00:00:48.860Tax relief advocates, real solutions for real people.
00:00:52.640In 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.
00:01:16.740personally, if you go back a decade, I was probably checking something like 20 different
00:01:21.440websites on a regular basis, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, there was a thing called surfing the
00:01:27.300web, which is a phrase that you don't hear much anymore, but kids that were your, that's what
00:01:31.480your parents would do. Um, and today I checked maybe two or three websites and I think most
00:01:36.660people have had a similar experience. We'd been bombarded with so many different apps and so many
00:01:41.420different websites for more than a decade. And now we've decided that we don't need most of them.
00:01:47.400So instead of following a dozen different independent bloggers or websites, people are just
00:01:52.640on social media. They're scrolling Instagram or X, the endless feed that just brings everything
00:01:58.720to one place. They're talking to AI. And if they want to spend some money, maybe they're subscribing
00:02:03.880to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or maybe a premium sub stack or two. Our information
00:02:10.300is coming from a very concentrated handful of sources, and therefore we are extremely easy to
00:02:16.540manipulate in ways that many people don't realize. This is the exact opposite of the original promise
00:02:23.900of the internet, but that's where we are. So how exactly did this happen, and how significant is
00:02:30.240the problem really? Well, to answer those questions, we'll begin in Russia, which is still
00:02:35.060waging some kind of war in Ukraine, a war that, simply based on the fact that it's still going on,
00:02:40.000we can assume that Russia must be losing. Russia has 10 times the economy of Ukraine,
00:02:46.240nearly four times the population, and yet they've apparently been on the defensive for quite some
00:02:50.720time now. In fact, as we've previously discussed, Ukraine has been striking targets deep in Russian
00:02:55.180territory with total impunity. They've been ignoring the Trump administration, which doesn't
00:03:00.940want Ukraine to escalate the conflict. And for a very small, notoriously corrupt country, Ukraine
00:03:06.020is punching well above its weight. And for our purposes, what's worth talking about is that when
00:03:11.040they're not bombarding refineries and spiking the price of diesel, Ukrainian drones are now going
00:03:17.060after Russian data centers, which handle a significant amount of automated online activity.
00:03:22.400In the past few days, Ukraine has bombed at least three data centers belonging to a technology
00:03:26.980company called Yandex, which is Russia's equivalent to Google, in the sense that in Russia, it handles
00:03:33.060much more traffic than Google does. The data centers were located within about 100 to 200
00:03:38.200miles of Moscow. So these were aggressive strikes. The leader of Ukraine, Zelensky, claimed
00:03:44.060that swarms of Russian bots had been taken offline because of the attacks. In fact, he said that so
00:03:50.780many bots have been disabled that, quote, a lot of people noticed as they were just sort of casually
00:03:56.140browsing the internet. This was his victory lap from an event in Warsaw. Watch. When we started
00:04:03.440responding to Russia's operation against our data centers, and when our strikes reached Yandex
00:04:12.840data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breeze on many social media platforms.
00:04:21.140A lot of people, 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.
00:04:42.880so i don't know if you happen to notice less hate less division and fewer provocations online
00:04:51.680i can't say i did i mean all the same basically the same amount of provocation and hate as i've
00:04:58.520as i've become accustomed to but according to zelensky that's because ukraine has been conducting
00:05:03.380bombing runs deep into russian territory now even by the standards of wartime propaganda0.95
00:05:08.800This is pretty shameless, ridiculous stuff.0.86
00:05:12.880On its face is the kind of claim that no one should really take seriously.0.98
00:05:16.480He's claiming that if you just keep giving Ukraine more money and more bombs,
00:05:20.760then he can fix the Internet by blowing up stuff in Russia.0.64
00:05:25.640Now, credit where it's due, he knows his audience.0.77
00:05:27.720He knows how to manipulate Westerners into giving him exactly what he wants.
00:05:31.420Ever since Donald Trump very unexpectedly won the 2016 election,
00:05:34.820a critical mass of Americans have been primed to believe that the Russians can hack anything they
00:05:40.700want. They can hack elections. They can hack Facebook memes. They can basically mind control
00:05:45.840us anytime they want with their, you know, amazing hacking skills. It's much easier for Democrats to
00:05:52.760just blame Russia for everything than it is to assess their own failures. So that's what they
00:05:57.260decided to do. And now Zelensky is once again taking advantage of this derangement by presenting
00:06:03.200three random Russian data centers as a kind of ground zero for online hate and division.
00:06:11.080You know, the ongoing concern about data centers in some corners of the country and broader
00:06:14.980concerns about AI in general, prying people to take this seriously as well.
00:06:21.360So this is going to be a big theme heading into the elections next month.
00:06:25.580It's probably going to be a theme in every American election for the foreseeable future.
00:06:29.400And 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.
00:06:43.980Even 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.
00:06:55.320This is from a deep dive the Wall Street Journal published earlier this year, quote,
00:06:59.400Last summer, Donald Trump's 28-year-old former campaign aide Alex Brusiewicz had some new advice for the president, reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug.
00:07:10.780Nearly 70% of Republican voters support Trump on this. No brainer, he said to more than 640,000 followers on X.
00:07:18.360What Brusiewicz left out of the post, a political action committee funded by legal marijuana's biggest players had just paid him $300,000.
00:07:25.320dollars. Israel made plans over the past summer to spend $900,000 on an influencer campaign
00:07:31.360with a U.S. audience, according to disclosure documents. As Israel fights negative sentiment
00:07:36.740on the right, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with conservative social media stars on at
00:07:41.020least two of his visits. The solar energy and health industries have paid thousands of dollars
00:07:45.840to influencers to support their interests, according to people who have been offered
00:07:49.360or participated in such deals. Qatar, beverage interests, and others have courted those
00:13:25.720Some restrictions apply. See puretalk.com for details. Offer ends on November 15th, 2026.
00:13:31.620The midsummer elections are here, and if the DSA Democrats win, they'll push a radical socialist agenda and drown President Trump in endless investigations.
00:13:40.880We've seen their playbook before. They tried impeaching him. They tried putting him in prison. They tried everything.
00:13:46.360Don't let them win, because if we lose, they'll undo everything our movement has fought for.
00:13:50.540I need you to vote early. You can bank your vote and fight back against the left's turnout machine.
00:13:55.840Go to gopvotes.org right now and find out when you can vote. If you live in the critical set of
00:14:00.800battleground states of Maine, Ohio, or Iowa, early voting is already underway this week.
00:14:05.460Making your voice heard is easier than ever. You can get election reminders, look up your polling
00:14:09.080location, and pick a date to vote early. Go to gopvotes.org, paid for by SLF PAC, not authorized
00:14:15.360by any candidate or candidate's committee.
00:14:18.020But while Zelensky is obviously overselling vastly
00:16:18.420Search engine crawlers indexing pages or monitoring tools, checking whether sites are up.
00:16:23.720Because Yandex runs Russia's biggest search engine, its network constantly sends out crawlers to index the web.
00:16:30.160Knocking its data centers offline would bring traffic to a halt, regardless of whether a single troll account went quiet.
00:16:36.880Okay, 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.
00:16:56.920and this looked convincing too at first glance but when you zoom out you realize that it's highly
00:17:03.620misleading they looked at a thousand subreddits and found that only 90 of them had a drop in
00:17:09.140activity over a three-day period and as the account reddit lies has pointed out there's
00:17:13.780nothing remotely unusual about that uh reddit lies monitors reddit all the time as the name
00:17:18.220implies so they have some experience here sometimes there's a big event that everyone's
00:17:22.340talking about in that community. And then the next day, traffic falls off a cliff. For example,
00:17:26.920one of the subreddits, which focuses on Czech politics, experienced a 20% drop after the
00:17:32.220Ukrainian bombings. But the Czech Republic was also holding elections right before the bombing.
00:17:36.340So you'd expect a spike followed by a sudden crash. And that's what happened here. A researcher
00:17:41.620named Valdemar Osted has confirmed that according to his analysis, nothing unusual happened
00:17:47.400on Reddit. The gray boxes are the normal expected range for posting levels. Everything was exactly
00:17:54.480what you'd expect on the right-wing end of the spectrum. I also saw someone else post this chart
00:18:00.980supposedly showing that on X, references to free Palestine dropped after the bombings.
00:18:08.040And you can see it there. But again, we have no idea whether this is normal noise or not.
00:18:13.380At a minimum, as expected, we can conclude that there's no objective basis for what Zelensky is
00:18:19.160claiming, which is not a great shock. But that leads us to the more interesting question, which
00:18:24.160is what would happen if we actually could somehow eliminate the ability of bots to communicate with
00:18:30.820us on the internet? What if we could revert back to the internet of the 1990s and early 2000s when
00:18:36.320AI-powered bots simply didn't exist, or at least didn't remotely resemble what we have now?
00:18:43.380To get a sense of how much things have changed, a woman named Ellie May recently conducted0.89
00:18:48.720something of an unscientific experiment on Instagram.
00:18:52.680At the height of the Lindsay Clancy hysteria, she posted the following video on Instagram.
00:22:22.440of many people who comment on my videos
00:22:24.180because most of them are great, but there's a very vocal minority of lunatics that drift from
00:22:29.020YouTube video to YouTube video, like a swarm of locusts. And they're totally unbothered by the
00:22:33.520content of whatever they're responding to. And with respect to the internet lady running this0.93
00:22:37.840experiment, she doesn't appear to have considered that possibility. You know, there's always the
00:22:43.940possibility that human beings can be very stupid. And there's, there's always that. You can never1.00
00:22:48.940discount that. You got to factor that in. You got to, you got to bake that into the equation
00:22:53.160whenever you're doing a, in any kind of experiment like this, but there's no question that as a
00:22:57.320general matter, she's making a legitimate point from my perspective. And this is anecdotal,
00:23:03.600but I think many people would relate. If I go to just my X feed, um, it feels, which is one of the
00:23:10.020two or three places I go on the internet now feels like 95% of the feed is fake now. And maybe it's
00:23:17.720not that high in reality. It's probably not 95%. But if you go there, you go to any social media
00:23:23.840or you read the comments under anything, it does appear that a huge number of them are fake.
00:23:31.760Comments are fake. Posts are fake. Bots will come up with some irrelevant or idiotic take,
00:23:38.000and then another bot will respond to it. So you've got fake posts and then fake comments0.96
00:23:45.240responding to the fake posts. So you've got bots talking to bots all over the place.
00:23:50.300And this happens millions of times every day. You know, it's a particularly big problem on
00:23:55.820Facebook where this image here was posted. Check this out. So it's, you know, I don't want to,
00:24:04.160I mean, I've done my own assessment of this very scientifically, and I can tell you that
00:24:09.980this appears to be AI generated. So this is a, an AI generated picture of a wounded soldier
00:24:16.160in a wheelchair with the sign that says, today's my birthday. No one loved me because I'm poor.
00:24:25.780And he appears to be sitting, where is he? Like he's in some kind of control room.
00:24:30.560He appears to be in some kind of control room over at NASA or something.
00:24:35.480I mean, that, that picture makes more sense if he's on the street corner.
00:24:37.640um but so he's in a he's in a control room somewhere in his uniform in a wheelchair with
00:24:45.520a cardboard sign saying today's my birthday no one loves me because i'm poor and the hashtag
00:24:51.500on this post naturally includes wonder woman kylie jenner christian bale and at angelina jolie
00:24:57.760now this post that you see there obviously completely fake and nonsensical
00:25:04.780racked up more than 290,000 likes and 49,000 comments.
00:25:13.520And yes, most of those likes and comments are fake as well.
00:25:18.940It's an endless cycle and it's compromised many different websites from Quora to Reddit to pretty
00:25:24.240much every other social media platform. You've got these conversations that are happening on
00:25:28.980these sites between thousands of accounts, and there might not be a single real person
00:25:34.380there at all. Then you have the many different AI slop accounts that post fake photos of
00:25:40.840celebrities doing something incredibly generous or selfless. Peyton Manning is one of the more
00:25:47.780prominent athletes in this genre for some reason. The point isn't simply to trick boomers, although
00:25:53.780there's plenty of that going on. And once again, as we talk about, you can't discount the0.91
00:25:58.720possibility that people are stupid. When you see posts like this, a lot of the comments are fake.1.00
00:26:03.220A lot of the people that are, you know, a lot of the accounts that are responding are not people
00:26:06.680at all. But then you also have people who genuinely will look at an image like that and not know that
00:26:13.880it's fake. And I don't know what's more disturbing. You go back to the wounded warrior. I don't know,
00:26:21.46050,000 comments. What's more disturbing if 50,000 people actually believed that and thought it was
00:26:29.480real or if 50,000 bots are responding? I don't know which is worse, honestly. I think it's just
00:26:35.320kind of a combination. It's the worst of all worlds. But the idea is also to scam Facebook's
00:26:41.140algorithm into thinking that these are legitimate views so the account owner gets the advertising
00:26:46.100revenue from the posts. And this is a totally hands-off process now. You could program AIs
00:26:52.100to go out and create these posts for you all day across every platform you can think of.
00:26:59.580Realistically, there's no way to stop the flood of constant garbage.
00:27:05.660Five years from now, the entire internet is just going to be that. A year from now, maybe.
00:27:12.660It's going to be totally unusable, and there doesn't appear to be any real plan to stop that from happening.
00:27:18.640Every year, the holiday shopping season starts earlier and earlier.
00:27:22.640We used to wait until Thanksgiving, and now Halloween candy shares an aisle with artificial Christmas trees
00:27:27.620because the retail calendar has abandoned all restraint.
00:27:31.500Somewhere right now, an inflatable reindeer is on sale, and it's still October.
00:27:35.900So before you start buying gifts for everyone you care about, handle something that can protect those same people long after the wrapping paper is gone.
00:27:43.920Life insurance is nobody's favorite purchase.
00:27:46.320Nobody's ever excited to unwrap it, which is why it keeps getting pushed to next year and then the next one, next one, and next one.
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00:28:04.060Their license team helps explain the coverage, the prices, and the terms, answers your questions, handles your paperwork, and advocates for you throughout the process.
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00:28:18.980Head to PolicyGenius.com slash Walsh to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you can save.
00:28:28.740Now, we've all heard the radio ads about owing the IRS money.
00:28:32.580they try to scare you and frighten you in the calling. Well, tax relief advocates is different.
00:28:39.060If you owe the IRS $5,000, $50,000, or $500,000, TRA has a solution to resolve your tax problem.
00:28:47.180Don't lose hope. TRA could reduce or even eliminate what you owe. Their passion is taxes
00:28:52.040and helping regular people and businesses fix their IRS mess. They have over 1,000 five-star
00:28:58.100Google reviews and an A plus with the Better Business Bureau. You don't have to be afraid of
00:29:02.560the IRS anymore. Real tax relief programs are available that can give you a fresh start. So
00:29:07.220don't wait. Go to tra.com. It's tra.com or call 800-575-1753. Again, that's 800-575-1753. Tax
00:29:18.020relief advocates, real solutions for real people. Just the other day, the DOJ announced that a 54
00:29:24.760year old man named Michael Smith has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for running
00:29:29.280a scam, kind of like this, from 2017 to 2024. So he was doing this for seven years before
00:29:36.340he was caught. Started doing this back when the AI and bot technology was nothing like
00:29:41.820what it is now, so it's only getting worse. But here's what he did, according to the DOJ's
00:29:45.800press release. He targeted Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music in particular.
00:29:51.600Quote, first, Smith created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the streaming platforms, the bot accounts, that he could use to stream songs.
00:29:59.800Second, he used software to cause the bot accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned, which were generally created using super intelligence.
00:30:08.880Artificial intelligence. I'm not doing the super intelligence thing.
00:30:12.320I'm not respecting the AI's pronouns that Donald Trump has assigned to it for some dumb reason.0.88
00:30:16.740Anyway. 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.
00:30:33.920At times, Smith was using as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once to fraudulently stream music,
00:30:39.760and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently obtained debit cards to create the bot accounts.
00:30:44.000To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed,
00:30:47.880Smith turned to super intelligence, otherwise known as artificial intelligence,
00:30:52.360which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.
00:30:59.000Smith's hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his bot accounts billions of times.
00:31:08.480So his only mistake was getting too greedy.
00:31:10.980Otherwise, nobody would have suspected anything.
00:31:13.700To give you an idea of how brazen this was, in the month of April 2023,
00:31:19.100Taylor Swift's entire catalog received 9.3 million streams on YouTube music from family planned streams.
00:31:28.600That same month, according to DOJ, Smith's bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times on YouTube Music.
00:31:40.780As a result, he collected more than $8 million in royalties.
00:31:45.400This is why if you use Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, you keep coming across terrible covers all the time.
00:31:54.360Most of them are made with AI for the sole purpose of scamming the system.
00:31:59.840And because of these scams, the service gets noticeably worse for everybody.
00:32:04.320We're seeing this play out all over the internet.
00:33:48.420It's the first one that I can remember in months.
00:33:52.400And one of the things that made it a viral article is that aside from the fact that the
00:33:55.740story they were telling was so ridiculous and funny, it was good writing. Whoever wrote,
00:34:01.360I forget the author's name, but whoever wrote that was actually good writing, good human writing.
00:34:08.020This is a change that I've seen up close because I was an independent blogger in the early 2010s,
00:34:12.500which was a reputable career back then. Well, not reputable, but it was a career and it was a thing
00:34:17.680you could do. And all I did was write blog posts. And in doing so, I made enough money to support
00:34:23.280a family. I'd get four or five million views on a single viral post easily. Even with a base of,
00:34:31.560you know, my follower base, mostly on Facebook, was very small compared to now. It was like maybe
00:34:37.98050,000, 60,000 followers. That was enough because you actually had access because, you know,
00:34:43.06050 or 60,000 followers, they were all humans, first of all, they were real people. And you
00:34:49.720could access like all of them. It isn't like it is now where you've got a bunch of followers, but
00:34:54.460through the algorithms, you only really, only about 0.1% of them will see what you post.
00:34:59.100Back then you have 50,000, 60,000 followers. All of them will see your stuff because they're
00:35:03.660following you. And, um, you know, I had a post that would go viral once a month, sometimes more
00:35:08.940frequently than that. And now that's impossible. Somebody with my exact perspective and skill set
00:35:14.400writing the same kind of stuff today would have an infinitely more difficult time getting noticed.
00:35:19.620And if they did get noticed, there's no way they could scratch out a career just writing long
00:35:24.780articles or commentaries that just doesn't exist anymore. You might remember Matt Drudge. Remember
00:35:30.180how in January of 1998, he blew open the Monica Lewinsky scandal because Newsweek had spiked the
00:35:36.600reporting on it. They didn't want to run the story because they couldn't verify the authenticity of
00:35:41.780Lewinsky's conversations with Linda Tripp. So Drudge just went ahead and published it himself.
00:35:46.740And here's how the BBC covered that development at the time, all the way back in the ancient past.
00:35:51.960Quote, holding the story wasn't an issue for Matt Drudge, the maverick internet reporter
00:35:55.900who authored the story. Mr. Drudge proudly admits he has no editor but himself. On Saturday, he
00:36:01.300published the story to the web's worldwide audience. Plus, according to his own calculation,
00:36:06.600is more than 85,000 subscribers. By the early hours of Sunday, the news had hit internet news
00:36:12.840groups. It moved from alt-current events Clinton-Whitewater to alt-impeach Clinton and then
00:36:18.900to more mainstream political discussion groups. An early interview about the scandal, former Clinton
00:36:23.240aide George Stephanopoulos dismissed the report. And where did that come from? The Drudge Report?
00:36:28.640You know, we've all seen how discredited that's been. This was the moment it became clear to
00:36:33.400Everybody that the mainstream press has lost its ability to control the national narrative for the first time.
00:36:37.840The Internet gave everybody the ability to become, you know, a blogger and reach an audience of millions.
00:36:43.000Anyone could reach an audience. And therefore, as the scandal broke, people were wondering what the media would look like in 30 years.
00:36:50.020Would many more websites like the Drug Report spring up challenging the established narratives?
00:36:55.220Well, you know, and people wonder, would people still be making those little geosites pages about their pets and sharing them with their friends and family?
00:37:04.260How advanced would those websites be in 30 years?
00:37:08.480Well, what they didn't expect was that 30 years later, all of this creativity, most of it, all of the value of surfing the web, as they called it at the time, would be replaced in large part by a flood of AI slop and scams designed to manipulate the algorithm.
00:37:27.420They 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.
00:37:42.140And 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.
00:37:53.740Now, whatever you call this phenomenon, dead internet theory, as the term that's used now,
00:37:59.640or anything else, it's obviously real. And over in Ukraine, Zelensky has clearly concluded that
00:38:06.140any politician who promises to bomb our way out of it, even if he's lying, is going to be immensely
00:38:12.120popular as a result. He's determined that military action in the form of drone warfare is a palatable
00:38:17.580solution to the dead internet. Is he right about that? Well, it's really not clear at the moment,
00:38:24.420but until someone provides a viable alternative, it's the solution that a lot of people are going
00:38:29.060to support. Many more bombs will fall. Many more data centers will inevitably be destroyed.
00:38:34.740Many more bot farms incinerated. We'll continue our march backwards through what they used to
00:38:41.000call the information age, but on the bright side, you know, a random guy talking to a camera in his
00:38:46.260car will have a much better chance of finding an audience, earning a living. That's a trade that
00:38:52.360many young men would happily make at this point. And as someone who knows a lot about broadcasting
00:38:56.720from a car, I can't blame them. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks
00:39:01.940for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed.
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