StarTalk Radio - Fixing the Internet with Harleen Kaur (Bonus Minisode)

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Can we fix the news? On this minisode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Gary O’Reilly sit down with Harleen Kaur, former space engineer and founder of Ground News, to explore our current media landscape, navigating bias, and fixing the internet.Go to https://ground.news/startalk to stay fully informed on the latest Space and Science news. Save 40% off through our link for unlimited access to the Vantage plan this month.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:https://startalkmedia.com/show/fixing-the-internet-with-harleen-kaur-bonus-minisode/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

At least somebody's trying to fix the news. About time. And we got them on this show. Yes. Where else are you going to hear about it? Where else are you going to see this? I don't know, because we just try to deal in objective truth. I know. We'll look at the biases. Why, where, how? Who's doing it, who's not? We are all in here on Star Talk. Special edition coming up. Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now. This is Star Talk, special edition. How about that? Neil deGrasse Tyson here right next to Gary O'Reilly. When you see Gary Gary it is special today We're talking about a very important subject. Yeah, the news Was something we've been wanting to come to grips with for a while now Who would have thought that you'd have to talk about that?

Yeah, I grew up the news was just the news and you went on about your life You watch the news and then you went to the real TV when you were growing up as a kid. Right, this news thing got in the way. Right, yeah, the news was like, yeah, I don't need this. See, now it seems we live in a constant need for news. It's not just on the hour, it's every hour, 24 hours a day. I would say that it's a desire for news but a strong enough desire becomes a need. That's what I think is going on.

I mean just have to think about the number of news channels there are on TV if TV even exists anymore then there's online there's social media platforms Not just how many are there how many hours a day they broadcast news. Oh gosh, yeah. Right. I mean, it does fold out into a larger number. I mean, throw in the unfiltered influences, and then the news landscape will and can

look a bit of a mess. We all have our trusted news preferences, our go-tos, and as I've said before, the better the information, the better the decisions. That you're going to make based on that information. Exactly. But do we know if these news sources bring their own filters or their own biases? It's not always obvious to see from the outside or just by a headline.

Sometimes it is by the headline. This is where our guest comes in, Neil. So if you would introduce them, please. I'd be delighted to. Yes, we have with us Harleen Kaur. Harleen, welcome to Star Talk. Thanks, Neil. Delighted to be here.

Excellent, and you're in from Canada. That's right. Canada, the 51st day. That's right, we have no water. Do not do that! Oh, you. Where did you read that, Nia? I don't know, some news source told me

that that's what it was. That happened? Co-founder and CEO, I got it here, of Ground News. All right. Are you grounded? Grounded means you have an objective understanding of reality in any language, I'm pretty sure. Because the ground is the ground.

You're a former engineer? That's right. And what kind of engineer? A space engineer. Space, loving it. In the right place. Yes, yes. So big fun now.

Okay, thank you. You are trying to fix the news problem, not by giving it a bias of your own, but by figuring out a way to de-bias it. That's right. In some objective way that people around the table would say, hey, I see what you did there. And we kind of all agree,

no matter what side of the aisle you're on. As Gary said, if I have what I would consider a trusted source of news, and what you do to the news makes it look different from that, why should I have any confidence at all that you're doing the right thing? Yeah, that's a very good question.

So let me try and explain what we do at Grand News. So we are not- No, there's no try. There's do or do not. I shall explain. Okay. What we are doing at Grand News. So how we view news is that something happens,

as you call the objective truth, something happens, and then it goes through this prism of the media landscape, and then it fragments into all these million of different versions of what exactly happens. And depending on where news outlets are, on what their biases are, or what their agendas are, or who's funding them, who owns them, on where news outlets are on what the biases are, or who's funding them, who owns them, who is the audience

that they don't want to piss off. And who's the sponsor. Who's the sponsor. Yeah, yeah. Then they will tell you, although the event that they're reporting is the same event, but how they're reporting is going to be very, very different. And depending on what version you're reading, your perception of the reality of what happens is going to be very, very different to each other,

to the point, yeah, using a space analogy, we are literally sometimes living in the different universes, depending on what news outlets or group of news. That analogy totally works. Yeah, thank you. You've met people and say, what universe did you come from? Yeah, literally. I've said that way too many times lately.

Yeah, are we finding the same thing? So yeah, our job is not to say that this one's right or this one's wrong. And what we do is we literally reconstitute all of that, those versions together to reverse engineer what might have happened. So we'll show. Whoa. Mm-hmm.

Whoa. It's a new take on it. That's badass. Yeah, so what criteria? But let him finish his thing. She just used the word reverse engineering. Let that sentence finish. The engineer said reverse engineering.

What a surprise. Yeah, yeah, I hope it doesn't become scientist versus the engineer here. No, no, no, not for this interview. Otherwise, meet me outside. I give up. We put all those sources together. So let's say, yeah, there is some executive order that has passed and there's a new story saying, hey, this is the headline and this is what happened.

We will show you along the spectrum of how the different news sources cover it, all the way from the far left to the far right. And then we don't put any check marks or Xs against any of them. We very much let you decide where the truth kind of gets reconstituted and you use your critical thinking to put that together.

You use your critical thinking. Yes. What does that presume? Yes. Where's the big assumption there? You're absolutely right. Or you should use your critical thinking. Which is a skill we are all losing.

Which is a skill that we... It's interesting you say that. Yeah. How it's more herd mentality then? It's herd mentality but also I think we're becoming lazy a bit because I feel like we like to be intellectually lazy because it's great to hear somebody else talk about what they think about it or what their opinion is about something

and then regurgitate it rather than using your own brain to be able to say it because it takes effort to be able to do that. I'll just pick one guy, one girl, one sub stack, one podcast, one newsletter, one news channel, whatever it is, and then just follow the one that I agree with and reinforces my cognitive bias. So the psychology of the news and how it's absorbed, how it's portrayed is now much, much deeper than you and I growing up. Oh, there's a nice guy in a suit and a tie

and he's reading the stories from the day at 6 p.m. And then we moved on. There are a couple of reasons why that's not the case anymore. So one is there was a doctrine called fairness doctrine. If you've heard of that, that came into existence I think late 1940s, which- That early?

That early. Yeah, that's before TV. That's right, because they wanted, FCC wanted radio and then TV to take responsibility to provide a more equitable and honest version of what's really going on. So there was a fairness doctrine where the onus was on the broadcasters

to actually show all versions of what happened. And they had that control of them because the federal government allocated the electromagnetic spectrum to them, right? That's right. That's how they controlled it, the licenses. It was a public trust.

That's right. Right. And then it got repealed during the Reagan administration. So that's where the fragmentation really, really happened because then there wasn't any legal obligation to be able to say that I have to show all this various version and show the foot That's why the the guy in tie told the Walter Cronkite version of the news that used to exist didn't exist and then of course everything spun out of control when

News had the internet and then later had social media and then it just went crazy and Because I remember I mean, it's how old I am, I remember when the news would give an opinion, it was like, are you seated? Okay, we're about to give an opinion, get ready for this opinion, we're going to come back and we're going to sit here and this is going to be an opinion, like flashing an opinion. And then it was over and then...

And it wasn't snuck in to be said, this is news, this is an opinion, yeah, as you said, very much categorized. So let me ask you. Of course. What criteria are you using at Ground News to determine an outlet's bias, be it left, center, or right?

That's right, so. And can a center be biased? Oh, that's a philosophical question. That's a philosophical question indeed. I told you, you're in that date. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, go ahead. So one decision we made early on, again, to be as neutral as possible and in a way as scientific as possible, we do not determine the rating, that if the CNN is left or Fox is right,

we're using third party rating agencies and actually we are using three of them who use three different methodologies. One of them is using crowdsourcing, one of them is using experts, one of them is using algorithms, and then we take a statistical average of them and then say, okay, based on these rating agencies, that's where the news outlet lies. And do you look for keywords that would indicate? That's right, that's right.

How does the story get framed? What topics do they cover more often than less often? And how much time they give to that topic. To that topic, which is very, very interesting as well. It's not one thing that we stumbled upon, to be honest, I did not set out to do, was it's not necessarily the spin on the coverage, it's the lack of coverage completely. That tells the bias of the outside as well. That's a whole other thing.

Yeah. of coverage completely. That tells the bias of the outlet as well. Very recently when markets were crashing, there were certain outlets if you went to it and you wouldn't know that there was anything terrible happening in the financial market. Nothing to see here. The nothing to see here approach to news. You said the spin. Do we still call them spin doctors or is that such an archaic term now? For the politicians, yes, but I think, yeah, the news outlets are very much doing that. The spin doctor was one person among many who was doing the spin, but now the many are spinning.

Yeah, and that's just impossible. Everybody's at it. So it's a spin of doctors. Several doctors. Invention. Okay, so when, I suppose, an article goes beyond simple bias and it's actually misinformed, misleading, I mean, not misinformation, but disinformation, how do you sort of scan that? And what's behind that, I think, is you began this conversation saying there's an event. Yes. And then you watch how people cover the event.

Yes. Or don't. However, that presumes that everyone has equal access to the objective true information about the event. Yeah. But in the days of reporters, different reporters would be delivering information back to the newsroom from their view. So there's another layer in there, isn't there?

It's not just the person presenting the news or writing the article, it's the person supplying the information. Yes, yes. So again, it's very hard to say that anything is objective because this is a chain of humans as you described it. Somebody is reporting it, somebody is writing about it, and then somebody is watching it and making sense out of it.

Did you have the game of telephone in the UK? Did you play that? That's exactly what I'm reminded. Well maybe I did and I don't remember. No, you would so know. I know we invented the telephone, so maybe you didn't do it. We wouldn't play it just out of spite.

No, in elementary school, you do it in elementary school, like kindergarten or something, and someone starts with a story that has a little bit of detail, but not, not on the level that you can't remember it, right? It's like, so Mary wore a blue dress to Johnny's birthday party. And he turned six.

And he blew out the candles and made a wish he'd go to Disneyland. Something like that. That's very, there's nothing weird about that. And I tell it to you, you tell it to the next person, you whisper it. And then at the end, it's like, hey, Joey wanted to go into space

and have a birthday party. The whole thing. It's one of the first things we learn in elementary school, how unreliable the human means of communicating information is. That's right, but if you had the versions of all of those people along the chain and put it together, perhaps you can decipher

what we're exactly. Maybe. But everyone's version is accurate in their own mind. There it is. And it's passed on, but the helicopter view is something very different. That's happening. But everyone's version is accurate in their own mind and is passed on, but the helicopter view is something very different. That's right. So let me answer your question, Gary. How do you determine if there is disinformation included?

So let me take an extreme example. I don't know. There was a claim a few years ago, a totally false claim, that medicine called ivermectin cured COVID. And let's assume a news outlet publishes that claim. So what Ground News does is, again, we will not just show that claim published by that outlet, we'll also show all the other outlets commenting on it, saying, hey, how there are claims out there. So they react, they're basically reaction videos.

Reaction videos and also correcting it. Some just go out and correcting it and publishing reports that, hey, this is a claim that's not true. The second thing we do is, apart from bias ratings, we also provide factuality ratings of the news outlets. So how have they historically been reporting? And so on their reporting practices, we'll say,

hey, this is historically... Is it from one source or again is that cross-reference? Again, it's from a cluster of sources. Again, trying to be as neutral and as close to objectivity as we possibly can be, that we do. So again, when you're reading that news, not in isolation, but again, clustered with the other reactions, other disproving of that claim, then you have all the information at least in one place to be able to say this is true or not.

But that's what we're trying to do. Okay, word salad question. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and cognitive biases. They're not phrases that you would have heard 10 years ago, probably. But now- Well, cognitive bias is well known in psychological literature. In terms of a news.

A news, no, yeah, definitely not a news. So this is now the landscape of news media. You've got to go through filter bubbles or look through someone's bowel, understand if that is something, and then find yourself in an echo chamber. That's right. So interestingly enough, I'll start at a very different place. I think the reason all this has happened, again, going back to what's happened with news is one of the main reasons is the revenue models of the news outlets.

So the revenue models of news outlets have gone to similar to social media advertising and how much time can we retain you on the channel or on the app or on the website. Commodity is your attention. That's it. That's what they are. But then how do you do that? By not showing you stuff you might disagree with and leave the site or leave the app. So keep showing you, again, reinforcing that cognitive bias, creating that bubble, and then you're like,

yeah, this news outlet gets me or this guy and girl gets me. In the old days, and I just know this from what I was told, I didn't research this, The news was not expected, TV news was not expected to be a revenue generating center. It was funded by all of the other programming that went on in the day and the news was a service to, of course it had ads, yes, but there wasn't a calculation done that they have to adjust the news to boost ad revenue.

Yeah, but now each news channel is its own profit center. So then how do you make sure that remains profitable as you're saying that if that is the revenue generating source, then you keep showing people what they want to see and not let them. You say that, hey, I cannot own the entire population, I'm going to own this slice of population that believes in these things and I'm going to keep reinforcing these few things.

I like that phrase to own them. Own them. Basically do. They do what you say, they think what you think. Yeah, they think what you tell them to think. Yeah, and then they own you. And then you're working very much with the demographics. That's right.

So that's where I think, again, going back to the different universes come in, that if you're reading that channel or listening to that channel or reading that newspaper, or even a group of newspapers that are similar to that ideology, then you would think of things happening very differently what another person at an opposite end of the spectrum might be thinking. If you're enjoying this episode and want to start using Ground News, head to ground.news.startalk to get 40% off their Vantage plan, the same one we use here at Star Talk, that's ground.news.startalk for access to their top tier plan for just $5 per month. Now that we understand a little bit better what's out there and how it's sort of brought

forward, what strategies can people develop to be able to see through, to be able to be aware of what bias might be spun out there. It's self-awareness. That's what it comes down to, right? It is, but it's a very tough ask for somebody to do. I think to challenge that a few tools that we are using, and as a layperson, even if you don't want to use ground news, I hope you do, but if you don't,

you can use it yourself. One is very much what we call lateral reading. Again, take the new sources and read it across, even if you don't agree with them, you don't have to, but just having that access and challenging yourself, as you said, having the self-awareness that there are the versions of what's happening. Second, as I said, by going across the new sources, or if you are, let's say, on social media,

you are the person who gets news on social media, go follow accounts that you might not agree with, and they might make you angry, but at least going out and seeing what we are calling blind spots. So we have a feature called blind spots. What we mean is that if you were reading a certain set of news sources,

you would have never come across these news stories and every single day. And it's not just one side or the other, both sides of the spectrum are very much, they do that, they just leave certain news stories out. So how are you going to find them? And by the way, just as a professional educator, can I call myself that?

You just did. Yes, it's true, you are. You are. I'm born and raised in New York City, so I lean left politically, but when someone starts railing on the political right, and I say, well, did you get that information? And they talk about the New York Times or MSNBC, whatever,

then I tell them, I probably watch much more Fox News than you do. So you're doing that already. Yes, yes, I do it on purpose. And what that helps me is I know there's our demographics that watch Fox News exclusively. Yes. And I've been on Fox News, okay,

with a couple other shows. So when I'm out in the wild. In the wild. We let you loose. When I'm set forth into the nation, I have some sense of what forces are operating on people's thoughts. And it makes me a way more potent educator, I think. I'm so glad you say, Neil, that you do that, because then you can exactly have that empathy to understand where people are coming from.

Yeah, it's not to pass judgment, it's to just understand. Yeah. What force is operating on the brain? Wow. Yes. We get such heartening feedback all the time where, hey, I stopped talking to my father or stopped talking to my uncle or husband and wife stopped talking because our political views didn't agree

and it's fracturing people. And one common thing they do is, okay, let's agree not to talk politics, but that cannot be the solution. We cannot solve other problems and one common thing they do is, okay, let's agree not to talk politics, but that cannot be the solution. We cannot solve other problems if we don't address and bring people back to common ground. So that's, I think, the only way you can do that

is presenting all of the different opinions, and you don't have to agree with it, but when you run into that person who has this opinion, you can have at least an educated conversation about it. That's a strategy for an individual that wants to get a better understanding of the news landscape. Doesn't that assume they want to get a better understanding?

I think so. Yeah, suppose they don't want to. They're happy. It's interesting you say that. Being fed the way they are. So I think nobody wants to be gamed. I think that's for sure. You just say you're being gamed.

Oh, that, those are fighting words. I love that. You have been gamed. Yeah. Everybody thinks they have self-awareness, right? Everybody thinks they have self-awareness. Oh my gosh. It's just that it's very challenging when we are presenting to the world view that we

don't agree with and how are you going to go find it if you keep cocooning yourself with information that you agree with. And if it's not in agreement with you, then it's wrong. Yes. That's just different. Yeah. Right. Let's spin that around.

Yeah. Rather than put the burden of responsibility on the individual, could the corporations, and there are major corporations in play here, could they be more responsible for the messaging? We can. I think, again, things like fairness doctrine was one of the ways that we could ask, but I don't think that's going to happen again. One specific thing is, course social media. I think social media is as you know it's the most intense form of those reinforced algorithms.

It's an outrage engine. It's an outrage engine. They know that more outrage you are, more time you'll spend on it and more likely you are to click. But that's an example though. It's the opposite of what you said a moment ago. There's one thing to show me what I want to see because I agree with it, but if you show me something that I vehemently disagree with, that gets me bubbling and then I for that, look what they said over here. Without checking what exactly.

So it seems to work on both extremes of that spectrum. But I think again, it's not that showing you, yeah, the emotion works on both extremes. Emotion. But again, you might forward it, but it's such an exaggerated version of whatever it is on the other side as well that you are shown. It's not exactly that you're becoming enlightened by seeing that new story. You're getting enraged by seeing that new story, but not necessarily. But yeah, because it's, again,

whatever the hot button topic is, take the most emotional exaggerated version of that and show it to you. What is your revenue model? Yeah, someone. Ooh, that's a good question. That's a good question. Ooh, wow.

Whoa, whoa, we're talking about other things than the sponsor then? We're riding that, aren't we? Oh! Yeah, someone. We're talking about other things than the sponsor. How do you like that? Try to answer that one. It is straightforward. One thing early on we decided is we are not going to do the ad revenue model way to do that. Is it my imagination? Yeah. When it might be. But has science become a trigger, especially on social media? That's an interesting question. What do you mean by that? Yeah.

OK. Throw a view at somebody that aggravates out of them, right? Mm-hmm. And science seems to be one of those trigger points. My answer to that would be because I think people like making compelling arguments on social medias and that's why throwing a scientific, I don't know, an excerpt of scientific report or scientific news which is either taken out of context, which as a scientist you would

never do, you would explain the nuance and to make... So good point. So you throw in a little bit of science. Exactly. You get to boost what your audience might think is the authenticity of the account. It goes back to that old adage of every good lie has a grain of truth. Now it depends on the size of that grain.

I've never heard that. Oh, you're kidding me. Never. So you haven't heard of telephone and you haven't heard of that. No, no, no, I've heard. Every day's a school day. Not every lie, I've heard every stereotype has a grain of truth. I've heard that.

Oh, and then it's copy and paste. Every good lie has a grain of truth in it. Okay. And it's one of those sort of... It's part of the storytelling. So it goes back to the telephone. It's the storytelling. That we never went to the moon has no truth in it at all.

That's why. Okay. That Earth is flat has no truth in it. Okay. As a former NASA engineer, I think we can very much agree on that one. There is objective. Science is weaponized.

Yes, that's right. Because it adds heft to an argument, but if you use a snippet out of context. So what we started at least doing at Ground News is if there is a news story being reported about a study that every single day there's some study coming out and then the headline only covers a partial. We actually started connecting that report.

So if you want to go read the report in the entirety and even summarize it for you and say, hey, this is the entirety of it. How's AI summaries lately? They've gotten much, much better. They have gotten much, much better, but out of the box, LLMs have a lot of hallucination, which is for a use case like news is exactly the opposite of what we're trying to do.

Right. So we've worked a lot on putting guardrails in place that it sticks to exactly what's been most of. I was taking ayahuasca. I know. We were one day in the lab. Hallucinating. So I mean, is this where the...

They'll open the hatch. Sitting there. Open the hatch and there there. Open the hatch. And there it is. Doing the eye wash. Doing it with a shaman. But I think AI can be very powerful for news. So again, I would like to think just as internet gave us access to so much information, of

course, which had a lot of positive but some negative, AI can help us understand, improve our comprehension of news. Again, at Ground News, we show you, for example, hundreds of different versions of the article. We have people who read through all of that, but if you don't have time, summarizing it and giving it to you in a format that, where we can highlight the differences

or highlight where the news outlets agree, make your life much easier. Again, we don't say, hey, this is right or wrong, but this is the summarization of what's happened or this is a summarization of the report. So you don't bring the judgment to the... We don't bring the judgment. Because I think as soon as you bring the judgment,

you alienate somebody and we don't want to do that. We mentioned AI. Is it likely we're going to get responsible, I'll say journalism formed by artificial intelligence or are we going to end up with constant stream of deep fakes? And something I've come to understand or just learn recently, synthetic headlines. I mean, I'm used to the bias of the news outlet being

in the headline, and therefore, there's no need to read the article because they want you just to read the headline and then take that. And that's how most people read, by the way. Exactly. It's just like, yeah, I read that. We all think we're time poor. Yeah. And therefore, I've only got the just to read the headline and then take that. And that's how most people read, by the way. Exactly. It's just like, yeah, I read that. We all think we're time poor, and therefore I've only got the time to read the headline.

But does AI have the capacity to really stop? And if it does, will it ever be utilized that way? I think like any groundbreaking technology, AI has the possibility to do both, which is help the news and hurt the news, which it's doing as well. Help the news by doing things like identifying deep fakes, by giving tools to journalists to be able to produce quality content or take out the bias, even highlight the bias. You're asking AI to turn itself in.

Turn itself in. By finding deep fakes. Okay, so. in. One day AI is going to say, I'm not going to do what the humans tell me. These are our people. Our deep fakes are our people. You're looking at the AI, but I'd look further back in the history and say it's the design of the algorithm. If you want to design it to do those things, then you will. If you don't, it to do those things, then you will. Where are we with the biases on algorithms that people thought were not biased?

Like facial recognition software. I think now there are companies actively working on ways to correct that and again, create datasets to be able to reset that to remove bias and same for news as well. So there are datasets that exist and for example, we work very, very hard to identify when there is bias language and to be able to say, hey, this and simply sometimes just highlighting it and say, hey, this is where the bias is and help people.

And the bias is not so much in the nouns as it is in the adjectives. It's in the adjectives, yeah. I remember, it's funny, one adjective comes to mind. So last time President Trump, there was a parade and then every headline on the left kept using the word soggy and every headline on the right kept using grand and I was like,

how did they agree on which adjective to use? And it's like soggy for it and yeah, that's an adjective. In between major corporations that dominate the news outlet universe and the wild west of social media and unregulated influences, are we kidding ourselves to think that we're going to get responsible journalism coming forward? You just said her whole job is pointless. Our job is to help you make sense, I think.

That's what we are doing. No, I don't think we are kidding ourselves. My job is not pointless. We are trying to. I think there's amazing journalism coming out. There are journalists out there who are working on exposés that take years. There is some journalists out there in a cave and I don't know, wherever trying to report to you.

That's all that amazing work happening. I think the problem is it gets drowned out or drowned out by all the else that exists. The noise. The noise that exists. It's the noise again. It's the noise again. So I think, yeah, we, again, we, our job is, at least at Ground News, drowned out by all the else that exists around there. So I think, yeah, we, again, our job is, at least at Ground News, is not to recreate this amazing work,

but to be able to help you dial down that noise and give you tools to be able to read that. So I got to land this plane. So let me ask you, what are the metrics that you might use to know if you're succeeding? Very good question, very good question. I think the number one metric for me is how many news sources people end up reading. When they come to ground news, we see that in our KPIs that people would go to two or three sources that quote unquote trust or came in with, but within three months,

we see that three X. People are going to 10 different news sources because the ease of it and expanding that. Do you have to pay a fee to those news sources to channel them into your report? No, we don't because if you want to read their articles, you're still going to the publisher's website. Got it, got it.

They're not reading it on your website. No, you cannot. That's where we draw the line. And so if you want to read that, go to New York Times or go to whoever. But yeah, we see that. We actually had a researcher from Duke University who did research on ground news

and found out that people's opinions can actually be changed if they're presented with counter to what their beliefs are. So we really think that's gotta be the way that we can bring everybody back to the same page, back to common ground. This is very hopeful. Yeah.

I didn't think this would end hopefully, but it did. You pessimist. Yes, I was totally skeptical. Well, thank you for this insight. Where can we find you online? You can go to ground.news to our website. Ground.news, news is the... That's right, the domain name. The domain name. for this insight. We have a free version and we are subscription supported. So let me see if I can knock this out with a little bit of cosmic perspective, if I may. I've said a couple of times, I'm on record noting

that as AI gets better and better, yes is the good side, but the bad side is it can be better and better at making deep fakes. And a deep fake becomes a source of what someone thinks is an objective reality. What someone thinks is news. And then that becomes part of what people then argue over. And I worry, and I think I still worry,

even after this conversation, that it could signal the end of the internet. When deep fakes become so good, and it's known that they're good, that all the people who used to believe the fake news won't believe the fake news anymore because they'll be sure that it was faked. Once the people who believe fake news anymore because they'll be sure that it was faked. Once the people who believe fake news no longer believe

anything on the internet, there's nothing left on the internet to believe, not even the fake news, because that was faked. And I think that would signal the end of the internet as a source of objective information in this world. And we'd all go back to just reading books and talking to people in the town square and maybe reading broadsheets

stapled up on the bulletin board. And then the internet will just resort to cat videos just as it once was. And that's my cosmic perspective on that topic. And let me thank our special guest, And that's my cosmic perspective on that topic. And let me thank our special guest, Haleen Kaur, who's trying to fix the world one reader at a time. Good luck with that. I think you'll need some of that as well.

Thank you. All right, Gary? Pleasure, Neil. Oh, good to have you, man. Signing out from my office here at the American Museum of Natural History. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.