Back in the Saddle?
This week on GrokTALK! GraniteGrok.com co-founder Skip Murphy joins me to talk about getting back to the ‘Grok, with some chit-chat about what’s kept him away, AI data center outrage, Lindsey Clancy culture, and whatever tangents we end up on in the process.
00:00 Reintroduction of Skip Murphy
02:03 The Impact of AI and Data Centers
04:36 Moral Accountability in Society
07:27 The Dangers of Moral Relativism
09:34 Political Landscape and Midterms
11:40 The Rise of Authoritarianism
14:11 Final Thoughts and Future Plans
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” – Gustav Mahler
Watch on the ‘Grok Rumble Channel if the Embedded Video does not load.
Linke:
- https://granitegrok.com/author/skip
Authors’ and Speakers’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of Grok Media, LLC, GraniteGrok.com, its sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers.
Unedited Transcript:
Steve (00:00)
So he’s not dead, just so you know, Skip Murphy’s alive and well, co-founder of GraniteGrok. com. We found him, we dusted him off, and here he is for you and your enjoyment, amusement, and entertainment, as well as he’s very informative and maybe not on all the topics politically, because he’s been busy doing other things in his life.
All right, well, Skip.
Skip (00:20)
Back, I think. I’ve said that
several times over the last few years, and just like that famous movie line: I keep trying to get out, but they keep pulling me back in. And yes, we have been doing a lot of different things, raising our grandson since birth, as you well know. He’s now 11. Well, 11 in two months. And then DCYF decided to rear its head, so we’ve had a number of foster kids with us.
We just had two little ones. They were two and four when they reached us, and anybody reading Granite Grok can see one of the sagas that I have been through with the boy. It I will tell you that my blogging experience and education experience allowed me to play rings around their special ed person. Let’s just say that the judge was not amused, but I haven’t written that post yet.
Steve (01:12)
Well, yeah, you can check out some of that story. I think we’re up to part; we’re coming up on part five. So you can just look that up. You can just click on Skip’s byline, and you’ll be able to see all that stuff. And then the tens of thousands of other things he’s done over the last two decades about New Hampshire, the nation, and the world, which we continue to do even in his absence. But now that he’s back, I may not have to write as much. Fingers crossed. So it’s nice to
Skip (01:37)
Yeah. Well I’m
Steve (01:38)
have a little help.
Skip (01:39)
I’m planning on doing it. Maybe not as fevered as I did once before,
Steve (01:44)
So, a lot of things going on in the news. We only have a few minutes. Just wanted to get an opportunity for Skip to say, Hey, I’m trying to come back. Here I am. We’re gonna do some stuff, talk about your story a little bit. But there are a few things that happen, you know, in the world, even when you’re not paying attention, quite a few of them actually. And I kind of wonder what it would be like.
If I wasn’t paying attention anymore, and how much easier my life would be if I wasn’t, but I do this for a living now. So that’s not gonna happen. But anyway, AI data centers, of course, have been a huge subject. And you were in tech for a long time, and you know as well as anybody that everything is in a data center somewhere. That’s what the cloud is, but there’s an ongoing battle about data centers and the environment and China and big tech and thoughts.
Skip (02:29)
It is certainly another revolution that’s going on with AI. You know, AI first started back in the fifties, but it’s only in the last two years that it has actually come to the public fore with the ChatGPT models. And now they’re getting very extensive. And I’ll tell you, it is a huge interruption. I went through three interruptions during my career where the technology changed so fast.
I found myself unemployed until I could retrain, reskill, and get back in the game again. And I do want to play with some of it. I’m looking at playing with, of course, Grok AI, which I use, and Perplexity a lot for doing a lot of my upcoming research-type stuff. But I do want to build my own app at some point. The controversy. I think a lot of them have now been spotted on X.
Formerly Twitter, as well as on Facebook, a number of Chinese-associated folks and bots are trying to make a mess of the growth of AI here in the US. Obviously, Bernie Sanders, of course, Mr. Luddite, wanted to shut it down altogether. I think it’s deliberate. I think it’s just like how China wanted to sell us lots of windmills and
renewables to keep us from using our own energy resources to put us at a disadvantage, make us as energy-poor as Europe is right now. If we don’t stay ahead of China, this will end up badly for the United States. So to all those folks out there that are being very disparaging about AI, shut it down, don’t do it, yada yada yada, I’m sorry, I agree with those who say this is a national security kind of deal.
I think the industry itself, the hyperscalers, are finally getting the idea: okay, we’re not just going to make life easier for doing search, which will put Google and some of the other search engines out of business, but they’re willing to spend a whole lot of money for taxes and helping out local communities. And that story is finally coming out: teachers, police, and firemen are getting big raises.
New equipment’s coming into town, and you’re starting to hear from some of those towns that started early on that there are benefits beyond just being able to type in a question and get an instant answer back. It is transformational. And I also read medical blogs or scientific blogs, and in that area, there are some real things coming to the fore that would have been impossible now.
Yes, it can be used for bad things, deepfakes and all of that. But all in all, I think once this thing gets to a level past what the first industrial revolution did back then. We’re in that now. Things will calm down a little bit. There will be some guardrails put in place. But it’s so new. Nobody knows what guardrails we need. You can’t just say, do this, do that. We didn’t even know what it was going to do three months ago. So those are my thoughts, and I’m sticking with them. And no, I haven’t gotten a check from Elon because he stole part of our name.
Steve (05:38)
Yeah, no kidding. So put your wooden shoes back in the closet. Don’t be tossing them into the machinery, and we’ll see where we go. I agree. I mean, I’ve written about it extensively. I’ve had to remind people that, again, the Koch brothers didn’t write us any checks. Nobody else wrote us any checks. We just came out and said what we thought. And that continues to be the case with AI. Hey, I would tell you if somebody offered me money.
Just just just ’cause it’s novel and it’s a subject. It’s a, hey, somebody tried to buy my opinion. Ha ha, good luck with that.
Skip (06:06)
Even with the foster care saga that I’m writing about now, the ability to get done in mere minutes, sometimes seconds, instead of me having to spend hours or days, just shows that it can be used for good if you know how to ask questions properly. And that’s really the key. As a former programmer, how do you break down a problem? How do you figure out what is necessary? How to formulate
Your thinking, your philosophy, that’s key for a lot of folks now who are now AI programmers. It’s a completely different thing because while there is a certain subset of high-level coders that have to go back and fix some of this vibe coding because some of it just plain sucks- all kinds of holes and stuff like that- not enterprise grade. That’s changing quick because now the AIs are teaching themselves how to be better.
Steve (07:01)
What we do, right? In theory. Every day we try to teach each other about the issues of the day and to have a conversation about it. And that’s how a lot of things start with AI. You just start having a conversation. We had a guy, one old conservative, who for a number of months was talking to Claude and proposing questions about AI and all sorts of other things and free speech. And he would just have this conversation, and he would share the conversation.
And he would take an excerpt the next time he went in and give it to Claude so Claude knew where they were, and then they’d continue the conversation. He did that for a couple of months. So it’s really, really fascinating to see, you know, maybe somebody will do that in a year or two, and we’ll see what the difference looks like, and it’ll probably be mind-blowing.
Skip (07:45)
I agree. I happen to like Grok, by the way, because you can tell it to use a manner of writing that’s sort of like a swashbuckling pirate.
Steve (07:55)
Okay. All right. So other things happening in the world. Of course, Lindsay Clancy, the whole psychology behind women, you know, standing behind her for her postpartum depression justification for strangling her three children to death. And of course, the response is, as it always has been, quite amusing to see.
You know, they’re like, we we’ve got this. We we’ve got the messaging down. And then a a whole bunch of regular people who are just sitting there going, What? Come up with great things like memes or, you know, just statements. And they’re like, Yeah, this is really such a great idea. So you said you did a little, we talked about this ahead of time, what we were gonna talk about. And I said Lindsay Clancy, and Skip said, I got memes.
Skip (08:38)
I got a whole bunch of memes that are sitting right behind me that if you don’t mind looking at the backside of my pantry, I’ll read some of them to you if you wish. Okay,
Steve (08:47)
Sure. Sure, go ahead.
Skip (08:48)
I thought this was good. Mental illness may explain why somebody did something heinous, but it doesn’t excuse the moral accountability.
And yes, I know that they’re trying to paint her as somebody who literally lost her mind. But I’m sorry, it’s three kids. And that’s where this lone juror stood. And a lot of men, I think, are saying, you know, the kids are ours too. It’s not just a mom, it’s us. And I think it’s gone through as you and I said just earlier a few minutes ago.
It’s spread through the manosphere saying, What the heck is going on? Because if I can claim mental illness, that now in this era that we’re sitting in allows me to do anything.
From abortion isn’t murder to murder isn’t murder. That’s effectively
Steve (09:38)
Right.
Skip (09:38)
what we’ve got right now. And that’s not gonna help anybody.
Steve (09:42)
Well, no, I mean, when you have moral relativism in a secular worldview and there’s absolutely no accountability but whatever you happen to think at that particular moment, total chaos pretty much is what you’re inviting.
Skip (09:52)
Yeah, I think society really has gone to the secularism and avoiding God, and we’ve been heading that way since the mid-sixties. And I’ll tell you, not a good thing because we have made ourselves our own gods, and moral relativism can allow you to basically justify anything. And it but it comes down to this courage. sometimes
Doing what’s right means standing alone. And you know, God helped the guy who was that juror, which I think it’s very funny. All these awful white liberal ladies were screaming that he’s wrong, he’s wrong, he’s wrong. And then it turns out the lone man jur juror was black. Racist, racist women, look what they’re doing.
Yeah, here’s here’s the quote. Lindsey Clancy was just mentally ill. Yeah, and Jeffrey Dahmer was just hungry. So, you know, we we can do all that kind of stuff.
Steve (10:47)
You know, as long as he’s eating a Republican.
Skip (10:50)
Yeah. Well, yeah. there’s a brass statue that came across as a meme. I don’t know whether you published that one, but the the big message is the holdout, standing for truth when everyone else gives in. Courage is a lonely vote. Justice still lives in ordinary people. And as we’re seeing with the AWFLs the affluent white liberal nitwits, they’re not ordinary.
They are so tied to third, fourth, maybe fifth wave feminism, they they’ve lost their c moral compass. It is whatever they say it is.
yes. Throw back to the late sixties, early seventies during the Vietnam War end, when a lot of soldiers coming home were called baby killers. The people who once called our soldiers baby killers now march for the right to kill babies.
Steve (11:37)
I think we did that.
Skip (11:37)
What do you think happens
in just fifty odd years?
Steve (11:40)
Yeah, I mean and and at the at the pace of of crazy, you know, you have to assume that it’s gonna accelerate even faster now.
Skip (11:48)
I do worry. I mean you and I have fought stuff by writing and talking and speaking for a long time. We were too old to pick up arms like my sons were, but we’ve done what we could. You know, the fighting keyboards one one.
Or hundred and first rather. But what
Steve (12:04)
There you go.
Skip (12:05)
is what is our society going to be? You look at the DSA, you look at the left, and words are not full of meaning anymore. They’re not precise. They are always being assigned a public political motive by the left. And they’re always changing those meanings when everything is relative, not just relative mor
Moralism. But when our own language becomes anything that anyone pleases at any time, how long can we last?
Steve (12:35)
Well, not very long. And you know, I think that w obviously we have red states and blue states, everybody talks about the civil war and I’m like, I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the midterms, and we’ll segue into that in a second for a few minutes before we finish up. But, you know, everybody we’ve been warning people for years. I mean, that’s why everybody we know has firearms and knows how to use them and has ammunition, because at some point
The crazy people on the left were destined to get to where we’re at today. And the next step seems very inevitable. They threaten you with violence. They try to intimidate you. They suppress your speech. And then they actually talk about doing violence to you. And then they applaud violence against others. And you have to accept that no matter how polite you are, how many times you try to cross the aisle, how many times you turn the other cheek, sooner or later somebody is going to attempt to do violence against you. And you have to be prepared for that.
And I’m not saying you need to be an asshole. I’m not saying you need to be mean and vicious. Continue to be a decent human being. Just be prepared.
Skip (13:37)
You’re absolutely right. There’s another meme that’s in in my flock of stuff. Maybe I should just post all of my memes just for the heck of it, and I may duplicate some of yours. But there’s one where all these black clad Antifa DSA folks with clubs and poles and everything else. Watch out, rural people. We’re coming for you. And underneath is a is an old time redneck scraggly beard holding a s
A hunting rifle with a very large scope on it says Well come on, hurry up, will ya? I got a pie in the oven.
Steve (14:11)
they don’t really know what they’re they’re they’re they’re gonna encounter. I don’t think I think during the BLM situation we saw some of that where they were like, We’re gonna move out into into these suburbs and then a little further and things got a little different once they got out there because the city was their turf. They had Democrat mayors and council members and district attorneys and everybody else on their side. But the minute you get out of that little bubble, things change.
Skip (14:35)
Well we saw how sophisticated got in Minneapolis. and I kept on thinking this is a forbearing of what might come because they are absolutely organized by all kinds of different technology. And now Trump’s folks have figured out where all of this was coming from and now is going after them like an anaconda financially, and a lot of those.
People are running for the hills. They’re going to get the same treatment that Iran is getting being cut off economically. Because they’re not just going after the people who supplied the folks, say in Minneapolis or in Seattle. They’re going the next two or three levels up. Where did all this money come from? And there are a lot of scared people going, crap. They finally woke up.
And now we
Steve (15:22)
Yeah, and
Skip (15:23)
are what’s for Jeffrey Dahmer’s dinner.
Steve (15:25)
Well, we need to hope that the midterms turn out well, so that he can continue to do that, uninterfered with by the crazy Democrats who are like, We’re gonna impeach him. That’s our entire agenda. So anyway, I know you haven’t been paying a ton of attention to the midterms, to politics in general, ’cause you’ve been super busy with family stuff. But you know, November is coming. any closing thoughts before we wrap this up about that and maybe what happens after?
Skip (15:49)
While I’ve been doing fostering, I have continued doing reading, just not as much of it. not as much here in New Hampshire. you know, the only thing I put up was that one thing about Scott Brown reaching back to twenty fourteen to what he said about he voted more with Democrats than with Republicans. I don’t know how
his rival is going to do and his name th the car dealer. What’s his name? The guy who won the
Steve (16:14)
Down to
Skip (16:15)
the guy who won the election that
no I’m sorry, Congress. My fault. Yes, where he said
Steve (16:22)
Di Lorenzo. That’s
Skip (16:25)
You know, he wants to give a pathway to citizenship for illegals if they’ve been here for a long time. there’s one other thing that escapes me. It’s like, you know, sometimes the Republicans shoot themselves in their own feet. But what I’ve been concentrating on is watching how the DSA goes. And I’ve been reading about them for a long, long time. I used to be on their email list five times. I always got found out.
they literally want to remake America in their own way. They don’t understand how stupid they really are, because none of them have even a quarter of the brain power wattage that our founders had. They basically want to turn us into an authoritarian communist country. And they are hellbent in doing it, and God help us all if they get that.
they’ve I’ve heard that they’re only about one percent of the electorate, but there’s a lot of confused college kids is another meme that I’ve got where you know people who have been through communism, like Lily Tang, really know what’s going on, but all of the college kids nowadays that are for it think it’s all like Christmas, we’re gonna get everything for free. They just don’t understand history in that you guys are gonna be the kulacs.
You’re gonna be the idiots that they brought into the fold and you will be the first ones put up against the wall. The rest of us had
Steve (17:49)
Yeah, we’ve been warning.
Skip (17:50)
better start firing our five trillion rounds with our four hundred and fifty million firearms.
Steve (17:57)
Yeah, we’ve been warning them for years. you know, of course, while the DSA may only be one percent, like any radical group, the Democrat Party is at least a third. And the Democrats will vote the way the DSA tells them to. So we’re gonna wrap up with that so you can get on with your day because you still have family things to do. And of course, we want you to keep thinking about writing more content.
Skip (18:19)
I’m going to. I’m also restarting what I started five years ago, which was to rehab my house. I have paint on my fingers. So just a lot of work. But I I will easily say I have missed writing every single day. And now that we have done our good deal, this was supposed to be a six-month hitch, turned out to be a year and a half.
We were told they were very cute, and yes they were. The littlest one had a smile that would light up a stadium easily. they’re normal. No they weren’t. I can’t tell you how many times I brought one or both up to Dartmouth Hitchcock in Lebanon. The this was not easy.
Steve (19:00)
All right, well you’re out the other end of that and we’re at the end of this. So thank you, Skip, and I look forward to doing this again really soon.
Skip (19:08)
I would love to do it. After all, it’s like giving a blogger an open mic.
Steve (19:13)
All right. Thanks a lot. That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. that’s it for this week on Grok Talk. And with any luck, we’ll be back next week. You almost didn’t get this week because we had some technical issues, but we always have technical issues. So we just overcome them and move on. Skip, thanks a lot and have a great night.
Skip (19:29)
Great, I thank you very much. And now I have to persuade Debbie, the most esteemed wife, to let me start buying new equipment.
Steve (19:36)
Good luck with that.
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