The Ben Mulroney Show - The left vs right patriotism debate / The AI politician flub

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

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With our price freeze promise, you'll keep your wireless plan price for as long as you keep your plan. Conditions applied. Details at freedommobile.com. Welcome to the show and welcome to a new segment that we are calling media misdirection. We start with the Toronto Star where a cartoon was posted today. And I'm just going to describe it as best I can. It's titled Poliyev making a trade deal with Trump. And you see the back of a rather rotund DJT playing monopoly with a childlike Pierre Poliyev. And the president is saying to his Canadian analog,

I'll trade you Baltic Avenue for all your properties, all your houses and hotels and all your money, to which Pierre Polyev says, that's a good deal. Now, I saw this and I was just confused. And I posted as much when I said that humor typically requires some sort of shared reference, which allows for misdirection, subversion, exaggeration. And nothing like this has ever occurred in history. So I said, I can only assume that there's some odd attempt to own Pierre, in which case, ha, ha, ha, I guess.

Look, comedy works with context. I doubt that I would laugh a whole lot if I were sitting and listening to a stand-up comic in Japan because I wouldn't get any of the references. And the reason the images of my dad were so funny to so many people with the big giant chin was because it was generally assumed that he had a significant chin. The reason Austin Powers was so successful is because we all have this shared conception of the campiness of late 60s and early 70s spy movies. And the great irony of all of this

is that this joke would have absolutely worked and been much funnier if it had been our current PM playing monopoly. And the president was talking about trading revenues for the Gordy Howe Bridge. He would have taken Baltic Avenue for our digital services tax, our retaliatory tariffs,

the net revenues from the Gordy Howe Bridge, our streaming regulations, as well as living up to our native. commitments and $900 million in border fortification because all of that happened. That would have been funny if you'd said, that's a great deal. Now, look, it's unfunny. That's fine. But you'll remember that last week, Robert Fife of the Globe and Mail admitted on the

nuanced podcast to a longstanding bias in the media against the conservatives, which means they're no longer speaking truth to power. but in this case, holding the powerless to account. Which leads nicely into, conservatives have a patriotism problem. This is according to the Globe and Males, Andrew Coyne. He wrote a piece where he argues that conservatives have a problem with separatism

and adopting right-wing politics. And because of all of this stuff and many more issues, we actually, we conservatives, small C and big C, appear to be disloyal to the country. So we're going to go through some of his points, break them down, and well, poke the many holes in the arguments that they deserve. Here's one of them.

The column argues that a faction of conservatives increasingly side with American conservative politics, especially Trump, over Canada's national interest. Some do, sure. But I would argue that a far larger group of leftists have been importing American politics and American tactics for far longer. For example, applying U.S. concepts of systemic racism and historical racial dynamics to Canadian political institutions and Canadian culture that do not rely on the same dynamics.

What about adopting the nomenclature of the American protest movements, the leftist protest movements, like defund the police during the protests in Canada, which, by the way, the flashpoint for which was an American issue. George Floyd, an American, killed by an American cop in America. What did the leftists do? Bring that trouble up here for us to solve, to make our problem. And how many times have the liberals and the NDPs stoked fear during political campaigns that the conservatives were coming for women's abortion rights,

just like Roe v. Wade. That's, they were the one saying that. And the last time I checked, it was the Liberal Party of Canada that was constantly inviting Democratic Party strategists and Democratic Party luminaries to their conventions and to help them in their elections. And heck, just recently, our prime minister invented an entirely new office within the prime minister's office, the C-O position. And who did he hire an American who had worked for Hillary?

Lee Clinton. Let's also talk about this issue. Patriotism in Canada has long been associated with the political left, partly because conservatives felt alienated by liberal dominance and liberal branding of Canadian values. And this is what he said, quote, in virtually every other democratic country, patriotism is the province of the right. Only in Canada has it been the monopoly of the left. Look, Mark Carney said that Muslim values are Canadian values.

and I guess we're supposed to accept that without any debate. We're just supposed to accept it. And if we don't, that is somehow unpatriotic. Some conservatives flirt with anti-American ideas, according to Andrew Coyne. Annexation or separatism. Most conservatives, I think, reject separatism annexation outright. It is a fringe movement. It represents just the edges.

I would argue that there are far more leftists, far more members of the NDP, far more members of the Liberal Party that have no problem with Hamas, that have no problem with those terrorists and what they stand for, have gone out into the public square and shouted those things,

and have no problem with the rising tide of anti-Jew hate in this country. Where is the article, Mr. Coyne, about how the liberals have a terrorism or Nazi problem? It's, you know, one rule for thee, one rule for me. And then the author also argues that some conservatives reflexively blame Canada in any dispute with the U.S. regardless of facts. Mr. Coyne is Donald Trump responsible for some of our ills, of course.

But he didn't make the last 10 years happen. A lot of liberals want us to just, history starts with Mark Carney. Oh, we happen to be in a hole. Let's not talk about who dug the hole. Let's not do that. Conservatives for a decade, we're begging and pleading for policies that would strengthen our hand. so that one day if we had to sit opposite Donald Trump playing monopoly, we would have a stronger hand.

We could fight toe to toe. We would have more independence. We would have more of a way to chart our own path. But we have a lost decade, lost decade of productivity of money exiting the country, the flight of intellectual capital, financial capital that led us to a position where we were in a position of weakness, thanks to one person and one party only. And not for nothing. You don't get to embarrassingly and wrongly and systematically rewrite our history.

Deny our national identity. Accuses of genocide, vilify our founding fathers, lower our flag to half-mask for six months, and then challenge anyone's right to waive it, any which way they choose. left abdicated its own right to call itself patriotic when it spent nearly a decade denying the essential and inherent goodness and nobility of Canada. And it comes down to this, to me, when the left, I believe, defines its entire conception of patriotism is actually re-skinned anti-Americanism, which means anyone who does not full-throatedly and entirely blame every problem that Canada has on America, they are viewed as treasonous.

It is wrong and it is grotesque. And lastly, this is his last argument. Quote, people would like to be governed by the kind of people who have the country in their bones. I have two things to say to that. One, Mark Carney up until 2025 had three passports. And two, I would like to remind you of the picture. of a cosplaying prime minister in India, dressed in a way that even Indian people were embarrassed for,

standing dressed up in the most stereotypical Indian garb with their poor kids in tow. This is not a person who has Canada in his bones. Mark Carney up until a few years ago, had a lot of countries in his bones. So, yeah, case closed. When we come back, we're going to take your calls on all of this stuff. This is The Ben Mulroney Show.

Well, it's only a matter of time. If you're not using AI to streamline your life, to optimize your work, to help you in a infit number of ways, yet you will. And so it's no surprise to learn that politicians are also using AI. but this next story is one that it's one for the ages. And to talk about this and many more stories in tech, we're joined by our good friend and bon vivant extraordinaire, Carmi Levy.

Welcome, my friend. I bet it's so good to be back. Yeah, I saw this story a couple of days ago, and I have been laughing ever since. I just cannot. I still can't get over it. I will never be able to explain it. It will never not be funny.

So this is a Bill Oliver, is a conservative New Brunswick MLA. And he's given a speech. And he's an older gentleman. Let's just listen to him reading his notes. And it will let it breathe. And then we'll talk about it on the other side. The dangers associated with creating advocacy offices

is that citizens often develop expectations that exceed the powers actually granted to those offices. Here's a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like legislative speech rather than a series of short points. Okay. So before we continue, and because I'm petty and I love pop culture, we have to tag it with this. Well, that's going to do it for all of us here at Channel 4 News. You stay classy, San Diego. I'm on Burgundy. Who typed a question mark on the teleprompter? For the last time, anything you put on that prompter, Burgundy will read. Yeah, I mean, that's what it is.

And this is what we've been debating. I don't think, Carmi, that Mr. Oliver knew, I think a staffer handed him this document. Because it absolutely feels that way. Like, you know, right before they went into session, Stafford hands them a sheaf of papers and says, this is your speech, go read it. Stafford didn't bother reading it beforehand. clearly Mr. Oliver did not bother reading it beforehand, and he just picks it up and just starts, you know, talking.

Don't you think also, I think I think AI and the nomenclature and how it's structured like that, where at the end it sort of gives you tips on what to do next, it was foreign to him. So as he started reading it, no red flags went up for him. None. Like, I watched this on video as well, and there was no, like, his body language didn't even change

as he started reading that prompt. It was clear it didn't even occur to him, even though everyone else in the room, you can almost feel the oxygen leading room because everyone else knew, oh, my God, this is an AI prompt. He clearly cut and pasted it out of a chat bot. It didn't occur to him.

He was the only person who wasn't in on the joke despite the fact that he was the center of this, frankly, circus. It was frankly, hilarious to watch. Well, I got to tell you, I'm going to tell you, so something I haven't talked about yet. I've used AI now for my work for the first time. and it's for sort of a side hustle I work on. And I had all these ideas that I come up with myself

and I started working with Claude going back and forth on honing the ideas and turning them into a visual that would really be punchy, something I could never do myself. And it kept sending stuff back and I said, well, that's pretty good, but here's where I want some changes. And then I brought my sons in on it, Carmi, because I said, is this the way I should? should be using AI.

And my sons are actually quite ethical when it comes to this sort of thing. I said, well, you don't want it to be doing your work for you. And I said, well, and I laid out for them what I had done. They said, no, that sounds like a good thing that you're doing, Dad. Like you're using it as an assistant, someone to, someone to perform your tasks for you, but you're telling it exactly what you want. And I don't think that's what happened here. No, clearly not.

Like, in this case, you know, someone was, he was obviously reading it. It was obviously created entirely by AI. and it was cut and pasted into a document and then not reviewed. So there was really very little human involvement, which is, you know, for me, especially for an elected official, I think that safely qualifies as a non-ethical use of the technology because you're not even disclosing it to your stakeholder. People voted for you on the assumption that you would fight for their rights

in the House of the legislature. And that clearly didn't happen here, whereas what you're describing your use case is an entirely normal. use of AI. I do the same thing. It becomes part of your workflow where you interact with the technology and you use it to get you further down the road, to move faster, to open up new ideas. I use it as a brainstorming tool and I just toss things down. I always describe, especially as a writer, the thing that I hate the most is a blank screen. What I do is I start with, I just bounce ideas back and forth so that my screen isn't blank and then I take it and then I start

writing it and shaping it and putting my stamp on everything. So my words are still my words, but it opens my eyes a little bit, gives me a little bit more color, a little bit more to work with. It's a great brainstorming tool, and it's perfectly fine for people to use it within that process, but you kind of want to be transparent about it, right? So in this case, if he had said, hey, by the way, I was really rushed and I used AI to help me put this together, I don't think anybody would have blinked eyelash. But in this case, clearly didn't say anything and tried to pass it off and obviously got caught. Yeah, you know, and the last thing I'll say about this, and then we'll move on to the next story is there's a part of me that's feeling a little disappointment over all of the things, all the projects I never started over the years because I didn't have a tool like this to help me get over the hump that was going to stop me from trying. Yeah, it's a great thinking tool, isn't it? Like, you know, just to kind of get you going, if you don't have momentum at, you know, six in the morning when you first start writing, which is, you know, usually when I, you know, first sit down at my keyboard, it's the thing that gets me going.

even before the T is ready. And I think it's wonderful for that. And, you know, so we tend to look at AI as a negative. It isn't. It's how we choose to use it. And that's a really cool way to, you know, do better, do bigger, do more. Well, let's talk about somebody how chose to use AI in a particular way. A. Florida pastor is suing Open AI because he's claiming that Chad GPT repeatedly misdiagnosed his worsening symptoms.

It discouraged him from going to see a doctor. And now he has a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Now, I'm sorry this happened to him. But if you're going there, if you keep asking Chad GPT, am I getting sick or? If you're the simple act of asking that question means you probably should be going to a doctor. Yeah, exactly. I mean, anyone who's using a chat bot as their not only primary, but exclusive form of medical guidance, clearly doesn't understand the limitations of AI.

And quite frankly, it deserves whatever happens to them. I mean, my first response to this story was boo-hoo. Like, I hope this lawsuit gets laughed out of court because, quite frankly, anyone who brings a lawsuit like that may as well stamp it with frivolous, you know, right on the front. And, you know, you're a lawyer, you know this. And so, you know, the problem here is is that AI is not designed to solve your medical crisis or to fix your problem. No. It's designed to perpetuate the conversation. And so when he asked, you know, shouldn't I be taking this to a doctor, the chat bought perceived this as.

oh he wants to end the question end the conversation yeah I don't want the lights to go out on me so I'm just going to say well no and I'm going to continue to throw things in so it it incorporates facets of his background so it knew that he was a pastor it sort of talked about religion it invoked god and he just kept buying into it not you know not really thinking that maybe i should be seeing a doctor so you know bottom line is uh no and i know we live in a country where one and six canadians does not have a family doctor we are leaning more heavily on the tools and that's a really dangerous place for us as individuals and us as a country to be. We really have to give ourselves a head shake if we start taking advice directly from a chat

bot for the love of all that is good, please never do. But even the chatbot will tell you to check its work. I was watching a video as I was trying to learn how to use this and said whatever you do, anytime you do anything, ask, ask it, is this verified? And then it's going to double check everything. And this guy, the fact that this guy is now like, This is what I call legislating for the lowest common denominator. We've now established who the dumbest is.

It's this guy. And now he wants everyone to be treated like the dumbest person in the room. Oh, I want more guardrails. Most people, the vast majority of people, know that if you're, if you've got chest pains and you're asking the question, should I go to a doctor, if you don't go to a doctor, it's your own darn fault. We're going to have to take a break right here. We've got lots more to get to with Carmi Levy, including. some very bad news for some people who work for Uber

and PlayStation made a decision that they might be regretting. Don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulrooney show. Summer heats up in FX's The Shards. Said in 80s Los Angeles, the Shards follows a group of beautiful, privileged prep school students who are preyed on by the trawler, a serial killer targeting teenagers across the city. This fever dream of youth, beauty, sex, and mystery

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Conversations with Carmi Levy always matter, and we're very glad that he is stuck around. Carmie, thanks so much. Good to be with you, Ben. Let's talk about Uber. I don't think anybody is under any illusions. I mean, it's a technology company. They're not looking to have, in an ideal world for them,

there will be no drivers. There could be driverless cars and they're going to have a fleet. They don't have to worry about people ever again. So it's not surprising to me that they're laying off 10% of their customer service in favor of AI. Yeah. And they're saying the quiet part out loud because for the longest time when companies had mass layoffs, they use very soothing PR-like words to cover it up, you know, saying they're going to drive efficiency. They're preparing for the company of tomorrow.

But they never explicitly said AI. But that's really starting to change. And now Uber has said advances in AI have made it possible to deliver customer service, or what they like to call community operations, more efficiently, that they're more human-like, and the technology can do a better job. And the humans can't. So now it's time to get rid of the humans. So, you know, the scary thing here is that this isn't just, you know,

all I want to return that dude ad that I ordered on Amazon. In many cases, those customer service people, they are the folks that you contact when you're in a vehicle and there's a crisis. And that crisis could include being assaulted by the driver. We know that Uber drivers and other gig economy drivers major vector for things like sexual assaults and attacks in the vehicle. That's a huge problem in the industry. Or you just had an accident or something. And so losing that human lifeline and handing that over to a bot,

that's going to drive the next generation of headlines that we probably don't want to hear, but we will over the next few months as this technology begins to take hold. It's so odd because last week, or maybe it was, no, it was about a month ago that I was reading a story or hearing a story about how big technology companies that had been adopting AI didn't feel like they were getting their money's worth. And Uber was one of them that they were talking about. And somebody pointed out the irony, because what was happening is they were, they are being, at scale, it's costing them an enormous amount of money to operate their services through artificial intelligence. And we're not, none of us are actually paying the true cost of AI yet. We're being, we're being sold it at a discount.

They want to get us addicted to it. And then they're going to jack up the prices, very much like what Uber did. And yet now we're hearing that they are going to be using more AI and people are losing their jobs over it. So what exactly is going on? So, I mean, it's an industry trend. Other companies like Oracle and Meta and SNAP have also used AI as the excuse in mass layoffs over the last few months. And the industry is banking on the fact that that really dumb chatbot in the corner of that app is going to get smarter, much quicker than anyone might have imagined, that they're going to cut the jobs now and the technology is literally going to save them over the next six months, a year, a couple years, whatever. It'll become so smart that no one's going to notice that there isn't a human there.

And no one's going to complain that they no longer have to wait, you know, 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour, until a human actually comes on the line and is able to help them. but the technology can help them immediately. That's the hope, but we keep seeing AI hallucinate. We keep seeing, you know, like in the last story that we talked about, you know, misdiagnosing things, it still gets things wrong. It still confabulates. And it's still based on data that, you know, when it was trained, was in many cases not validated data. So it's going to be an industry problem for quite some time.

And we are going to see many companies walk back some of those transitions to AI when they realize, goodness, we probably still need some humans on the other end of the line. Look, back in the day when you and I were playing video games, the worst problem that we had was dust in the machine and we just had to blow in... Blow on the cartridge. And PlayStation made that big commitment to give up the discs in favor of, you know, whatever it is, downloading it off the cloud or something like that and working through their PlayStation network.

Well, that only works if the PlayStation Network is reliable. And they had a major outage for eight hours. Eight hours is interminable for a certain type of gamer. This exposes a real flaw in their game plan, doesn't it? It certainly does because, I mean, no sooner had sort of the global backlash to their, you know, getting rid of disc's announcement, started to die down, then the network went down. And the problem here is it didn't just affect online games. It also affected people who actually were just, you know, loaded a disc up in their PlayStation 5.

but in order to play the game, it still has to validate or authenticate online before it'll actually start playing. And so even if you had a game loaded locally, it didn't matter you were still stuck, you weren't playing for a good chunk of the day. And ironically, this happened around the same time as an Xbox outage as well, kind of, you know, illustrating the industry's Achilles heel that they keep pushing everyone toward not only online games that you download and stream, but subscription so that you. You don't just buy it once, but you pay a monthly subscription fee until the end of time, and all of those games go dark when you stop paying that fee. So, you know, the industry is moving toward an economic model that will likely mean that games cost more for all of us. And unfortunately, they're not building network capability that is up to snuff.

And as a result, gamers, I mean, in this case, they're not playing games. But in many cases, right, like, you know, because we lean so hard on the cloud for so many other things, think about what happens when there's a major adage. Remember what happened a few years back when Rogers had a bad day and the entire country ground to a halt? Because literally everything we do on all of our devices is based on cloud services. I was going to the weekend concert. The weekend concert was canceled. I had tickets to the weekend concert.

Yeah. That's right. And you were nowhere. Everything was dark. Yeah. Hey, I always love thinking about this idea that when you invent a new technology, you also invent the abuse of that technology. Like when there were no plane crashes before the Wright brothers invented the plane. and so they inadvertently invented the plane crash.

Well, meta, I mean, I saw this coming a mile away. When they gave us their meta glasses, we knew that it was only to take a minute for the perverts to take over or take hold. And sure enough, pervert glasses are now a thing. Yeah, I love that they call them pervert glasses because, I mean, and it's a small minority of people who wear these glasses who obviously cause problems for everyone else. They're using them to, you know, surreptitiously, quietly, secretly,

secretly record video of other people. They're using them to harass them, engage in sexual harassment, you know, peeping tombs. I mean, it's nasty the kind of headlines that cross my feed of people abusing what frankly should be a really cool technology. I'm a cyclist. I love being able to take a ride with these things on my nose because if I want to shoot a video while I'm riding, It's a perfect tool for what I needed for. But Instagram now is saying, and Instagram, of course, it's a meta property. Meta makes the same glasses.

Instagram head out and Messary released a statement saying that they are going to ban any user on Instagram who uploads video that involves harassing others. Do their glasses have, like, is there a light that turns on to let you know that they're recording? Yes, there is. And so every time you're recording, there is a tiny LED just in the corner of the glasses that does sort of, it shines forward so that if you're looking at someone and they're looking at you and recording, you'll be able to see, oh, goodness, the camera is on, you know, I might want to cover up or I might want to turn around. Unfortunately, it's trivially easy because the YouTube videos are all out there to hack that light so that it doesn't go on when it's recording. Or you can just use, you know, electric tape and cover it. Or you can even go on Amazon and order fitted covers for this thing to cover it up. Oh, my God.

Exactly. So, you know, like, it's ridiculously easy to cover your tracks. And unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of that show up on streaming sites like Instagram and TikTok. TikTok so far hasn't said anything. I would expect them to at some point. But Instagram is taking a stand saying, basically, we see this, we'll take it down. I still have questions about enforcement because we all know how much new content goes on to Instagram in the course of a given day. That's going to take a lot of AI and a lot of human monitoring to make sure that they get every

last one and that they don't also capture legitimate content in false positive. So, you know, people who want to post something have their content banned for reasons that, you know, make no sense because they weren't being pervy at all. So, you know, enforcement is the key. It will be interesting to see if they can pull that off at scale. Carmi Levy, as always, love chatting with you, my friend. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if, like, what if it doesn't hold?

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