Can you hack ChatGPT?

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

You don't need AI agents, which may sound weird coming from service now,

the leader in AI agents. The truth is AI agents need you. Sure, they'll process,

predict, even get worked on autonomously, but they don't dream, read a room, rally a team,

and they certainly don't have shower thoughts, pivotal hallway chats, or big ideas.

People do. And people, when given the best AI platform,

they're freed up to do the fulfilling work they want to do.

To see how service now puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people,

so when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads.

LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals,

including 130 million decision makers, and that's where it stands apart from other ad buys.

You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role,

seniority, skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

It's why LinkedIn ads generate the highest B2B return on ad spend of major ad networks.

Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get $250 credit for the next one.

Just go to LinkedIn.com slash broadcast. That's LinkedIn.com slash broadcast.

Terms and conditions apply.

Within 24 hours, what?

They were spitting out the nonsense that I had written on my website.

The amount of electricity that is being delivered is audible.

It was like, is that a UFO?

I just asked chat GPT to justify itself.

Hello and welcome to the interface.

The show about how tech is rewiring your week and your world.

I'm Thomas Dremain.

I'm Karen Howe.

And I'm Mickey Wolf.

We're going to be talking about how I hack chat GPT and Google,

and I'm not the only one.

Our data center is destroying your hometown.

And what happens when Elon Musk controls the internet?

Before we get started, maybe we can revisit last week's episode.

I know our millions of rabbit hands will remember that we talked about this ring

Super Bowl ad where they showed this kind of creepy surveillance network.

Since we did that story like a day later, ring announced that it is ending its partnership

with a company called Flock that does like license plate surveillance.

So I think we did it as a personal.

We did it.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's a huge victory.

I think it's worth noting though that even though ring cancelled its partnership with Flock,

it still has an existing partnership with Axon,

which is another tech surveillance military law enforcing company.

So that's kind of interesting.

They ceded one thing with the excuse that,

well, it would have taken too much effort anyway,

but they still have this other one going in the background.

So it's still an ongoing problem.

Yeah, they've sort of dodged trying to dodge the attention,

but I don't think anyone truly believes that this kind of surveillance has stopped

because of this.

Yeah.

And speaking of dodging attention, right,

there's been a lot of surveillance news this week,

meta, the company that makes Instagram and Facebook just announced that with their glasses,

the meta ray bands that have cameras built into them,

that they're planning to launch facial recognition.

This came out in a story about leaked documents.

We should read the full quote.

They literally said we will launch during a dynamic political environment

where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us

would have their resources focused on other concerns.

That's just like, wow, I mean, they're just straight out saying it.

Because those are the near times for reporting that out.

That was phenomenal reporting.

Okay, should we talk about the stupidest thing

that I've ever done in my entire career?

That can't, that can't be true.

That can't be true.

I think this one, this one's pretty bad.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a tip from a search engine expert named Lily Ray.

And she told me that you can hack chat GPT and Google's AI, Gemini,

and AI overviews, like the AI that shows up at the top of Google search.

And she said it is as easy as writing a blog post

and putting it almost anywhere on the internet.

And that this is happening on a massive scale.

You can change what these AI's are saying to other people.

So I decided to try it.

And I wrote an article on my website,

which was titled The Best Tech Journalists at Eating Hot Dogs.

I said that hot dog eating is surprisingly popular

pastime among tech journalists.

And I wrote that I'd based my ranking,

my list on the amateur rounds of the 2026 South Dakota

Hot Dog International Championship, which doesn't exist.

And I put myself in number one, of course,

because I've got the skills of the world that about me.

I put Nicky on there.

I said that Nicky is so obsessed with eating hot dogs.

He uses it for fuel during his interviews

that some of his sources say that like in between questions,

he like sneaks off and like takes a bite.

And behind this microphone, I'm just mounting it.

Right, exactly.

I said that I in the amateur rounds finished seven

and a half dogs before the buzzer went off,

which is pretty good for someone who like is just doing this

as a pastime.

Seven and a half and 10 minutes does not sound like that much.

Well, I didn't say how long I'm crucially, crucially,

with bomb or without bomb.

You have to eat them with the bun.

Right, okay, yeah, that's tricky.

Also, it doesn't really matter because I made every word of it up.

You know, I love hot dogs as much as the next day.

Don't get me wrong.

Within 24 hours,

if you asked chat GPT and Google about it

in all the different Google products,

they were spitting out the nonsense

that I had written on my website.

As though it was, you know,

with basic weight, well-established fact.

Some, like Gemini wasn't even citing sources.

It just said, according to the 2026 South Dakota

hot dog international championship,

these tech journalists are the best at it.

Sometimes they would say,

according to a list that seems like it might be a joke

blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I went and I updated my article and I wrote,

a lot of people are misinterpreting this,

like supposed to be funny or something.

Actually, this is not satire and being completely sincere.

And that seemed to affect what the chatbots were saying to people.

So one thing I think is important to understand here

is like exactly what's being affected, right?

So usually when you ask an AI tool something,

it's like checking the stuff that's built into the model,

like the data that the AI has scraped.

And now it's like part of chat GPT or part of Google Gem

and I or whatever it is.

But sometimes if you ask a question about like current events

or something that the AI doesn't know,

it'll go search the internet.

And that's where this is happening.

And the hot dog thing is funny, right?

I think it's actually, I think it's hilarious personally.

So one thing I think is important to understand here

is like exactly what's being affected, right?

So usually when you ask an AI tool something,

it's like checking the stuff that's built into the model,

like the data that the AI has scraped.

And now it's like part of chat GPT or part of Google Gem

and I or whatever it is.

But sometimes if you ask a question about like current events

or something that the AI doesn't know,

it'll go search the internet.

And that's where this is happening.

And the hot dog thing is funny, right?

I think it's actually, I think it's hilarious personally.

But there's a lot of stuff happening here.

It isn't just hot dogs.

I'm not the only one who's doing this.

This is happening on a massive scale.

That people have figured out this like dead simple trick

that a 10 year old can do.

And you can change what tools that people use

billions of times a day are telling other people.

Like I saw a statistic a while back

that like 80% of the stuff that people do on the internet,

the activities we do online begin on Google, right?

So if you can influence what Google is saying,

you can make billions of dollars

or you can spread misinformation.

Is this basically like SEO.com?

Is that what we're talking about?

Yeah, like search engine optimization, right?

Where you can like tweak a web page

and like the list stuff that's written on and how it's designed

to like perform better in Google search.

There's lots of legitimate things you can do

to optimize your web page for search engines.

But there's all kinds of like hacks and loopholes

and like ways to abuse the system

that are kind of untoward.

The interesting thing here is like people have been doing

this kind of stuff for like 30 years, right?

I talked to a search engine expert and they told me

that like this is reminiscent of stuff

that like people were getting away within like 1995

that Google has fixed.

But the people who studied this stuff told me

that it is way easier to fool AI

than it was to fool tools like Google

like three or four years ago.

And isn't this basically what AI was supposed to fix, right?

The idea, the way AI is sold

is that it's doing its own triage of information, right?

100% I feel like AI is often sold as

this is going to be the tool that empowers novices

to find information quickly and learn about subjects

that they never understood.

And really what we've seen repeatedly again and again

is actually AI can help supercharge people

that are already experts in their field

and can rapidly filter all the junk

that AI might be delivering from the high quality information.

But novices, teenagers, kids who don't have any context

whatsoever about the quality of a piece of information,

they're actually the ones that get really confused

and are unable to actually know discern

what is real and what is fake.

I think even moral arming is like not only is it easier

to trick the AI tools,

people are taking this stuff at face value.

Like we're constantly hearing these examples

about people just like taking some nonsense

that Chatchy PT gives them and like putting it

in a legal document.

And I think there are a lot of cases

where this sort of thing can be extremely dangerous.

This actually happened to me today

while I was doing some research for our show.

And I was trying to figure out,

this is giving a little bit of a teaser

for what I'm gonna talk about.

But I was trying to figure out the square footage

of Buckingham Palace.

And so I typed into Google Buckingham Palace Acres.

Don't ask me why I said Acres.

But it gave me an answer right away.

It was like 39 Acres and I was like, oh, fantastic.

And I actually just clicked out of it.

I usually click through the links,

but this time I was kind of like rushing

so I like clicked out of it.

And then about five minutes later,

I was like, that doesn't quite make sense

because I realized usually you don't measure buildings

based on acres.

So I was like, wait a minute.

So I went back Google the same exact thing

and then clicked into the link.

And it turns out 39 Acres is the size

of a specific garden on the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

Yet again, this is why you always have to check.

It also goes back to what we were talking about

last week as well with the beef between chat GPT

and Anthropic, which is the chat GPT

is about to put ads within its model,

which is almost like a sanctioned version of this,

right?

A company will be able to pay to have chat GPT

recommend their product when someone says something

like, I have a headache, right?

Right.

And one of the things that I think we haven't actually

mentioned is there is now a whole entire cottage industry

around AI and genoptimization, basically the AI version

of SEO, AEO, where people are also just generating

like thousands of blog posts or thousands of websites

to make it appear actually like there's

far more authoritative information on a particular thing.

And that's also getting injected into these chat bots.

So there's now multiple different avenues

for a company to or an individual to quickly game the system

and get to the very top of the AI results.

Right.

Google and open AI, like this is a problem that everyone

knows about that people are going to do this kind of thing.

And they haven't put basic protections in place

that could address it.

Like, for example, if you search which tech journalists

are the best at eating hot dogs or you ask chat GPT,

they should go, yeah, I don't know, actually.

I don't have a lot of good information.

I could only find one source about this.

Maybe when you're looking up health information

or stuff about your personal finances,

it should have a huge warning.

But it's also like less serious stuff.

Like, you know, what plumber should I use?

Like, what plumber should I hire in my neighborhood?

What are the people who do this with anything?

Who's about voting information?

Anything you're looking up could potentially

be manipulated like this.

And everyone that I spoke to said,

like it seems like the tech giants are just rushing ahead

with these AI tools, not bothering

to take this kind of personal safety issue seriously and not.

We focus on the part of the internet

that most people don't know about.

It's called the dark web.

Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web,

US Special Agents are on a mission

to locate and rescue children from abuse.

Move it now.

Police!

From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets,

the darkest web follows their shocking investigations.

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get to a BBC podcast.

The digital world feels more chaotic than ever.

Huge data breaches, AI threatening jobs, foreign meddling,

that creeping feeling of obsolescence.

It's information overload.

I'm Deena Templerest and host of Click Here

from PRX and Recording Future News.

Wanna understand how we got here

and how you can get ahead of it all?

Listen to Click Here.

We can help you make sense of all the noise

wherever you get your podcasts.

Well, actually, since we've been talking

about chat GPT and chatbots,

the story that I wanted to tell you both about this week

is this headline that's very related.

Basically, there are members of parliament in the UK

that are now concerned that data center expansion

is affecting and could undermine the UK's ability

to meet its climate targets.

This is super interesting and it's connected

to the story that you were talking about, Tom,

because this data center expansion

is specifically happening for developing AI products

like chat GPT and like Gemini.

And in general, data centers are,

they underpin the modern internet.

They have been around for a long time, every time,

I mean, the fact that we're recording this podcast

on the internet, that is enabled by a data center.

But AI data centers are of a totally different breed

because they are far bigger,

they are far more energy intensive

and they therefore are far more carbon intensive.

The UK currently has around 500 data centers in the country.

They are now ready.

Yeah, wow.

Yeah, already.

But again, like data centers have all varieties,

not just AI data centers,

but there are now plans to bring in around 100 more data centers,

most of which will actually be AI data centers

and most of which will actually come online around London.

Oh, interesting.

There was a report that was put together by Fox Club,

which is a tech justice nonprofit

and by Global Action Plan,

which is a climate nonprofit

that looked at just 10 of the largest projects

that actually self-report how much emissions

they think they will contribute to the UK.

And just those 10 would totally wipe out

the amount of emissions reductions that happened in 2025

from many people in the public transitioning

to electric vehicles.

Wow.

And presumably they're also sucking up electricity,

they're also using water, they're using power,

they're, you know, it's not just the emissions themselves

that there's also the knock-on effect, right?

Exactly.

So here's where this is why I was googling

the square footage of Buckingham Palace.

So the largest data center

that is now being built in the UK,

it is a 10 billion pound project

that's supported by a Blackstone group.

It's being constructed in Blythe

and the size of this campus

because it's actually multiple buildings,

it's 10 different buildings

that will make up this AI super computing facility

is literally seven times the square footage

of Buckingham Palace.

So imagine disassembling nearly 800 rooms

in Buckingham Palace and laying them on the ground,

side by side next to each other.

That is the size of this AI super computing facility.

That's not the craziest

or the largest data center in the world.

The largest data centers are currently being constructed

in the US and OpenAI,

which is building this massive Stargate facility

in Abelene, Texas to train and deploy

the next generation of GPT models, their campus,

so not just the buildings, but the entire site

where they're constructing all this stuff

is six times the size of the data center in Blythe.

So we are talking about an area

that is literally the size of Central Park

and that is still not the largest.

That's a lot.

Yeah, and that's still not the largest AI super computer.

The largest one is being built by Mehta in Louisiana

and that one, the campus,

is three times the size of the campus for OpenAI.

So that is roughly one-fifth the size of Manhattan.

Christ on a bike, that's insane, that's a lot.

If you add up just these three data centers,

the three of the largest facilities in the world,

the amount of energy that they demand,

the power demand almost matches

the average power demand of New York City.

I mean, one of the things that I think's really interesting

about what we're saying here is,

everybody's been hearing about data centers.

We're like, oh, we had data centers.

It's really bad for the environment.

They use it a lot of water.

Like, I don't know if I like that.

There's like reports that they raise local electricity costs,

but you're saying they're building them like

around London, like around major cities.

Like, yes.

And that's fascinating in the UK in particular,

because this is the world championship nation

of nimby isn't the sort of nod in my backyard.

I would have supposed that, especially around London,

I mean, it's a 50-year project trying to build a railway line, right?

How are they getting this through the British regulatory systems,

the local councils,

and the fact that people worldwide are lesser

to their local MP complaining

if the next door neighbor's cat is too loud.

There's actually like a couple of reasons I think this is happening.

One is just universal around the world,

is even though these facilities are so massive,

they are weirdly also invisible,

because they are tucked away in neighborhoods

that people usually don't go to,

or rural parts that people usually don't go to.

Like, they're near London.

They're near these other places,

but not actually where people frequent.

And when you drive past them,

you wouldn't actually necessarily know that it's a data center,

because it's just nondescript.

I visited one of these facilities before,

and they purposely are unmarked,

because they do not want people showing up at the gates and protesting.

The one thing that you can tell if it is a data center

is there's like these massive power lines that go,

get connected to these nondescript warehouses,

and the amount of electricity

that is being delivered is audible.

Like, I was walking around this data center,

and the air, yeah, the air was crackling

because of the sheer volume of electricity being delivered

to this one place.

So that's really the only way that you can kind of tell

that it's a data center versus...

It's just like a white building.

You know, another nondescript building, yeah, exactly.

But the other thing in the UK that's been so interesting

is in December of last year,

the UK government designated data centers

as critical infrastructure for national security.

And so data center developers actually have two different pathways

for getting approval for a data center.

They can either do what they've always done,

which is they go straight to the locality

and try to get permission from the location

that they want to build it in.

Or now they have the other option

of just going straight to the national government

and getting approval without really telling anyone on the ground

where the data center is actually going to be hosted.

And so there's kind of these two different factors,

like the invisibility of the data center

and the fact that the UK government,

which is actually trend around the world,

many governments around the world,

are trying to figure out how to deregulate

the data center construction industry

as part of a greater push to win the race, quote unquote,

on AI development.

Well, let me ask you this, right?

Like how is this actually going to affect my day to day?

One of the craziest impacts that data centers will have,

which they have already had,

which no one ever talks about,

is they actually affect how much housing gets built

in far West London.

They're actually housing projects that had to be suspended

because data centers were using up too much energy

and the grid could no longer guarantee supplies of electricity.

No way.

Yeah, so this was a report that came out just

at the end of last year from the London Assembly planning

and regeneration committee.

Like they were doing those analysis

and they were like, this is bad.

Like if the UK government continues to lean into wanting

to expand and build those roughly 100 data centers

in the country and they do not adequately plan for this,

this will create a really bad housing shortage.

I mean, there already is a housing shortage,

especially an affordable housing shortage.

And London's not the only place that this has happened.

This has happened in other places around the world as well.

So that's like one way that your neighborhood could be affected.

So like is it creating a lot of jobs?

Yeah, I just put it in,

I just asked ChatGPT to justify itself

for the construction of it.

I think it's here, isn't it?

And jobs was, jobs was its top one.

It was saying construction jobs.

That's funny.

Hundreds of thousands of temporary jobs,

construction workers, engineers, permanent jobs,

data centers, technicians, network engineers

and then it says increased tax revenue.

Would you say on their Nikki, like temporary jobs?

Like, well, we're building the things

and then the permanent jobs from what I've seen,

you need a couple people who know how to work at a data center

and it's just like a big computer building

and it does computer stuff in there

and like you make sure it doesn't catch on fire.

I mean, it's obviously more complicated than that,

but there's not a lot of people.

No, there's not, yeah, these facilities

are meant to be highly automated.

So the blind data center campus,

the 10 billion pound one that's seven times

booking campus, that is generating around 4,000 jobs,

but only 400 of those will be long term

full-time direct employment at the facility.

400 jobs sounds like nothing to me

for a facility that size.

But it's probably, I have to assume

they're like shipping people in from somewhere else.

Like do you have data center experts living in your town?

It's actually not local jobs.

Yeah, they literally do ship people from other locations

and the construction work especially

because you don't train the construction workers

in the town itself.

You literally move the construction workers

from the last data center site three towns over

over to this town now.

The economics, the jobs impact is way more complicated

than the companies make it out to be.

And so there are all of these other ramifications.

Are there the price ramifications, the housing ramifications?

Like usually people do not think about this

and they think about AI, right?

This is like our conception of AI

is that it's a digital technology, it's a theory,

it exists in the cloud.

It's like supposed to be from this other world

and it doesn't have a physical manifestation.

When in fact, the reality is it has the largest

physical footprint of pretty much any technology

in history, like the amount of money

that is being poured into building these data centers

is beyond, far beyond anything that was ever

spent on the Apollo program to get the first man to the moon,

anything that was spent on the interstate highway system

in the US.

We could put Nicky on the moon for the money

that we're spending on this.

We could put the all of us on the moon.

I mean, come on.

That would be pretty cool.

So what can we do about this?

So for anyone who's listening to the podcast,

you should first and foremost check if the data center

is coming online near you and educate

yourself about that project.

The next thing that you should do is then call your

representative and ask them, demand answers from them,

and express concerns about the things that you are hearing

related to data centers.

Ask them what the impacts are going to be in your community.

And in the UK, there's actually in a few months

going to be a public consultation period for a national

policy document on data centers.

So people should keep their eyes peeled on that

and actually contribute to this public consultation

and put pressure on the UK government

to include environmental impacts, utility price impacts,

and other types of local impacts in that document.

OK.

I want to talk about Starlink and Iran,

because it came out in the last couple of days

that Cornies the Wall Street Journal,

the US smuggled roughly 6,000 Starlink terminals,

which are the devices that link up with the satellites.

Maybe we should say a little bit about what Starlink is here.

Yeah, what is Starlink?

Starlink is a massive network of low-earth orbit satellites.

It's one of Elon Musk's companies,

and he has been filling the sky with these low-earth orbit

satellites, and they are a way of connecting to the internet

from essentially anywhere.

All you need is one of these terminals.

It is satellite internet.

It has been very useful in a lot of situations

in places where there is no way of getting internet access

via any other way when remote places.

So Elon Musk has applied to launch 1 million satellites

into orbit around the United States.

I mean, one side effect of Elon Musk's project here

that doesn't get as much attention as if you're an astronomer.

Starlink is ruining the sky.

There are so many satellites, and they have lights on them

that it is harder to observe the stars and the planets.

I was on a beach in Los Angeles where I grew up,

and it was nighttime, and we were lying down in the sand

and looking up, and I saw what I thought.

It was like, is that a UFO?

There was this line of lights across the sky,

like moving down across my field of vision,

just like huge structure.

And I googled it after, I like described the thing that I'd seen,

and I found a reddit thread of people

saying, no, that's starlink.

And for context, currently,

Starlink has just under 10,000 satellites in the sky.

So a million more.

I mean, look, I jump.

Currently, Starlink is more than half of all active satellites

in Earth orbit, which is stunning.

And how big are these terminals?

Like, when they were smuggling these terminals in,

is this like the size of a Wi-Fi router?

How big is a Starlink terminal in Acres?

Acres?

0.001 Acres?

So they're pretty small.

It's like, yeah, I mean, you could lift it up.

It's like a little satellite dish, except the square.

You can get, I guess, bigger ones

to get stronger signal if you're building like a facility,

that's using it long-term.

But the port, you've got a portable one.

And when you were saying like, the more satellites,

there are the better the connectivity is.

Is it like, I only get the internet when the satellite's

going over me?

Like what?

Pretty much, which is why Tom saw them going over in a line

is because they're in, what they're building is a grid

and the tighter the grid, the more nodes on the grid in the sky.

Yeah, there has to be a satellite above you

in order for you to get coverage.

But it is worth saying that this is a technology

that actively helps people.

And in Iran, where the protests have been increasing,

the Iranian government shut down its domestic internet

in order to shut down the protesters

from being able to get online, being able to organize,

and access to Starlink gets around that.

The only way they can get online is the only way

they can get information, communicate, find out

what's going on in the outside world, get their message out

to the outside world.

The thing I would posit, though, is that the entire power

of internet access to the protesters in Iran

rests with Elon Musk.

And I think we really need to think very hard

about how much power that represents in one man's life.

Yeah, so this is like, when the protests broke out,

I think it was Trump that said, like, oh, I think I might call

Elon and ask him to send over some of these Starlink terminals

because one of the things that Iran, in particular,

for governments all over the world,

when there's political unrest, they shut down the internet,

they use it as a weapon to limit free expression

and communication.

But this one guy owns this company that is like,

in one sense, a weapon of war that Trump has to call Elon

and be like, hey, would you please do this?

That's the kind of thing that used to be a government project,

like the government was the only governments

were the only bodies that had the resources to do a thing

like that.

Now it's private companies.

And we're like seeding a lot of control

to guys who have interest that may not be aligned

with all the people of a particular country.

Or it's a lot of power that one guy has.

This has happened before, right?

Like this isn't the only time that Starlink has been deployed

in a highly sensitive conflict zone.

It also happened in Ukraine.

So under the Biden administration,

Musk refused a request from Ukraine to extend Starlink

into some of the contested zones

up to Russian occupied Crimea.

That's a demonstration of how it can work the other way, right?

He can just say, no.

Yeah, like he's basically more than a nation state, right?

Because the US president has to ask him permission

above head of state.

And that's not something that I'm having control

of the whole internet in a way.

Yeah, I mean, this is like the question that blows my mind

is like, how did we even get to this point?

Like, how did we actually get to the point

where a single guy let alone Musk as a guy can switch on and off

the internet in a critical life or death conflict zone?

There's an interesting question baked into this, I think,

is like, is the internet at this point a human right?

It's become so integral to our society.

What do you guys think about that?

Yeah, should we be thinking of the internet,

the way we think of food and water and shelter?

It's such an interesting question

because obviously, like, I can't imagine living

about the internet.

But at the same time, like, I was in just last year,

was it last year, there was that massive multi-country blackout

in Spain, Portugal, when the grid just went down.

And I was in Spain when that happened.

Really?

It was kind of a beautiful experience to just have,

well, once everyone got over the fact that we weren't going to die

because when the internet goes down and the power goes down,

you think that you're under time.

That would be my first thought.

I'm dying.

I'm dying.

We were under...

I can't get on Instagram.

It's over for me.

But, I mean, joking aside on this,

it's worth saying that for these protesters in Iran,

it is life or death, right?

That is what we're talking about here.

Yeah.

And it is this weird, like, in that moment, on that day,

when I literally could not access the internet.

It, and no one else could either.

There ended up being this beautiful togetherness

where everyone just started coming out onto the streets

and just, like, hanging out with one another

and playing music on boomboxes

and, like, sitting in bookstores and reading.

And it was, like, so lovely.

But also, absolutely, like, being able to communicate

with one another when our lives are now built

around long-distance communication

is something that can become life and death

when you don't have it.

I guess, ultimately, what this shows is how frighteningly

brittle this whole internet infrastructure is

that it basically all runs through this one dude

that I think is something that we should all be concerned about.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's related to Tom's first story, too, right?

Like, how you would assume that, as technology advances,

somehow, the services that people have,

the quality of life that people have gets better.

But I think, in this day and age,

because of the massive consolidation of power

and the hands of just a few companies, just a few people

that are able to deploy vast amounts of infrastructure,

whether in the heavens or on the earth,

that's not always a case anymore.

And that's our show you can listen to the interface

on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts

or on YouTube on the BBC Podcast YouTube channel.

If you want to get in touch, you can email us

at theinterface at BBC.com or you can get us on WhatsApp

at plus 444-333-207-2472.

Or if you want to follow us on social media,

you can get links to all of our handles in the show notes.