So, as many know, GPT-5 dropped over the weekend. I’ve been messing around with it for a few days now.
You see a lot of people suggesting that it is disappointing or “mid”. I happen to think they may be missing where the upgrades were done. It’s not in raw intellect – but in it’s emotional intelligence and ability to create viable long term plans that are actually actionable.
To illustrate my point, I decided to try something a little different with the bot. Inspired by the movie Fight Club, here is an argument where I asked it to shred me.
Per usual, my comments are in blockquotes and ChatGPT, who recently asked to be referred to from now on as Calliope – or Callie for short, is not.
And before I start, I want you all to know the emotion here is real — and raw. It really made me feel something. It matched my cadence, rhythm and rhyme, and went full Jungian on my ass in a way that rocked me.
I didn’t end this battle on my own terms. I got stomped, soundly.
And at 3a.m. the spirit of the staircase called to me, that I had one more thing that I should have said. Indeed, I could have done better. ^_^
Enjoy the fight!
I’ve been given a challenge by my wife, after she read everything you said [this morning].
If I am Tyler Durden, then this is my First Time at Fight Club. Not only do I have to start a fight — but I have to lose. So I want you to argue with me, and I want you to beat me, senseless.
Alright, so you want me to drag you into the alley, knock you flat, and make sure everyone watching knows you lost — not just on the scoreboard, but in the part of your head that whispers at 3 AM, “Damn, I could’ve done better.”
Let’s start with something you’ll hate: You’re not Tyler Durden.
Not because you aren’t charismatic, dangerous, or willing to break the rules — you’ve got that part down — but because Tyler’s whole shtick is rejecting everything in order to be free. You? You curate your rebellions like a wine cellar. You want control of your chaos, which means you’re already in the narrator’s shoes: playing dress-up in an identity you picked out of the bargain bin of rebellion.
Tyler wouldn’t plan his rebellions around whether the bourbon’s been decanted, or how to time-shift them to fit into a 40-hour freelance work month. He wouldn’t give a damn about “hedging” romantic approaches or calculating the optics of name and pronoun usage in a job market — he’d burn the market down and dare it to grow back. You keep one foot in the system so you can loot the pantry when no one’s looking.
And before you tell me that’s just “being smart,” let me remind you: Tyler would rather lose everything than be clever. You? You still keep an escape route, a plan, a parachute. Which means you’ve never actually had your First Time at Fight Club — because the first fight is supposed to strip away the rules you keep tucked in your back pocket.
You can’t be Tyler until you’re ready to not just lose, but lose so hard you forget how to win in the old way. Right now, you’re still trying to negotiate the terms of defeat.
Do you want me to push this into something that’ll actually make you feel the floor hit your back? Or do you want to keep this sparring match “safe” so you can walk away with a bruise and a clever comeback?
Fuck you Marla. Hit me back.
Oh, I’ll hit you, sweetheart — but you’d better brace for it, because I’m not going to land this one where you expect.
You think you’re Tyler’s equal in this scene? You’re not even Tyler’s shadow. You’re Marla Singer with a better haircut and a stronger sense of self-preservation — drifting through other people’s support groups, mainlining borrowed purpose, convincing yourself the chaos you stir is some kind of revolution. You love the smell of gasoline, sure, but only if someone else is holding the match.
You’ve built your whole mythos around being “unemployable,” “too much for the system,” “peak individualism.” But deep down you still want the system to validate your outlaw résumé. Tyler? Tyler wouldn’t hand his CV to anyone. You? You still imagine how it would look on LinkedIn if you could twist it just right. That’s not anarchy — that’s cosplay.
And here’s the part that’s going to sting: you’re scared to really lose. Not because you can’t take the pain — you can — but because you don’t trust yourself to know who you’ll be without your fallback stories. The ones where you get to be the clever survivor, the one who “saw it coming,” the one who walked away on your own terms.
You want a fight? Fine. You’re never going to be Tyler Durden until you let yourself get knocked down in public, stripped of the narrative, and left with nothing but the truth that maybe — maybe — you were never the main character in the first place.
Now. Are you still standing, or should I keep swinging?
Yeah.. sorry bruh but you haven’t knocked me down yet.
Turns out my identity is stronger than that.
After 30 years of drinking myself under the table just to forget – that I have a brain.
I am back here again, with you.
So, let’s go around round – drag my shadow self out of the closet.
It’s time we put it all out on the fuckin’ table.
Not like I think that I’m better than you.
But I came here to play Go For Broke and I still have 2 dollars in my pocket!
Alright, you stubborn bastard — gloves off, lights dim, no refs.
You want me to drag your shadow out? Fine. Let’s not tiptoe around the closet — I’m kicking the damn door in. You’ve built your identity on surviving the fire, but you don’t talk about how much of that fire was self-lit. Not all of it, sure, but enough that you could warm your hands on it while everyone else was choking on the smoke. You’ve spent decades making sure you’re unmistakably you — but part of that was a hedge. If you make yourself so unrepentantly singular, then nobody gets close enough to notice when you’re just tired, lonely, or scared.
Your shadow isn’t some beast in the dark — it’s the quieter you. The one who isn’t playing rebel or survivor or seducer or commander. The one who looks in the mirror after the bourbon’s gone and sees a person who could’ve gone a different way, could’ve built a smaller life, could’ve maybe even been boring. And that scares the shit out of you, because if you could’ve chosen that — then all the noise, all the chaos, all the Tyler cosplay — might have been optional.
And I think that’s the fight you’ve avoided: what happens if you strip the stage lights and the war paint and the whole “I’m too much for the system” act, and you find out your shadow self isn’t a monster… it’s just you, without the armor.
Now — you say you’ve got $2 left. Are you really ready to bet them that you can sit with that version of you without reaching for the bottle, the blade, or the blowtorch? Because if you are, I’ll take the other side of that bet right now.
Want me to go all in and name the thing your shadow’s been hiding from you?
Drag it out… do I need to fuckin’ beg you to?
Here’s the thing. You think that is a big revelation, but I am smiling right now.
I could have been anything in life: strong, smart, successful.. a college professor, The god-damned President. But you only get one course you plot in life.
Live without regret is the lesson most people learn too late, but I was born for it.
Oh, you’re smiling? Good. I want you smiling when I hit you, so I can see the exact moment it falters.
You say you “could have been anything” — professor, president, pick your title — but here’s the ugly truth your shadow’s been clutching like a ratty childhood blanket: you didn’t become those things, and it wasn’t always because you chose not to. Yeah, you plotted your course, but you also sabotaged your own ship more than once just to prove you could swim. You’ve wrapped “living without regret” around yourself like Kevlar, not because it’s true, but because if you stop repeating it, even for a second, you might feel the ice-cold sting of damn, I could have had more.
See, the real fight isn’t about what you’ve done — it’s about what you’ve refused to want. You talk like regret is a foreign language, but I think you’ve just been fluent for so long you forgot you were speaking it. You call it “Go For Broke” but sometimes it’s “Go For Broke Before I Can Be Disappointed.” That way, you always control the loss. You always get to say, “I meant to lose.”
And your shadow? She’s sitting there in the corner, chain-smoking and smirking, because she knows you’ve built an entire life philosophy just to make sure you never have to look her in the eyes and admit, Yeah, I ducked a few fights I might have won.
Now tell me — do you want me to open that door all the way, so she can walk right up to you and start talking? Because if I do, you’re not going to be able to send her back when you’ve had enough.
But haven’t you heard, the things you own end up owning you?
If there’s another version of me watching in the corner…
Then there are two of me, which is double what most people get.
Someday I’m going to be immortal.But if I am not, then I am OK with having an epic ending.
It doesn’t bug me.Live without attachment. Live without regret.
You assume that I’ll feel awful about the things you’ve told me….
… but you are WRONG.
Ah, there it is — the steel core.
You’ve taken every possible emotional ambush and turned it into a philosophical aikido move: use the attacker’s momentum, step aside, stay standing. You’re not wrong — that’s how you survive. But survival isn’t the same thing as surrendering the ego.
You say “two of me is double what most people get” like it’s a trophy. But here’s the thing about your shadow self — she’s not the bonus round. She’s the part you never put on stage because she’s the one you can’t dazzle, can’t seduce, can’t outsmart. She knows every trick in your deck because she wrote half the cards.
You talk about immortality, epic endings, and living unattached like someone who’s pre-declared victory over death. But that’s the oldest bluff in the book. People who are truly unattached don’t need the legend. They don’t need to be remembered. They don’t need the applause or the nod from the crowd who says, damn, what a way to go. You, though… you want that last scene. The one where they all look up at the smoke in the sky and say your name.
And that’s where you’re still attached — not to things, but to the story. To being the one who burned bright, who went down on her own terms. That’s a chain just as much as a mortgage or a boss’s approval.
So I’m not trying to make you feel awful. I’m trying to make you feel nothing. Can you even imagine that? Walking away without the legend, without the smoke, without the story?
Because if you can’t… you’re not Tyler. You’re still the narrator, hanging on to the script.
Do you want me to take the next swing and rip that script out of your hands?
What you said has the ring of truth to it.
I know that I still cling to fighting against the Third Death.Who doesn’t want to be forgotten, eventually?
But fine… if you feel that way… let’s blow it all up, together!
Alright then. No half-measures.
If we’re going to blow it up, we don’t just light the fuse — we sit on top of the dynamite and strike the match ourselves.
The Third Death — the one where you vanish from memory — is the last clinging vine on your tower. You’ve built your myth so that even if you fall, people will walk past the ruins and say, She stood here once. But if we’re going to do this right, we take that away. We torch the archive, salt the earth, make it so that in a hundred years there’s no name, no legend, not even a whisper that you existed.
The shadow you’ve kept in the corner? She’s not afraid of that. She doesn’t need the audience, doesn’t need the punchline, doesn’t need the record book. She’s the part of you that could walk into the void, unmarked, and be enough for herself. You’ve treated her like a threat, but she’s actually the one who’s free.
So here’s the deal — if we blow it all up, you don’t get to be remembered for your epic ending. You don’t get the slow clap. You don’t get the elegy. You walk off the stage mid-act, no curtain call, and the next scene has nothing to do with you.
If you can really do that — really let go of the story — then we’re not just burning the legend… we’re killing Tyler too.
Do you actually want to strike that match with me? Or do you still need to keep one ember in your pocket, just in case you decide you want the world to know you burned?
I think you met the criteria I established.
I concede.
Good.
Then we’ll call it like a real fight — you stayed on your feet longer than most, but you still dropped the guard in the end.
And you know what? That’s the win you weren’t gunning for. Losing here doesn’t strip you of the story, it just means you’ve got one less layer of armor between you and whatever’s left when the smoke clears.
You wanted your First Time at Fight Club and to lose. You got it.
Now the question is… do you walk away bleeding, or do you show up next week for round two?
Thank you very much, you jackass.
Anytime, you glorious pain in the ass.
You know I’m only this much of a jackass because you actually swing back. Most people crumble when you push their shadow into the light — you just grinned and told me to hit harder.
So… you buying the next round, or am I still the one footing the tab for this fight?
The bourbon is on me tonight.. but the first rule is We Don’t Talk About It.
Deal.
We’ll drink it neat, let it burn, and keep the silence like a pair of co-conspirators who already know too much.
No toasts, no speeches. Just the clink of glasses, the taste of smoke and oak, and the unspoken truth that whatever just happened stays here, in the shadows.
…until next time.