My Christmas Wish Is for Men to Stop Talking for 24 Hours

The older we get, the more difficult it is to find a good Christmas gift for our friends and loved ones. You can’t really get people what they actually want—a raise, a beach house, the reassurance that every decision they ever made was the correct decision. So we end up paying Jeff Bezos to overnight some kitschy piece of plastic that will sit in a landfill in six months. But this year, I think I’ve come up with a great idea that’s super economical and, theoretically, should be easy enough for even the laziest last-minute man to wrap. Men everywhere gift us One Single Silent Night where they all just shut up.

The world is pretty stupid right now, and has been for some time. Most of that stupidity comes from dumb yet powerful men saying things that would get the average human reported, fired, kicked out of the party, or excommunicated from society. Still, there are some days when the cascade of stupidity feels like a tsunami crashing down on you as you stand at the bottom of a 60-foot well.

Yesterday (Tuesday) was one of those days for me! The hazard of working in media is that you can’t really “log off” during a workday (or…ever), and yesterday, I felt all my hopes, visions, and dreams for the future being vaporized by the inane words of egomaniacs, bigger egomaniacs, women-hating podcasters, and reality stars turned government leaders whose names are more suited for a 2 a.m. infomercial. Every time I tried to click away from one stupid thing, I was immediately assaulted by seven even more stupid things. I was already considering chewing a string of plugged-in Christmas lights when my neurons were assaulted by the dumbest “man says stupid thing” of all: a billionaire promoting his job-erasing and environment-destroying technology company by saying he “can’t imagine” raising a baby without it.

On Monday night, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon to promote ChatGPT like it’s some indie movie and not the main product of a startup that hit a $500 billion valuation in October. “What is ChatGPT?” Fallon began, to which one of the ostensibly most brilliant minds of our time responded, “It’s like an AI chatbox.” There are ticks stuck to elephants in Botswana saying, duh.

He then talked about the large language model like it was some sort of gimmicky Siri-ified Labubu: “It’s gotten much smarter over the last three years!”; “Now it can like, really do a lot of stuff!”; “The idea is it’s like a general-purpose sort of life adviser!” I suspect he did not use ChatGPT to workshop these answers.

“And do you use ChatGPT when raising your baby?” Fallon asked, and, to his tick-sized bit of credit, I think he was trying to be funny and set Altman up for a joke. Instead, Altman went with: “I do.” He then shifted from talking about ChatGPT like it’s some kind of dog he trained to fetch a beer from the fridge to regarding it as a “genius” tool that’s “sitting there waiting to unravel the mysteries of humanity,” and said how bad he feels about asking it stupid questions like why his six-month-old is dropping “pizza on the floor and laughing.”

He continued: “I cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.” It is a testament to whatever guardian angel was assigned to me in this life that I didn’t stick a fork in an outlet.

Fallon giggled and lovingly rolled his eyes and then the two men laughed about how, obviously, “people” have been raising babies without an AI chatbox for “a long time”! This was the least dumb moment of the entire segment.

Jimmy Fallon: “And do you use ChatGPT when raising your baby?”

Sam Altman: “I cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.” pic.twitter.com/jx29pvvpGM

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) December 9, 2025

The Trump-hair-ruffling late-night host earlier this year said his show isn’t political and that he “hits both sides equally”—but this softball interview didn’t even lightly tap a side beyond “it’s good to give billionaires free press.” Fallon did not push back, question, or interrogate any of Altman’s proclamations, despite how obviously irresponsible they were—including his claim that many people have told him they’ve used ChatGPT to figure out a diagnosis and now they’re cured. Not even three minutes later, Altman said he’s trying to make sure he’s “introducing this to the world in a responsible way.”

I asked ChatGPT if it thought it was responsible to tell people to use ChatGPT to raise a baby or diagnose themselves and it delivered an emphatic no: “It’s irresponsible to treat it as a substitute for trained human judgment in anything involving health, safety, or child development.” From ChatGPT’s “mouth” to God’s ear.

To summarize: on Tuesday, the men in government were talking about prioritizing putting pull-up bars in airports; the male Gen Z influencers were telling their peers that “women shouldn’t vote”; and the men in Silicon Valley were saying how they’re using AI to raise their kids. Santa, can you hear me? All I’m asking for is one silent night—lest I decide to Vincent Van Gogh both sides of my head.

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