Can you hack ChatGPT?

Summary

The Interface (BBC) – Episode Summary

Episode Title: Can you hack ChatGPT?
Release Date: February 19, 2026
Hosts: Thomas Germain, Karen Hao, and Mickey (Nicky) Wolfe

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Episode Overview

In this lively and incisive episode, the hosts investigate the vulnerabilities of AI search engines like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, highlighting how easily their outputs can be manipulated via basic online hacks. They also explore the explosion of energy-intensive AI data centers and discuss Elon Musk’s growing geopolitical influence through Starlink’s satellite internet. Throughout, the team keeps the conversation sharp, humorous, and jargon-free, making sense of the technological shifts that are reshaping society and power.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Hacking ChatGPT and Google Gemini – The Hot Dog Test

Time: 03:43–13:27

How Easy Is It to Hack An AI?

• Thomas Germain recounts a prank where he wrote a fake blog post about tech journalists excelling in a fictitious hot dog eating contest.
  • "Within 24 hours, if you asked ChatGPT and Google about it... they were spitting out the nonsense that I had written on my website as though it was, you know, basic, well established fact." (08:02, Thomas Germain)
• He changed details in real-time and watched as AI tools updated their answers accordingly.
• This points to a fundamental vulnerability: modern AI chatbots scrape recent web content for answers, making them easy to manipulate with even low-effort misinformation.

Concerns About Scale and Impact

• Old SEO "dark arts" have found new life in gaming AI-driven search—except now it’s even easier, and the stakes are higher.
  • "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." (07:21, Thomas Germain)
• This affects both trivial topics and crucial ones (e.g., health advice, local services, or voting info).
• Major tech companies are aware but seem to lack or delay protective measures.

Who’s Most at Risk?

• Karen Hao: Novices, including teenagers and kids, are easily misled, unable to discern junk from trustworthy information.
  • "AI can help supercharge people that are already experts... but novices... are unable to actually know, discern what is real and what is fake." (09:40, Karen Hao)
• The trio notes chatbots will soon display paid ads within answers, further muddying the mix of accurate and sponsored information.

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2. AI Data Centers: The Hidden Cost

Time: 14:01–26:04

A New Environmental Threat

• The UK plans major new data center developments, mostly for AI like ChatGPT and Gemini.
• Reported emissions from just 10 of these new projects would negate the UK’s 2025 carbon savings from EV adoption. (15:33, Karen Hao)
• The size and energy demands are staggering:
  • Blythe, UK: A single complex will be 7x the square footage of Buckingham Palace.
  • OpenAI in Texas: Their new site is six times the Blythe campus, covering an area close to Central Park.
  • Meta’s project in Louisiana: 3x larger than the Texas site—about 1/5 the size of Manhattan.
  • "The amount of energy that they demand... almost matches the average power demand of New York City." (18:19, Karen Hao)

Invisibility and Political Loopholes

• Data centers are deliberately nondescript and often located where few notice.
  • "When you drive past them, you wouldn't actually necessarily know that it's a data center because it's just nondescript." (19:31, Karen Hao)
• In the UK, data centers are now deemed "critical infrastructure," allowing companies to bypass local planning for national approval.
• Governments globally are deregulating construction to "win the AI race," sometimes at the expense of transparency and local oversight.

Local Impacts

• Housing shortages: In parts of West London, residential developments were suspended due to grid constraints from data center power demands. (22:08)
• Minimal permanent jobs: Massive, expensive centers yield relatively few direct jobs (e.g., only 400 staff at the £10B Blythe site), and teams are often imported.

Action Steps

• Karen Hao urges listeners in affected communities to get informed and participate in public consultations, pressing for environmental and local impact assessments.

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3. Starlink, Geopolitics, and Musk’s Power

Time: 26:56–35:01

What Is Starlink?

• A massive satellite internet network built by Elon Musk's SpaceX, providing connectivity (and bypassing government shutdowns) anywhere there’s a terminal.
  • "Currently Starlink is more than half of all active satellites in Earth orbit, which is stunning." (29:11, Karen Hao)

Starlink in Conflict Zones

• Recently, 6,000 illicit Starlink terminals were smuggled into Iran to give protesters uncensored access after government blackouts.
• Nicky Wolfe: "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 head." (30:49)
• Musk has previously refused Ukraine’s request to extend Starlink to Crimea, demonstrating unilateral power over critical infrastructure.

What If Control Is So Centralized?

• Concerns: A single private individual now has influence rivaling nation states. Heads of government must ask Musk for access—he can simply say no.
• Raises uncomfortable questions about whether internet access is now a human right—and if so, how society should regulate or distribute such power.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On AI Vulnerability:
  • "It is way easier to fool AI than it was to fool tools like Google like three or four years ago." (08:54, Thomas Germain)
• On AI Optimization:
  • "There is now a whole entire cottage industry around AI engine optimization — basically the AI version of SEO..." (11:46, Karen Hao)
• On Starlink’s Reach:
  • "Currently, Starlink is more than half of all active satellites in Earth orbit, which is stunning." (29:11, Karen Hao)
• On Musk’s Power:
  • "He’s basically more than a nation state. Right. Because the US President has to ask him permission...” (32:29, Karen Hao)
• On the Internet as a Human Right:
  • "Should we be thinking of the Internet the way we think of food and water and shelter?" (33:13, Mickey Wolfe)
  • "For these protesters in Iran, it is life or death. Right? That is what we're talking about here." (33:56, Mickey Wolfe)
• On AI’s Physical Impact:
  • "The reality is it [AI] has the largest physical footprint of pretty much any technology in history." (24:46, Karen Hao)
• On Centralized Tech Power:
  • "Because of the massive consolidation of power in the hands of just a few companies, just a few people... That's not always the case anymore." (35:18, Karen Hao)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment / Topic | |-----------|-------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:43 | Recap of the Ring/Flock surveillance news | | 05:00 | Thomas’s “Best Tech Journalists at Eating Hot Dogs” prank | | 08:20 | AI and search engine optimization vulnerabilities | | 10:27 | How the AI tools mislead people (Buckingham Palace anecdote) | | 14:01 | UK data center expansion and climate impact | | 16:19 | Size and scale of global AI data centers | | 18:55 | Location, invisibility, and fast-tracking of data centers | | 22:08 | Local impacts—housing shortages in London | | 26:56 | What is Starlink? Musk, geopolitics, and Iran | | 32:10 | Musk’s refusal to extend Starlink to Crimea | | 33:02 | Debate: Is internet access a human right? | | 34:44 | Fragility of internet infrastructure | | 35:18 | The world built by tech titans—do we want it? |

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Tone & Language

The hosts maintain a smart, conversational, and often humorous tone, parsing daunting tech issues with clarity and wit. They blend skepticism toward tech giants with comradely banter and a sense of urgency regarding the societal stakes of unchecked technological expansion.

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For Listeners: Why This Episode Matters

Whether you’re concerned about misinformation, the hidden physical and environmental footprint of digital life, or the unsettling fusion of tech and geopolitical power, this episode sheds light on the often-invisible ways technology is restructuring our world—and the importance of scrutiny and public engagement as that happens.

Transcript

[Mickey Wolfe]

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[Thomas Germain]

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[Dina Temple-Raston]

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 Dina Temple Rastin, host of Click Here from prx and recorded future news. Want to 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 podcast.

[Karen Howe]

Yes,

[Thomas Germain]

Within 24 hours.

[Karen Howe]

What?

[Thomas Germain]

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

[Karen Howe]

The amount of electricity that is being delivered is audible.

[Thomas Germain]

It was like, Is that a UFO?

[Mickey Wolfe]

I just asked ChatGPT to justify itself.

[Thomas Germain]

Hello and welcome to the Interface, the show about how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Thomas Germain.

[Karen Howe]

I'm Karen Howe.

[Mickey Wolfe]

And I'm Mickey Wolfe.

[Thomas Germain]

We're going to be talking about how I hacked ChatGPT and Google, and I'm not the only one.

[Karen Howe]

Are data centers destroying your hometown?

[Mickey Wolfe]

And what happens when Elon Musk controls the Internet?

[Thomas Germain]

Before we get started, maybe we can revisit last week's episode. I know our millions of Rabbit fans 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. Personal.

[Karen Howe]

We did it.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah, it was. So that's a. That's a huge victory.

[Karen Howe]

I think it's worth noting, though, that even though Ring canceled its partnership with Flock, it still has an existing partnership with Axon, which is another tech surveillance military law enforcement 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

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.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah.

[Thomas Germain]

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 bans that have cameras built into them, that they are planning to launch facial recognition. This came out in a story about leaked documents.

[Karen Howe]

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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

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

[Karen Howe]

Kudos to the New York Times for reporting that out. That was phenomenal reporting.

[Thomas Germain]

Okay, should we talk about the stupidest thing that I've ever done in my entire career?

[Mickey Wolfe]

That can't. That can't be true. That can't be true.

[Thomas Germain]

Can I think this one. This one's pretty bad. A couple weeks ago, I got a tip from a search engine expert named Lily Ray, and she told me that you can hack ChatGPT and Google's AI Gemini and AI overviews. You know, like the. 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 AIs 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 a surprisingly popular pastime among tech journalists. And I wrote that I based my. 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 at number one, of course. Right. Because I've got the skills. Everybody knows that about me. I put Nikki on there. I said that Nikki is so obsessed with eating hot dogs that 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Yeah. And behind this microphone, I'm just munching.

[Thomas Germain]

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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Seven and a half and ten minutes does not sound like that much. Well, I didn't say, crucially, with bun or without bun, you have to eat

[Thomas Germain]

them with the Bun that right.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Okay. Yeah, that's trickier. Yeah.

[Thomas Germain]

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 guy. Don't get me wrong. Within 24 hours, if you asked ChatGPT and Google about it and all the different Google products, they were spitting out the nonsense that I had written on my website as though it was, you know, basic, well established fact. Sometimes 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, blah. So I went and I updated my article and I wrote. A lot of people are misinterpreting this like it's supposed to be funny or something. Actually, this is not satire. I'm 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 ChatGPT or part of Google Gemini 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 ChatGPT or part of Google Gemini 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Is this basically like SEO Dark arts? Is that what we're talking about here?

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah, like search engine optimization, right? Where you can like tweak a web page, like the stuff that's written on and how it's designed to like perform better in Google search, uh, there's lots of legitimate things you can do to optimize your webpage for search engines, but there's all kinds of like, you know, 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? Uh, I talked to a search engine expert and they told me that like this is reminiscent of stuff that like people were getting away with in like 1995 that Google has fixed. But the, the people who study 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

And isn't this basically what AI was supposed to fix? Right. The idea, the way AI is sold is that it's a, it's doing it, it's doing its own triage of information. Right?

[Karen Howe]

100%. I feel like AI is often sold as this is going to be, 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, they're actually the ones that get really confused, confused and get, are unable to actually know, discern what is real and what is fake.

[Thomas Germain]

I think even more alarming 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 ChatGPT 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.

[Karen Howe]

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 going to 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 then I was like, wait a minute. So I went back, Googled 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. This is why you always have to check.

[Mickey Wolfe]

This also goes back to what we were talking about last week as well, with the beef between ChatGPT and Anthropic, which is that ChatGPT is about to put ads within its model, which is almost like a sanctioned version of this. Right. Like a company will be able to Pay to have ChatGPT recommend their product. When someone says something like, I have a headache. Right, Right.

[Karen Howe]

And one of the things that I think we haven't actually mentioned is there is now a whole entire cottage industry around AI engine optimization, 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 chatbots. So there's now, yeah, multiple different avenues for a company to.

[Thomas Germain]

Or.

[Karen Howe]

Or an individual to quickly game the system and get to the very top of the AI results.

[Thomas Germain]

Right. Google and OpenAI, 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 ChatGPT, 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? Or whatever. People could do this with anything about voting information. Anything that 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 enough.

[Dina Temple-Raston]

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 Dina Temple Rastin, host of Click Here from PRX and Recorded Future News. Want to 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.

[Karen Howe]

Well, actually, since we've been talking about ChatGPT 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 ChatGPT and like Gemini. And in general, data centers are they underpinned 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Already.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Wow.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah, already. But again, like data centers of 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.

[Thomas Germain]

Oh, interesting.

[Karen Howe]

There was a report that was put together by Foxglove, 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Wow. And presumably they're also sucking up electricity. They're also using, you know, water, they're using power. You know, it's not Just the emissions themselves. There's also the knock on effect.

[Karen Howe]

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 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 supercomputing 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 supercomputing 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 Abilene, 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 Moly.

[Thomas Germain]

That's a lot.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah. And that's still not the largest AI supercomputer. The largest one is being built by Meta 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Christ on a bike. I mean, that's insane.

[Thomas Germain]

That's a lot.

[Karen Howe]

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.

[Thomas Germain]

I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting about what we're saying here, right, is everybody's been hearing about data centers. We're like, oh yeah, data centers is really bad for the environment. They use up a lot of water. Like, I don't know if I like that. There's like reports that they raised local electricity costs. But you're saying they're building them like around London, like around major cities.

[Karen Howe]

Yes.

[Mickey Wolfe]

And that's fascinating in the UK in particular, because this is the world championship nation of NIMBYism is sort of not 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 will write a letter to their local MP complaining if the next door neighbor's cat is too loud.

[Karen Howe]

There's actually like a couple reasons I think this is happening. One is just universal. Around the world is even though these facilities are so massive, they, 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've visited one of these facilities before and they purposely are unmarked because they do not want people showing up at the, the gates and protesting. The one thing that you can, you can tell if it is a data center is there's like these massive power lines that go get connected to these, these nondescript warehouses and you can. 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, 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 a 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.

[Thomas Germain]

Well, let me ask you this, right? Like, how is this actually going to affect, like my day to day, one

[Karen Howe]

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 west, far west London. There are 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.

[Thomas Germain]

No way.

[Karen Howe]

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 this 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.

[Thomas Germain]

So like, is it creating a lot of jobs?

[Mickey Wolfe]

Yeah, I just put it in. I just asked ChatGPT to justify itself for the construction of it. And jobs was jobs was its top one. It was saying construction jobs.

[Karen Howe]

That's funny.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Hundreds of thousands of temporary jobs, construction workers, engineers, permanent jobs, data center technicians, network engineers. And then it says increase tax revenue.

[Thomas Germain]

What you're saying there, Nikki, like temporary jobs, like while 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.

[Karen Howe]

No, there's not. Yeah, these, these facilities are meant to be highly automated. So the Blythe Data center campus, the 10 billion pound one that's seven times Buckingham palace, that is generating around 4,000 jobs, but only 400 of those will be long term full time direct employment at the facility.

[Mickey Wolfe]

400 jobs sounds like nothing to me for a facility of that size.

[Thomas Germain]

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?

[Karen Howe]

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. So there's price ramifications, the housing ramifications. Like, usually people do not think about this when they think about AI, right? This is like our conception of AI is that it's a digital technology, it's ethereal, 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 to, on, 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

[Thomas Germain]

put Nikki on the moon for the money that we're spending on this.

[Karen Howe]

We could put the inner the. All of us on the moon. I mean, come on, that would be pretty cool.

[Mickey Wolfe]

So what can we do about this?

[Karen Howe]

So for anyone who's listening to the podcast, you should first and foremost check if a 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

Okay, I want to talk about Starlink and Iran, because it came out in the last couple of days that according to 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.

[Thomas Germain]

What is Starlink?

[Mickey Wolfe]

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, you know, in remote, remote places.

[Thomas Germain]

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 is, like, if you're an astronomer, Starlink is ruining the sky. There are so many satellites and they have lights on them that it is, like, harder to observe the stars and the planets. I was on a beach in Los Angeles, where I grew up. And, you know, it was nighttime, and we were, like, lying down the sand and looking up, and I saw what I thought it was like, is that a ufo? There was this, like, line of lights across the sky, like, moving down across my field of vision. This, like, like, huge structure. And I Googled it after I, like, described the thing that I'd seen. And I found a Reddit thread where people are like, no, that's Starlink.

[Mickey Wolfe]

And. 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.

[Karen Howe]

And how big are these terminals? Like, when they were smuggling these terminals in, is this like the size of a WI fi router?

[Mickey Wolfe]

How big is a StarLink terminal? In acres?.00.1 acre. So they're pretty small. It's like. Yeah. I mean, you could lift it up. It's like a little satellite dish, except they're 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 can get a portable one.

[Karen Howe]

And when you were saying, like, the more satellites there are, the better the connectivity is. Is this like, I only get the Internet when the satellite's going over me. Like, what?

[Mickey Wolfe]

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, being to able. And access to Starlink gets around that it's the only way they can get online. It's 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 head.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah, so this is like when the protest 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, but 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 like, 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, like, the resources to do a thing like that. Now it's private companies and we're like, ceding a lot of control to guys who have, you know, interests that may not be aligned with, you know, all the people of, you know, a particular country or, you know, it's a lot of power that one guy has.

[Karen Howe]

This is. 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

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.

[Karen Howe]

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

[Thomas Germain]

less than one guy having control of the whole Internet in a way.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah. I mean, this is like the question that blows my mind is like, how did we even get to this point? Like, how. 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.

[Thomas Germain]

There's an interesting question baked into this, I think, is like, is the Internet at this point a human? Right. Right. It's become so integral to our society. What do you guys think about that?

[Mickey Wolfe]

Yeah. Should we be thinking of the Internet the way we think of food and water and shelter?

[Karen Howe]

It's such an interesting question because obviously, like, I can't imagine living without 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.

[Thomas Germain]

That would be my first thought, yeah.

[Karen Howe]

100%. Everyone thought we were undersea.

[Thomas Germain]

I can't get on Instagram. It's over for me.

[Mickey Wolfe]

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.

[Karen Howe]

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. 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.

[Mickey Wolfe]

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.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah, I mean, I think that's related to Tom's first story too. Right. Like the. How you, you, 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

[Mickey Wolfe]

age,

[Karen Howe]

because of the massive consolidation of power in 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 the case anymore.

[Thomas Germain]

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 Podcasts YouTube channel. If you want to get in touch, you can email [e-mail] or you can get us on WhatsApp at 443-332-072472. Or if you want to follow us on social media, you can get links to all of our handles in the.

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[Thomas Germain]

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[Dina Temple-Raston]

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 Dina Temple Rousten, host of Click Here from PRX and Recorded Future News. Want to 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.