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00:00:01
Speaker 1: It's 8.06 at 55KRC, the talk station. Brian Thomas here wishing everyone a very happy Tuesday and welcoming to the 55KRC Morning Show, a segment we do each week at this time, the Insight Scoop with Breitbart News. Always start out by telling my listening audience, bookmark the site, Breitbart, B-R-E-I-T-B-A-R-T.com. You'll be glad you did because you can read what Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow writes about among the other topics. Alex Marlow, welcome back to the 55KRC Morning Show. Your name came up earlier in the program. We were talking about Empower You seminars. Welcome back, my friend.
00:00:30
Speaker 2: Thank you, Brian. I always appreciate what you do for Breitbart and for your audience.
00:00:34
Speaker 1: Well, we're all trying to do it for the audience. I mean, this is why we exist. We're trying to keep people on the straight and narrow and logical, reasonable path and keep our country alive. I mean, Lord Almighty, we see what's going on in France. We're about half a baby step away from that reality. Your background is tremendous. I have to just note, because your bio talks about your long-term relationship with Andrew Breitbart, you were the first Breitbart employee... and you started out in his basement. You started out and you met him in college, and your first career move was to take a huge risk by working in the basement. And I got a kick out of the fact that you were in charge of making sure there was Diet Coke in the fridge. I had a similar experience. I left a very large law firm in Chicago. A couple of partners broke off and asked me to come with them. So we started out in a conference room in a rented space, and I was in charge of coffee procurement. So You've got to do the little things when you're starting off in a new business. But it all worked out great for you, and I'm happy with where I ended up. And I'm glad you're doing the Empower You seminar tonight because I need you to react to this. Because one of the things you're going to be doing, the topic, economics polls and trolls with Alex Marlowe. Can we believe what we see online? One of the rhetorical questions you're going to dive on into.
00:01:47
Speaker 2: Today....
00:01:49
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're familiar with the gubernatorial race here in Ohio, but it's Vivek Ramaswamy, demonstrably better candidate than Amy Acton. But Amy Acton's mom just made a commercial for a pack where she specifically calls out her own daughter, a liar. My name is Donna Arthur, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent, it's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that's true. She's lied her entire life. My daughter needs help, among the other comments. My first reaction, Alex, and the reason I bring that up, not just to remind my listening audience about that going on, but my first
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reaction was, this has to be AI. You know, I mean, we can't tell the difference between truth and fiction with video even these days. And I thought maybe someone got hook, line, and sinker drawn into this because whose mom would say something like that about Amy Acton? Well, apparently, Amy Acton's mom would.
00:02:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is an everyday occurrence where there's something online where you feel like, how could that possibly be real?
00:02:48
Speaker 2: And then it does turn out to be real.
00:02:50
Speaker 3: I mean, there was one with this French rioting over the weekend where there was an old couple in their underpants and a bunch of black-clad younger people taking stuff from them.
00:02:58
Speaker 2: That can't be real. Oh, no, it was real. There's an Elon Musk flying car from last weekend. How is that real? Apparently it was.
00:03:04
Speaker 3: Each and every day we get another example of something where we can't tell if it's true.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: It was Alyssa Slotkin.
00:03:11
Speaker 3: Yesterday, who is saying flat out she is going to prosecute and to hold legally accountable anyone who works for Donald Trump simply because they're Republicans.
00:03:22
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:03:23
Speaker 2: That's the type of stuff.
00:03:23
Speaker 3: I wrote a whole book, which we discussed on the show, Breaking the Law, my last book, about this phenomenon where I have to convince people this is how the Democrats are behaving.
00:03:31
Speaker 2: And then she just flat out goes and says it.
00:03:33
Speaker 3: I wrote 250 pages explaining that's how they really think. And then I never had a quote like that where they're just saying, hey, we're going to go after Republicans just for the sake of being Republicans. I would have killed for that quote when I was doing the book because we all know that's what they think. They just started saying it out loud. And again, I had the same thought as you, Brian. That's got to be AI, right?
00:03:50
Speaker 2: Like a clever Republican made that up and put those words in their mouth.
00:03:53
Speaker 1: Nope, they didn't. How are we to, you know, how do we know what's true and what's not online?
00:03:58
Speaker 2: I mean, I speak truth.
00:04:00
Speaker 1: I try to rely on the most confident resources I can come up with. I'm a fan of Breitbart. I know you guys do your due diligence in your reporting. You also, you know, link sources where some of the information comes from. I'm a fan of the Wall Street Journal. Yes, some of the things I like and some of the things I don't, but they do good, credible journalism and they're good at fact checking but once you gravitate over to one of the more suspect sources and that's kind of any other side page that doesn't get as many hits isn't known for the you know what they do then we're lost in a in almost an unnavigable environment alex how do we deal with something like.
00:04:37
Speaker 3: That yeah it's tough i actually if it's some people see this as maybe a positive others probably less of a positive but I don't think the AI slop, as we call it, that we're seeing online, I don't think it's less accurate than the previous age of media fact checking. I think the previous age of media fact checking was somehow even worse. And so we've garbage in and garbage out, but some of the AI models, particularly Grok, seem to be less biased than any sort of major newsroom that you would see. And so they were putting out false stuff all the time. And Again, not to plug.
00:05:12
Speaker 2: All my books.
00:05:12
Speaker 3: I'm not making money off of these books anymore at this point, guys. So if you buy one of my books, it's just because I believe in what I wrote in it. My first book, Breaking the News, I wrote about the media. And I talked about the agendas the media has.
00:05:24
Speaker 2: But I go through all these examples. They were just blatantly false.
00:05:26
Speaker 3: They would ride not for a story or two stories, but for months and months and months, just the same falsehoods repeated over and over again. And I do think in an AI era, we actually could probably fight through those news cycles a little quicker.
00:05:40
Speaker 2: So the best thing that you could do.
00:05:42
Speaker 3: Is you try to find sources that are consistently accurate because we're all busy. And then if you do find something that you feel like is suspect, try to see if it appears at one of those sources you trust. And if it doesn't, then that's a good time to run it through a rock or something like that and say, is this true? And you're not going to get 100% batting average doing that. But for busy people, that's generally a pretty good process.
00:06:04
Speaker 1: Indeed. And I guess one of my concerns along those lines is the learning models that these AI systems use, it's sort of a volume-based thing. I recall a Reddit subgroup conducted a test, and the purpose was to perpetuate an absolute outright lie. I mean, it was bizarre. Like, J.D. Vance was dead, or J.D. Vance killed Donald Trump, or something really crazy. And it involved even more something, even something crazier than that. But they went around and they repeated it, and they put it on different news sites, and they posted it elsewhere. So repetition appeared ultimately to give credibility to it so much so that when you typed in a question about that in AI, it confirmed at least to a certain degree that that lie was in fact true. I mean, that's a reality that we might run into unless they change the learning model.
00:06:50
Speaker 3: We're definitely, particularly with you, Anthropic and ChatGPT, which is open AI, both are very left and everyone there is left. And we're going to have the same issues as we've seen with Google searches with a By the way, so anything Gemini is going to be the same thing where Google basically banishes a lot of conservative sites from their results. And so this has been a big thing in the news business lately, Brian, is that
a lot of these websites are losing tons of traffic now because of AI, because people are going to AI instead of Google and they relied on Google for their traffic. Well, I can't rely on Google for my traffic because we're basically banned from Google. Again, something that we've researched and reported on repeatedly shows up in my first book as well, how Google doesn't allow for people to get to Breitbart stuff unless you put the word Breitbart in the search. So unless you physically search the word Breitbart, you're not getting any of our stories, even if they're exclusive or the authoritative story on that subject matter, which is horrific.
00:07:46
Speaker 2: And I don't know how it's legal, but it's held up to this point. But so then I'm not dependent on them.
00:07:52
Speaker 3: A lot of these websites that you read, a lot of these newspapers that you read are dependent on Google funneling them tons of traffic. And people aren't going to Google to figure out what's going on. They're going to their AIs at this point. So it's kind of interesting that that's a new thing. They're going to get hoisted on their own petard, as the expression goes.
00:08:08
Speaker 1: Well, one might hope, but I mean, a lot of my listeners, I always consider myself like you. We can label ourselves, and it's a positive, weed dwellers when it comes to politics. We can label ourselves weed-drawers when it comes to ferreting through nefarious information versus accurate information. We can search for the truth because we know the trusted news sites, and you, as you pointed out, know how the quote-unquote nefarious forces work, like your illustration with Google. But how are the run-of-the-mill folks who've got more important things to do with their lives and follow the minutiae of this, how are we out there supposed to deal with this in this emerging brave new world, if I can call that, drawing Aldous Huxley reference?
00:08:47
Speaker 3: Well, I'm new as much as I can on the politics and international news front at Breitbart.com.
00:08:53
Speaker 2: So you get the Breitbart app. It's the best thing you can do. That's number one.
00:08:56
Speaker 3: I think that's the first thing you can do because if we're doing stuff, you know it's accurate because, first of all, we have morals and standards.
00:09:03
Speaker 2: But second of all, the fact-checkers are on our case. So anything that is wrong, we're getting corrected the moment it happens.
00:09:10
Speaker 3: And all of you guys are good fact-checkers too. So we keep an eye on what our audience is telling us. If they think something is inaccurate, then they're not going to get it. But overall, I think that there is a huge crisis in credibility and trust in the media, and it's on individual outlets to be able to sort it out. But the people are smart, and there's lots of volume. So if you go to– again, if you're skeptical of a story, I would recommend going to Grok or X, the Everything app, and putting it in the Grok thing.
00:09:42
Speaker 2: Saying, is this accurate?
00:09:43
Speaker 3: And usually you're going to get a pretty good sense of if something's accurate at that point.
00:09:47
Speaker 2: And if you're not convinced, then just don't repeat it to your friends or don't share it with people until you are.
00:09:52
Speaker 1: That's sound advice right there, Alex. Well, and you know, the idea of social media influencers, perhaps that people, and here's my, my often repeated rules for memes. I get memes all the time. I have friends who are just meme fanatics. So I'll get, I'll get 15, 20 in a row from some folks. Sometimes you're like, wow. But most of the times I'm, wait a second, that can't be true. So I'll follow up with it and I'll type in the information that's in a meme and I'll find out, yeah, you know, Andy sent me another one that sounds plausible, but it is not true. So maybe we need to fact check what we're hearing from social media influencers online and various podcasts online.
00:10:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm very interested in exploring this. I was thinking about this recently about how the memes, the individual influencers online, particularly I've been noticing this on the meta platform, Instagram, and I'm not on Facebook a lot, and I'm not on TikTok a lot, but I know the stuff on TikTok is just completely deranged. At this point, TikTok's 100% responsible for the Lindsay Clancy phenomenon that we all were forced to live through that was completely egged on by TikTok. There's so much false stuff from individual creators that's promoted in the algorithms, and then it'll get hundreds of thousands of likes on it, And as a person who runs a pretty big newsroom, I feel very odd, you know, correcting some person with 12,000 followers who had one viral post, but the algorithm does keep pushing the inaccurate posts because people engage with it. And that is a curse. It really is a curse that we're dealing with this right now. And it's very hard to fight through it, especially when you're seeing, you know, Mark Zuckerberg 2.0 is he's been kind of cool to Trump all of a sudden. And so, What's the Trump administration going to do? Just go in there and say, hey, Mark, all these false stuff that make us look bad are going viral. Can you shut that down? It's kind of a weird move. It's kind of a weird move if the White House were to do that. So it's a real new frontier that we're in, and we've got to work through it each and every day.
00:11:52
Speaker 1: Well, haven't we been through that or down that road before with the prior administration and having agents inside Facebooks and other social media platforms?
00:12:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it's not a great look when you learn that Joe Biden was pressuring Trump zuckerberg to change stuff in the election zuckerberg said so it's not a great look so trump's got to be thinking about that but you know on the zuckerberg platforms there's just tons and tons of far-left falsehoods that go viral every day and a lot of people aren't going to be smart about sorting it out is that your audience will my audience will but that's not the whole world unfortunately.
00:12:25
Speaker 1: Well and going back to the number of clicks likes reposts we can't even trust that. I mean, there are bot farms out there that self-serving, politically motivated Chinese Communist Party bot farms that seek to undermine America's interests and will stir the pot of whatever it's in its best interest by giving the appearance that any given post is popular.
00:12:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, totally right.
00:12:47
Speaker 3: It's very, it's just, it's so challenging out there in this regard because so many people buy followers so you think they're credible because you have a lot of followers, but a lot of them aren't real. There's a lot of followers who are, you know, foreign, but, but that just means we can't count who they are. It's not that I, we have an international audience too.
00:13:04
Speaker 2: That's great.
00:13:05
Speaker 3: But a lot of them are these farms that are overseas and they're simulating lots of people and they're not in a lot of the engagement. You can see a lot of the engagement on certain platforms is AI. I noticed this in my mentions on certain platforms that a lot of it is just clearly not a human being who wrote it. It's just really sloppy AI stuff that people are doing to try to build their own accounts by engaging with other accounts. And It is very hard to sort out what's real and what's fiction now. So that's why I recommend get some books, go take a walk, go touch some grass. Don't spend your whole day on the Internet.
00:13:35
Speaker 1: And log in at 7 p.m. EmpowerYouAmerica.org where my guest today from Breitbart, Alex Marlow, will be doing economics, polls, and trolls. You can talk to him, ask questions. This is going to be a nice one. You have interactive exchange, and he can give you a lot more information about what we scratched the surface on this morning on the Breitbart Inside Scoop. Thank you, Alex, for everything that you do throughout the week. I appreciate your teaming up with Andrew Breitbart so many years ago and doing the great work that he started. I look forward to having your team back on the program next Tuesday at the same time. Have a great week and enjoy the seminar tonight, my friend.