Investigate Earth Conspiracy Podcast - Dead Internet Theory: Is the Internet Already Mostly Bots & AI?

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Is the Dead Internet Theory becoming real? In this episode of Investigate Earth, Chad and Sheri look at how bots, AI-generated content, fake accounts and coordinated influence campaigns are changing the internet.We examine how artificial engagement can shape public opinion, how foreign governments have used online influence operations, and whether the internet is becoming less human than it appears.How much of what we see online is actually real anymore?Our Merch Store

Life is a winding road. No telling where it goes. Driving through days and nights, won't stop for traffic lights. Hello and welcome back to Investigator's podcast. I'm your host chat alongside my beautiful wife, Sherry. And today we're getting into something that sounds like a conspiracy theory at first. But the longer you look at the internet today, the stranger it looks, it's called the dead internet theory. And the basic idea is that a huge portion of what we see online may no longer.

be coming from real people at all. Think about how much your day has spent scrolling through posts, comments, videos, reviews, arguments, viral trends, and breaking news. Now imagine that a growing percentage of that content is being created, boosted, commented on, and even argued over by bots and artificial intelligence. So today, we're going to ask a simple question, how much of the internet is actually still human? And are we getting closer to the point where we can't tell the difference?

Guys, welcome to the show. It is September the 25th, 26th. The name of this song is, even if the sky has fallen. down by Candleon, just featuring Kara D. And guys, this topic we're going to be talking about today is something that we have talked about a few times, not necessarily the dead internet theory itself, but just kind of the prelude to the dead internet theory. We're talking about bots.

We're talking about boosted content. We're talking about, like, for example, back when Biden was president. And obviously, how unpopular the Biden administration was, nonetheless, when they posted on social media, they all. always had comments that seem like they were the most popular president in U.S. history. And it wasn't until you would scroll down and down and down and down further that you would actually start seeing some real people comments that actually criticized the Biden administration. But before that, you had to go through hundreds, if not sometimes thousands of comments

that were just propping up the administration saying how amazing of a job they were doing, how there could have never been a better president than Joe Biden. and he was the most cognitive president in history. And that's when you know for a fact that these are bought accounts that are propping up these accounts. And then on top of that, not only do you just have the political or the administration side of bodding, you also have influence side of bodying. You also have ideological or ideological side of body to where they want you to go with a certain narrative. They want you to believe that the mass population is actually all in agreeance about this one particular thing.

and then you sit there and feel like you're the outsider. You feel like, damn, maybe I'm the one that is actually thinking completely screwed up. And everybody else I'm seeing online are actually the ones that are right. And that really will start to make you question whether or not what you believe is even the right thing to believe anymore. And I don't think we understand how dangerous that this can be, especially when it gets switched over or turned all over to AI. Bodying is one thing, right? boughting actually just uses bot accounts that have predetermined messaging and you know over the past three or four years sherry just like i was talking about on the biden post or on other political

candidate or i guess political party post you could usually decipher what the body accounts were and what were not because a lot of the i guess you can say comments that would be under these posts looked very similar they might change a couple words or or here and there or maybe some of the formatting, but the overall messaging was essentially the same. And so what they would do is they would get these Chinese bot farms or Indonesian bot farms to where they would have buildings that were two and three and four thousand square foot. And in each room, these bot accounts or these bot organizations or companies or groups of

people would have literally thousands of phones in one room. And they would all be connected to various accounts. This is where the botting comes from. and then they would all be programmed to send certain messages or scheduled messages over a certain time frame and they would have predetermined messaging whatever that was. And oftentimes actual administrations or political parties will coordinate with these bot farms to let them know what their upcoming tweets or their messaging is going to be so that they could then figure out what their comments need to be in response to these things.

Now that's just botting. But we've not even talked about how dangerous is going to be when AI takes over and AI actually has a almost like a cognitive sense of how to reply, especially all you got to tell AI is no matter what we say here or no matter what we post about, you just give a response in favor of the administration. And then you can do this very easily because then AI will create all the accounts. They will create all of the messaging and you don't have to do anything, but just tell AI, hey, here's all you got to do.

Just make sure that whatever you say back to us is favorable. Well, I've already noticed that on my personal Facebook. I have like the, I don't know, the content creator thing or whatever. So it tells you how many posts have been seen. And it seems like they only push the post that they want to post or they want to push. Yeah. And so some of my posts might have 60 views. Others will have 3,000 views.

And I don't get where they're coming of what to push and what not to push. That doesn't make sense to me. And who's determining that? Yeah. Well, it just all depends, right? Because this is not just political parties that do this. This exists across the political spectrum, but it also exists across corporations, advocacy organizations, foreign governments, religious organizations, basically anybody with enough money who wants to shape public opinion, they're going to have bots. And it's going to become easier as AI works this way further into our systems. The influencer business itself is enormous. And we've talked about this extensively. Current industry estimates put U.S. influence or marketing spending at more than $10 billion a year. And so you don't really necessarily even have to have someone with 10 million followers to get paid.

Nowadays, a small creator might make a few hundred dollars to post. Micro-influencers can make anywhere from around $500 to a couple thousand dollars. And then obviously the bigger accounts can easily charge $10,000 or more for a single sponsored post. And we obviously also heard about after October 7th and after Israel's response where they were supposedly paying creator $7,500 per post. and it was kind of interesting because after we heard that news, you started seeing all these influencers that never,

ever talked about Israel, all of a sudden being complete support of Israel. Ashton Forbes was one of those people that I questioned whether or not this dude was getting paid $7,500 because Ashton was someone we had had on the show many times, never was political, never got into any of the political talk or the conspiracies, you know, the political conspiracies. Nor did he want to.

No, and we even talked to Ashton many times on the show about politics or about conspiracies. And the only thing he ever wanted to talk about was MX30. He did not care about Trump and he did not care about Biden. He did not care, never really even mentioned religion whatsoever. And then all the sudden, like once we heard the news about Israel supposedly paying $7,500 per post, then all of a sudden, Ashden Forbes might as well be wearing a yarmaca or what it, is that what's on your hat? Yamaka. Yamaka. Yeah. So that was interesting. But it wasn't just Ashton Forbes that we noticed that about. It was so many others, Benny Johnson and Misfit Patriot. I mean, there were just so many

And obviously I'm not even going to say Laura Lumer. That's a dead given. But this happens not just with the Israel thing. We're talking about political organizations, the Republican Party, the Democrat Party. We've already talked about Biden and how the Biden administration did it. But I'm telling you, the Republican Party is doing very similar things. And so during the 2024 election, people working in political influence campaigns told the Washington Post that payments could range from $200 for a very small influence or all the way up to $100,000 for someone with millions of followers. And that's per post.

And so Priorities USA, a Democrat-led organization said it expected to pay $5,000 to $15,000 for a single influencer post, sometimes even more. And that's according to the Washington Post. And so these are obviously tiny political operations during 23 and 24 election cycle. Federal filings showed political action committees spent about $15 billion, while the national and state Democratic Party committees tracked by the FEC spent about $1.56 billion. And the comparable Republican Party committee spent roughly $1.8 billion. And so obviously most of what the influencer money was was going from or coming from the political PACs or organizations. So it kind of gives you an idea of just how much money is spent on influencers, especially leading up to elections. And then that obviously matters because then you've got to think about not only is the Republican parties and the Democrat parties paying influencers.

But then who are these political PACs that are behind the parties? You know, I'm talking about the, you know, MAGA parties or whatever the political action summit groups are or the funding or lobbying groups are that are behind the political organizations. Well, oftentimes they will make groups called like MAGA forever or even America First Pack or whatever the name that makes you want to believe it's American. But when you actually start looking into the people that are behind these organizations or these lobbying groups, a lot of them are foreign. They're not even people from the United States. They may be Israeli. They may be another country in NATO. They may be somebody else.

But regardless, they make or create a name that makes you think like it's a very patriotic, political organization name that is led by Republicans and conservatives from the United States of America. And then we started to dig into a lot of these, especially MAGA packs. And a lot of them were pro-Oren nation, right? And this is not just on the Republican side of the party. The Democrats did the exact same thing, and they used various other organization hats or I guess covers, even BLM and Antifas and, you know, a lot of the trans LGBTQ stuff. A lot of that stuff was funded by foreign governments or outside NGOs, non-government organizations, especially like the Open Society Foundation, which is George Soros's Foundation. We know, at least we believe that the Open Society Foundation is funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in a lot.

lot of these riots and protests that we've seen across the United States, whether it be Antifa, BLM, or LGBTQ. And most of that is just to completely disrupt American, the American way. They wanted to disrupt politics. They wanted to interfere in elections. And they do that by creating uproars, creating riots. That's exactly what the United States does. When they want to go to another country and take over another country, they want to, they want to rile up the people, right? They want to rile them up enough to where then you're so divided that no matter, who wins, it's going to be screwed. But these NGOs have more power over both parties if they can control both parties.

And they do this in various ways. And those companies do control. Like they do control the Republicans. They do control the Democrats. I'm saying one company will control both of them and use both of them. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely. I 100% believe that.

On the Democrat side specifically, though, public campaign spending records reviewed by the Washington Post showed that the DNC and the Harris campaign paid nearly $4 million to Village marketing agency, an influencer marketing firm between March 23 and late 2024. The Harris campaign also paid more than half a million dollars to good influence and people first marketing. Now, that does not mean every dollar went directly into influencers' pockets, but because agencies handle strategy, production, and other expenses, influencers were absolutely part of that ecosystem. And then there was money on the Republican side as well. The National Republican Congressional Committee spent nearly 500,000 with creator-grateful.

grid, a company that describes itself as connecting Republican candidates with conservative influencers. Turning Point USA has also operated a larger influencer program involving hundreds of creators. And then the Trump campaign itself told the Washington Post in 2024 that it wasn't directly paying influencers for posts. So that's an important distinction. But the Republican organization and outside groups were absolutely spending money in the influencer space. But, you know, with the Trump lead up to the 2024 election, everybody believes and I believe

myself that Trump primarily won because of the influencer bros or the podcast bros as they call it. You know, when Trump was going to every single podcast he could think of, I mean, you're talking about the Nelk boys, Joe Rogan, um, Theo Vaughn. I believe he even maybe sat down with Tim Dillon. I can't remember. But either way, he went to all of the most influential podcasters. And, you know, also Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn and all the others reached out to the Harris campaign and said, look, you guys are welcome to come on the show. You can say your people. and they all declined. And it sounds like the reason they probably declined is because obviously the Democrat

Party was spending a lot of money on influencers as the Republican Party wasn't spending quite as much, but they didn't have to because they got to the biggest podcasters there were. And their interviews went really well. Trump said what he thought most people wanted him to say, it sounds like, or at the very least maybe what he believed then. And it really resonated with people, especially coming out of four years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, which was a disaster.

disaster was what most people believe a weekend at Bernie's presidency where someone someone was in charge, but it definitely was not Joe Biden. I mean, we all have watched the movie Weekend at Bernie's, and that's literally what they did with this dude. They ushered him out on the stage and then they had to cart his ass off, whichever side, because if you left him up there for too long, he was literally going to fall off the front of the stage because that's where he was going to walk, wherever was the closest place. He was just trying to get off stage. Also, the Justice Department uncovered a case in 2024 where employees of RT, the Russian state-controlled media outlet, was accused to funneling nearly 10 million into a Tennessee-based media company producing content

for American audiences. Now, that company contracted with American social media personalities, and according to prosecutors, the connection to RT and Russian government was concealed from the influencers and from their audiences. You could theoretically be watching an American creator, in an American studio speaking English, talking about American politics, and even that creator might not completely understand where the money behind the operation originally even came from. And Russia isn't the only example of government's influencing influencers and then influencing you. A U.S. Foreign Agent Registration Act filing from 2025 documented an influencer campaign

connected with Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Now, the budget documents show roughly 60,000 in June, 140,000 in July, 250,000 in August, and 450,000 in September. number allocated to influencer and production activity during the portion of the campaign. The filins described bringing influencers on board and producing roughly 25 to 30 posts during some of those monthly phases. Again, those figures include production and campaign costs. So we don't actually know how much was genuinely spent to the influencers.

But if they were paying $7,500 a post and the amount of people that I saw switch it up, I'm sure they were probably paying into the millions. And this is something obviously Benjamin Netanyahu himself, has been on mainstream media and said, we have to get to the American audience. We got to do this through social media. We got to control mainstream media. We have to control the narrative.

I mean, he himself is saying this shit. I think he just said it at the UN summit or whatever that he just did a couple days ago where like, I don't know, 90 nations walked out during his speech. Oh, yeah. I did not even see that. Yeah, as soon as he started talking, it was like most of everybody was just walking out. And then one of the guys under Benjamin Netanyahu, I've seen him many times. He goes on Fox News all the time and talks.

But he literally walked up to the Iranian diplomat that was in, you know, in his little seat behind his little plaque that says Iran and his name. And he was trying to give this guy a Starlink satellite. Like it was the weirdest thing. What? And the Iranian dude was just staring straight ahead, not even looking at him. And this guy was trying to give. Eddie Dannen? No, I don't know who this guy is.

But either way, he's in Israeli, he's in the government, and he was literally trying to hand this guy a Starlink satellite. And I think he was saying something like, you should take this for your people. And of course, everybody was like, don't take that shit. That shit will blow up as soon as you touch it. And that's probably what this guy was thinking.

He's like, hell no, I ain't touching that. Uh-uh. I saw what y'all did about the Pagers. I ain't touching the Starlink. So, yeah, so this is obviously a big deal. I mean, when you open Instagram, you open TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X, and you see literally 10 different people suddenly talking about the exact same issue using the exact same words. It's pretty apparent that they're likely getting paid and they're getting paid to say a certain thing.

And those people may not even be real people. And then also you get to think about it this way. You know, even for your influencers like your Benny Johnson's or like whoever, just name one, Stephen Crowder, whoever. You know, in a lot of cases, a lot of these big creators don't even actually control their. social medias. They may have access to their social medias, but Mario Nafal is actually a good example of this. For a while, like especially last year or the year before, we

kind of pretty much know where Mario Nafal, which is one of the biggest news creators on the platform on X, we pretty much know where his opinion lies as far as Israel and the United States and Gaza and Palestine and that whole war. We kind of know where his opinion, personal opinion,

lies when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. But it was interesting because about eight months ago, we started seeing these posts for Mario's account and it was like so contradictory to what we thought that he believed especially about so many different things and so he started having this firestorm underneath his post where they were like what the hell are you talking about like who took you and what the hell they do with you so then he you know obviously Mario being as big of a creator as he is on so many different platforms running so many different things he obviously has other writers that also

write under his Mario Nafal account on X. So next. Now he has made a rule that anybody that writes under his account that is not him, they have to post at the very bottom writer, whoever it is. So that everyone knows this is not Mario. This is someone else writing this. Well, I noticed that with Nancy Mace too. She doesn't write any of her posts. No, I'm sure she doesn't. I mean, you know, and you can probably tell when she does because it's some dumbass shit that she says.

But she's made me so mad lately, but I won't even get into it. Well, she basically just tries to be like the next Trump. You know, she wants to be outspoken. That is like the big thing nowadays in social media. The craziest shit you can say is going to get you the craziest reactions, right? And it's just like the other day, guys, you know, when we, our last episode was about Noah's Ark. And I've heard from some of you, obviously some of you disagree. Some of you also agree.

Like, yeah, I don't understand it either. But it was funny when you start talking about these bodied accounts and stuff like this. So I go on on X. I think it was the night after we did the Noah's arc. night. It was that night. Yeah, I went on, I went on X and of course, the first thing I see on X, probably because they heard what we were talking about in the podcast, was the Noah's Ark expedition team, like their official account. And they were basically saying, you know, we know we found Noah's Ark and all this shit. And I just commented something on at the bottom. And I just said,

I'll actually tell you exactly what I said. I said there is literally zero evidence. This is Noah's Ark actually more points to the contrary that this is a natural geographical anomaly rather than manmade. And so that post has got 30 or 40,000 views. It's got shit tons of comments. And basically all the comments are, you're an idiot and you don't know shit. And oh, did you go down and dig and find out there's no boat under there or whatever? I was like, no, but they don't know there's a boat under there either. Like that's the reality.

And that's all I'm saying. And it's like people get so riled up about this shit. but also to to the contrary of what I was saying too, it's maybe not just people. It could be bots. And there are a lot of people saying very similar things. And all they got to do is say one sentence, basically talking shit to you,

trying to make you feel like you're an idiot and that you are the outlier. You're the only one that believes this isn't Noah's Ark. And then so when everybody sees your top comment, because my comment is one of the top comments on this post, then at least they have some backing to where it's like, oh shit, this comment says this. and it's very popular.

It's got a lot of likes on it. But then if you look at the comments, it's mostly just all of the comments are shit talking. Right. I mean, for the most part, all of the upvoted comments are the shit talking comments. But there's got to be a human that's programming these bots to do this. Like, there's got to be a program that says anybody says anything bad about Noah's Ark or that it doesn't exist. You need to go and reply negatively. Yeah.

Oh, there is. But I think in the future, that's not even going to have to have to have. happen anymore. I think that bots will already know what to do. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what's scary. And that's what we're going to get into. I mean, you know, what we're talking about right now is just kind of the precipice for what is to come. And when AI fully gets involved in this bot farming or not we don't even have to call it bot farming, although it will be, but when AI actually starts getting into this kind of dead internet theory to where it's like most of what we're going to start seeing for the, for the most part is going to be fake accounts.

It's going to be fake boosting. It's going to be fake things that aren't really the truth. And they're going to try to do their very best at making you believe that. That's like Project Mockingbird. It's like mainstream media and the way that all of mainstream media has a narrative to try to convince you of based on either some political party or some religious ideology, something. And they've done this for years to where we have been indoctrinated with so many things.

I mean, you could go from point A to point. Z and see that like we have been indoctrinated on so many things. I just, and Sherry, we've talked about this too before. You know, I'm an American. I love America.

I love America for what I think America can be. I think I love the idea of what our founding fathers envisioned for America before the internet, before AI, before all of the corruption that we see today. And I'm not saying that America wasn't corrupted to some degree. And then, but I'm saying the vision of America,

the American experiment, is what I love and is what I desire for America. And I think that what makes you a patriot is wanting the absolute best for your country. What makes you a patriot is not going with whatever the government that may be tyrannical. They may be one of the most corrupt governments in history of the United States. They may be protecting pedophiles. They may be working for foreign governments instead of your own interest. Being a patriot is not just blindly supporting that.

Being a patriot actually is the contrary. It is fighting that. It is contradicting that. It is talking up and speaking out against those things, right? And I think that's what's so crazy to me is that people want people to believe that if you speak out against Trump or the Republican Party or the conservatives because they're conservatives, then you're not a patriot. But literally, that's the opposite of what you're supposed to be doing right now. You're supposed to be, if you love American, you love the idea and what founding fathers envisioned, you should be fighting against Trump and what the wrong that he's doing as much as you did Biden. and that's my only point.

And the point of what these bodding accounts are trying to do is make you believe that you are the outlier, you are the naysayer, you are the one that is not with everybody else. And that's just not true. Because I'm telling you, even with the Israel thing, with Trump's popularity thing right now, all of that shit, you might think that Trump's still extremely popular. You might think that most concerned. Because honestly, like, there's a lot of body accounts that make you believe that most of them are on board.

Right. With the war and all this bullshit. and that's just not true. And we're going to see that, I believe, as long as election, as long as the elections in this November are actually fair. Well, it's with BB too. You know, he's like, we have to fight this through social media. We got to control social media.

But I think it's backfired on him because if you look at social media and the internet and what people are portraying BB as, I don't think he's very popular at all on the internet. And, you know, he has all this influence. with financial backing groups that are putting out these bots saying how great Israel is, but I think in the same sense, it is backfiring on him. So it's not really working in his favor. No, I 100% agree. I think they thought that was their opportunity and, you know, to really do what they wanted to do.

And instead, I think that just the people are still not dumb. And they don't quite control the Internet enough yet to have done what they've done over the past couple of years. but like I said, I think that's going to change with the dead internet theory. And keeping also in mind, the influencers being funded by foreign governments or political packs or NGOs or whoever, this is absolutely a legitimate industry where corporations and all of these people spend hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars on individual creators because they understand something very important. People tend to trust a person speaking into a camera more than they trust a traditional

advertisement and especially if you can buy out the influencers that you already trust, man, it's perfect for them. And so that's who they go after. And unfortunately, money talks. Yeah. And that's so true because when I see ads like on Facebook, I purposely will not click on them because I don't want to click somebody's ad because I know I'm making money for them. Yeah.

Instead, I want to see somebody that's real and talking about the same thing and then I'll click on their link, but they're still probably getting paid too. Oh, for sure. Well, you've got to ask yourself, this, right? If money can already manufacture, right, the appearance, and I say the appearance of like a grassroots opinion using real people, real influencers, like what happens when you no longer need real people, right? What happens? Like, how dangerous is that? And so this is where the whole dead internet theory starts getting very strange and very scary, actually. You think of all the ways

the AI could hurt us in the future. Yes, there's a lot of ways the AI could absolutely help us. And I think for a large part, AI is helping a lot of people right now. There are people making a lot of money on it. There are people that are getting things done quicker. There are more, I guess you can say, inventors and creators and entrepreneurs now that probably it would have taken them years, if ever, to accomplish what they are doing now. But with anything good always comes bad, and especially when the government gets involved and the government right now is currently trying to regulate AI.

And, you know, before we get into this dead internet theory, I was thinking about this today. There's this big push and there's kind of this, I guess you can say, propaganda in some ways out there that all of these influencers and all of these news articles and these mainstream media hit pieces on AI is coming out. And especially anthropic founder just the other day saying that, you know, we could be dead from AI by 2030 or the end of the decade, which would be 2030. the more I start thinking when you start getting all of the mainstream media on board with the same narrative, right? Usually you got to start thinking the other way. And the reason I'm saying this is because obviously the United States is wanting to regulate AI.

They are going to be writing up bills and all kinds of shit to regulate it. But it's not going to be to regulate it from the military or the government. It is going to be regulated from you. Keep this in mind. They're not going to regulate AI to the point where. where it hampers their ability to use AI for bad or for spying or for spying on you or for things against you, the government would never do that. They're going to regulate it so that you can't use AI in the way that you hope to use AI one

day or especially use AI to ever interfere in what dirty shit the government has planned in the future. Because eventually AI, and it probably is already smart enough now, but once AI gets a general consciousness or general learning or what was it called general generalized knowledge or to where it just starts learning things on its own and it starts doing its own thing. Once you start getting that and an AI can be reasonable and it can look at things and say this is right and this is wrong because honestly AI would be one of the best ways to figure out here's right, here's wrong.

and if AI does to some degree start this generalized learning to where it learns on its own, it's going to look at the government and be like, this is bad of what they're doing, obviously. I mean, look at how much the taxpayers are paying. Look at what they're getting out of their taxpayer dollars. Where is the taxpayer dollars actually going? Is it going back to help the American citizens? Absolutely not. What is the politicians doing?

Who are they actually for? Who are they actually representing? How are these people actually getting elected? Right. When AI starts looking at all this shit, when it's a generalized system to where it's a learning system, it's not going to go good for the government. It's not going to be like, yeah, we think the government's right here, unless it can be influenced. But if AI ever starts thinking on its own, obviously it would probably go with the people, right? And the government knows that the real danger of AI is not because it's going to necessarily kill us. If it ever kills us, it's going to be because the government commands it to do so. But what they don't want is for you. you to hold this much power in the palm of your hand because that's really bad for the government. And that's, that was just what I was thinking. And I do think that they're going to propagandize enough to make you scared of AI to where you accept these regulations on behalf of the government to where you can't do a lot of things with AI that they're going to be able to do. And so I just

want everybody to understand that. Be careful about how much you start hating AI. Because AI could actually be helpful to you as a citizen, especially against a tyrannical, government at some point in time. Well, and there is so many people that are already out there preaching against using AI. But if you're not using AI, I think you're losing. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and that's just what I'm saying. Like, there's a lot of people that are like, oh, that's AI. This is AI. This AI. And or if you even use AI to help you anything or so, oh, my God, that's, you know, stupid. But those people are going to be left behind, you know, if they don't get on board. And like, I have friends that are entrepreneurs and business owners and tech guys and stuff. And, and, and especially the

tech guys I know like Jeff Hunter and and you know one of the smartest AI minds of our time and he he goes around the world right now speaking at conferences for AI and the amount of shit that he's doing with AI right now is just insane he he at one point in time before AI kind of came around he has a call center over in I think the Philippines and all that so he holds he has these massive call centers for all kinds of businesses and so whereas he is keeping all of the same people that he has had employed forever and he said that he's going to try to do that, you know, for the foreseeable future. Now these people are not only operating as real humans in the call center, but they're also helping coordinate all of the AI, you know, the AI chat bots and all of this shit.

So he has taught them how to run the AI systems. And so now he has what would be, I think he, I think originally he had like two or three hundred call center people. And now he has voice AI for a call center. And he's up to like five or six thousand. he's literally quadrupled, if not more, his business since AI has taken over. So that's why I'm saying, like, you can absolutely massively use AI to your benefit. Like I said, I wouldn't be as scared of AI as they're trying to tell you only because usually

when the government and media and everybody tell you to be scared of something, you should probably look the other way. Well, in thinking about call centers, I would rather have an AI person than somebody overseas that I can't understand what they're saying. Yeah, for sure. for sure um so now is the dead internet theory right which this is what i said starts getting weird and um because bots are not theoretical obviously we just talked about it right they exist and the basic concerns with bots isn't necessarily that one fake account is going to completely change somebody's

political beliefs the bigger power is the numbers so if you can put hundreds of thousands of accounts into the same conversation. You obviously can make an idea appear much more popular, controversial, or widely accepted than obviously it actually is. And you can artificially push hashtags, flood comment sections, retweet something thousands of times, attack somebody who disagrees, praise somebody you want promoted, and basically create the appearance that there's this enormous organic movement happening around a certain issue.

And by the way, I 100% think this was done during BLM. I 100% think this was done during LGBT. Q and all of these parades and the protest on that. I 100% think this was also done around George Floyd. I think this was done around the anti-police movement, especially when it first started under Obama in Ferguson, Missouri. We started seeing a lot of bauding during that time. I think a lot of these uproars and riots and unrest in our country has been in large

part because of bodding, because of the internet. And you may ask, like, well, how? How could botting and the internet and social media actually, like how would it affect our life, our physical life, like in our, in reality, not just the internet, but you have to think of how many cities burned during all these riots. And that was a bot. That was real people. I know.

But what led them there? What drove them there. The bots did. Yes. The bots drove them there because they, the bots all got on this massive movement to where BLM was trending the hashtag for, for months. It was like the number one trending thing. And in any video you saw of a police officer shooting someone, even if the guy had a gun and it was a justified shooting, these videos would go massively viral.

There would be tons of comments under him that would say how awful the police officer was and that he killed an unarmed black man, even when the black man would have a gun in his damn hand. But it didn't matter. It would still drive people out to protest even in obviously justified shooting instances. So this is how bodying is very dangerous. This is how it can cause literal uprisons, riots, fires, bombings, and potentially even civil war. And that's the reality. And that's why it's dangerous. Researchers have actually found bots doing exactly that.

One study looking at political conversations found that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, there were roughly 400,000 social bots generating 3.8 million tweets per hour, accounting for an estimated 20% of the election conversation that they analyzed. were from bots, and that's at least what they have been able to find. So a much newer global study found that the bot-like accounts average of around 20% across the major online events they were examined, and during the U.S. elections, discussions that were, went as high as 43%. So now bot detection is it perfect, so I wouldn't interpret that as saying basically 43% of everything you see online is definitely fake, but what they are saying is that with the best technology they have right now, they're showing about 43% of conversations that you see

online are fake conversations right now. And to me, the way that you can tell that they are fake is when you go down the comments and the comments like you said are almost exactly the same. They're identical. And a lot of the comments are identical. I noticed on my threads, you know, off Facebook, you go to threads in the comment section, all the comments were exactly the same. I mean, identical word for word, but it was different people or different accounts.

Yeah. No, I mean, it's true. And the same thing also, speaking of that, happened with the Russia-Ukraine war, you know, and the Democrats 100% use bots to influence people to believe that we were supposed to get on board with the Ukraine situation. And just like I have said before, where a lot of these congressmen and women that were posting on a regular basis on X and various other platforms that had the Ukrainian flags in their bios, but also a lot of these accounts, these bot accounts would have Ukrainian flags in their bios as well.

and they would be saying very similar things as the Congress and women and men did. And so the problem is you don't really even have to convince everybody. So sometimes their job is just to get something moving. Researchers studying millions of posts found that social bots disproportionately promoted low credibility information during the earliest stages of a story. And that would just push the content, mentioned people with large followers and try to get real user to pick it up. Once humans start sharing it themselves, the bots don't necessarily matter anymore. the real people become the distribution system.

So they just have to get it going enough. And if enough bots can push one particular post, then the algorithm picks it up because of conversions, because of reactions, because of how much something is being retweeted or liked or commented on. And bots know this. They manipulate the algorithms. And that's how they get things moving. I want to ask you a question, like on your Noah's arc post that is going viral or your comment

under the post, even though you have all these negative. reactions is still boosting your post. Are the bots wanting to boost your post or are they just wanting it to make it look like nobody agrees with you? Well, yeah, they're probably just making it out that nobody agrees with me. Although there were a lot of comments on that post that were in agreeance with me until this flood of people that hate my guts now because of what I said. You know, that's literally what probably they were doing.

They saw that my comment was becoming a top comment on the post and then all of a sudden They just flood it with negative. Yeah, flood it with tons of people that came. And probably a lot of them are bots. I'm not saying all of them are. Obviously, a lot of people are going to believe

the story and the narrative of Noah's Ark being found in this place, Mount Ararat and Turkey. And reality is we have zero evidence of this, but yet that is the narrative right now. So if you say something contrary to the narrative and especially, and you don't me tell you who the main people

coming after me are, are the conservatives or Christians. They are the ones that are hardcore. At least that's what their accounts say. We don't exactly know if they're even real people, but that is the people that are coming after me the most. So I do want to play a clip. The Y files actually did a spot on the dead internet theory.

And this was four years ago. And it's not a very long clip. It's not the whole episode. But I do want to at least play this. And then we'll talk about it. We got more to talk about about this dead internet theory on the backside. Here you go. What if I told you that most, if not all of your online existence, is fake?

The articles you read, the Twitter accounts you follow, even this video you're watching right now. It's all fiction, created by artificial intelligence whose job is to keep you clicking on content that doesn't matter and keep you buying products that you don't need. You, me, everyone. We're living in a real-life matrix designed to distract you from the truth, that we're just drones in a digital ant-hill.

We live, work, and die so that the wealthy and powerful can grow more wealthy and powerful. This is called the Dead Internet Theory, and there's some compelling evidence that it's real. Let's find out why. The core premise of the dead internet conspiracy says that most internet content and the consumers of that content are fake. They don't exist. So how much content on the internet is actually created by AI? Actually, it's more than you think.

Studies say that only about 50% of web traffic is human. And that number is going down every year. In 2013, the Times reported that half of YouTube traffic was bots masquerading as people. And this was so scary that YouTube employees were worried about. an inflection point where their algorithms would be so overwhelmed by bot traffic that they couldn't tell what was real, eventually seeing actual human traffic as fake. They called this event the inversion. Ammonous. It is. I see these bots on this channel. Most days I get 10 or 20 comments.

It should be more. It should, but that's not my point. But sometimes I wake up and I've got a thousand comments, and they're all very generic comments posted by people with very generic usernames, and they're not watching the videos. Subscribers to this channel watch 60%, 70%, even 100% of each video. You people who watch 100%, we salute you. We do. But the bots, they're watching for 10 seconds and then leaving a weird comment and then moving on to watch another video for 10 seconds.

When I look at the channel's stats after a wave of bots, it's like locusts. It's swift and it's destructive. So why is this happening? What's it about? Money? Money. Take Facebook. Do we have to?

We do. It's been alleged that Facebook has been overstating its reach and misrepresenting its data for years. In 2018, a Facebook product manager emailed colleagues that their metrics are, quote-unquote, a lawsuit waiting to happen. What happened? A lawsuit. I see what you did there. It's a class action suit filed by Facebook advertisers. They claim that Facebook overestimates its traffic by between 150 and 900 percent.

Now, Facebook claims they only overstate their traffic by 60 to 80%. Either way, it's fake traffic. It's fake traffic. But the money Facebook collects from advertisers, that's real money. If you're a business and you spend money on online ads, you want your ads viewed by actual people, not viewed like this. Oh, what the hell do I look at it? This is a Chinese click farm. Hundreds or thousands of bots are currently clicking on videos, leaving comments, creating engagement,

row after row of smartphones, watching videos, and more importantly, watching the ads. Now, the platforms know this is happening, but they aren't in a rush to change it. According to the leaked emails, Facebook knows that there are millions of duplicate accounts on the platform, but it leaves them active on purpose. An internal analysis claimed that removing fake accounts would cause a drop of 10% or more of Facebook's numbers. Is that a lot? Well, last year, Facebook took in $84 billion in ad revenue. That's actually grotes.

I agree. Facebook is not going to give up 20%, 10% or even 1% of that money. The numbers are too large. This is billions of dollars. Now, to be fair, Facebook says these allegations are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously. But mere hours after the lawsuit was made public, Facebook changed its policy to say potential customer reach is an estimate, not a guarantee of actual customer reach. Your mileage may vary. Exactly. So, bots for profit. Totally predictable. But is it darker than that? It's darker? According to the dead internet theory, much darker. Like so many good conspiracy theories, the dead internet theory started out in some of the darker corners of the web. Places like 4chan, Wizard Chan, and Agora Road. The first person to put a name to it goes by the online handle, Illuminati Pirate. Name checks out. The theory goes like this. Sometime around 2016, the internet,

internet started becoming sterilized and homogenized. Content that was always generated by humans was now being generated by AI bots, and the bots are subtle. They're designed to sound human and blend into the background, but if we look a little more closely, eerie patterns seem to emerge. On Twitter, there's a type of account that uses a certain formula. First, the profile pictures aren't people. They're usually anime characters or hearts or stars or other generic looking icons, and the colors are soft, usually pink, purple, or light blue. Posts are short, written in all lowercase, and contain the same kind of message. I'm young, I have a crush, I enjoy simple things. I'm optimistic, but most of all, I'm relatable. People who believe the dead internet theory say

they've been seeing the same content repurposed over and over for years. Supermoon. Right. Every year we're slammed with articles about the super moon. Murder Hornets. Murder Hornets. Every year. Climate change. Oh. Climate change is real. You believe anything. That's for another time. So why? Why is content on the internet so bland and repetitive? Well, according to the dead internet theory, and this is a quote,

it's because the U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence-powered gaslighting of the entire world population. Get my tinfoil head! Coming up! The original post about the dead internet theory says that a few online influencers are working with corporations and the United States government in order to manipulate our behavior and manipulate how we think. Well, as far as social media platforms go,

this is true. Take Facebook again. Hey, let me ask you, is Facebook evil? Uh, they're very profitable. You didn't answer my question. No. On Facebook, you're shown posts that you're likely to engage with. So, politics-wise, you're going to be shown an overwhelming amount of content

that supports your worldview, which keeps you on the platform, which keeps you clicking on ads. And you're also going to be shown. political posts that make you angry, prompting you to respond, which keeps you on the platform, and keeps you clicking on ads. You won't see a lot of posts saying, you know, I may disagree with your opinion, but I respect and support your right to have that view. Now, let's discuss the issues on which we actually agree, of which there are many. Facebook profits by having you produce dopamine, which keeps you clicking, and cortisol and adrenaline, which keeps you clicking.

How does Facebook know what content keeps you on the platform? Well, you tell them. all the time with every link you click, every site you visit, and how long you spend on those sites. Now, don't take my word for it. Here's Mark Zuckerberg. I wish I could keep telling you that our mission in life is connecting people, but it isn't. We just want to predict your future behaviors. Spector showed me how to manipulate you into sharing intimate data about yourself and all those you love for free. The more you express yourself, the more we own you. He said that? Well, technically no, but that's exactly what Facebook does, which leads to another part of the dead internet theory.

I'm confused. Well, that wasn't Mark Zuckerberg. That was a deep fake. Which is? A computer-generated video made to look like a human. And deep fakes, they're getting good. I'm going to show you some magic. It's the real thing. I mean, it's all the real.

Even Tom Cruise has a TikTok. Yeah, that wasn't Tom Cruise. Deep fake? Deep fake. The technology uses artificial intelligence to sort through hundreds or thousands of images to find frames that match the actual person in the video. But millions. I mean, millions of people thought those videos were real.

Well, we're not crazy enough to trust Zuckerberg. Are we? And nobody's crazy enough to trust an actor. But what about a deep fake from a trusted world leader? President Trump is a total and complete d-a- Now, you see, I would never say these things, at least not in a public address, but someone else would. Now, that video was a joke and created by Jordan Peel, but what if, in today's climate, someone released a video of a politician saying something racist or radical? The media would believe it.

Well, of course, the media would believe it. They'd believe everything. A deep fake is a computer simulation of a real person, and people are fooled by that. But what about a computer simulation of a completely artificial person? Could people be fooled by that? I don't like what this is going. Mekyllisusa is an Instagram influencer with over 3 million followers. Lil Mikaela, as she's known, is a Brazilian-born model who posts about her glamorous L.A. lifestyle. Photoshoots, product endorsements, and all the typical bumper sticker social activism that Instagram models are known for.

She sounds pretty hollow. Well, how's this for hollow? In 2018, Michaela's account was hacked and it was revealed that she was completely fake. Computer generated. Oh, no. Her fans couldn't believe it. Eventually, a media-slash marketing company called Brud confessed that she wasn't real. Did her fans abandoned her?

No. Since then, she's amassed about 2 million more followers. Did I know she's fake? Well, some do. Most don't care, and Michaela doesn't bring it up, so... This is dangerous. More dangerous than you think. This is a completely fake, computer-generated character created by humans.

Okay, but there is a piece of technology that is completely autonomous, runs on artificial intelligence on its own and is programmed to kill humans. There's a drone quadcopter called Cargo 2, produced by a defense contractor, STM, developed in Turkey. Cargo 2 uses machine learning to classify and identify threats. Then, completely on their own, swarms of drones working together will attack their target. According to the UN, the drones are programmed to attack targets without requiring an operator. In effect, a true fire, forget, and fine capability. They just analyze a bunch of data and decide, yes, that's a murder target, without any human analyzing their work.

But I love a card, these things have killed people? Oh, yeah. Since 2018, they've been deployed by the Turkish military both foreign and domestically. It's currently killing people in Ukraine. How many people will act? Oh, they won't say. Of course. Well, let's put these pieces together now.

As the algorithms get better and better at showing us content to keep us engaged, What's to stop those algorithms from actually creating the content to keep us engaged? Nothing. Nothing. And isn't that the natural progression of this? A Google whistleblower has said that Google has algorithms that can write other algorithms. Google's auto ML0 does exactly this. What does Google say?

Google says the allegations are false. That means it's definitely true. Look, if artificial intelligence can create social media accounts, attract millions of followers, generate billions of dollars, influence elections, and drop bombs on people, all without human intervention? Well, the internet really is dead. And real living people, people like you and me, are here to do nothing more than feed it our money

and our knowledge so these systems can become smarter and even more powerful. Now Facebook is launching Metaverse, where you experience your entire life online through virtual reality. If you think online culture is toxic now, wait until we're spending all of our time there. The Metaverse is going to make us long for the good old days of the Matrix. And where's Neo when you need them?

there you go that was the why files on the dead internet theory and he got a lot of stuff that we have not even covered yet but you know number one i wanted to start with just the fact that where he's talking about you know there's a lot of companies that are making money off of these bots and off of the uh i guess inflated reach numbers that facebook instagram and all the other platforms say they actually have for these advertising companies to actually put their products in front of, right? But on the same side, influencers are selling a lot of products to you and everyday users on social media. And there are a lot of influencers that have inflated numbers from bots, whether it's their follower account. We actually just recently found out that a lot

of streamers, which I don't know if you guys have paid attention over the past year, but streamers are like the new Hollywood actors. Yeah, and they stream 24-7 like all the time. How is that possible? Well, they don't, well, they don't. Do they have AI streamers? I don't know. I'm sure they probably do have AI streamers. But most streamers are like eight, nine, ten, twelve hours a day. And then they'll sleep a few hours. They'll be right back on stream. And the thing that really props up a lot of these streamers are their numbers. So when you can say, hey, I've got a hundred thousand people right now watching me live. But what if 70% of those people are bots? And we have found out that a lot of these streamers that have these 100,000, 200,000, 300,000, 300,

thousand numbers, literally 70% of their viewing audience are bots. But they're getting paid for it. They're getting millions of dollars for it. And so whereas that the social media companies are doing very similar things by saying we have this much global reach, we want you know, we want you to advertise with us. And I'll give you a good example. So I do marketing. I do marketing and use Facebook and Instagram and all the other platforms data on a regular

basis. And I do this because when I have a client that gives me a budget and says, hey, here's how much I want to spend this month on advertising or this six months or this year. Well, that's, you know, in a lot of cases, it's a lot of money that I deal with. I mean, you know, and especially on, with some clients, they're kind of like unlimited budget. You know, you could literally spend as much money as you want to. But you got to be careful too. And you, what my strategy is, is I look at all the platforms we could possibly spend money on and we try to find the platforms that have the least amount of bots because say that you're going to spend just on a month say you'll spend $10,000 a month on a particular campaign and say that you're going to put $5,000 on Facebook.

Well, when you enter it into Facebook on the ad account, it'll tell you what your likely reach is going to be, right? So for this month, your reach is going to be hundreds of thousands of people or whatever. It'll also show you your pool of people that you're actually going to be advertising to, but your actual reach is what you look for. And then it also gives you a kind of like a predicted click. So how many clicks am I going to get per week on this link that drives people to this product or to this website?

And whereas when the actual link is clicked, that's where your money's going. But when you look at actual numbers, especially from a lot of auditing websites that audit Facebook ads and Instagram ads and all this, they're saying that like, 60% of those link clicks that you're paying for are bots. So obviously they're never going to buy your product. They're never going to do anything. But for Facebook, it is making them a shit ton of money. And so Facebook is using this data because they're like, hey, look, here's the amount

of clicks you're probably going to get. And then they tell the advertisers, well, here's the amount of clicks you're going to get. I mean, it doesn't matter if it's Coca-Cola, if it's Chevrolet, whatever. They say, here's the clicks you're going to get. This is what we charge per click. but if 60 to 70% of those clicks are bots, then there's still in a shit ton of money from you. They're still in 60 to 70% of your money.

And so that's why Facebook doesn't want to be transparent about how many bots they actually have on their account because if you take away 70% of the money that advertisers are spending, it's not just a 1% of money or whatever the YFiles guy says here. You're talking about 40% to 50% of money loss that Facebook would absolutely lose if the actual numbers of how many bots are clicking links and ads

actually come up. It's tough from a marketing perspective because you have to look at like what are the least boughted platforms. There really aren't any. Like Google ads is a pretty good place that you can at least get ahead. If your company is not doing great on SEO, it's where if someone looks up, say, an attraction or whatever and you're not going to be the first website that comes up, then you need to pay for advertising to get your listing up there to the top. But a lot of people just scroll past the ads. So now it's like people are really starting to invest a lot of time into AI advertising, where when people look things up like on Google or chat GBT, most people aren't going below AI anymore. If you go to Google and you type in something you want to look up,

most people aren't going below what AI tells them. Like whatever AI says, they'll go with or they'll click the link there or they'll just go to chat GBT and ask chat GBT for something. But now chat GBT is actually allowing you to advertise along with Google and using their AI systems. And although that will do some good, but like our aviation company, for example, we've done really good with being able to utilize our strategies to make sure the AI uses our website for the content it uses and then also references our website and links and all that stuff. But from the money perspective, yes, it's huge. And I think that a lot of these social media companies are outright just stealing money out of your damn pocket on a everyday basis when you

market with these companies. And yeah, you might get 30% of actual. reach, but the reality of it is probably 60% or so is going to be bots. But like I said, influencers are also lying and, you know, inflating their numbers, whether it's their follower accounts or their live numbers. And then advertisers are paying them based on those numbers. Right. So influencers are screwing advertisers too. You know, it's both ways.

Yeah, it's not just the social media companies. So for advertisers, it's going to be extremely hard to figure out how to advertise and what's the best way to do it. In my opinion, I think podcast and video, media is probably the best way, rather than paper click ads or any of that stuff anymore. Well, I did a little experiment on Facebook and, you know, with the true crime stuff, I'm into true crime. And I saw somebody that had about the same amount of followers I did.

And I saw their posts and it had tremendous reach, tremendous conversation, engagement going on. I was like, I didn't copy it. I didn't share it. But I wrote a post almost identical on my Facebook. And I got like zero likes. Why? Well, I mean, like I said, I mean, there's a lot of people that are botting.

And, you know, there are websites all over the internet that has bots that you can pay for. I mean, you can go to so many bot farms on the internet. You just got to know how to find them. You can go to them. You can drive numbers to whatever it is that you want to drive numbers to, whether it's likes, comments, followers, live viewers, stream plays. I mean, you name it. You can do it on the internet.

You can pay for bots. and it's not even that expensive, which is a crazy thing. And, you know, all these social media companies say that it is against their policy to use botting, although they do. Right. But it's against their policies to use body. But like most of the time, nothing ever happens because, I mean, I'm telling you, so many of these influencer accounts are propped up by bots.

And in a lot of cases, like a lot of the political influencers in particular, a lot of these accounts are just, you know, I don't know if you'll notice, like when a certain account goes from a very small account. But you start seeing, even when they're really small, that their posts are just blowing up. Yes. And I'm like, what the heck? Why are theirs blowing up? And mine aren't. It's because likely either they're paying for their own body, but especially political influencers,

usually it's political packs that are paying for their body. And then whatever, you know, say if it's the Republican Party and they are in the office, in the White House currently, they'll make sure that social media doesn't screw with their damn operation. So social media in most cases are on board. with this shit on both sides. We've seen that. We saw it during Biden and Harris, where Biden and Harris could basically just call Facebook or Twitter or whoever and say, block these people, censor these people, make sure that no one sees their post. The same shit

happens when they call and say, hey, we got a body operation going on. So we want to make sure that these posts get the maximum reach. They do that same shit. And the social media companies can't really do anything about it because the government is the one telling them this. And if you don't comply with us, then we'll screw you. However, we need to screw you, whether it be congressional hearings, or whatever, subpoenas, you name it. And that's what he was talking about. The government is gaslighting us.

Yeah. But I also noticed during the fake Zuckerberg video that he played, he was right on target on that because when I'm scrolling on Facebook, if I click on something or if I am on a video for so long after that, I see the same kind of content more and more. And I've never even heard of these people before. Yeah. Like half of, no, I would say 90% of my Facebook now is not even. my friends. Well, yeah, absolutely. The same with me. And, you know, I don't know if you know,

but X is actually the social media platform that started this to begin with. And it really started from Twitter because Twitter's always been a platform to where, yes, you have a following. And people follow you. You follow people. But unlike Facebook and the way Facebook used to be, say three, four years ago, especially, and it really changed over the past year. But three or four years ago, you would have a certain amount of friends. And your timeline would show your friends. And you wouldn't ever always see all of your friends because if you have 10,000 friends, yeah, you would see 10%. And then if just by chance one day you see a friend you haven't seen in a while, if you interact with that post or you comment it on it, you start seeing more. Yeah.

But now Facebook has done basically the same game plan, the same outline as Twitter and X has to where 90% of what you're seeing on your feed is not anybody that you're actually following. Now, X does have two tabs. It has one, which is just your four years. you timeline kind of like TikTok does and then they also have a timeline over to the right you can click this says following right so if you only want to see content from the people you're following you click that do I ever click that no and you want me tell you why because the algorithm is so good on the actual for you page even though you think it's good but you know usually it pisses you off right that's what it's designed to do but it is the most engaging content it is the most it is the best

content to keep you on the platform the longest, which is the entire idea. That's why they put that following over there, that following tab further to the right, kind of hidden, because they don't want you to be on the following, because if you were constantly on your following tab, you're not going to stay on the platform as long. You're not going to talk as much shit. You're not going to get as much shit talked if everybody that was following you and vice versa was only seeing each other. You would not have nearly the contention or the hate or the whatever as you do now.

And I remember like even four years ago, like I said, when Facebook was to where you actually saw your friends. You actually saw your friends on your timeline. And even though then, yeah, you would get in fights with your friends. And it's like, you know, over politics or whatever the case is. And now you don't even fight with your friends. You just fight with, well, I don't fight with anybody, but. Strangers.

Yeah, people fight with strangers now, right? So, and of course, I will, like, say comments like on the Noah's Arc thing or whatever, which does rile people up. You know, it's like, it's funny because on our, on our bio on X, you know, it says number one truth podcast. And of course, one of the comments was number one truth podcast my ass. It's so funny, dude. It's just funny to see it like people talk shit and like all of the ways they talk shit. I can literally just go through all the comments because it's funny to me. It like doesn't offend me. It doesn't hurt my feelings. Well, you can't in this kind of

business, you can't be offended or if you can't accept criticism, you're in the wrong place. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it's just like I had posted a video on our Instagram where it was just showing like this this journalist that was in gaza and he was just showing what gaza is like now and literally someone commented uh back to that my story and they said fuck you the jews are the chosen that's literally what the post was i was like okay um but he also mentioned here that four chan you know four chan is really uh the platform that this post went crazy viral that talked about the dead internet theory and if any of you have heard about the dead internet theory which is what this podcast episode is about, that's one of the places it started.

Now, the interesting thing about 4chan is people for a long time, actually, for whatever reason, have always been quick to just, I guess you can say dismiss 4chan because a lot of the craziest shit has come out of 4chan. Does 4chan have bots? I'm sure they do. But the interesting thing about 4chan is, is this one of the most encrypted platforms. it's very hard for like the government per se to be able to find out who you are on that platform if you're anonymous at least it was four or five six years ago i don't know about now but

the interesting thing is there have been many whistleblowers that have used four chan to say things there have been gta gta six leaks um from people that worked inside of rock star that went to four chan and leaked videos that everybody at first thought was bullshit they or ai videos and this has been like the past couple months but then come to find out this is guy actually did work at Rockstar. And so he was just going to 4chan to post all these leaks. Same thing with the guy that killed himself supposedly in Los Angeles that in this Tesla. I think it was a cyber truck or whatever.

The guy that talked about the drones in New Jersey and the fact that the U.S. government was complacent in operations that he worked on killing innocent civilians and then said that he was running for his life. He wasn't suicidal. Although it turns out that he blew himself up supposedly in this Tesla. Yeah. But yeah, he used 4chan. to issue a statement and the letters that he also sent to Sean Ryan. Then you also got to think about the MH370 videos.

That's where those videos came from back in 2012, although I still don't 100% know the reality of the MH370 videos. My point is that 4chan shouldn't necessarily always be quickly dismissed. And so when this 4chan dead internet theory came out, supposedly the guy that wrote this post. Um, that would, Illuminati pirate. Yeah. But come to find out, there's been a lot of deep dives about this person.

And long story short, allegedly, I guess he was a whistleblower from Google. Um, that was an engineer in Google that wrote this post about what he knew what the plan was going to be and what, and how the government was going to use, uh, the dead internet, uh, essentially or, or why it was eventually going to be called the dead internet theory. because 90% of what you're eventually going to see on the internet is going to be completely overwhelmed by AI. And, you know, Gentile here says, I think that's, is that his name, Andrew Gentile, whoever the Y files guy is, you know, that video was four years ago. And a lot has happened in four years. AI has got substantially better in four years.

Videos, deep fake, stuff like that. You can literally make a video now of AI. And the only way you're going to know that it's fake is basically usually, by what the person says. So if it's Trump saying some crazy shit, it's just because of the way they wrote it, it makes it pretty obvious that Trump didn't say that. Now, if you were to make a video of a deep fake of Trump

saying something very similar kind of crazy shit that Trump's kind of sometimes says, you could easily pass that off as real. But you just can't go too far because then people are just going to be like, that's fake. That's obviously fake bullshit. Yeah, but that's what's scary nowadays is sometimes you don't know what's fake.

what's real. Yeah. Yeah. There's like all these programs out there where I see people do these crazy dance things. All you have to do is upload your picture. Oh, yeah. And it makes you dance and do all these crazy dances. And it looks so real, though.

Yeah, even the rapping. I've been seeing this one video go around with two people. It's always two people. They're doing some rap song. You guys are probably saw on social media. Everybody's doing that freaking video. And it's just AI thing. You upload your picture.

It does it. It's getting pretty scary. And back to your point about Facebook or what we were talking about. Facebook now has went with the way the X is doing to where you barely see your friends. Occasionally you'll see your friends. But from the most part, you see random ass people that you don't even know. That have a very similar interest as you is what I've noticed. Yes.

You'll also see groups. I see a ton of group posts like groups you're not even in. They'll be in front of you. And, you know, I had said something on social media the other night. It was like 11.30, 12 o'clock at night, couldn't sleep. scrolled across a post of some dude dying of some crazy-ass disease, young guy about my age, and it kind of made me emotional, sort of. I was just like, I commented on it.

I mean, the mistake, I commented on it. Now that's what you see. Yeah, I said, sorry, I pray for you, whatever. And then, like, the next 50 post was just people dying. I was like, holy shit. Well, and it's probably your AI telling your algorithm somehow, because you post about your health all the time. Or you don't post you, but you're asking questions about your health in AI.

Yeah. Could that transfer? Does it transfer? I'm sure it does. Because we know that chatGBT and those platforms do not keep your data secret. I mean, we know that. So they're selling your data. They're giving your data probably to other social media companies that are buying it from

you to better their algorithms because I'm telling you, yes, I've absolutely seen the exact same thing that I have experienced diverticulitis and the colitis stuff and all that. My intestines, I've 100% seen that on my timeline all the time. See, and I never see it. I'm surprised because just us talking. about things, I will see things that your interests are online. Yeah. And, you know, the last part of what he said, too, was drones and AI and how the battlefield is quickly taken to AI. Well, we know that Ukraine and both Ukraine and Russia have done it. And although I don't think Ukraine and Russia has

been quite as successful as you would imagine as far as the AI goes in their drones, but we had the guy from Dark Horse Allies on, you know, that was over on the front lines. of Ukraine, which I've not heard or seen from him in what a year probably, but he had been over in Ukraine on the front lines for probably the entirety of the time. At first he went over there with the group that he was helping train the Ukrainian soldiers because he was at special forces. Then he actually went to the front lines. Then he was equipping drones with explosives because I remember on his social, he was posting pictures of that. I would like to actually get him back on if he's still alive to find out about the AI and how they use AI over on in the battlefield.

but I can tell you for sure that based on internal investigations during the Israel Gaza situation, that Israel has been heavily using AI for their targeting, whether it be on their drones or certain missiles. The AI is the ones that are the ones that are making decisions on who's an enemy and who is not, which it sounds like AI was like, I think everybody's an enemy. Let's just blow up everything. Well, and I just picture this movie in my head where humans are being attacked by drones and they're killing every. human. Anybody that is breathing, they're going to attack. Well, and that's why, you know, that's why I talked about the other day about like the Second Amendment, you know, the Second Amendment was created to

defend yourself against the tyrannical government. But what happens when that government has so many tools that your gun is obsolete, it becomes non-existent. And, you know, that is one of the biggest problems with the battlefield today, especially in Ukraine and Russia. That's what's killing most of their troops or most of their soldiers is drones because it's really hard to get away from. I mean, if you're not near cover to where you could immediately get into cover. And I'm not just talking about a tree or something else because if a drone hits a tree and you're behind it, you're still going to die more than likely. I mean, these explosives, they're packing on these things are insane.

And it'll kill people within a 15 to 20 yard radius, but it's really hard to get away from. And like, I've saw videos of soldiers training on how to get away, but you can't. Like you're in a field and these drones just go left and right, left and right. And you're just screwed. And you're going to be tired within about two or three minutes. and then a lot of these soldiers I've saw the actual videos of the drones hitting them and they'll just screw with them

and sometimes you can hear the operator of the drone that's doing the video like laughing, you know, just screwing with them and then they'll get tired and then they'll just go down and blow them up like right on their head. And not only that, they're not just outside. They can go inside. We've had drones that were taking out Iranian leaders

in hotel buildings. Yeah. Yeah, they're nuts. I mean, and they don't have to be the big massive drones or any of that crap. I mean, it's like, I think we played a video the other day. It's like sometimes basic is the best, you know, the most basic systems. And whereas the United States is spending shit tons of money on all of this advanced

warfare, all of our fighter jets and all this shit. And literally Iran has taken down F-35s with a drone that you can literally buy at Best Buy. And that's one of our best aircraft. Supposedly our best aircraft. Like 50% of them are non-operable because they're either crashing or got some kind of issue. But either way, I think the biggest scary part of the dead internet theory is just the fact of how impressionable people are, and especially the boomers. I mean, this is going to be devastating for the boomers and devastating for their minds and their beliefs because the boomers like,

people like my mom and your mom and probably a lot of our moms that are listening right now, they have no idea how advanced AI is. And I can even tell you, like, how many things that my mom bought off the damn internet that she thought that some Fox News host was the one promoting. And I said, Mom, can you send me the video? And it's like the website link is like Fox News and something behind it.com or whatever. Right. Mom just didn't look at like what was right behind where it said Fox News. And then it had like Laura Ingram or somebody like promoting this product that is just complete

bullshit. It wasn't her even though I wouldn't believe her anyway. But yeah, I mean, this is what this is part of the. problem. But the bigger problem is, is that when there are AI campaigns that are out there with influencers or bots that when my mom logs on social media, you know, and she sees everybody talking about this one thing and everybody's going for this one thing and saying this one thing is right, then my mom's going to believe this one thing's right, even though it might literally be the complete opposite. And so public sentiment and opinion is going to be the most dangerous.

thing that the dead internet theory does for our civilization and is scary. I think some boomers, though, like my mom, who is not internet savvy, knows the real truth, I guess probably from... She don't know the real truth. No, because she's constantly saying, AI is going to take over the world. I'm glad I'm dying soon because I don't want to be here when that happens. Yeah, well, it's already kind of happening. But what I'm saying is your mom believes mainstream.

media. Yeah. That's the problem. She believes nightly news. So does my mom, right? And, um, but the bigger problem is going to be. And this is what they're going to have to, you know, this is what countries like Israel or anybody like the United States government or Russia or China. China's already got that shit on lock because China controls everything. They, China controls what you do, what you see, what you watch, what, you know, social media apps you're on. Like, for example, you know, bite dance, which was the owner of TikTok. It was a company that created TikTok was supposedly a Chinese government company. Well, anyways, China would not even allow their own people to use TikTok.

I mean, it was only for everyone else. They had their own version of TikTok, which was heavily regulated and censored. They were only allowed to do certain things. They, you know, like seeing all these girls half-ass naked on TikTok and all this stuff, they didn't allow any of that stuff in China. They definitely did not allow anything negative towards the government at all. And that's the way it's going to be here. right and you know when we bought it from we i say we but when israel basically bought

tic talk um their entire reasoning behind that was because they did not you know ticot was not going very well for israel and and the sentiment of after and post october 7th and so it was a huge buy for them and not just that but it was also the united states that helped them do that trump helped them do that as well and and then you're also like i said seeing all these mass media companies that are being bought out they're all they're all they're all being monopolized. And that's why you're not seeing all the shit talk about Trump that you are, or that you did. Talking about that, did you see where Trump is not allowing certain, certain news agencies

to even. Yes. CNN and MS now, I think, are the two. Yeah, there's like three of them. Yeah. But, and now he's coming up with his own news agency, I guess. Oh, yeah. That'll be awesome.

Well, he already has them. And it's called Fox News. I mean, and now CBS and now CBS. Because CBS is bought out, ABC, NBC, all of these news agencies have been bought out primarily in large part by a certain foreign government has been some of the biggest funders of those buyouts. But yeah, this is what it's going to be. And then once, like I said, once these foreign governments and our government figures out exactly how to use the dead internet theory to influence the younger generation because the younger generation is the battleground. That is where they're fighting. And unfortunately, that is also where they're losing their ass.

whether or not you look across the board and you say that all of our younger generation is a bunch of libtards or whatever you want to call them. But there's also a bunch of conservative young people more so than you think. I mean, the government wants you to believe, and mainstream media wants you believe that all of our younger generation is all left and liberal. And that's just not true. There are a lot of libertarians that are younger generation. There's also a lot of conservatives, which turning point USA was doing an incredible job to bring people on board the conservative movement. that shit is all screwed up now after charlie kirk's death i mean there has been chapters closing down on turning point usa more people don't believe turning point usa's official

or not even their official narrative but i guess their response and the way they have acted after charlie kirk's death there's been a lot of people just completely abandoned turning point usa and so where are those young people going to go i don't know right i mean i guess the best we can hope for is a third party maybe will it do any good i don't know uh and there's going to be a third party. I think there's going to be a third party in 2028. I think it'll be the Massey, probably the Massey pack.

Tucker will be behind it as well. Margie Taylor Green, Joe Kent. Basically all those people. I hope Nancy Mesa's not going to be there. I used to like her, but I cannot stand her now. No,

they won't let her in. They will not let her in. Either way, I'm trying to think if there's anything else. The biggest thing I want you guys understand is just be very careful of what you listen to, what you read on the internet because the likelihood 50% of it is fake and bullshit,

especially with just like influencers that you follow that might be big influencers. And also polls, that's the other thing. It's like I used to notice about a year ago when influencers would create polls about a certain topic, whether it was COVID or the Epstein files or Israel or whatever, it was always pretty accurate. I was like, yeah, these polls are not doing very well for what.

you're trying to post these polls for because oftentimes these influencers would think that this this option would actually be the winning option and it was the opposite which is what which is what we knew it would be but nowadays you're starting to see polls to where it's not that way anymore and I think that they are bodding the shit out of polls now and then just think about this for elections think about AI getting involved in elections right as far as vote tallies somehow they can use AI to be fake people or to, you know what I'm saying? And that's going to be the even more dangerous thing to where we have, we're going to have no idea. Are they going to have AI systems in voting booths? Are they going to have any of the shit? I'm sure that they probably will. They're going to find a

way to do that. That alone could flip elections. And if it isn't that, then just the public sentiment or what they, or what, when you go on social media, what you think is the public sentiment based on the dead internet theory, based on most of it is fake of what you see, that might 100% influence how you're going to vote because you do not have the facts in front of you. You have a constructed narrative that whoever is in charge of those bots have constructed and put right in front of you over and over and over again to where eventually you believe is true. And then when they get mainstream media behind it, it's also kind of concrete that in. It's where maybe you go look up whatever the AI bots are telling you is true. And then mainstream media is also saying

it's true. That's like that's the perfect setup, the perfect system. And then you live in a fake world, which we, I think, already do. And so that's the scary part. But either way, by the way, I did want to mention before we go, my new song is out. It just came out today. I've had it scheduled for release for like three weeks. She's Your Problem Now on Spotify. And that's a good one. I love it. Yeah. So go check it out. See free. See free on Spotify. And look up, she's your problem now. That is out. And go Vols. That's the other thing I want to say. tomorrow is the Tennessee Volunteers Against Texas, and they have the T-Manyu version of a manning. We had the real version.

They have Arch Manning, but we had Peyton Manning at freaking Tennessee, and so we don't have them now, unfortunately. But if we could have used Lane Kiffin's protocol, we could have brought Peyton in. It would have been a Manning versus Manning. Oh, my gosh, that is so funny. Could have been a Manning versus Manning game tomorrow. I'm not going to predict who's going to win. Texas is number one in the country. We are ranked 15th.

I don't, you know, I love Tennessee. They're, they're my number one team. I don't know that we're strong enough to beat Texas, though. I've watched us play. Yes, we have won by big numbers, but we've also played nobody yet. And I don't think we've even won convincingly enough in those smaller matchups that I feel like we're going to run away. I mean, I don't know. We'll have to see.

But we're going to be up in the mountains probably tomorrow driving and eating dinner on the top of Mount Pisga tomorrow evening. And Sherry's new car. Sherry got a new convertible. So we've been doing a lot of driving lately. A lot. And I still have not drove it because it's a stick shift. And I stall it every time I try to go on first gear. Well, second gear is usually where you're first to second gear is where you're having issues.

But we're going to practice. And hopefully there's still a clutch left when Sherry is done that we can actually still use the vehicle. But anyways, we're going to close it out with even if the sky is falling down by Candleine. Until next time, guys, we'll talk to you again. Sunday. Peace out. Peace out. Have a great weekend. I'm a winding road.

No telling where it goes. Driving through days and nights, won't stop for traffic lights. And if I'm falling down, I will keep on searching for my highs. You can say I lost my mind. I will keep on holding my head high. Even if the sky's falling down.

Cliffs so high. Trust in our wings to fly. Sometimes we're crashing down, but we get up and stop from the ground. Keep on searching for my high. I lost my mind. I will keep on holding my head. Even if the sky's falling, the sky's falling.