The Death of Reality - with Charlie Warzel

(soft piano music) Lemonade. - Thanks for listening to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know. Listen to and follow, Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know, add free on Amazon Music, or just ask Alexa. Alexa, play the podcast, Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. Also, with Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts, and audio books, all in the Amazon Music app. Listen to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. - Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. - Maybe it's Mavily. - What you're seeing right now isn't real. This is a digitally constructed copy of my body, using a new software called Filmic.ai. It was used on that tron movie that I did, and the studio gave my team access to the software. I mean, look how real I look. Look at this. It's got my wedding ring, it's got the hair on my fingers. This is so great. It even recreates my stomach perfectly. Look at this. Look at the level of detail on my fingernails. Okay, none of that was true, but you believed it for a second? Because that's where we are as a society right now. We can't fully trust anything. Now, we've all heard about the loss of trust in institutions. Democracy is crumbling. We're descending into fascism. Yeah, I got it. But I'm talking about something even deeper than that. We are losing trust in reality itself. - Angela Carter here. Lie from the Cedar Grove flood disaster. Just kidding. I'm not real. (upbeat music) Every time we open our phone, the same questions keep coming up. Is this rage bait? Is this a grift? Is this a bot? Is this AI? Is this a sia? Nobody has ever heard of such an absurd thing. It's total nonsense. Believe me. You spend a lot of time online. You will often hear this term, sia. Now, originally it meant a disinformation campaign by the military to shape perceptions of a group of people. Basically, some men in black (bleep) right? You got black suits, you don't think. You pull out the thing. Bing. You never saw this. Now you have dementia. But blast. But since 2020, the use of this word has spiked because it articulates a feeling that more people are having. This feeling that we're all somehow being manipulated. We're not 100% sure what's real and what's not. And there's a good reason for this. More and more of what you're seeing online right now isn't real or at least isn't human. It's a power look, a buzz cut, and a mullet. A recent report found that in 2025, AI-generated text accounted for over half of all new articles published online. And studies have found that 20% of YouTube videos in nearly 60% of TikTok videos shown to new users are literally AI-slot. - AI-slot is everywhere. - We have to focus on what's real. - But we're not real. We're sloths. - An online traffic from bots? Oh, it is now bigger than traffic from humans. When I read comments on my own YouTube videos, half the time, I'm not even sure if they're from humans or bots. Especially the nice ones. My friend thinks you're cute, wanna make content? I mean, I'm married. Zigglic, Fizz, or 447. I no longer trust Amazon reviews, you help reviews Run Tomato Scores. And I am definitely suspicious of music reviews after that whole geese fiasco. Now, in case you missed it, a Brooklyn indie band Geese, which has been around since 2016, exploded last year. The New Yorker said they won 2025 and the Guardian called them the new saviors of rock and roll. Now, look, it's not unusual for a band that's been around a while to suddenly take off. I get it, it takes a minute to pop. But when wire dropped in article saying the hype around Geese was a siop, people started taking a closer look at how the band was marketed. And it turns out Geese is a client of a digital marketing company called chaotic good projects. The way they market their clients is through networks of sock puppet accounts that try to trigger recommendation algorithms into thinking that certain songs are popular. So they serve the songs to more users. You don't need to fact check this. The founders of chaotic good were very open about their business model and an interview with Billboard. So a big part of what we are doing is posting enough volume across enough accounts with enough impressions to try to simulate the idea that the song is trendy or moving or what they want to call it. You know, I'm in the right headspace for Geese because that was very depressing. So in a sense, yeah, the marketing of Geese was siopish. But also, this is just how a lot of digital marketing works now. It's called trend simulation. And chaotic good is far from the only company doing this. Today, most trend simulation happens through clipping. Clips are snippets of longer videos like shows, live streams, or podcasts, you know, kind of like what I'm doing right now. This long-winded research infotainment video, this is all just raw material for the content woodchipper. So I can just chop it up and feed it to you little baby birds. There's literally an entire economy for this. This is the clip economy, or the marketplace of going viral. It involves contractors who are called clippers going into a social media star's content, finding segments that they think can go viral and scattering that across short-form video apps like TikTok, Instagram, Rails, and YouTube shorts. Now, clipping can start out with a great reputation because one of its pioneers is the worst person on the internet, Andrew Tate. I know, I can't believe I'm talking about Andrew Tate, but just like you, I also have a nephew that's gone fucking crazy. Nobody had even heard of Andrew Tate five years ago. He was just some random former kickboxer who briefly showed up on UK Big Brother. But in 2022, some of his online followers started clipping his podcast appearances and posting them all over social media. Do you think that women are property? I think my sister is her husband's property, yes. His visibility skyrocketed. In that year, he became one of the top 10 most searched people on Google and then wax and self-clavicular. These fucking names are insane. Fucking, I'm not made for this, I'm not made for this world. Welcome to the Metropolis. He became one of the top 10 most searched people on Google. And then wax and self-clavicular followed the very same model. In just one month, over 1,600 clippers posted almost 70,000 videos of clavicular and racked up over 2 billion views. You guys can put for me and get paid to do it. It didn't take long for companies to realize that this was a very cheap and very effective way to do marketing. And now, clipping isn't just for sexual predators or racist people. It's going mainstream. Content from Netflix and Amazon Prime shows are being boosted by paid clippers and an executive at Capital Music Group told Bloomberg that they use it to promote artists, including ice, spice, and offset. As companies pour more and more money into clipping, it's become a legit job. Clippers can go on platforms like clipping.net or walk.com or to clipping agencies like ClipTick.co to pick up assignments. And some of them can make a sh*t load of money. If you had to put a number on how much money you've made from clipping-- oh, man, we're talking top line revenue. Easily over $1 million. Easily. A recent Wall Street Journal article quoted the head of social at DoorDash saying, clipping was a new name for something good marketers have always done. Meet people where the energy is at. But the difference between clipping and traditional ads is that it's often not clear what is an ad and what is organic. Technically, that's deceptive advertising, which is technically illegal. But that DoorDash marketer doesn't seem worried about it at all, saying, this is social media, baby. Nothing is real. Awesome. Ladies, don't accept any unsealed drinks from DoorDash. [MUSIC PLAYING] Not only are we losing trust in what's trending, we're losing trust in what we're seeing with our own eyes. A few years ago, we all knew that Will Smith's spaghetti meme. We knew that was fake. His head was all f*cked up. It looked like he got stung by a bunch of bees. He was eating out of the side of his mouth like a demon. But this tech has been improving exponentially. I mean, type in Will Smith eating spaghetti today and look what happens. I mean, look at that. This is f*cking crazy. It looks so real. OK, I'm messing with you again. The real Will Smith made that. But admit it, you believed it. And even if that was a low stakes example, AI photos are realistic enough to have some serious real world impacts. A fake image briefly went viral today. Appearing to show an explosion right near the Pentagon. There was no explosion at the Pentagon, however. The image we're going to show it to you, it's fake. A simple AI-generated fake image sparked about a $100 billion stock market move. Silicon Valley saw that and they were like, damn, we got to do better. We have to make it even easier for random idiots to f*ck up the entire world. So this summer, Google enabled a feature in Google Earth that let people generate realistic satellite images with simple prompts. I present to you Nano-Banana, which sounds like a Donkey Kong power-up. This is literally the worst possible function I can imagine for Google Earth, short of letting you type in Find My X-Wife. And shockingly, the rollout did not go well. Within hours, a researcher went viral with the demonstration of how easy it was to generate fake images of a migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border and a nuclear facility in Iran. And that's just photos. When it comes to video, things can get far more disorienting and dangerous. [SIRENS] [SIRENS] [SIRENS] [SIRENS] [SIRENS] [SIRENS] Inside, eat my food! I'm downstairs, come on! After the US and Israel attacked Iran, there was a surge in AI-generated video online, and less than a week after the initial attack an AI video of Tel Aviv being bombarded went viral. This video has been viewed millions of times on X, claiming to show Iranian missiles hitting Tel Aviv. And when users asked the AI chatbot grok about it, it told people it's real, but it's not. It's fake. The fake video was shared by accounts known for spreading Iran propaganda like this one. Now look, I'm not here to be a hall monitor. Let's have some fun on the internet, you guys. I mean, remember those Iranian Lego videos? They were f*cking amazing. [SIRENS] [SIRENS] You could totally tell they were fake, though, which is why they were so fun. I mean, the Trump Epstein and Yahoo puppet Lego. BB pulls the string in the puppet's rehearse. United slaves of Israel printed on a shirt. Listen to the crowd. Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. Louder. F*cking hilarious. No notes. You're not going to get a cease and desist letter from me, Iran. Bad boy, you need that spanking. But in this midterm cycle, candidates are running AI ads that seriously blurred the line between fiction and reality. At least for some people. After Republican Thomas Massey led an effort to release the Epstein files, he was primaryed by Republicans who ran this attack ad. Thomas Massey caught in a thruple in Washington. He's cheating with the squad on the America first movement. Massey voted with the squad against Trump's tax cuts. Massey voted if the squad against finishing Trump's wall. He voted with him against hiring new border agents. Okay, look, obviously that's fake. If you're part of a polyamorous thruple with AOC and Ilhan Omar, you're not going to be that open about it. You're going to have some decency and book the Lindsey Graham suite at the Washington Hilton. That's how it's done. You know, a certain part of his body literally blew up. But Massey said in multiple interviews that the ads were very convincing to the elderly. They made artificial intelligence ads that showed me in a three-way relationship with AOC and Ilhan Omar. It was actually very effective on the boomers. Yeah, dude. Of course, it's very effective on boomers. My mother is a physician. My father is an organic chemist. The two of them regularly like Facebook photos of dogs skiing downhill. Now, I don't know if it just makes them happy or if they think it's real. Either way, it's very concerning. So yeah, in this environment, it is no coincidence the world's worst people are becoming the most powerful. When nobody knows what's real or what's fake, the most shameless liars can get away with whatever they want. This is a concept called the Liars Dividend, a term coined by legal scholars back in 2019. What it means is, if you can say that anything that contradicts what you say is fake or manipulated or not real, lying becomes a better political strategy than apologizing. So yeah, in 2026, you can pull a shaggy and say, "It wasn't me." And obviously, we've seen Trump take advantage of the shaggy clause constantly. It's not my signature and it's not the way I speak. The files were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama. They were made up by the Biden. I never met the woman other than this picture, which could have been AI generated. I don't know. If something happens really bad, just blame AI. If something happens that's really bad, maybe I'll have to just blame AI. But here's what's scary. It's gone beyond politics. It's even seeped its way into legal cases. A lawyer for a January 6th rioter claimed that the video of his client storming the Capitol could have been faked. And in a lawsuit about Tesla's self-driving feature, the company tried to claim that a video of Elon Musk bragging about how great it was might not be real, even though footage of his own comments, which happened onstage, at a tech conference, had been on YouTube for 10 years. Now granted, this was Iron Man 2, Elon, back before his head swelled three sizes to fit all those black crime stats. The impact of the liar's dividend is scary with politics and the law. But what's even more disturbing is that we all get a liar's dividend now, because it's never been easier to lie to ourselves. If a band we don't like is popular, it's a sia. Thousands of people show up for a protest that we disagree with, they were paid. If a shooter voted for the same candidate as us, they weren't the real killer. If we don't trust anything that we see is fully real, everything becomes a confirmation of our prior beliefs, and unless we figure out how to rebuild some of that trust, and come together in something like a shared reality, then take a long look into the dead eyes of clavicular, because this is our future. To talk more about all of this, I reached out to a journalist who's been obsessing over the dysfunction in our information environment for over a decade, Charlie Warzel. Do you understand how these work, Charlie? Are you privy in any way to these algorithms? Nope, nobody. He is currently writing and talking about this issue for the Atlantic and formally reported on it for Buzzfeed News. We talked about how we got here. There was a real change in the mid to late 2010s. I worked at Buzzfeed at the time, and there was truly a day where you watched the fire host turn on. How much worse it could get? It's almost like large language model inbreeding, right? Where the knowledge just gets warped by the fact that it's like a computer talking to a computer synthesizing what a computer said. The internet is being poisoned at that point. And how we can turn it around, if that's even possible. We fall for a lot of stuff. Yeah. But as bad as things get, as bad as things are, we are good at detecting bullshit, right? Like, not everyone is insane, right? So here's my interview with Charlie. Or at least, here's what I'm claiming to be my interview with Charlie. Maybe the interview isn't real. Maybe Charlie isn't real. Maybe I'm not real. You have been writing and thinking about technology and the internet for over a decade. So first of all, I want to say I'm sorry. Thank you. You have to do that. Thank you. And then you've done that to yourself. But specifically what you've written about is the way it's cooking our brain and our society at large. How bad are things now compared to when you were predicting about where the internet would go about a decade ago? So I wrote this piece in the 2017 or 2018 about the information apocalypse essentially. And I was talking to different people who were working in this field, like studying this stuff or researcher at MIT. And he came and talked to me about this, this future. And he like laid it out in many different ways. Like this stuff, artificial intelligence, which you know, it was like not really a thing beyond like machine learning then, is going to come in and it's going to like hypercharge our ability to create like fake images, fake whatever. It's going to allow us to create things faster. So like just like text and things. Like stuff that is just very common right now. And he describes this and he basically says, it's going to be so hard to tell what is real from what isn't real that something's going to happen called reality apathy. People are just going to tune out, right? And I wrote this article. It was easily like the most like viral thing. Like people were freaked out about it. And it sounded even like as I was writing it like very futuristic. Very exaggerated. And I feel like that future has come true in many ways in like a frog in like the boiling pot thing, right? Like we just, okay. Oh, like, you know, we now we have this like, you know, dolly the image creation thing or like mid-journey and these things was like, I'm going to, you know, type in stuff and make a fun image or, okay, Chatchy BT comes out in late 2023 and a bunch of kids are like doing their homework and essays and stuff. And you just like, these things slowly start to ratchet up. And now I think when you look at just popular discourse, the understanding of like what is popular, the way that like propaganda has been supercharged, the way that we all now have to second guess every single thing that we come across across any feed. I think that that has genuinely come true in some extent. It's not as intense as it feels when you're describing the future. Describing the future is always going to sound like sexier. Right. Then it actually, you wrote this article that went super viral but this is a little, you know, not to be, you know, quaint and antiquated this 2017-2018. This is pre-COVID, yeah? Yeah, yeah. So did COVID supercharged all of this? I think absolutely it did. Okay. I mean, if you look at take like QAnon as a phenomenon, QAnon grows out of the pizza gate issue where a guy gunman comes, goes into this comet ping pong thinking that there are children trapped under there that the Clintons were involved in this thing. It all came from the hacked Podesta emails that came out like right before the 2016 election. A North Carolina man arrested in a DC pizza shop after brandishing a gun. Well, it said that he had read online that the comet ping pong restaurant was harboring child sex slaves. The accusation came from this unhinged story that originated online days before the election, saying that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were operating a child sex ring. QAnon comes out of it and it's this really ridiculous conspiracy theory of life. like, you know, Donald Trump's gonna save the world from a global pedophile cabal. It was a very small, fringy little, like, foreshand style movement. And by the end of 2020, it's huge. And you have, like, Midwestern moms were, like, you know, the QAnon moms for Facebook. Facebook purges, like, tens of thousands of QAnon accounts in 2020. And so much of that is, like, people were scared. They were very upset about the way that many different things in the country were being handled. There's, you know, like, all this trauma and everyone's trapped inside, all you can do is be on your computer. - One of the most recent articles that you wrote for the Atlantic earlier this year was called A Crisis of Agency. What is the crisis of agency? - The crisis of agency, I think, is that everyone feels right now that someone is putting something over on them. Like, it's really a crisis of trust. But it is amplified by the fact right now that we are in this, like, AI generative AI moment and that people in Silicon Valley are selling this narrative about the things that they're building, about the tools that they're building and they're saying it's going to potentially destroy jobs. It's going to need us to rewrite our social compact, right? Rewire the economy in unexpected ways. And they're using all these phrases about agency. They're creating AI agents, autonomous things that work in the background and like, make you money while you sleep or whatever, code you these websites out of, you know, a text prompt. And they're talking about the people who use them well as high agency people. They're like the Silicon Valley, you know, the high agency person has many digital agents. - Yes, and just, and like, the phrases like, they just do things is what they say, right? Like, you want this company to exist in the world, you only need one person. And the people who aren't on that path, the people who are, you know, reluctant adopters or skeptics or whatever, they may be subjected to, and this is another Silicon Valley term, is like the permanent underclass, right? And so all of that is like the, you know, the like cultural measma that is like hanging over people as they walk through this world where things are, you know, always up for debate, right? Where facts are really hard to find, or everyone has these opinions where there's tons of propaganda. And it's creating this feeling of, I don't know necessarily know what's real, I don't know when I'm being taken advantage of. And it, there's a, the crisis of agency to me, is like a broad cultural paranoia that we all have, just doing normal things like, you know, like trying to find a song on Spotify. - Something broke for me inside when I got my first AI responded email. 'Cause the vibes are always off when it's an AI response. - I'm bad, you know. - They're so bad. - What does it feel like to you? 'Cause I have a feeling that I get one, I see one of those emails. - There's a little bit of the like, it's like three babies in a trench coat kind of feeling, right? Like it's like, there's a lot of things working here to like sort of approximate the intelligence of one like pretty like mid-human being. But there's a thing where it like, I find in like the PR or like the pitch emails of whatever the things are, where it like gives me like the history of like the last four things that I did on the internet and like reads it back to me. And it's like, so now you know like I'm up on you. Like here's this decentralized, you know, finance platform that I want you to meet the founder over one night. And you're like, oh, is this AI sucks? - Yeah, the email is always written like a person who's being held hostage. That's what it feels like to me. - Totally. - Or it's like, hey Charlie, you know, it's been a long time exclamation point. Yeah, there's this kind of enthusiasm. It's not like somebody has a gun to my back right now. - Yeah. - What I'm trying to say is AI doesn't get the vibes. There's vibes. Every exchange has a little vibe that you got to meet the moment to and they don't get it. That's the one affirming thing for me where I'm like, I can immediately tell the vibes are off. This was written by a robot. That being said, let's talk about the way the internet was and the 90s and the 2000s when we grew up with it, there was this feeling of the worldwide web was a place to explore, to discover, put in that in Karta 95 CD ROM and let it rip. But now it went from this sort of pull of like, hey, I'm interested in this to now this push, this fire hose of information that's coming right at us. When did the algorithms take over? - Slowly and then all at once, right? I mean, you have things like you have the introduction of Facebook's news feed, right? Where it's not just like a chronological list of these posts, it's like different posts from your friends like at different times based off of how interested you might be. And then Facebook notoriously made a whole bunch of changes right to it where it was like, you know what? Like this stuff's getting like really personal. We want to actually show people nourishing content. So like we're going to have these lists of publishers and like their stuff's going to show up in it, right? And like I worked at Buzzfeed at the time and there was truly a day in like mid 2013, 2014, I can't remember the exact time. We're like, you watch the fire hose turn on and it was just like, oh, wow. Now there's hundreds of thousands of people like at once just showing up in this thing. Like it truly was like a turn the dial, everything is showered with attention. - What happened that day? - So you just started to see the top most viral stories showing up. - Yeah, or you would write something that you were like, yeah, this is, you know, this has its own audience or whatever and you'd see like a million people show up in the article and you're like, what, why is this even happening? And it's just, it truly was like Facebook was showing that to more people and more people were clicking on it and like they weren't engaging deeply with it or anything. But you know, a whole media ecosystem in like the mid 2010s came up around that, right? And then one day they were like, oh man, everyone's reading like way too much political stuff and arguing and the platforms turn in toxic. Like this is sort of, you know, like after Ferguson, there was like a very concerted effort to be like, you know what, think all this like political news? Like maybe we're gonna turn the dial down a little bit and we're gonna start showing you your friends a little more. And so like these things were manipulated in this way, but really later in the 2010s, you have like, Twitter introduces its algorithmic feed away from just like chronological posting. And then like TikTok is like a really, really big one because TikTok is like the perfection of the algorithmic feed. - Mine is TikTok so addictive. I don't have it. We post clips for the show on it. But a couple of our producers that work on the show say when they download it, it can eat up an entire evening. - Oh yeah. - Yeah, it's like the K-hole, right? You just like, you just lose. - So what specifically about TikTok makes it so much better than IG Reels? - Because they figured out that, you know, first it's a very short form content. - Okay. - But they also figured out that every swipe is data. It's a thing about you. Like every time you don't swipe for a little bit, like if you see something on your phone and you wait six seconds instead of two seconds, that's a piece of data. So then they analyze like what were all the properties of that video? Why did they stay on it? Did they play it twice? Did they play it three times? Okay, they play it four times in a row. And maybe it's just because it's confusing, right? It's not because you love it. You're trying to figure out what's going on. But you get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of it bats, essentially, on a single TikTok viewing thing that goes into honing that algorithm and making it very specific to your preferences in that moment, like TikTok can figure out in a moment. Are you feeling silly? Are you feeling angry? Are you feeling confused? Or like do you want a distraction? Do you want to be pulled into this? Because it's doing this so fast, like on YouTube, videos are longer. And so it takes some time for it to understand like what it is that you're after in that thing. What can I show you next to really hook you in? But TikTok's instantaneous. It's an extremely powerful contextual engine. Google recently said their next generation of search won't have links. You'll just get the answer. So explain this to me. Websites are going to go away. And it'll just be like this genie that tells me exactly what the answer is to my question. Well, this already happens now a little bit, right? With like the-- they've had for a long time the sort of like the search box answer thing where like oh, it used to pull in a lot from like Wikipedia. If you're saying like who's George W. Bush or whatever, it's like, OK, President from here to here, this happened, Iraq war, whatever, all that stuff. Choked on a pretzel, those types of things. Now what it's doing is it's basically going through their own large language models. And it doesn't have to just pull from like Wikipedia and pull from anything that it finds. So it basically runs its own search. And like is your little consultant in that, or you know, concierge, I don't know how it's going to actually play out. Because the thing about search is, you know, Google is only as good as the people who are making all the stuff that you can pull from. And this fundamentally like upends the understanding of the commercial internet, like as we knew it, right? Like Google brings traffic to people, which is why they allow it to get indexed. and take all their stuff so then Google can sell ads and do it. You know, it's sort of a mutual relationship even though it's a little bit of like they're like the big, you know, capitalist bully. This is like a completely, this is changing that fundamental principle of what search meant. And I think it's also, we haven't seen this yet, but I think they're like stumbling into a very weird political like culture war bite that's going to come because they're like, you remember in the, you know, 2020s and all this, like, you know, what are like, what are the algorithms bias or the tech companies bias towards one candidate or party or, you know, another. And who controls this information and the information we see? The technology companies, right? Right. And they didn't want to be. They kept, you know, saying like Facebook now has like very few moderators, right? Like Twitter is completely, or X under Elon Musk has gotten rid of all that stuff. All these companies like we don't want to be like the editorial directors of what you see. We don't want to take responsibility for that and we just like don't want to get involved. But all these large language models that are powering these platforms, but especially with Google, Google's essentially saying like here, no, we're going to give you one canonical answer. What used to be, here's 10 blue links, go figure it out for yourself. Like the same people who are saying do your own research are now basically saying, you don't need to do your own research. And that's going to, I think that's going to play out in a really, really weird way. This is super scary because by the way, my relationship with the guy who says I did my own research has changed over time. 20 years ago, a guy was like, I did my own research. I was like, where did you get your PhD from? And it was kind of interesting. Now when it's a, I did my own research, that guy, he stormed the capital. Yeah. There's something about that. But now this new version of it, this next gen Google is basically saying, take my word for it.com, here's your answer in two sentences, don't worry about cross checking it across different websites. Yeah. And I don't know what happens to, I mean, I'll speak very personally as like someone who writes for a living, works for a media company. I mean, a lot of media companies are trying to figure out now what happens after a knee-like patella at the verge has this term for it, Google zero, right? When Google traffic goes down to zero, like what happens to publishers, you know, media companies. They're trying to figure out what that is. But I think it's, it's going to be very interesting because if people don't create that content, create that stuff from which it can draw on, and the only thing that's happening are these large language models are generating all kinds of synthetic text and doing whatever and it trains off that. You get this like recursive problem where basically it's like, it's almost like like large language model like inbreeding, right? Where like the knowledge just gets warped by the fact that it's like a computer talking to a computer synthesizing what a computer said, and that is like, I mean, that's actually poison. That's like the internet is being poisoned at that point. I am interrupting this episode of House of Menage doesn't know with a special report. Last week I invited a roach on the podcast to give insight on the contentious relationship between insects and homeowners. Let's just say it could have gone better. Regina, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. You are here today because you have some very serious allegations against a company called Pest-D. Yes, they murdered my entire family in cold blood. For the viewers who aren't aware, she's being a bit dramatic. Pest-D is an easy to use DIY pest control treatment that's delivered right to your front door. No appointment windows, no strangers in your house, and it's only about $35 treatment. Sheep, fun, affordable, destruction. What makes you say that? Because these are big allegations. They customize it to the location, to the species, to the season. They are creating cocktails of doom, specifically designed to kill my family. Look, it started out all right, but then things got hostile. Pest-D is designed for homeowners to use in their house, so you'd have to be trespassing into somebody else's house for you to be killed allegedly. Oh, okay, so now you're going to say what were you wearing? What were you wearing when they killed your whole family? Maybe you deserved it? Okay, okay, listen, bugs already have the entire outdoors. You have all of planet Earth. That's where we're going to go. Yes. Go back to where you came from, on your podcast. Whoa. All places. Whoa, okay. You are claiming you are the lone survivor of a Pest-D attack, and there were over 400 of you in a dishwasher and other appliances. Yes. They killed us. I feel really bad. I don't want to make you cry, but I do want to be transparent with you. I'm with Pest-D on this one, Regina, because a homeowner has every right to make their home as uninhabitable as they want. Okay? issue was when the interview ended. On Google Trends, there's been a huge increase in the use of the word "psiop" since 2020. Let's do this spelling-by-style. Can you please spell "psiop" and then use it in a sentence? Sure. P-S-Y-O-P. I hope. You had to think. Sure did. Sure did. I'm barely verbal. Almost illiterate due to my own brain poisoning. Using a sentence, I would say it is a, like, "sirriptitious" often thought to be government run in conspiracy to make you believe something that either isn't true or that someone wants you to believe. Okay. So it's a government-based because I've used, I've heard it- Or shady organization, but- Okay. Yeah. Okay. Shady, I don't even know if organization is it because I've heard it in relation to someone's "X" all the way to Drake. I'm not joking. Charlie, like, my "X" was a "psiop." I've heard that. Yeah. Drake is a "psiop." But then based on my Google research, I came to found out- yeah, there is, it is in regards to some sort of power structure. Words don't really have to mean anything now in this context. You can just, like, your "X" can be a "psiop" because it's like what you're essentially saying is you were duped, right? Like you were made to believe something that, like, you with all of your faculties wouldn't have normally believed, or a different version of you would not have believed- the best version of yourself would not have been tricked into this. But for whatever reason, whatever is happening right now, like, it's too good. Like there's no, you know, you didn't have, like, a fair shot at it. And I think that's the feeling that the idea of the "psiop" is, like, really trying to capture this notion of, like, it's not a fair fight out there. Now, do you think conspiracy theories like that- they're attractive because they give people a sense of control, a sense of agency, it allows them to connect the dots so they can go to Trader Joe's and go grocery shopping? Yes. I think conspiracy theories are, in this way, a very rational response to a moment right now where there is lots of corruption. There is lots that we don't know. There's a lot that is unexplainable. And there are a lot of people who are angry and afraid and don't have the tools to make sense of that. So I think that there is that way that it does give people a sense of agency. It's also fun for a lot of people. Like a lot of people like to, you know, create this fan fiction about the world and get lost in it. And it is a slippery slope because some people start, like, I back in 2018, I was profiling Alex Jones of InfoWars, like, fan. And I went to, like, an InfoWars style, like, meet up with just, like, a bunch of, you know, fans or whatnot. Sure. And I was talking to some of these guys and they were like, "Oh, yeah, like, I, I did not ever believe in all of, like, like, even the 9/11 was an inside job stuff. Like, I didn't really believe in any of that stuff. You know? So what were they like for? Or, like, you know, Jews control the media stuff. Like, I didn't believe in any of that. I just thought it was, like, really fun. This guy was just like, like, he, he was an entertainer, he was, he was interesting, it was fun to, like, put him on late at night and even, like, some people got into it, like, making fun of him. And then it was like, you know what? Then I just, like, one day I actually started listening and, like, a few of those things started to make sense. And if you listen long enough, he makes connections between this totally random subject and this totally random subject. And, you know, like, actually, that does make some sense. And I had one guy genuinely tell me, it's like, I was not an anti-Semite of any kind before any of this stuff. And then I just started repeating the line that Jews control the media until I really kind of believed it. And that was something that someone, like, actually said to me, was just like, they just, by sheer virtue of repetition in some kind of, you know, conspiratorial, like, Soros controls the, you know, the whole world is like, the puppet master, like, narrative. And they convinced themselves. So just so I understand this correctly, it sounded like you met up with a group of lonely individuals who then kind of liked Alex Jones's stage persona, which then got them to like and subscribe on Patreon essentially and then go to exclusive meetups and it became its own self-fulfilling prophecy. I just want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. Yeah. Yeah. And then these people, a thing about someone like Alex Jones, right, is that he is on the radio or television or whatever the streaming thing is hours and hours a day. And full force. 60s. Yeah, at the time. Six days a week. Then he's going on live on Twitter or whatever. There's so much content, there's so much stuff that people develop these relationships to it that are almost sometimes nonsensical, like it's just a companion, like he's there. He's talking about these things. Most of the time, they're not even listening. It's just like background noise. And then people tune in and then they develop these, you know, parasocial relationships. And then the people who've developed those parasocial relationships often through the magic of the internet also find each other. And then they have a language like to talk to each other through. And it really is like it, you know, perpetuates itself. It revs itself up in these types of communities. And I've had, you know, that conversation was so eye-opening because it was like I didn't believe a lot of these wild things. And then I just was in a world where they were said over and over and over again. And now I do. And I understand how crazy that sounds, man. But that's it. And it truly, it changed my mind about like how minds can be changed. Seems to me like we're talking about fringe characters or concepts, then becoming mainstream because of the internet and social media. We're circling a pretty big philosophical question here, but we have an hour to kill. So let's go for it. Is Geese a good band? I like them. Okay. People are calling the popularity of Geese a siop. But here's my larger question. Has an advertising always kind of been a siop? Yeah. Well, like radio stations in Paola, right? You're accepting an idea. Hey, you should like this particular band or these particular songs. And this is the song of the summer. Yeah. It's, it's a, what is happening now, though? Again, so this is where the crisis of agency, I think, comes in. Where it becomes salient. So the band Geese kind of like blows up last, last fall. They've been around for a while. They've been doing their thing, like kind of, you know, making it as a band, right? So it's not like they emerged out of, you know, the ether fully formed. But their music is polarizing to some people. Some people do not like it at all, right? And then the story comes out that they use this creative marketing, this viral marketing agency, which either creates accounts that like post-friendly about like, oh, I love, I love this song, or post like TikToks using Geese music as the, you know, the audio. What they're doing there is essentially, they're like greasing the algorithmic skits, right? They're like showing the algorithm. There's a lot of people who feel strongly about this band. And so when other people who actually show a genuine interest, see it, like they find it. So that those songs then become used as like the templates for other videos that have nothing to do with Geese, or, you know, the lead singer or anything like that. What are the mechanisms that you use as a journalist to determine this is organic? Or, hey, something's a little bit fishy here, or a foot. I can't determine whether or not this is. What are the metrics? Yeah, are there any, you know, kind of specific things that you use to determine? Okay, this is, this is really happening. This is an organic kind of movement or moment. This is the Olivia Rodrigo summer, like everybody loves this new album. Versus, I don't know, I've never heard of this before. And apparently this song is huge in Ecuador. Is it? Question mark? Like that sort of thing of like, is this kind of bot propaganda? It's really genuinely very hard. Like, I have this larger theory that no one knows what anyone is doing on the internet anymore. Did there is no kind of, everyone's feed is so hyper personalized, right? Media itself is so fractured. Like what people listen to, like what my dad, you know, consumes as news from what thing is so different from what I might be consuming. What you might be consuming with someone in, you know, Minneapolis, you know, is consuming. And the fact that there's so many like small niches of like content or like lore or like things that you can get lost in, right? Like you can become a fan of a specific character on a TV show. And there's 150 other people who are, you know, deeply involved in creating fanfiction. And the moment you tap into that algo, you're in a whole new river stream. Right. And so everyone's experience is so different. There's so few like monocultural events. Like the World Cup was such a, like regardless of what you think of like FIFA or, you know, various like, you know, red card scandal or anything. There was a lot of joy around that. I think in part because everyone was participating in something at once. Like it was just heartening to see. We were witnessing the same thing at the same time. Exactly. And there's so few examples of that stuff, right? That I think people are driven a little bit insane by it. Like we're always shadow boxing. The idea of what someone else thinks, right? Like we invent that there's a line on like the internet, which is like you invented a new type of person to get mad at. And that's partly because you're like you are, you don't know what other people are seeing, listening, thinking about. And so we only have like some opinions and some things to go off of, right? Like the worst, like someone becomes the main character on, you know, on a platform and says something stupid. A lot of people imagine there's like a large constituency from that instead of like, oh no, this is like a guy shouting in the middle of target, right? Like you're going to ignore that person. But when you feel like they're a signal for something else, then you start to get mad. And that's happening in all these different places. We don't know what other people are doing, listening, consuming. We often assume the worst of those people. Well, how does the clipping economy factor into this? And how big is it? And how does it impact what we see every day? The clipping economy. So is essentially an industry that takes podcasts like this one? Or like Twitch live streams, like these internally long, like, clavicular spends nine hours running around Miami with like a harem of women going to clubs and saying terrible things. They take little segments from that, the best little pieces, the best 20, 30 seconds, maybe even shorter than that. And they clip it and they push it out to a million different social media channels, right? Like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, all the stuff, even like, you know, YouTube shorts, whatever. And those clips, if a clipper is really good at doing it often they're paid by, you know, what some party. If a clipper is really good, they're going to know how to, you know, phrase like the tweet about it or whatever thing to make it really sticky to the algorithm. And people are going to see it. And what ends up happening is these tiny little segments, like Nick Fuentes is a great example of this. Not a lot of people watch Nick Fuentes is, you know, white nationalist, ranty live streams. Just like, frankly, not a lot of people. Millions of people respond to his clips on the internet. A lot of it is like hate watching, right? And you see this again and again and again and again. And the idea is this dude is popular. Like this dude has reached critical mass. But it's not necessarily clear that all of the stuff that he's saying and doing, has a critical mass, has this audience. And yet it blurs all these lines. Like what is popularity? If this guy is popular in short form, but in long form, no one can stand. Yeah. You know, that's really weird. And it's like, it scrambles the mind. Like there are so many people out there that think, you know, this, like, like, Clificular or Fuentes or, you know, a number of these like Twitch streamers are like the biggest celebrities we have in this ecosystem. And in a way, they're like sometimes not wrong. But the actual thing that they spend their time doing is not really attracting that attention. It's just like the worst moments of it. And what's really fascinating about this is that a lot of these clippers are like you can link them back to like, like online casinos based in places like Macau or someplace. So what is the connection between clippers and online casinos? There are these companies that have invested in certain live streaming services or whatnot. Or you know, this happens a little bit with some prediction markets. Like prediction markets are really good at like aggregating news and things like that. To, you know, to draw people into events or whatnot. But what I mean, my, my conspiracy theory, let's go for it. My conspiracy theory about this is, I mean, and some of these like casinos have partnered people like Andrew Tate, right? The Manosphere influencer. But my conspiracy theory is that these online gambling companies form these, to elevate these people who are really pushing an extremely nihilistic message, whether it's like the looks maxing stuff or like the Manosphere men's rights in sell adjacent stuff. Or just like a whole bunch of like we're just going to, you know, like shout at babes and go to clubs and, you know, stay racial slurs or whatnot. It's like really nihilistic message of like, you know, you may as well just let it rip because like you have no pathway to progress. You have no whatever. It's the exact. type of person that is like the reliable sucker for these gambling companies in these casinos. And so they're elevating a person that attracts that kind of, you know, talent. And I just I just think that it's like it's an ecosystem that either wittingly or unwittingly, like totally feeds itself. So you're saying clipping is a siop? Maybe. Maybe. I hadn't thought about it that way. But yeah, I mean, and let's be clear too that like, I mean, everyone right now is in the business of attracting attention. And attention equals some kind of either cultural meta here. But depending on how well these clips do, maybe people will go to the main interview. Does that fuck with your head always, always, I mean, it happens. I didn't go even more meta. Sure. I had Ed Elson, who's a great podcast or his own right, who wrote about clipping, had him on my podcast. We talked about clipping, made some clips about it. The one clip explaining the clipping phenomenon, millions and millions of people go and see it. Got it. I mean, I like truly like like celebrities are like I can see or sharing it and be like, so true man, so true, all this stuff. He's a fiend for clips, Brendan Frazier, 30,000 people watched the podcast, but probably 20 million people saw the clip. I remember a few years ago, people started dropping deepfakes online. The moment for me was when I saw deepfake Tom Cruise. Did you see that? Yes. Okay, so that dropped on like a Tuesday for me, and I thought the world would be done by Thursday. But it didn't end, but I've been really freaked out about it since. How are we seeing deepfakes play out so far compared to those fears that we had back then? It did feel really apocalyptic. I think for a lot of people, because you just, again, you imagine that like really like exotic version of the future, right? Where just everyone, like everyone can be duped. I think we don't give ourselves like culturally, societally enough credit for our ability to like siphon out bullshit and stuff like that. So it's easy to just like take that Tom Cruise and like project it forward to the apocalypse, right? It's played out very differently for different people. For famous people, I actually don't think it's nearly as bad as anyone would have thought. A good example is there was a couple of years ago, Donald Trump's on trial. A bunch of people throughout these AI videos and AI images of Donald Trump being arrested on like fifth avenue, like running from the police. Yeah, they put the handcuffs on the orange man. Look at it. And yeah, and he's crying and like Mulan is in the street crying all this stuff. And it's so easily like anyone can see like, okay, if that is real, I'm going to go turn on MSNBC Fox any yet, it will be everywhere. Okay, it's not. So that's, it's got to be fake, right? Like with famous people because there's so much interest and attention on them, it's really easy to like check that bullshit. Yeah. Where it's really hurting people. It's like kids, girls in school who are getting like deep fake porn made about them, right? Because there's not a lot of that recourse. It's, there's not a million images of those kids to begin with that they can go and check and see. It's like if somebody creates revenge porn of, you know, a total civilian or something like that and shares it around school. I mean, they might even realize like, oh, it's not real, but it's still traumatizing. It's horrible. It's a crime, right? It's, it's, it's this terrible thing. So it affects different people differently. Yeah. And another sort of like wrinkle to that is around the same time of the Donald Trump people are, you know, showing videos of fake videos of him getting arrested. Yeah. There was this image that came out sort of like an early generative AI thing of the pope in this white puffy kaga puffy coat. Yeah. And a lot of people fell for it. Yeah. Because that is not so ridiculous. But like, what if it was actually just cold and vatican city that day, someone gave him a coat that looked like it could be something. But you got a one-of-one high-piece balance yaga puffer. I'm just saying, it's harder to, it's such a little weird detail. And so many weird things happen every day in the world. We're genuinely pretty good at dealing with this stuff. Like, like, like, we are, we have good bullshit detectors. Yeah. But the, you know, the, the problem with propaganda, it deepfakes with misinformation, whatever we're calling this like stew of this stuff is it doesn't, when it's huge, when it's big and splashy and sexy and all that, it doesn't work that well. It's like the death by like a million little cuts. Yes. That's what gets you that is where I feel something spiritual happening. I'll give you an example. Political attack ads. I want to play back a recent example of AI used in a political attack ad. This is an ad run by Michigan Senator Eric Nesbitt. Let's take a look. The numbers are a disaster. We don't have enough illegals. Don't panic. I know someone who can help. Hey, what's up, Gretchen? Don't worry. We got Michigan covered. Don't forget to register to vote. Pre bus rides for illegals! Attack ads aren't new. But, but what is it about this hatred hen ty porn being presented to millions of people that's going to profoundly affect them? I think one of the things is how easy and frictional it is to make that is that I think is so like off-putting and distasteful. Like, if someone had recruited a bunch of different actors and spent all this money and stuff, like the fact that something like very hateful like that can be coordinated and conducted just by type, like lazily typing in. Like, mom Donnie, Gretchen, Whitmer, bus illegals hit enter, you know? And like five minutes later, this is like fed to you on a silver platter and then you just inject it out into the world. Like, it's like the lowest amount of effort to inject some like bullshit into the world that I think is just extremely distasteful. But I think, I mean, first off, I think this affects different generations in different ways. I think when younger people of any political persuasion see this, they're just like, like, Mima and people on Facebook kind of stuff, right? It's just like, it just like doesn't appeal to specific people. Like, it's almost like white noise. I think that older, like, I'm very fascinated at how prevalent you see this a lot with the president of the United States seems to love AI Slop. Yeah, he really does. Like, love it. And I don't know. I think for some generations there is just a wonder. I'd like the machine made that. Like, like, I have to, I may hate it, but I have to respect it. Right. Because like, wow, like, computers can do that, man, which is like whatever. But I think it's, it's just so, yeah, why do you think boomers think it's so cool? I think there's just a respect for like the technology. Like, honestly, there was a clip that really surprised me. I think it was Jeff Bridges on Theavans podcast. Jeff Bridges is a musician in his own right. He's a very, you know, beloved creative individual. Don't Jeff Bridges from Tron? Yeah. Yeah. He also does music. He plays guitar. Scott, does Jeff Bridges from Tron do music? Yeah. Oh, shit. Go ahead. But he was talking about using Suno, like the music app thing. It's Tommy Sweet, huh? And I was watching him get like a ton of flak for this. And a lot of people saying like, oh, it's like a boomer fell like fell for it again, right? And whatever, whatever you, you want to say about people who use that kind of stuff, I do think like, what was at the root of that? Was this like, this is tremendous technologically. Whereas I think younger people are like, take it away, man. Like, I don't care how cool it is. Like, I don't, I don't want it. Okay, guys, I got a riddle for you. What do gear heads, news junkies, biohackers, comedy nerds, and true crime obsessed windmoms all haven't common? 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But plump, dewy, hydrated skin, that still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Maybelline, New York. Maybe it's Maybelline. What are your thoughts on the liar's dividend? And what is that? So it's a term that essentially means when there's so much fakery and BS out there in the world, a bad actor can use the prevalence of that much fakery to cast aspersions on anything. So you can essentially say, you can do something, you can be caught in a compromising position as a politician, on a date with someone who's not your spouse. And you can say, I don't know, I think that's AI, man. I wasn't on that. Like, how could we ever know for sure whether or not that was actually me, given how easy it is to create these life-like photos of anyone? Let's take a moment that happened in our country, summer of 2020, George Floyd, right? What would happen if that happened today? Because I think there's a growing number of people that would probably say, hey, that's AI. Or maybe they would play their liar's dividend out in that scenario. What do you think would happen? Again, I think the big things, right? The big moments of protest or unrest or conflict, there were 50 straight nights of protest in Portland, Oregon. I remember then, where people were on the bridges and doing these things. That's kind of stuff. It's really hard to fake that again. But I do think there is in, right before the 2024 election, there's horrible hurricane that hits Asheville, North Carolina. And there's all this destruction and devastation, and people are like, where's FEMA? Where's whatever? Why isn't it, why isn't the government assisting in helping out? And there were a couple of politicians, Republican politicians who shared these images of like a girl in a kitten, like crying or doing whatever, and it was very, obviously, a generative AI. And someone brought it up to the person. This is fake. This thing you're sharing. It may be fake, but it feels very real. And it expresses something that's very true, which is the government's not stepping in to help on time, right? And that, to me, felt like a little bit of a synapse just tearing in my brain, where I was like, oh, we've divorced ourselves. If you can't even call people on a lie, and they're like, nobody feels true, and that's what's important is that it feels true. I think, you know, bringing that back to what you just asked about, like, you know, what could have been like in 2020 with that? I think you could have had a lot of instances, again, these small little cuts, right? Like someone just being like, hey, my store was looted by a bunch of people wearing Black Lives Matter shirts, you know, and there's like a fake image. And it's like, as we were just saying, do I go back and do I go like, look through the police reports and try to figure out whether or not this thing that I'm just scrolling through in the feed that's like, maybe upsetting, maybe not, that like, a bunch of influencers are talking about is real, or do I just disengage with it? And so I don't think on the sense of what it has changed the entire narrative, I don't think that's the case. But would it have ripped or broken away two or three people who then saw this and got really mad and, you know, completely changed their minds about some issue? That's happening all the time. Well, is that another liar's dividend that we now have the opportunity to lie to ourselves? Meaning, if I think a new movie sucks, but it's getting rave reviews, I just lie to myself and, or dismiss it and say it's a siop. How do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, this is the geese thing. Yeah. There's a lot of people who just don't like the band. And they saw the story about the viral marketing firm and they went, there it is, there it is, man, industry plants, no one does like this music or a couple people like it and they're being forced down our throats by other people, right? And that's the sort of like the, the super structure of all of this, right? Is there somebody who stands to profit, whether they own a prediction market or they own a record company or they own whatever somebody or, or they're the social media barons, right? Who run these platforms? Somebody stands to profit off the fact that they're making me believe something that isn't true. So this conversation has been incredibly robust and depressing, but Charlie, my question is, where do we go from here? What I think about a lot, because I, when you write about this kind of stuff and inevitably depress whoever your audience or interlocutor is, the thing that I hear the most is like, what's the solution? What do we fix it, right? Like when I was writing a lot about misinformation and just like, you know, all the unbelievable fakery that's out there, people, okay, so how do we fix it? How do we fix, XYZ, how do we fix these platforms? And the thing that I like to make a comparison to is I think the outgrowth that we have seen of the commercial internet, you know, this, since we all got the AOL discs and logged on and, you know, to now, like it is it, the internet is this technology that I think is comparable with the printing press, right? It is. So yeah. Society, upending, connecting, democratizing ideas, changing the way that people think technology, the ever, like almost everyone in the world now has access to. Right. And when you look back at like the printing press, you had unbelievable chaos that it unleashed, you know, like religious fractures, wars, horrible violence, all because like, information was democratized in a type of way that allowed people to learn new things about the ways that they were being oppressed or do, you know, be coerced by other people and fed, you know, BS ideas and pit them against each other. Yeah. And it took so much time for us all to develop like the appropriate cultural societal, like inoculation and norms and, you know, mores and all this stuff to the point that now people are like, our reading is boring. The reading used to be the most radical, freaking thing that you could do. Everyone was afraid of books and the power of books and now it's like, we can't get people to read, right? Society changed, it adapted to all this until the technology became much more pedestrian to we sort of understood it. And so when people say like, what's the fix? How do we get rid of this? How do we fix this? I think the fix is time. The fix is adapting to these styles of behaviors. And I do think that there is, like, there is an optimism with a lot of this stuff that you can find. As bad as things get, as bad as things are, we are good at detecting bullshit, right? Is what you're saying? And just to try to end it here on some optimism, are you basically saying, hey, touch grass and wait it out? I would amend that. I think like, I think we all, like, I think we absolutely need touch grass. I think that we're seeing, societally, culturally, more of a desire to that. I think people are really fed up with the smart glasses now that can record you, right? Kids are really frustrated by phones and the dating scene and things like that. And the constant idea of surveillance and this feeling sort of like, hey, man, we want spaces where we can just be human beings. Brother, I feel that as an adult. People are pulling facetimes out in the goddamn locker room of the gym and it's like, sir, this is an LA fitness, like, please, it's lawless, it is lawless and I'm totally fine. You know, we've always had all due to the why who's letting it fly fine, fine. But it's only etched in my brain temporarily. But these Rayban metaglasses and the take in the facetime call in the gym, this is truly heinous activity. I saw an article late last year that was just basically like scrolling on your phone really on cool. Like it's a loser behavior. Really? It was like, you know, this like predictive trend thing that like this is going to become like it's an anti-social weird thing like or like, you know, just walking around and doing this in like a public space, like it's kind of creepy, but it's definitely like anti-social. And I can see a world where some of these behaviors shift into a way of just like, dude, we just, we, we need space. Just like culturally, whatever. Like you see a lot of artists being like, hey, like don't, no, no phones at my concert. Not because, like, I'm going to say or do something objectionable. It's just like, let's all be here together. Let's have this be a space where we're, so I do think, like, that's how these cultural changes happen, right? That take this from, like, this, like, total wild west chaos into this. What I would say, though, is that in the meantime, we also need to, like, structurally push back on this stuff, right? Like, because these companies, you know, there's a big, like, populist kind of brown swell against data centers right now that is based off of a lot of different anxieties about these tech companies and AI in the world and Nimbism and water resources and all that kind of stuff. It's a really complicated problem. Yeah. But it's also people more than anything else. Yeah. Signalling. Pump the brakes, like you are ushering in a very specific future, telling us we have no choice but to just jump on board. Yeah. And maybe we don't want that. Maybe we do want it, but we want to decide. And so that that structural push to me is like, it's very heartening because we haven't done that. Like, we didn't do that with social media. We just let it happen. This has been a very beautiful bipartisan giving AI data centers the bird. And I appreciate it. Yeah. I think we'll see where it goes. Like, you know, history shows us that these things can start really nicely and then contort you know, all the culture war crap gets stuck in on it. But I see this idea of like us acclimating to these technologies will also as a society really putting the screws to the tech companies and these people putting this on us and say like, we're not just going to consent. We're not going to accept all cookies on, you know, your vision for society and the way that humanity goes. Couldn't agree more brother reject all jacked all cookies. Charlie, thank you so much for joining us. This was an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me, man. Hey folks, you can now watch hmdk on Spotify. If you're subscribed to Spotify premium, you don't get any Spotify ads on my video. If you're watching your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippie setting mist from Mavily New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all-day comfy grip. Try new grippie setting mist from Mavily New York. Maybe it's Mavily.