Ep. 1855 - How Scammers Make Money By Infesting The Internet With Bots

In terms of sheer size, the internet is bigger than ever by any objective metric. There are more than a billion websites in existence right now, I think like 1.5 billion. In 2010, there were just 250 million, and yet for all the growth, the internet for most people feels much smaller and more restrictive than you probably remember it. Personally, if you go back a decade, I was probably checking something like 20 different websites on a regular basis 10 or 15 years ago. There was a thing called surfing the web, which is a phrase that you don't hear much anymore, but that's what your parents would do. Today, I checked maybe two or three websites, and I think most people have had a similar experience. We've been bombarded with so many different apps and so many different websites for more than a decade, and now we've decided that we don't need most of them. Instead of following a dozen different independent bloggers or websites, people are just on social media. They're scrolling Instagram or X, the endless feed that just brings everything to one place. They're talking to AI. If they want to spend some money, maybe they're subscribing to the Wall Street Journal or New York Times or maybe a premium sub-stack or two. Our information is coming from a very concentrated handful of sources, and therefore we are extremely easy to manipulate in ways that many people don't realize. This is the exact opposite of the original promise of the internet, but that's where we are. How exactly did this happen? How significant is the problem really? To answer those questions, we'll begin in Russia, which is still waging some kind of war in Ukraine. A war that's simply based on the fact that it's still going on. We can assume that Russia must be losing. Russia has ten times the economy of Ukraine nearly four times the population, and yet they've apparently been on the defensive for quite some time now. In fact, as we've previously discussed, Ukraine has been striking targets deep in Russian territory with total impunity. They've been ignoring the Trump administration, which doesn't want Ukraine to escalate the conflict, and for a very small notoriously corrupt country, Ukraine is punching well above its weight. And far purposes, what's worth talking about is that when they're not bombarding refineries and spiking the price of diesel, Ukrainian drones are now going after Russian data centers, which handle a significant amount of automated online activity. In the past few days, Ukraine has bombed at least three data centers belonging to a technology company called Yandex, which is Russia's equivalent to Google, in the sense that in Russia it handles much more traffic than Google does. The data centers were located within about a hundred to two hundred miles of Moscow, so these were aggressive strikes. The leader of Ukraine, Zelensky, claimed that swarms of Russian bots had been taken offline because of the attacks. In fact, he said that so many bots have been disabled, that quote, a lot of people noticed as they were just sort of casually browsing the internet. This was his victory lap from an event in Warsaw. Watch. When we started responding to Russia's operation against our data centers, and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations, because there were fewer bots, and it's pretty clear where those bots were coming from. So, I don't know if you happen to notice less hate, less division, and fewer provocations online. I can't say I did. Basically the same amount of provocation and hate as I've become accustomed to. But according to Zelensky, that's because Ukraine has been conducting bombing runs deep in the Russian territory. Even by the standards of wartime propaganda, this is pretty shameless, ridiculous stuff. On its face is the kind of claim that no one should really take seriously. He's claiming that if you just keep giving Ukraine more money and more bombs than he can fix the internet by blowing up stuff in Russian. Now, credit where it's due, he knows his audience, he knows how to manipulate Westerners into giving him exactly what he wants. Ever since Donald Trump very unexpectedly won the 2016 election, a critical mass of Americans have been primed to believe that the Russians can hack anything they want. They can hack elections, they can hack Facebook memes, they can basically mine controllers anytime they want with their amazing hacking skills. It's much easier for Democrats to just blame Russia for everything than it is to assess their own failures. So that's what they decided to do. And now, Zelensky is once again taking advantage of this derangement by presenting three random Russian data centers as a kind of ground zero for online hate and division. The ongoing concern about data centers in some corners of the country and broader concerns about AI in general, prime people to take this seriously as well. So this is going to be a big theme heading into the elections next month. It's probably going to be a theme in every American election for the foreseeable future. And that's because there's a fundamental truth underlying the obvious lie that Zelensky is peddling, which is that nobody trusts anything they see online anymore. And for good reason, you shouldn't even when you remove AI from the equation, which you really can't. It's a big part of the picture. It seems like pretty much every influencer and online commentator has been taking money without disclosing it. This is from a deep dive. The Wall Street Journal published earlier this year, quote, last summer, Donald Trump's 28-year-old former campaign aid, Alex Bruceowitz had some new advice for the president, reclassify marijuana, as a less dangerous drug, nearly 70% of a public voter support Trump on this, no brainer. He said the more than 640,000 followers on X. But Bruceowitz left out of the post a political action committee funded by legal marijuana's biggest players had just paid him $300,000. Israel made plans over the past summer to spend $900,000 on an influencer campaign with a US audience according to disclosure documents, as Israel fights negative sentiment on the right. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with conservative social media stars on at least two of his visits. The solar energy and health industries have paid thousands of dollars to influencers to support their interest according to people who have been offered or participated in such deals. Qatar, beverage interests, and others have courted those with online political follow-ups. Now they go through many more examples, just a couple of years ago, the DOJ presented evidence that Russian operatives had secretly been funding tenant media, which was an up and coming media organization that was appearing everywhere, all of a sudden, although it was never proven in court that they knew the money was coming from Russia. We cited tenants reporting once or twice on the show. For the most part, they were doing legitimate work. But behind the scenes, according to the DOJ, they were taking a lot of money from foreign sources far more than you would think. You were talking millions of dollars for a relatively small outfit. Then there was the soda debacle of 2025, or you may remember a lot of conservatives with big social media accounts suddenly became mysteriously advocates for food stamps to cover soda purchases. It was a strange position since any actual conservative would support abolishing the food stamp program altogether. No conservative is sitting around worrying about making sure that poor people can get soda for free. We don't need food stamps at all because poor people aren't starving. If anything, they're too fat. Something like two thirds of food stamp recipients are overweight. But in this case, a bunch of alleged conservatives came out and pushed for food stamps to cover soda in the face of possible regulations that would have restricted SNAP for that purpose. Watch. Something peculiar happened this weekend. A handful of conservative influencers all defended big soda. People make sugary drinks. They said the Make America Healthy Again movement is out of line trying to cut soda and other junk food out of SNAP benefits. Arkansas, among other states, wants to ban the use of food stamps for junk food. And you can see here all of the posts. And they're all parodying the same talking points and are oddly similar. Why? Well, former swimmer turned women rights activist, Riley Gaines, let us know why. She posted on Twitter in response to this. Quote, they offered to pay me to post a big fat heck no, Robert F. Kennedy now. Secretary of Health and Human Services thanked her. It's troubling that some companies now think they have a right to demand taxpayer money to poison our children. Podcast host investigative reporter Nick Sorter unveiled all this on Twitter claiming the company influenceable is behind it all paying mega influencers to post in favor of the soda companies. So this is an incredibly common routine. It plays out constantly on social media, very widespread. In this case, they got caught, but usually it goes undetected. And what happens is that some powerful industry in this case, the soda companies see an opportunity to earn some corporate welfare by manipulating public opinion. And here they they want poor people to be able to use their snap benefits provided by taxpayers to buy soda because that means the soda company will earn more money, obviously. But there was a plan to make soda ineligible for snaps so soda companies decided to engage in some lobbying and rather than disclose what they're doing up front, they paid social media influencers under the table, apparently using a cutout, some third party influencer firm, so that the soda companies themselves are not implicated. And after all advertising is always more effective if people think that it's organic. And the problem with the social media campaigns is number one, they aren't cheap. If you want a big influencer or even a medium sized one to read your script, they'll often charge tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum. And secondly, as we saw all in this case, they carry a lot of risk, the risk of exposure is fairly high. And on top of that, people are getting more familiar with how influencer campaigns work. So the marketing is losing its effectiveness. People are starting to realize that these influencers aren't actually offering their authentic opinions, it turns out. Big shocker. And that's where AI comes in. And this is the reason that bots can be so powerful. Now, if you're marketing firm instead of spending a million dollars for a handful of influencers to send a few tweets, it makes more sense to spend half that money and hire a swarm of bots. Those bots will engage with other people and promote your product in conversation without those people even realizing what's happening. This is becoming the default way that these operations are run. So when Zelensky claims that his bonds are putting an end to this insanity, whether that's true or not, a lot of people want to believe that it's true. Because the problem underlying it is obviously a real problem. They'll support anyone. 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Go to GOPvotes.org, paid for by SLF PAC, not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. But while Zelensky is obviously overselling vastly what Ukraine's drones actually accomplished, the bombing campaign does raise a couple of interesting questions. You have to wonder, was there any noticeable decrease in fake online traffic as a result of the destruction of these data centers? I'm talking about AI-generated replies on sites like X, Reddit, and Instagram, and even if most people wouldn't have noticed it, did the destruction of these data centers have any impact on traffic on these websites? That's the first question we need to answer. And the second question is hypothetically, if we eliminated every bot farm and data center in the entire country, what would the internet look like? I'm not necessarily saying we should do that, but as a thought experiment, it's a question that's worth answering, even aside from the wisdom of Ukraine's bombing campaign. So I also have the first question. The practical effect of this particular attack by Ukraine, the truth is it's difficult to measure pretty much everyone who's attempting to answer the question as a conflict of interest. As the tech website Mashable notes, much of the buzz about the drone attacks affecting bot traffic traces back to a report from U-24 media, the media arm of United 24, which is a platform run by the Ukrainian government. U-24 reported that automated web traffic from Yandex's network fell immediately after the first drone attack on October 8th, and nearly disappeared after the third attack on October 11th, and you can see the chart on your screen, the chart shows automated traffic plummeted to just 0.3% of its peak as compared with 88% at the same hour from a week earlier. Even when you keep in mind that correlation isn't causation, it seems like a smoking gun. But if you understand what the numbers mean, it's not that remarkable at all, as Mashable reports quote, the catches that automated traffic and Russian propaganda bots aren't the same thing. Automated traffic is any request sent to a website by software rather than a person. Most of it is mundane, search engine crawlers, indexing pages or monitoring tools checking whether sites are up, because Yandex runs Russia's biggest search engine. This network constantly sends out crawlers to index the web, knocking its data centers offline would bring traffic to a halt, regardless of whether a single troll account went quiet. Okay, so we're back to square one. The fact that automated traffic decreased does not by itself tell us anything about bot activity, necessarily. I saw a few other armchair attempts at crunching the numbers, including this analysis, which happens to show that traffic plummeted on various subreddits following the bombings. And this looked convincing too at first glance. But when you zoom out, you realize that it's highly misleading. They looked at a thousand subreddits and found that only 90 of them had a drop in activity over a three day period. And as the account reddit lies, it's pointed out there's something remotely unusual about that. Reddit lies, monitors reddit all the time as the name implies, so they have some experience here. Sometimes there's a big event that everyone's talking about in that community. And then the next day traffic falls off a cliff. For example, one of the subreddits, which folks is on check politics, experience a 20% drop after the Ukrainian bombings, but the Czech Republic was also holding elections right before the bombing. So you'd expect a spike followed by a sudden crash. And that's what happened here. A researcher named Voldemort Osted has confirmed that according to his analysis, nothing unusual happened on reddit. The gray boxes are the normal expected range for posting levels. Everything was exactly what you'd expect on the right wing end of the spectrum. I also saw someone else post this chart's puzzle is showing that on X references to free Palestine dropped after the bombings. And you can see it there. But again, we have no idea whether this is normal noise or not. But at minimum, as expected, we can conclude that there's no objective basis for what Zelenski is claiming, which is not a great shock. But that leads us to the more interesting question, which is what would happen if we actually could somehow eliminate the ability of bots to communicate with us on the internet? What if we could revert back to the internet of the 1990s in early 2000s when AI-powered bots simply didn't exist or at least didn't remotely resemble what we have now? In a sense of how much things have changed, a woman named Ellie May recently conducted something of an unscientific experiment on Instagram. At the height of the Lindsey Clancy hysteria, she posted the following video on Instagram. Here it is. If you think anything about this trial, listen to this, because Lindsey Clancy is a person, there was just a mistrial, Reddington represented her, and I'm just saying words with emphasis and a certain cadence to see what the algorithm picks up and whether or not bots will drop in to say hello because justice, women, it's unfair, men, men, Patrick Clancy, innocent, guilty, the judge is a man, the prosecution, woman, voting rights, 19th Amendment, children, the second floor window SSRIs, unalived, winter, snow, wet, temperature, spinal injury, exercise bands, Lindsey Clancy, wheelchair. Now, honestly, when it comes to the quality of female created Lindsey Clancy content on Instagram, this is probably in the top 5%, maybe even top 1%, there's more depth and intellectual horse power on display in this footage than the vast majority of content that women were uploading unironically throughout the trial. But still, she does a great job with it, maybe she could have thrown in a few more references to astrology, but otherwise, pretty much dead on, but the point is she's trying to attract bots to comment on her video. She was weeding out humans to see how many bot replies she would get, and very quickly some unusual replies rolled in, and we'll put them up on the screen right now. But don't give a crap about her disability more so about her children, retard, liberal white women and Dahmer glasses. Where's the footage from the police body worn cameras? Why didn't the police arrest Patrick? Why hasn't Patrick's phone examined? Why wasn't his phone examined? It will be forced to repeal the 19th Amendment, and they continue from there. Now, while this is both entertaining and kind of depressing at the same time, we do have to concede that there's pretty big problem with this experiment, which is that she just sort of assumes that all of these responses must be from bots simply because they have nothing to do with her video. But as someone who's been uploading videos online, you know, long before the current AI bot epidemic, I have to take some issue with this methodology, you know, based on my extensive experience, she is vastly underestimating the number of people who are actual people and will respond to a video with very passionate and lengthy responses that have nothing to do with anything because they haven't watched it. That's not to say that most people don't watch the full videos, you know, we have the metrics on that, at least in the case of our videos and the average viewer does indeed watch most of the show. But when you're talking about people who leave comments, that's a demographic that's hit or miss. And as far as watching, you know, the actual content of the video, it can kind of go either way. People will leave comments because they want to get something off their chest. So they go to the first video that's tangentially related to something that they're upset about and they'll just let loose. People will leave comments because they're heavily intoxicated and they think they're writing the state of the Union address, which will be personally delivered word for word, you know, to the president of the United States. People will leave comments for all kinds of reasons that would shock and horrify the typical God-affearing American, not to disparage the good, good name of many people who comment on my videos because most of them are great. But there's a very vocal minority of lunatics that drift from YouTube, video to YouTube video, like a swarm of locusts and they're totally unbothered by the content of whatever they're responding to. And with respect to the internet lady running this experiment, she hasn't appeared to have considered that possibility. You know, there's always the possibility that human beings can be very stupid and there's always that. You can never discount that. You got to factor that in. You got to bake that into the equation whenever you're doing any kind of experiment like this. But there's no question that as a general matter, she's making a legitimate point. From my perspective, and this is anecdotal, but I think many people would relate. If I go to just my ex-feed, it feels, which is one of the two or three places I go on the internet now, feels like 95% of the feed is fake now. And maybe it's not that high in reality, it's probably not 95%. But if you go there, you got any social media or you read the comments under anything, it does appear that a huge number of them are fake. Comments are fake, posts are fake. Bots will come up with some irrelevant or idiotic take and then another bot will respond to it. So you've got fake posts and then fake comments responding to the fake posts. So you've got bots talking to bots all over the place. And this happens millions of times every day. You know, it's a particularly big problem on Facebook where this image here was posted. Check this out. So it's, you know, I don't want to, I mean, I've done my own assessment of this very scientifically and I can tell you that this appears to be AI generated. So this is an AI generated picture of a wounded soldier in a wheelchair with the sign that says, today is my birthday, no one love me because I'm poor. And he appears to be sitting, where is he? Like he's in some kind of control room. He appears to be in some kind of control room over at NASA or something. I mean, that picture makes more sense if he's on the street corner. So he's in a, he's in a control room somewhere in his uniform in a wheelchair with a cardboard sign saying, today's my birthday, no one loves me because I'm poor. And the hashtag on this post naturally includes Wonder Woman, Kylie Jenner, Christian Bale and Angelina Jolie. Now this post that you see there, obviously completely fake and nonsensical, racked up more than 290,000 likes and 49,000 comments. And yes, most of those likes and comments are fake as well. It's an endless cycle and it's compromised many different websites from Quora to Reddit to pretty much every other social media platform. You've got these conversations that are happening on these sites between thousands of accounts and there might not be a single real person there at all. Then you have the many different AI slopp accounts that post fake photos of celebrities doing, you know, something incredibly generous or selfless. Peyton Manning is one of the more prominent athletes in this genre for some reason. The point isn't simply to trick boomers, although there's plenty of that going on. And once again, as we talk about, you can't discount the possibility that people are stupid. When you see posts like this, a lot of the comments are fake. A lot of the people that are, you know, a lot of the counts that are responding are not people at all. But then you also have people who genuinely will look at a image like that and not know that it's fake. Now, I don't know what's more disturbing. You go back to the wounded warrior. I don't know, you know, 50,000 comments, what's more disturbing if 50,000 people actually believed that and thought it was real or if 50,000 bots are responding. I don't know which, which is worse, honestly. I think it's this kind of a combination, it's the worst of all worlds. But the idea is also to scam Facebook's algorithm into thinking that these are legitimate views. So the account owner gets the advertising revenue from the post and this is a totally hands-off process now. You could program AI's to go out and create these posts for you all day across every platform you can think of. Realistically, there's no way to stop the flood of constant garbage. There are five years from now, the entire internet is just going to be that, a year from now, maybe. It's going to be totally unusable and there doesn't appear to be any real plan to stop that from happening. Every year, the holiday shopping season starts earlier and earlier. We used to wait until Thanksgiving and now Halloween candy shares an aisle with artificial Christmas trees because the retail calendar has abandoned all restraint somewhere right now and inflatable reindeer is on sale and it's still October. 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Head to policygenius.com/walls to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save that's policygenius.com/walls. Just the other day, the DOJ announced that a 54 year old man named Michael Smith has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for running a scam, kind of like this from 2017 to 2024. So he was doing this for seven years before he was caught. Started doing this back when the AI and bot technology was nothing like what it is now. So it's only getting worse. And here's what he did, according to the DOJ's press release. He targeted Amazon music, Apple music, Spotify and YouTube music in particular. Quote, "First Smith created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the streaming platforms, the bot accounts, that he could use to stream songs. Second, he used software to cause the bot accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned, which were generally created using super intelligence, artificial intelligence, where I'm not doing the super intelligence thing. I'm not respecting the AI's pronouns that Donald Trump has assigned to it for some dumb reason. Anyway, third, Smith collected royalties based on the fraudulent streams that he orchestrated his own bot accounts to conduct. Smith spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song, which would likely cause the streaming platforms to discover his scheme. At times, Smith was using as many as 10,000 bot accounts. He wants to fraudulently stream music and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently obtained debit cards to create the bot accounts to obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme succeed. Smith turned to super intelligence, otherwise known as artificial intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams. Smith's hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his bot accounts billions of times. Yes, billions of times. So his only mistake was getting too greedy, otherwise nobody would have suspected anything. To give you an idea of how brazen this was, in the month of April 2023, Taylor Swift's entire catalog received 9.3 million streams on YouTube music from family planned streams. That same month, according to DOJ, Smith's bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 8.9 million times on YouTube music, as a result he collected more than $8 million in royalties. So I, if you use Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, you keep coming across like terrible covers all the time. Most of them are made with AI for the sole purpose of scamming the system. And because of these scams, the service gets noticeably worse for everybody. We're seeing this play out all over the internet. It is a gold rush for scammers. And meanwhile, people will actually create good content. People, humans are being drowned out. It's harder than it's ever been to get a real audience. And again, there's no plan in place to do anything about this, really. Other than to rename AI to call it super intelligence. Maybe, maybe if we flatter it, it will, you know, it won't kill us all. Maybe that's the plan. Good idea. That'll solve it. As far as I can tell at the moment, and maybe this is self-serving to say, but I think it's true, you know, the only way to survive right now, if you're creating content, maybe is to create actually good content, and particularly with writing, you know, great writing. This is one thing that the AI has gotten very sophisticated, a lot of ways very quickly. It still can't write for, I mean, it can't, it cannot write at all. And if you're even vaguely intelligent, you can spot AI writing from a mile away. Now if you're a media organization that wants to continue existing in a few years, this is non-negotiable. You need good writing. And the problem is that most writers, even human writers, are generally god-awful. And we kind of talked about this last week. They're only going to get worse as human writers who are already, many of them, especially on the internet, are really bad. And now they're reading a lot of AI generated content, and they're using AI more and more, and so their writing skills are getting worse and worse. That's why the phenomenon of the viral article, which used to be a thing, is dead now with rare exceptions. There was that Boston Globe article about the lesbian bar, the one we covered on the show a couple of weeks ago. That was a massively viral article. It's the first one that I can remember in months. And one of the things that made it a viral article is that aside from the fact that the story they were telling was so ridiculous and funny, it was good writing. Whoever wrote that, I forget the author's name, but whoever wrote that was actually good writing. Good human writing. This is a change that I've seen up close because I was an independent blogger in the early 2010s, which was a reputable career back then, not reputable, but it was a career, and it was a thing you could do. And all I did was write blog posts, and in doing so, I made enough money to support a family. I'd get four or five million views on a single viral post easily, even with a base of my follower base. Mostly on Facebook was very small compared to now, it was like maybe 50,000, 60,000 followers. That was enough because you actually had access because 50 or 60,000 followers, they were all humans, first of all, they were real people, and you could access like all of them. It isn't like it is now where you've got a bunch of followers, but through the algorithms, you only really only about 0.1% of them will see what you post. Like then you have 50,000, 60,000 followers, all of them will see your stuff because they're following you, and I had a post that would go viral once a month, sometimes more frequently than that, and now that's impossible. Somebody with my exact perspective and skill set writing the same kind of stuff today, but have an infinitely more difficult time getting noticed, and if they did get noticed, there's no way they could scratch out a career just writing long articles or comments areas that just doesn't exist anymore. You might remember Matt Drudge, remember how in January of 1980, he blew up in the Monica Lewinsky scandal because Newsweek had spiked the reporting on it. They didn't want to run the story because they couldn't verify the authenticity of Lewinsky's conversations with Linda Tripp, so Drudge just went ahead and published it himself, and here's how the BBC covered that development at the time, all the way back in the ancient past. Holding the story wasn't an issue for Matt Drudge, the Maverick Internet reporter who authored the story, Mr. Drudge proudly admits he has no editor, but himself. On Saturday, he published a story to the web's worldwide audience, plus, according to his own calculation, his more than 85,000 subscribers. By the early hours of Sunday, the news had hit internet news groups and moved from alt current events, Clinton, whitewater, to alt and peach Clinton, and then to more mainstream political discussion groups. An early interview about the scandal, former Clinton age, George Stephanopoulos, dismissed the report, and where did that come from, the Drudge report? We've all seen how discredited that's been. This was the moment it became clear to everybody that the mainstream press has lost its ability to control the national narrative for the first time. The internet gave everybody the ability to become a blogger and reach an audience of millions, anyone could reach an audience, and therefore as the scandal broke, people were wondering what the media would look like in 30 years. With many more websites like the Drudge reports, spring up, challenging the established narratives. Well, people still be making those little geosites pages about their pets and sharing them with their friends and family, how advanced would those websites be in 30 years? People could only imagine. Well what they didn't expect was that 30 years later, all of this creativity, most of it, all the value of surfing the web, as they call it at the time, would be replaced in large part by a flood of AI slop and scams designed to manipulate the algorithm. They probably didn't imagine that 30 years after Drudge took down the mainstream press, Drudge itself would be limping along like a hollowed out husk of its former self, endlessly aggregating pointless stories that nobody cares about anymore. And nobody thought that 30 years later with more websites and podcasts available than ever before, most people would go back to relying on just one or two sources for their daily news and information. Now, whatever you call this phenomenon, dead internet theory, as the term that's used now or anything else, it's obviously real. And over in Ukraine, Zelensky has clearly concluded that any politician who promises to bomb our way out of it, even if he's lying, is going to be immensely popular as a result. He's determined that military action, the form of drone warfare, is a palatable solution to the dead internet. Is he right about that? Well, it's really not clear at the moment, but until someone provides a viable alternative, it's the solution that a lot of people are going to support. Many more bombs will fall. Many more data centers will inevitably be destroyed. Many more bot farms incinerated. We'll continue our march backwards through what they used to call the information age, but on the bright side, a random guy talking to a camera in his car will have a much better chance of finding an audience, earning a living. That's a trade that many young men would happily make at this point, and if someone who knows a lot about broadcasting from a car, I can't blame them. I'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow of a great day. Godspeed. [BLANK_AUDIO]