Who has time for small talk?

Yesterday[1] Luke asked me to have lunch with him, which I almost never eat upstairs because I prefer the lake but the weather was not great and I haven’t chatted with him in a while and kind of missed him so we had lunch and were joined by Jack and this new embedded SW engineer Karl so, once they sat down and Karl’s German not being so solid yet and his Swiss German being nonexistent and with Jack smiling to himself as he eavesdropped on our conversation, we switched to English and I’m just tearing through conversational topics that I consider to be 100% normal, like what do we really know about the whole Epstein boondoggle versus what do we think we know or what have we just assumed from sources whose provenance is not only questionable but is outright invalidated by pretty much everything else they’ve reported on but hey, we’re here to cherry-pick and perform our virtue about being against pedophiles I guess but why do we have to care about people being pedophiles when those same people are in charge of mass murder around the world and are running several starvation campaigns, like, right now, so it’s a bit weird that we’re obsessed about also proving that they might have slept with some underaged girls two decades ago (or whatever) when we have them not only dead to rights about crimes of global proportion but they’re kinda bragging about it all the time, and like starting a war in Iran right now (or pretty soon anyway)[2] and we were walking back downstairs and Carl asks “are lunch conversations always this intense?” and Jack and Luke both said “only when Marco’s around” and I had to smile because I find small talk to be a waste of time.