The Ben Mulroney Show - Has the Hamas/Israel war infected Canadian institutions?

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

GUEST:   Tal Rozenblit/U of T student GUEST:   Casey Babb/  Director of the Promised Land project with the Macdonald Laurier Institute GUEST: Carmi Levy /Tech journalist If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Twitter: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ TikTok: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. Hey, thanks, son. What do I owe you? Don't worry about it. It's payday. Payday, huh? I bet you it went straight into your bank account and you didn't even check your pay stuff. My what? Your pay stuff. Back in my day, you had to wait for a physical check. Then you had to go to the bank. Deposit it and wait for it to clear.

Your pay really meant something. Payroll is incredibly complex. It's art and the science. It literally keeps the economy moving. Payroll professionals do a lot for us. You know, it's about time we do something for them. How about we ask our leaders to name a day in their honor? A national day to recognize payroll professionals.

I got it. This is perfect. Why don't we explain to people just how important the roles are that payroll professionals play in our own? play in our lives. We can even ask them to sign a petition. We can even ask them to sign a petition to recognize the third Tuesday in September as the National Day to recognize payroll professionals. We'll rally support and bring the payroll party to the nation. National payroll party? Precisely. It sounds like a plan, you know, just one thing. What's that? I'm choosing the music.

What? And I'm sitting in the backseat. The whole way? The whole way. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've been following the news, like really following it, you know how exhausting it can be politics conflict uncertainty it's a lot to carry and for many men there's this expectation to stay calm stay in control and not talk about how it's affecting you but the truth is you're allowed to feel overwhelmed you're allowed to say i'm not okay right now and trust me i have been there whether it's the state of the world stress at home or just feeling like you've got to have it all together and have all the answers you don't have to hold it in better help is here to help with the world's largest network

of licensed therapists. They've already supported over 5 million people. You can connect with a therapist online from wherever you are. No wait list, no office visits. And if it's not the right fit, you can switch any time. It's time to put your mental health on the agenda. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com

slash Mulrooney today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H-E-L-P.com slash Mulrooney. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show on this Tuesday, October 7th. And depending on who you are, October 7th means one thing or it means something else. It's either a day to remember the vicious atrocity by the most disgusting human beings that currently occupy the public space in Hamas and the atrocities that they perpetrators. against the Jewish people of Israel, or if you are like so many useful idiots across this

world, it's a day to celebrate what they did. You know where I stand, and we'll talk about that in just a moment. But first, let's turn our attention to something that is wholly positive for the people of Toronto and hopefully for baseball fans across Canada, which is the high-performing Toronto, who are up to nothing in their best of five series against the New York Yankees. New York Yankees fans on social media are so much fun to watch. They lay it all out there for you. Sometimes in real time.

We showed you some of that yesterday. And some of them highly emotional, highly emotional. And so we thought that we would start this segment with a calm, rational fan in the form of of Vic DiBettetto. Let's listen to the the sane and sage words of Vic de Beto. You didn't lose too, Gaines.

You had your manhood ripped off and driven over by your car. You better snap out of it and start playing like men. Yeah. Thank you, Vic. I needed that this morning.

How could I couldn't, there's no way I could have presented that to you in any way. How do you explain that? Well, he's, I don't know what's going to happen to him if they go, if they go down three, nothing. I'm going to be, so I don't know how what you guys are doing tonight. Well, it's actually a best of five, so they would lose, right? This is the game, they can't go down three nothing.

Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right. I totally forgot. Also, I'm really bad at math. But tonight I have a, I have a work dinner that starts at seven. The game starts at eight.

So there's no way that we won't have. at least three phones going simultaneously, like updating Twitter. And by the way, Twitter is actually pretty good. If you want to follow a game, it's a really good app for that sort of thing. That's what we'll be doing for the first hour. Hopefully I can go home and watch

like the back half of the game in a positive way. Speaking of something positive that happened yesterday, there's an organization called unapologetically Jewish. It's newly formed grassroots, non-profit organization dedicated

to protecting and amplifying the voices of Canadian Jews. And one of the people involved is somebody I have I've actually known for years by the name of Matthew Taub. I didn't know he was part of this organization until I saw

what we're about to play for you right now which was a press conference. It was given in Ottawa yesterday where this organization is suing a raft of people and organizations in Toronto and Montreal. Let's listen.

Unapologetically Jewish has officially filed formal human rights complaints against the cities of Toronto and Montreal, their respective mayors, Mayor Olivia Chow and Mayor Valerie Plunt, the Toronto and Montreal Police Services Board, and the Toronto and Montreal Chiefs of Police. These complaints stem from their repeated failure to protect Jewish communities from anti-Semitic hate. This is not a theory, this is lived experience. And this is about more than words.

It's about action, accountability, and anti-Semitic hate. equal protection under the law. Yeah. And, you know, in our previous hour, we were joined by Kevin Vong, former MP and staunch ally of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. And he pointed out, inaction is a form of action, right? Like not doing something has consequences just like doing something does. And the city of Toronto, I can't speak with as much knowledge on what's happened or not happened in Montreal, but I've seen the effects of it. The fact that both cities have allowed protests to operate with impunity. The fact that both cities, or at least in Toronto, the mayor,

the mayor has, I don't know if she's allowed it, but on her watch, protesters have felt it was okay and they were allowed to enter residential areas of Toronto, where Jewish people have called home for for generations protesters have been allowed to go walk through their streets letting them know in no uncertain terms we know where you live

if that is not if that is not permission by those by the city up to those people to let Jewish people feel unsafe I don't know what is and so I'm very happy that this that Jewish organizations are taking

upon themselves to do to tell the city, you've messed up, you've crossed the line and we're going to slap you back on the other side of the line using every legal avenue at our disposal. We are going to have Matthew on the show tomorrow to discuss these human, what they say are human rights violations and how they believe this is going to unfold. We've told lots of stories of, you know, these human rights tribunals being kangaroo courts and if it is going to be a kangaroo court

then let it be a kangaroo court that airs on the side of sanity in this case let's use the tools at our disposal but sometimes people some people don't understand anything but legal avenues

and very happy to see that unapologetically Jewish is moving ahead with this now it's been two years sometimes we look at what's going on in the Middle East and say, why can't they come to a conclusion? In Canada, I look at it and say, like, why have we allowed chaos to reign in our biggest cities?

Like, to what end? And to put this into perspective, I want to go back to months and over a year ago. Douglas Murray, the British intellectual, staunch advocate of the state of Israel. And he was on the Pierce Morgan's show, and he put things in very crystal clear terms as far as I'm concerned. Let's listen to how he saw it way back when still applies today. In my view, it is not Netanyahu who's uncompromising. It's Hamas that's uncompromising. They could have handed back the hostages last October. They could have not done this. I mean, they could have tried to build a state since 2005 when Israel withdrew from the Gaza and handed the place over to them. Hamas could have used the billions of dollars and, and

pounds and euros that British and European and American taxpayers gave them since 2006. They could have used those billions of dollars to build up Gaza. They could have made a booming, in the good sense of the term, Mediterranean Paradise. They could have created wealth for their people. But you know what they did? They built down instead of upwards. They built a tunnel network bigger than the London Underground for all of those years. And they squirled away the money, just like Yasser Arafat did before them.

They made themselves rich. All right, we've got a new segment we want to start for you today. It's a segment called Saying Something Stupid. We should think people saying something stupid. We should think people saying something stupid. The star of this segment is our good friend, everybody's favorite idiot, Greta Tunberg. Tintin, Tunberg. Tintin, Tunberg.

You'll remember that she was on the flotilla that was going to break the siege of Gaza and was arrested by the IDF. And look, there's certain words you don't use, right? Like, the context is everything. I would never, for example, say that a school board is holding our students or teachers are, teachers unions are holding students hostage while we're talking about what happened on October 7th. I wouldn't do that because it's insensitive.

And so let's listen to what she said. Oh, no, she referred to herself as being kidnapped, right? You know who actually kidnapped? People on October 7th. And they, you know how I know they were kidnapped? Because they're still being held hostage. I would never do that because I'm not so stupid to do that. But Tintin is.

Let's listen to a little bit of the God complex that Greta has. This is what happens when you're a 16-year-old and the world tells you you're a genius. No, wait, no, not heroes. No. No, we are doing the bare minimum. What we are doing is not in any way. No one has to come to the rescue of Palestinian people. What we are doing is hearing and acting upon their call.

Yeah, we're not heroes. We're not heroes. That's like me saying, you know what? I'll let other people talk to, talk about what a genius I am. You're calling yourself a genius. Anyway, we're going to leave it there for now. Greta, Tintin, good luck to you. Up next, what students are seeing on the ground on campuses here in Toronto. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show.

If you're in Montreal or Toronto, and you're a university student, you may be subjected to some pretty vile celebrations today on the anniversary of October 7th by student groups on various campuses celebrating the death, destruction, rape, murder, hostage-taking and kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis on October 7th that started the conflict that has engulfed Gaza. And if you're a Jewish student, then this has been part of your life on those campuses for the better part of your academic career. Is it unfair?

You goddamn right it is. We're joined now by Tal Rosenblit. He's a fourth-year international relations student at the University of Toronto, and he can And he's going to talk to us now about being Jewish in Canada as a student in university. Welcome, Tal. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me on Ben. We really appreciate the opportunity to, you know, spread the message and have our voice heard as your students.

So you're a fourth year student, which means you have, you remember before October 7th, and you remember and you know what life has been like since that anniversary two years ago. What was life like as a university student in Canada prior? to October 7th? You know, I'll be honest with you. I don't really remember that well because it feels like we live in a completely different world. Campus has always been, it's always a place of our ideas or exchange where people are having

conversations, topics that are really controversial and so people are always provoked. But I remember ever since October 7th, ever since, you know, the death and destruction that happened on that day, like things change permanently on campus. Everything has gotten so much more hostile, the environment is become so much more intimidating for Jewish students. And it's been quite the, quite the shock. You know, I've been speaking since about last week of a permission structure that I believe that has been created for a certain type of person with a certain type of perspective that does not exist for their counterparts on the other side of any argument. And sometimes it's political

and other times it's religious. And, you know, there's a certain type of person that gets away was saying some of the most outrageous vile things. And we've allowed a system to propagate that props them up and does not force them to walk it back, retrench. In fact, we've created a system that emboldens them to take things to the next level. And part of that permission structure is that leadership in whatever arena they're in has either turns a blind eye or supports it. would you say that one of the things that differentiates this sort of the toxicity that that you've experienced is because the leadership at the University of Toronto has allowed for it to happen? Yeah, I think 100%. I mean, I'd say that definitely the student unions, the administration,

there are so many layers to what has allowed for the climate and the culture on campus to become so inflamed. And there just hasn't been enough accountability placed on the bodies and the organizations and the people themselves who have the ability to call out what is wrong. And it's just, it's deteriorated to such a point where, like, I know people fear for their safety. I know Jewish students who've received death threats. I know people who've, you know, been scared to come onto campus on certain days. You know, you have multiple weeks of rage every year. I mean, this week on our campus is a week of rage with multiple. one protest after the next, and it really creates this climate on campus that's hostile

that Jewish students are intimidated by, are at risk of being socially ostracized, and it's just shocking, absolutely shocking, that we're in Canada at this day and age and dealing with things like this in our society. Tell, what has this done to your ability to form friendships, to, you know, build out, become the person you're supposed to be when you come out of university. I mean, look, university is about trying new things, testing out new friendships, you know, just trying on identity and seeing what fits and, hey, do I want to be this kind of person? Do I want to be that kind of person?

Do I want to study this? Do I want to study that? You know, we talk about, we've been talking generally about student bodies and temperature and that sort of thing, but you as a student, you must, like, have your grades suffered, have your friendship suffered, has your mental health suffered? You know, I'll tell you that universities, like what they're supposed to be.

They're supposed to be society's beacon for innovation and the free exchange of ideas and opinions. They're supposed to be a place where new ideas are cultivated, and instead, we've come to a point where universities are now just one big place where everyone comes to agree with each other and do what they think is cool sort of fit into these trends. Yeah.

And let me tell you that in terms of the social relationships, in terms of the social life on campus, 100% things have suffered because, you know, you'll have friends, people who are even acquaintances or even good friends who are capable of whether it's out of hate or even just ignorance, saying the most outrageous vile things. I remember multiple instances of being shocked to learn about some of the beliefs and opinions that my people who I thought were.

or my friends held about the war going on, about October 7th of the massacre itself, people who denied, people who thought it was a good thing, people who celebrated it, about, you know, Israel's right to exist and the right of us as, you know, Jewish students to have a connection to Israel in that land. And it's just, I would definitely say on a personal level that I've had a relationship suffer,

and I know many of my friends had as well, and on institutional level as well. You know, Jewish students don't have that kind of representation in the student union, we've often had to, you know, kind of force our way in and mobilize on our own. We haven't had that representation in the student press, for example, where oftentimes a lot of minority Jewish voices are tokenized by people who are not involved with the Jewish community at all, and then basically speak for all of us and say things that none of us would agree. And so it's been, socially, there's been a lot of consequences.

There's a great line by Edmund Burke that says the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. The Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy recently did a survey of 760 university students, and they found that over 48% expressed reluctance to reveal their opinions on controversial political issues. The survey found 27.5% of students were somewhat reluctant, and 20.6 were very reluctant. other words, there are a great many good and decent students on campuses across this country that are unwilling and they are afraid to say what they truly feel on important issues. And I suspect that some of those people would be people who support their Jewish brothers and sisters and support Israel's position in defending itself against a bloodthirsty death cult, but will not say what they feel for fear of repercussions from those people who have been

given license, to behave like animals, to scream and to threaten violence and to and to hurl hateful epithets. Do you have friends who have quietly supported you but do nothing publicly? Yeah. I mean, I'll say first of all regarding those numbers, they do not surprise me for one seconds and 100%. You know, it's been really nice, even in the small instances, to see, you know, friends coming out, especially after October 7th originally happened, people reaching out to not just myself, but other Jews and checking and saying, are you okay, recognizing, you know, how grave and how impactful this must have been on the Jewish community. But since then, I would say that support has faded mostly because people are scared. People are scared of what

is basically the loud mob who enforces this culture of fitting in. Because if you don't believe that, you know, Israel is committing a genocide, and if you don't believe that all these things about colonization and about center colonialism, any buzzword that I could give you. All the word salads, my friend. All the word salads. And the really sad thing is that it's what's behind all of it on campus. It's not a movement that's just against Israel.

What's deep in that, it's a movement that's against the West, against our values. Because right after saying, you know, down with Israel, they say down with the U.S., down in Canada, and they put us on that same pedestal. And sometimes it really just feels like we've lost a sense in society, especially on campuses, between, you know, right and wrong and good and bad. Well, Tal, we're going to have to leave it there. I will point out that, you know, when these students shout globalize the intifada, the globe is bigger than Israel. The globe contains Canada.

The globe contains the United States and contains Western Europe. That is what they are calling for. When they say what they want, you better listen to them. And we better heed their call. Tal Rosenblit, thank you very much. I wish you the very best, and you take care of yourself today. Thank you very, very much. I appreciate that and thank you again, Ben, for the time.

All right, what's the responsibility of our political leaders? Should they put their head in the sand or listen to the dialogue on university campus? You know, I said it before. I was caught flat-footed after, I was caught flat-footed on October 7th, obviously. But then I was doubly caught flat-footed at the, how well-organized and how well-organized the anti-Israeli movement was on October 8th, the use of the expression genocide started popping up immediately before the war had even technically started. You know, they were talking about starving the people of Gaza and there was a genocide in Gaza

before it even started. And there are people far smarter than me with whom I've had conversations who have mountains of evidence that point to, you know, an orchestrated campaign well-funded against Israel that has been in the works for years.

And that's what we've been fighting against here. I've always thought, you know, the truth will come out. That honest, good debate will allow for the wrong, right side to win here. And that has not been the case because the other side has been planning this for a very long time. I do believe that Warren Kinsella, who has been a staunch and honorable actor in this debate, is coming out with a book very soon in a documentary that

will be laying out exactly what I just claimed in the next few weeks and months. We're joined now by the director of the Promise Land Project with the McDonnell Laurier Institute, Casey Babb, who's been another one of those great voices in this debate. Casey, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. So there's a lot to unpack.

There's a lot of things I want to talk about here. But, you know, is the big picture of hate larger than you thought it would be? I have been, I was caught flat-footed. I know that I know that militarily Israel is going to win, but on the fight for the hearts and minds, I think that that fight started a long time ago by the other side and they were laying the groundwork

and we find ourselves today, you know, fighting an uphill battle for sanity and for what's right. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, as you so often are, Ben, you're right on the money. I mean, Israel is waging a war, a deadly war, a costly war, for Israelis, for Palestinians, and they're winning that war. Canadians need to wake up to the fact that we are also at war. Wars don't always need to be hot.

The enemies don't always need to be at the gates. Sometimes they're inside the gates. And in our case, that is very much true. We saw this not months or weeks after October 7th. We saw this the morning after October 7th, with not protests about a supposed genocide, not protests about a costly war, but celebratory gatherings, vigils being held for, quote-unquote, martyrs. This is indicative. This is the symptom of a rot that we have allowed to take place in our country for a very long time and for a variety of reasons. And I have to tell you, Ben,

even for me, somebody that I've been watching these things for decades, I was appalled and taken aback. And the last two years have been quite a reckoning for a lot of people, even people like me who have been paying attention to this stuff most of their lives. There was a committee meeting on Parliament Hill awhile back where MP Vincent Neil Ho was talking about. talking to the VP with the Research Council of Canada, Anne-Marie Thompson, about the political leanings of academia in Canada. Let's listen to this.

88% of all Canadian faculty and universities are left-leaning, and 12% are right-leaning. Do you see an issue with that? I won't comment on that personally. Okay, but you just said we want to promote diversity of viewpoints or diversity of perspective. Sure. And there is evidence, which, you know, I'm not a researcher myself,

but there is evidence to the idea that considerations of EDI in science results in stronger science. Yeah, so we're not having a debate about DEI or anything like that. And I'm not here to suggest that there isn't, you know, a significant problem with right-wing anti-Semitism. But when you've got 88% of Canadian faculty that are left leaning, that in a lot of cases subscribe to, you know, the identity politics siloed, colonial settler perspective of the world is academia complicit

in the fact that two years in on the anniversary of this disgusting barbaric inhuman attack on the Jewish people with such depravity and with such grotesqueness that two years in

there are celebrations that are happening all across this country and on campuses across this country quote honoring our martyrs It does do the professors and do the leadership of these universities bear responsibility for the fact that two years in that students are still blinded and bloodthirsty? Oh, absolutely. And I mean, I know from experience, I've gone to attended universities across the country. I've taught at multiple universities. I did a PhD here in Ottawa. universities now are not what they were 10, 20, 30 years ago. Universities are becoming unrecognizable, have become unrecognizable.

They are not institutions of higher learning anymore, as much as they are indoctrination centers of hate and division and radical ideology. And that's why you're seeing so many professors in the United States, in Canada, and elsewhere, come out saying that in some instances, we need to fully support Hamas and Hezbollah, that the Jews had it coming, that this is a glorious day, that it was a day of delight, and so on and so forth. These are the people that we're paying money to teach our children. And so if you're listening to this and you have a child who's thinking about going off to college or going off to university, you need to look at things much more carefully with them now than

you may have had to 10 or 20 years ago. But, Casey, you know, I thought about this years ago prior to October 7th, I was noticing on college campuses that there was a push for group think. And they were not only, not only was it not recommended that you be an outlier, an intellectual outlier, and that you keep your thoughts to yourself. But that, you know, kids who are rabble rousers, kids who want to stir the pot, kids who want to test out arguments, but kids who like to debate, and they're willing to explore ideas that they might not even subscribe to for the sake of debate, they would be putting themselves in a harm's way. That was before October 7th. Then after October 7th, it felt like that perspective was taken and weaponized against anybody.

who may subscribe to the idea that the that the Jewish people have the right to defend themselves and that the murderous thugs who want jet who have it written in their charter that they they they espouse and live for a genocide against the Israeli people and Jews writ large um they're not they're the victims absolutely yeah you know what october seventh really did bet and really to what you're talking about here is it in his broadest into the light, the inability of people to think clearly, to engage in meaningful, objective dialogue. It's really sort of turned everything on its head. And some days I'll be on social media or I'll see a poster of something that's going on on a university campus. It's almost

like I'm living in some alternate universe or everything is upside down. You know, a war that was started and which was lost is a apparently genocide. Zionism, which is a really a very basic concept of Jewish self-determination in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, is now colonialism. It is oppression. It is X, Y, Z. International law seems to have lost its meaning. The most powerful and influential multilateral organizations are turning their attention to vilifying the victims of October 7th, not the perpetrators of them. Everything has been turned on its head. It's at university, but it's everywhere.

And really, people have to try to maintain some sort of sense of sanity here and cut through the madness. But it is tough. Casey, we've got to leave it there. Thank you so much for being here today. Appreciate it. Take care. All right. Coming up a story about Open AI SORA, you need to hear.

Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you so much for John. joining us, of course, it is Tuesday, which means it's time to talk tech on Tuesday with our good friend Carmi Levy. Carmie, Carmen, welcome back to the show. Good to be back, Ben. Thanks for having me. Okay, so, you know, I'm in the days leading up to the conversations that we have with you, I'm paying attention to what's bubbling up on social media. And we're, the conversation that people seem to be having is that we've now crossed this intellectual Rubicon where AI is, it's is making us, we cannot believe anything we see anymore

because the quality of the fake videos that are being produced are so good that there's no coming back from it anymore. Yeah, I mean, I remember earlier last year, April of 2024, Open AI released Sora, which is essentially a video generator. So you type in a prompt, make me a video that does this, and then it goes off and creates the video. And it caused a serious stir at the time because the videos were so realistic that even if you leaned in, it was difficult to tell the difference between something that was real, actually shot with a real camera with real people on the other side of the lens,

and something that was synthetic, generated by AI. Then Google introduced VO3 earlier this year that was even better than SORA. And now Open AI has released SORA 2, which basically is the best of them all. And it is so realistic that literally the line between reality and AI has now been blurred permanently. Yeah. And the Internet is now being flooded with content. People are rolling up their sleeves and playing with it, seeing what they can do. And it means that just because you see video doesn't necessarily mean that it happened.

Yeah. And so to me, do you remember back in the day when you could, on your home phone, you had the ability to press a few buttons and you could find out who. was calling you? Yeah. Okay. So you paid for that service. And then they come up with the answer to that service, the antidote to that service, which

is you could block your number. So the phone company created a need and created essentially a problem for other people. And then they created an antidote for it. And if you paid for both, you're back to square one. And it feels to me like that's going to happen here, that these guys are going to create these, this impossible situation for us to tell the difference between reality and what's not reality and then soon they're going to come up with a paid model where you can you can pay them to let you know if the video that you're watching is real or not yeah they call it labeling

and and you know in the ideal world anything that is generated with a video generator would come with a label or a watermark or some kind of electronic digital signature google has introduced the technology called synth ID that does that and it basically puts it in the corner and it says that, yeah, this is, you know, this is created by software. OpenAI's tool also includes a moving watermark that apparently if you're pretty good at it, you can remove it. And so, you know, the industry is trying to figure out different things. And yeah, any of these features will be included in paid premium tiers. We're going to have to pay for the privilege of being able to tell the difference between reality and not.

Well, okay, I don't know a lot about a lot, but what about the government legend? that all of this needs to, like, it has to be built on the blockchain, because if there's anything I know about the blockchain, is that it is a, there's a ledger associated with every transaction on the blockchain that lets you know, you know, every aspect of every transaction. So nothing can get, nothing can get, you can't lie on the blockchain, correct? So how about if, if the government legislated that every one of these companies needed in some way, and I don't even know how you would do this, but in some way to build out their platform, using blockchain technology so that there is no way, all you got to do is press a button

and it tells you whether this was real or whether it was generated by a computer. Yeah, in the ideal world, that would be the case. The government would impose those kinds of standards on the industry and then vendors like OpenAI and Google and others would have to build tools that align with those standards that include those technologies to make it easier to tell that, yeah, this was created by AI. But here in Canada, we don't have a law. We had one on the way, but it was killed when the election was called earlier this year. So we've got to get with the program because while we're dithering with not moving a law over the finish line,

the technology is advancing really quickly and introducing all sorts of new complexities into the equation. And we're not ready for it. And as a result, companies like Open AI can pretty much do what they want, knowing full well, there are no consequences if they cross any kind of moral, ethical, or legal lines. One of the most talked about actresses on the planet isn't even alive. She's AI generated. Her name is Tilly Norwood. And depending on who you talk to, she is either a flash in the pan, just an example of what

technology can do, or she is a very real threat to living, breathing actresses. What's the latest on Tilly Norwood? So the latest is that, you know, so, yeah, she's created by, uh, a UK-based company, Particle Six Productions, headed by her name is Eileen van der Velden. She's a one-time actor. She says she wants this digital recreation of an actor to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman,

saying that she's in negotiations with a number of talent agencies and they're negotiating to bring her on to actually represent her, as they would, a real actor. SAG AFRA, the actor's union, has issued a statement. Obviously, they're not very happy. They're saying Tilly Norwood is not an actor. It's generated by computer and that digital replicas don't create opportunity. They erase it.

Yeah. That audiences aren't interested in watching a computer-generated actor with computer-generated content that is disconnected from this human experience. So there's lots of sort of back and forth, lots of questionings over which agency would actually sign her on. Is that actually a thing? Is it a major agency or not? I'm thinking it's kind of a small one looking for a headline. But again, we have to ask ourselves the question, why do we go see a movie?

Why do we follow certain actors? Why do we listen to certain music? We follow these creators because we're interested in them as human beings, not because they are created by code. There is no scenario that I can come up with in my head where a Tilly Norwood would be signed by a major agency and that would then translate into actual work where she, I say she, this computer program would be acting opposite real actors of any worth. I just, I don't see it. Perhaps a stunt. Somebody might do it as a stunt one day. I can't see it.

And if a major agency signed this computer program, I could see that agency's competitors would be poaching the clients of that agency so quickly because they'd be saying, like, listen, this place clearly doesn't respect you. If you think they're going to stop with Tilly Norwood, come to a place where we promise we will never do that. And that would be the end of it for that agency. And then anybody tries to put her in a movie. Good luck casting the rest of that film. I just do not see it going anywhere.

The only scenario I could see is if there is an AI-only studio that comes out of nowhere, that is born in this new era, and they make AI-specific, AI-only generated films where Attili Norwood is acting against or opposite another AI actor. That's the only way this works. Yeah, and exactly. You know, as a complement to the existing creative process, I think AI certainly has a role to play within the creative industry, and I know Hollywood is trying to figure that out.

But, yeah, you know, we cross that line at great peril to ourselves. And I think if you are an agency, you're certainly at risk, if you go there. And I think certainly audiences have a role to play here too, right? We have to have our voices heard. And, you know, we're already seeing, like, if you go on social media, there are lots of influencers who are digitally created, do we have significant followings. But then if you do a little bit of digging into the numbers,

you realize a lot of those followers aren't real accounts. Machines listening to machines, that whole idea of social media, humans interacting with humans, no longer the case, AI kind of takes it a step too far. So I'm right there with you. I think there's a line that's about to be crossed in the moment that we cross it. There's no going back. And I think, you know, we really do have to ask ourselves,

do we want to cross that line in the first place? The answer to that for most of us, no. All right. speaking with the very human Karmie Levy, not AI-generated at all. Thank you very much, my friend. Appreciate being with you, Ben. There is not a single self-respecting actor out there, dues-paying member of SAG-AFTRA that will ever sign on to work with an AI actor.

Mark my words. When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from winners, I started wondering. Is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. Are those from winners? Ooh, are those beautiful gold earrings? Did she pay full price? Or that leather tote?

Or that cashmere sweater? Or those knee-high boots? That dress, that jacket, those shoes. Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners, find fabulous. for less.