The Ben Mulroney Show - A.I. influencing elections and the risk to democracy

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Guests and Topics: -A.I. influencing elections and the risk to democracy with Guest: Mohit Rajhans Mediologist and Consultant, ThinkStart.ca If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining me now for our weekly conversation on all things tech, welcome Mohit Rajans, who's a media consultant, a meteorologist and consultant at thinkstart.ca. What's a meteorologist, Mohit? You know, it's interesting, Ben, I have been doing this sort of work and studying the world of media for such a long time and working in it. That meteorology is really that study, the culmination of just the world of analog right to digital, and everything in between documenting what the process is and studying what the implications are for the future. Okay, well, let's talk about 23andMe. That was a huge company back in the day, and people, if they don't remember,

it was a company where I guess you'd swab the inside of your cheek and you'd send that swab into this company, they'd do a DNA test and they would tell you where all of your DNA comes from. They would tell you where you, and conceivably you could also use it with like ancestry.com to find out where, if you have relatives and that sort of thing. But now they've gone bankrupt.

They're filing for bankruptcy and typically, Mohit tell me if I'm wrong, but typically in a bankruptcy, you start selling off the assets. And one of the assets that 23andMe has is this data bank of people's DNA. Bingo. 23andMe at this point is going to be a Netflix documentary.

Yeah. Because this was a $6 billion valuation company in 2021. In 2025, there's a 48 million. And what you're talking about is just, they were the groundbreakers, right? They sort of came to the market and said, listen, with some simple swabs, we're gonna be able to protect

and understand so much more about you, your genetic makeup, who you're linked to, everything you just mentioned was the consumer side of it. But everyone sort of jumped in the pool without thinking about what the terms and conditions were. Yeah. So here we here we are, while we listen to them being bankrupt on the verge of bankruptcy with 14 million customers information. Yeah. And it's not clear about what the legal ramifications are going to be for them. Well, firstly, on the business side, and I am by no means somebody

that you should take business advice from. However, a business built on having, accessing a customer once and only once is not a good business. You don't have someone who comes back time and time again. It's not like Netflix, where people pay that monthly fee and have been doing it for years and happily so. Once you've used 23andMe, there's no reason to use it again.

And so that to me was always a red flag. But look what could prevent Mohe what could prevent a government agency or a police agency from buying up this data? Absolutely nothing. Or an insurance agency insurance agency. Right. So right thing about that. They could cross reference to see if any of their clients have done this. And if they find out somebody has a pre genetic predisposition to cancer, they may cancel

their policy. I think we're on episode three of this Netflix show already. That's exactly what I'm worried about with this. You know, they've already been cited for a massive data breach just as recently as 2023. And so it was not going to be something that they were going to be able to climb out of and then exceed expectations, especially not that $6 billion mark. So it's fascinating to watch this because this is a learning lesson for a lot of the

information that we give out freely right now. The next story we want to talk about is the general idea of parents rethinking how they share aspects of their private life online specifically as it relates to parenting. Yeah you know it's interesting you and I have had this conversation before because you know we're raising kids in this real world and there's no playbook right there's no accuracy what you thought three years ago what didn't happen three years later. And I think what's happening now is there's advocacy groups all across Europe, what is called Children of the Street. And they're really trying to push this idea to parents early enough so that they

understand what this idea of sharenting is. Sharenting meaning you're spending too much time putting your kids' digital footprint and information online. And that could be risky at this point. And I think we're, as parents, we understand that. We've seen the dangers. We've seen the law and order special. We've seen everything that can't happen. But the bigger issue right now is how many people don't realize, including myself,

I will tell you how much damage we've already done. So it's a little bit of go back and clean up awareness going on here. Yeah, agreed, agreed. I don't even post anything online that isn't job related anymore. I just that's not part of my life anymore. Sometimes it's just a habit you got to get out of. You're very disciplined. I think that very a lot of us are very naive about how a birthday celebration right down to sharing family information can be detrimental. Okay, let's let's move on. Cyber warfare in elections is apparently a thing. Tell me about this. Oh, I think you know it's a thing. Tell me how. Okay, so we're now in a situation

where just last week, Metta had implicated or has implied that they're going to require any election advertising that uses AI to be flagged, and therefore it will be what they consider double moderated. That's problematic because pretty much their own insular system in Meta has a bunch of AI-related tools and helps you target your audience and your voters. And so now we're in a weird situation where on one hand, you see the wonderful spend that all the parties are making on social media. But if there's not they're not clear about how AI can be weaponized and used, it's going to be problematic. Well, well, it absolutely can be weaponized. We saw just a couple of days

ago when there was supposedly leaked audio of Vice President JD Vance talking trash about Elon Musk, and that apparently is entirely AI generated. This is, this is the, this is, that is the most innocuous version of what we could possibly see. possibly see. Very much so. But what we also have to pay attention to is this public relations side. So all of the social media platforms are going to have to come through because the political parties are spending money on them. Right. So they don't want to think that a, you know, look, we're meme culture, right. And we're in this culture where our kids might not necessarily know what's the difference

between a joke and actually spreading misinformation. And so all of this is easy. It's relatable. We can make it on our phones. We can make it while we're waiting for something. We can share it. And this idea of bots and fake, you know, posting, et cetera, it's here. If we don't necessarily hold these companies accountable, we're gonna be in a big mess.

No, but you actually make a good point though. If I'm the Liberal Party of Canada and I want to buy some digital ads on Instagram or Facebook or X, if my ad is gonna be competing with an AI generated ad that diminishes the value of my message. I don't know that I'm going to want to spend my money on that platform. Well, and then you also have to factor in who's moderating, right?

Yeah. But you know, if you happen to catch something that you're like, this is misinformation, I'm going to flag it. What does that mean? Does that mean that it's actually going to be removed or is there a backlog of people somewhere in some call center trying to flag things? No. So, you know, we're unfortunately we're at the we're just at the beginning of this. Yeah. And so, but if we don't have continued conversations about it, what ends up happening is those WhatsApp groups or whatever you call them become echo chambers and they become even more problematic with this content.

But Mohit, it feels to me like unless we get ahead of it now, we will perpetually be playing catch up. In other words, we're gonna be able to defend against the previous attack. It's like they used to say about the military and how we were defending against terrorism. We always learn from the terrorist attack of the past, and we learn to defend against that. Some guy tried to blow up a plane with explosive shoes, now we take our shoes off.

Some guy, up until, you know, some guy flies a plane into a building, well, now we make sure that you can't do that. But we're not preparing for the next iteration of that attack, and it feels like you could draw a parallel between that and the weaponization of AI. You make a great point. Unfortunately, the trains left the station. Yeah, so we and you and I mentioned that often, we're not talking about being able to go retroactive and take away some of this technology. This is like you and I said, this is the worst that AI is going to get. Yeah. All right. So we have to prepare that way.

Mohit Rajan is always great to chat with you. Have a great rest of your week, my friend. Thank you, Ben. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And now is a fun segment. It's a palate cleanser, if you will. It's an amuse bouche that we like to call Ben Goes Digging for Audio Gold. I go find the the social media posts that have been lingering on my feed and I wanna share them with you.

You may have seen these before, but. So I remember years ago, the biggest mistake that any actor had ever made in terms of except turning down a role that ended up becoming huge, not just in terms of popular culture and success of the films, but in terms of the bank account of that person.

Will Smith had been offered the role of Neo in The Matrix. And of course, that launched Keanu Reeves into a whole other level of superstardom. But more than that, I think he got points on the back end and ended up making just a ton of money in the if not in the hundreds of millions of dollars and pretty gosh darn close. So that was the biggest mistake that any actor had ever made until now. Now this is a video that's a little little old. I've seen it a few times but I think it bears it bears repeating.

Here's Matt Damon talking about the biggest mistake he ever made. I turned down and I will go down in history, as the person, because Jim Cameron called me, he offered me 10% of Avatar. You will never meet an actor who turned down more money than me. But I was in the middle of shooting the Bourne Ultimatum, and he wanted to shoot during our post-production,

and we always needed more work in our post-production, and I needed to be around. I needed to and we always needed more work in our post-production and I needed to be around, I needed to be available to do more work in our post-production. He was very, he was really lovely and he said, you know, if you don't do, he goes, this movie doesn't need you. It doesn't need a movie star at all. He goes, the movie's the star, the idea is the star and it's gonna work.

But if you do it, I'll give you 10% of the movie. And so he had to regretfully decline. If I cross my fingers, could we have a Matt Damon cameo just at the very end? Must do it, we have to do it so that the world is in equilibrium again. But he doesn't get 10%. 10% of Avatar, the highest grossing movie of all time.

Maybe, I think it got surpassed by one of the Marvel movies. The second one, I think is in the top five as well. I'm sure you would have gotten 10% of that as well in every subsequent sequel. Ah, yeah. Look, he falls asleep on his giant piles of money. They're just not as giant as they could have been. Okay, this is a vintage clip.

I wanna take you back to 1989. We talk about the cost of living today, right? And we also talk about new technology, right? When new technology comes out, what? It's big, it's bulky, it's also really expensive. But how expensive? Sometimes we forget. So let's go back to 1989,

when laptops were first introduced. Do you remember how much they cost? Cause I sure didn't, but this clip reminds us. Quick, what's the prices here in these three machines we've seen? Keith? This one's the list price at $49.99. This one goes for $95 or $11 grand, depending on the drive.

Kevin? $79.99 without modem, 2 megabytes, 40 megabyte hard disk, and $84.99 with a... Well, this is equivalent to an IBM AT. This is a 12 megahertz 286 It's got a 287 socket. It's got a 20 megabyte hard drive 11 grand for a laptop in 1989 I have not done the math, but I have to assume that's about 30 grand today I'd be shocked if it wasn't somewhere in that neighborhood

Would you but I don't care. And think about how good the laptops are today. Would you spend 30 grand on a laptop no matter how good today? Wow. I mean, talk about prices dropping up. So there's I've never seen these guys before, but there are these guys on social media. And I saw a video of them. These two dudes who went to a kids hockey game pretending to be scouts, and a father of one of the players came up to them.

And when I say they pretend to be scouts, they just stood there with notepads, scribbling furiously. That's how they pretended to be scouts. And the dad comes up to them and has a little chat with them. Let's, and he all, and in the process of it, maybe tries to sway their opinion about number 11. You guys scouts? Yeah, yeah, we're local scouts.

I've always wanted my son to play number 11 out there on the ice right now. Okay, number 11, yep. You guys from Berry? Yeah, yeah, from Berry, yeah. Excellent, I run a local contact business. Okay. I do two kitchen bathrooms. Oh yeah, nice. I give youor business. Okay. To Kitchum's bathrooms. Oh yeah? Nice.

I'll give you a card. Okay. If you guys can, uh, get yourself something nice. Okay. Yeah, thank you. Awesome, thanks. Thank you.

Eleven's looking really good, actually. Yeah, really, really good. Definitely think we can make some moves for Eleven there, yeah? Yep. He hands him his card and then hands him a wad of cash. You can see they're really surprised by it. Now, Eleven's looking great. I don't fault the dad.

You know, like I know that we live in a toxic time for kids, sports and parents who are all over too violent and too, you know, he just tried to grease the wheels. I don't think he's ever found himself in that position before. And I guess he thought this is what you do in those situations.

I thought it was adorable. I do not fault the dad one bit. We know, we hear a lot of things about Donald Trump. A lot of stories about Donald Trump. You know what we never hear about Donald Trump? Is Donald Trump apologizing? Donald Trump, and I had always lived in a world where Donald Trump doesn't apologize ever.

If he makes a mistake, it's on you. He does not apologize. Well, Rick Harrison is the star of the show, Pond Stars, and he tells a story about when Donald Trump actually apologized to him. This is in 2018. He's having a rally here in town for a guy running for Congress, someone running for

Congress and they wanted me to announce him at the rally. So I show up with my son Jake and my daughter Serena. White House staff, hey Rick, how's it going? Come on, come on this way. And we go to backstage and like Secret Service goes, he's not on the list. And they're going like, but Rick Harrison's friends like, nah, the list doesn't matter. So we had a drive-in home, I drop Jake off, I'm so pissed off, I'm going to the bar. I get like a block from the house and then like Senator Heller's number pops up on my

truck and I'm like, and like Senator Heller knows I have no filter. So the first words out of his mouth is like, Rick, before you say a word, the President of the United States would like to talk to you. And the first words out of Trump's mouth were, Rick, I am really sorry. This is all my fault. Because my White House staff, they work for me. They screwed up. That makes it my fault.

I am sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. I never thought I'd see the day. But I guess I guess he can apologize. But maybe when it's behind the scenes, because I don't think he would ever do that publicly. Speaking of Donald Trump, you know, we all witnessed the rescue of the two astronauts

that were stranded up at the space station by the failed Boeing launch. They launched their Starliner. And once the capsule got up into space, it started having all sorts of problems to the point that they could not trust that it was capable of bringing them home. And so it was incumbent upon SpaceX to conduct the rescue. And unfortunately, though, they were supposed to be up there for what, eight days and they were up there for eight months. A long time to be in space. They were not prepared for it, but they stayed up there for eight months. And of course we all witnessed, felt like a movie, the splashdown of the SpaceX capsule

into the Gulf of America. Is that what we're calling it? And as it splashes down, a pod of dolphins appeared out of nowhere. I mean, you could not have scripted it better. But I guess, I don't know what to make of this. Here is a member of the press, highlighting to Donald Trump, that the astronauts don't get paid overtime. To astronauts that you just helped save from space, they didn't get any overtime pay

for all that extra time. They got $5 a day per day. For 286 days, that is $1430 in extra pay. Is there anything the administration can do to get them, to make them whole? Well, nobody's ever mentioned this to me. If I have to, I'll pay it out of my own pocket, okay? I'll get it. I mean, that's nice. I don't know that they're eligible for overtime. It's not like they're shift workers.

They're astronauts. But okay, I guess that's how you turn nothing into a story. code word during the show. Then enter at homenetwork.ca watch and win for your chance to win big. Amazing! The small details are the difference between winning and losing. Watch and win with Renovation Resort on Home Network.