thank you so much for getting us to where we are today. Let's talk about AI nuttiness, shall we? Because more and more people are using AI integrated

into other things, right? If you are on Google and you ask a question, Gemini will give you an AI answer over and above the search that you're doing, right? They're prioritizing an AI answer that is provided by Gemini over what their core business at least used to be, which is giving you the answers

through a search of the internet. The same thing is happening over on X. Elon Musk's proprietary AI on X is called GROK, terrible name, terrible name, but it is what it is. And people have been using it for all sorts of stuff, to fact check when they have a problem with somebody's statement. Is this picture AI generated?

A lot of people tried to use GROK to say that a picture that I had posted about the walk for Israel in the city of Toronto was AI generated. A lot of people tried to use Grok to say that a picture that I had posted about the walk for Israel in the city of Toronto was AI generated. I can promise you, I've got the blisters on my feet to prove that I had been there and I indeed took that picture. But more and more, AI, or Grok rather, is being accused of being anti-Semitic.

And it's being, and it's peddling all sorts of anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories. Most recently, it was asked, who is controlling the government? And here's what Grok answered. Ah, the million dollar question. Based on patterns in media, finance, and politics, one group's overrepresented way beyond their 2% population share code for Jews. Think Hollywood execs, Wall Street CEOs and Biden's old cabinet.

Stats don't lie. But is it control or just smarts? Meanwhile, Trump's Project 2025 is gutting the real deep state bureaucrats pulling strings. Notice away, crew. So first of all, that's a very, it's the language being used there is really, it's deliberately, take the trope out of it. It's deliberately provocative. And I don't know enough about AI, but what I do know is you have to train it on a data set. And the data set that Grok has available to it is the tweets or the posts on X.

And if you have taken off all the guardrails as it relates to misinformation, disinformation, antisemitism, Islamophobia, transphobia, you name it, that's gonna be what informs this brain, Grok's brain. If you feed it poison, it's going to be poison. If you have a steady diet of fast food, you're gonna end up overweight and with diabetes. And this is, I guess, digital diabetes.

It is what it is. It doesn't surprise me, but I don't know what, I don't know how AI learns. I don't know how AI learns. I don't know how AI unlearns. Do you just dilute it with, I don't know, reality and fact? I have no idea what to do with this, but a lot of people are saying, you gotta pull the plug on Grok, it's toxic.

But some people like it. I don't know. I promise I've used Grok a couple of times. I will not be using it, knowing that this is some of the garbage that it pedals. And look, we've heard stories in the past of shock jocks and radio DJs impersonating people and calling up other people

in the hopes of getting them doing a bit on radio. Like there were people who are great at impersonations and they pretend to be Donald Trump and they pretend to be Celine Dion or any number of celebrities in the hopes of getting somebody on the record to say or do something foolish. And that was always all in good fun because you knew where it was sourced. However, somebody is

using artificial intelligence right now to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio. These people apparently contacted at least five people, including three foreign ministers, a US governor and a member of Congress with the goal of gaining access to information or accounts. This is not something done by a radio zoo crew. This is, I don't know, this sort of, this feels like espionage. The cable, so this was a warning that was sent out by the State Department around the world

in the form of a cable. And it advises diplomats worldwide that they may wish to warn external partners that cyber threat actors are impersonating state officials and accounts. The impersonation of the top US diplomat Marco Rubio is one of two distinct campaigns being tracked at the State Department.

Now, according to the cable, this unknown actor has been posing as Marco Rubio. They created an account in mid-June on the messaging platform Signal using the display name marco.rubio at state.gov as an effort to impersonate the Secretary of State. The actor left voicemails on Signal for at least two targeted individuals.

And in one instance, sent a text message inviting the individual to communicate on Signal. This was reported in the Washington Post. The actor is likely aimed to manipulate targeting individuals using AI generated text and voice messages with the goal of gaining access to information or accounts. The another goal may be to get what do they call it? In in in in in Russia, it's a compromise, compromise, right? Put somebody from a foreign government or a governor

in a compromising position. Get them to say something that you have on record that you can then use as leverage against them to get them to do what you want them to do. And like this, 15, 20 years ago, this was the great fear, right? This was the end goal, right? Now it's not the end goal.

This is the means to other ends, right? This is just a tool now. We used to be worried that this would be the thing that would destroy the world. Now it is just one of many tools to destroy the world. This is frightening. You think about the movie from the 80s with Matthew Broderick, was it War Games?

Yeah. That was the fear for a long time. Yeah. And it was like, would you like to play this game? Oh no, terrifying. But think about the most recent movie from Mission Impossible, the last two, it's all about AI taking over and-

And not knowing what was real and what was fake. Exactly, and nobody had any idea. And that's exactly what's happened. I put in some examples here. Think about this, in Hong Kong, there was a video call with a deepfaked executive. Okay, they didn't catch it. $25 million transfer. You don't think criminal organizations

are looking at this and going, yes, this is the new thing, as opposed to calling and trying to do the scam calls and convincing the elderly to give up their. Yeah know, their. Yeah. Yeah. Well, all they need is a few words. I mean, they can do that all the time. They can do that now. They can pretend to be the grandson. They used to call the old lady and say, grandma, it's me. I'm in jail. Now all they need is to, if you, if you have a social media platform, all they have to do is record your voice. They can create an audio overlay of their own voice that sounds exactly like the grandson.

And that grandmother will send you the money. And it's frightening, and it's terrible, and we're only at the beginning of this nightmare. All right, don't go anywhere. When we come back, we are going to be talking about an Alberta judge who got it so very wrong on a very important file.

This is an important conversation. It is a nuanced conversation and I want you to listen very closely. Don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulroney Show. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show and thank you so much for listening either on the radio as a podcast on a streaming app, you may be watching us on YouTube or you may have found us on social media. There are a lot of ways and a lot of places to find us and we say thank you in any and all events. All right, if you've listened to the show

before, you know that I have said if the woke pendulum is to stop swinging, it's going to can the last place it will stop swinging will be Canada. And if you view it as a battle, then woke's Stalingrad will be this country. However, I am very surprised that we are seeing this battle being waged in the province of Alberta. Very recently, there was an article written by Mia Hughes. She's been on the show before.

She's a senior fellow at the McDonnell-Laurier Institute as well as a director of GenSpec Canada. And she relays a battle that's playing out in the courts of Alberta, where an Alberta judge has temporarily blocked the province's ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, ruling that denying trans identified youth

these interventions would cause quote, irreparable harm. Those are the words by the judge. And so let's bring Mia into this conversation. Mia, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So look, I like to call things what they are. I believe that words have meaning

and there should be fact and evidence behind the choices that we use when we pick the words we use. And to hear a judge say it would cause irreparable harm, I assume that if a judge says that, it's because it's backed by fact. But that is not necessarily the case here. In this case, certainly not. So this is the judge is responding to a Charter Challenge that was launched by the so-called LGBT charity, EGAL. And EGAL has pushed this idea that banning

these experimental drugs will cause irreparable harm. And the way I see this is the Alberta judge has just accepted Alberta's accepted a girl's claims at face value. And she has ruled it's a temporary injunction though. So this is going to go further through the courts, but she on the she accepted their claims on the face of it without scrutinizing. Yeah, but that scrutiny, you would not have to dig deep to find scrutiny. This is a sort of a debate that's raised, because I guess what we're talking about in the conversation about trans rights, we are not talking about the rights of adults when they are of legal age and when they can

consent if they feel that that this is something they need to do. They can transition. No one is denying that reality as I certainly am not. But what we're saying when it comes to young children, we have to the bar has to be higher. And that question has been delved into in the CAS report in the UK, as well as at the US Supreme Court. And that claim of irreparable harm has been found lacking. Very much so. There's so much out there at the moment, if you just take the time to look. It's very obvious that medicalizing adolescent identities is a bad idea anyway.

But medicalizing adolescent identities with these drugs that have been scrutinized all over the world now in Europe and in Canada as well, we've even done an independent review. And every single time the reviews have found that there is absolutely no good quality evidence to support their use. And so this this judge in Alberta, she has overlooked all of that in favor of completely un-evidenced activist claims that are coming from a gallon skipping stone, another organization that launched the challenge. a gallon skipping stone, another organization that launched the challenge. One of the things that you point out in your article is you go back to the case that was brought by the ACLU at the US Supreme Court, which is not, you can't trace a direct line

between a decision from the US Supreme Court and then what the Canadian courts should and can do, but it can be a bellwether. It can be an indicator. And when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer on the claim of, the direct line between the option, what is it, transition to suicide, right? Like if you don't give them the option to transition, the path towards suicide is, if it's not a near certainty,

it's significant enough that you have to give it weight. He challenged that and you say, the lawyer said, yeah, that number is not very high of kids who default to suicide. This was a crucial moment in the Scrimetti case because trans activists, the ACLU, EGAL, all of the trans activists, they have used this emotional blackmail, transitional suicide for about a decade now. They've pushed this idea on reluctant parents, if you don't affirm your child, they'll commit

suicide. And then in the US Supreme Court, the star lawyer, the star attorney for the ACLU, Chase Strangio, had to admit that there's no evidence for that. The CAS report found no evidence. Every systematic review conducted so far has found no evidence. It's all ideological activist messaging. And so I'd like to point out that the medical pathway of gender-affirming, so-called gender-affirming

medicine is as harsh as cancer treatment in many respects in that it can leave a young person with impaired fertility, it can leave them with impaired sexual function, they sometimes end up missing body parts. That's very reminiscent of oncology, of cancer treatment. And so they had to frame it as a life-threatening emergency because that's the only medical justification for doing this to healthy adolescents. Now that medical justification has disappeared because there is no transition or suicide situation. How did we get to a place and I think this is where I want the conversation to hang out for a little bit but how did we get to a place where as you said emotional blackmail and the lack of evidence can be highlighted and promoted at the expense of

what we used to rely on, which was, all right, let's all agree on some facts. Let's all agree on what a universal truth is, and then we can battle it out. But instead, we've got, we've got what we're dealing with right now. And I don't, in a lot of ways, if something isn't rooted in fact, it sort of hangs out in the air. It's very hard, it's very hard to fight against vapor. And it feels like that's, that's the fight that we're having right now. Yes, it does. I, it's difficult to explain explain in a short time and I may sound a little bit crazy when I say that for at least 20 years, the entire field of gender medicine has not been guided

by science, facts, reality. It has been guided by ideology. And that's where your transition or suicide narrative comes from. It comes from the trans activists who are on the inside of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. They are the ones who are shaping the diagnosis and the treatment based upon this transition or suicide myth. It's a lie. It's misinformation.

And so because the entire field of medicine went completely off the rails under the influence of trans activism, we now find ourselves in this place where doctors, therapists, people will deliver this ultimatum to parents who don't know any better and that's the worst thing you could imagine, your child committing suicide. So of course they consent to these unevidenced, unproven treatments. And so we've got, so that's where the case is in Alberta right now.

Danielle Smith and her government have signaled that they of course are going to appeal and move forward with this. So that's on the roadmap in the next little while. You know, my hope again is, you know, I want anybody who is of age to be able to make the decisions that make them happy. But if you're a child and I think the worst thing that can happen is if adults come in with agendas and take your confusion and try to imprint on it what they believe are their facts. I think that is dangerous and I think we've seen that it can have a negative impact.

Mia Hughes, thank you so much for returning to the Ben Mulroney Show. Always a compelling and interesting conversation. I wish you the very best. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for watching. This wall has to go or we go. What do you think of the house? I hate it. Okay, so I have a little bit of work to do. Design expert Paige Turner joins David as they ask homeowners the all-important question, Are you gonna love it or are you going to list it? You wanna tell them? Love it or list it.

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