A (29:35)
Yeah, among many, many other things. All right, to understand this one, you guys are going to have to start at the beginning. The weekend played out something like this. Netanyahu's dead, but probably alive with six fingers. No, wait, at seven. But this is in 2024. Or maybe it was during COVID I promise, if you just heard me say all that, I'm not having a stroke. If you were online this weekend, you know exactly what I mean. And if you weren't, you are in for a treat because it all started with an Instagram account with 13.5 million followers that dropped a post claiming Benjamin Netanyahu was dead because he appeared to have six fingers in a video. Now, I encourage you aggressively to check out the video for yourself. You'll see the supposed six finger is a part of his palm. When I first saw it, I was like, wait, what? Like, are people trolling? This is obviously part of his poem. If you look at it closely. If you just, just pause the video and look at his finger, the region of his finger, even as a name, it's called the Hypothenar Eminence. So there you have for the nerdy kids in the crowd. Now, if you ran that original video through a deep fake detection tool, according to Grok, anyway, the rating comes back at 0.1% chance of being AI generated. And I have to say, looking at it with my own eyes, and there's no doubt AI is getting very, very good. But. But it seems pretty normal and was not the kind of thing that I expected the Internet to go absolutely haywire over. The video showing Netanyahu getting coffee was also just absolutely mahusive with a bunch of supposed smoking gun video zoom ins showing one aspect or another being obviously, quote, unquote, AI generated. Again, some of it, the takedown video, the smoking gun video, is faked. And so you get all of this stuff going on where if you're just looking at the takedown videos, the smoking gun videos, some of which, which are AI generated, many are zoomed in past the point of intelligibility, you could easily walk away with the conclusion that this is all AI generated. But if you go back to the original source videos, because I'll admit I flip flopped this weekend when I saw the pocket video, it's so funny talking about this stuff. Like if you guys weren't online this weekend, you really did miss a treat. He puts his hand in his pocket. Now, I didn't notice it in the full video, so I saw. I'd seen the full video, but now I'm watching all the smoking gun videos, and I see this one smoking gun video of his pocket seeming to violate the laws of physics. And I was like, oh, snap. Like, this is 100% fake. Like, oh, my God, he really is dead. I was like, holy, I can't believe it. And then I was like, hold on, hold on. Go back, watch the original video again. It's not that hard. So I went back, I watched the original video again, and if I'm honest, the way his pocket reacts when you watch the full video at normal speed was more convincing that it's not AI because how would the AI know to. The momentum of his hand stops because he hits the zipper, and then he pauses because it's like, how hard is this going to be? And then he decides, oh, it's just a zipper. I'm going to push through. He pushes through. That releases the snag of the pocket, the zipper on his skin. And then it moves rapidly because tension had built up with his hand. I cannot believe I have to take time to explain this. This is so wild. We are living in a totally different dimension. Nothing is provably real anymore. And that's where all of this gets crazy. When you've got a video. It was posted on March 15 on Netanyahu's official X account, by the way, where he's poking fun at the rumors of him dealing with, like, I'm dying to get coffee, all of that stuff, and having to point out that he's got ten fingers, you just know that we have completely lost the plot. And so looking at all of this from that perspective of we can't believe if his hand going into his pocket is real, if the sip that he's taking, because it does, doesn't disturb the foam in his drink, if that's real, people are going crazy over these details. When we can't use that and the tons of subsequent videos to decide if something is real. Even if asking AI to estimate the likelihood that the videos AI generated, if none of that proves to people that this stuff is real, then we are really in trouble. And that is exactly where we're at. Whether these anomalies come from video compression, whether they come from just the coffee being bizarre, barley, resilient in real life, or from something else, we are in a period where nobody can decide on what is real. Nobody is convinced by what they see that something is real. Nobody's convinced by the fact that it comes from his own account that this is real. And because we're living in a world now where, believe me when I say this is wartime propaganda that is being spun to confuse people, that there are reasons why Netanyahu probably doesn't even mind that much that some people think he's dead. Because if the Iranian people think he's dead and he's really not, yes, you take a morale, a morale hit on your side and you give them a bit of a boost. But if you're really still alive and are back channeling and keeping everything moving, then they're not going to focus as hard on trying to hit you. It's the same reason why I thought it was brilliant that the Iranians have promoted to supreme leader somebody who is either in a coma, missing legs and or already dead. Because now it's like going on to strike that person, you know, doesn't really do you any good because they're already out of commission. And so now you've sort of defanged the opposition's approach to coming and getting that person, because it won't matter to what's really happening inside the country. So if he's alive, then they still have to worry about it and go after him. If he's dead and the country is still moving forward, yes, they have to manage the expectations of their own people, and that could be problematic. And if they're slowly unraveling because there's no longer a center of gravity, then you have a problem. But ultimately, the big win is that the public is just confused. The public is paying attention, attention to all kinds of other things, and they're not paying attention to the things that really matter. What are the economic consequences of this? Are the allies coming to our defense? Who's actually winning the war? And so if you look at this from the perspective of what happened in Vietnam. So Vietnam is the first living room war, and the American public turned against it very quickly. We no longer had the appetite to prosecute the war. It all fell apart. We end up backing out. Total clothes cluster. Now, this is the first social media war. And what I'm seeing is that you can confuse the public so much that they just infight and then you go do whatever the hell you want. And so that's where this is going to get wild. Like, how do we get everybody on the same page? How do we get the American people pointed in a singular direction to either be behind the war or not behind the war, or at least have an intelligent debate, but we're not having an intelligent debate based on the merits of the outcomes of our actions. We're spinning up. I, because I knew I was going to need to report on this was like this has become a far bigger story than by just volume of interaction. Then the economic impacts of this or a story we're going to cover later. The fact that China is surrounding Taiwan as presumably a military drill for hey, while the US is distracted, let's go just snatch this bitch up. Nobody's paying attention to that. Like that was measured in like the hundreds of thousands of views, whereas the stuff on, on a single pocket video, coffee sip video was millions of views. Boys and girls, there is a thing happening right now. This is a new form of entertainment world affairs as bread and circus. Because I can influence it the way that I could vote on American Idol if you get what I'm saying. Like you can actually influence what part of all of this people are paying attention to. If you can write the viral tweet about the, the coffee gate, the pocket video, the zoom in on the cash register, you can actually sway which way people are looking. If you can write the next bot that enrages people and they just fall for the entertaining value of rage bait. Remember, people want to be rage baited. They love that. And this is becoming a new form of entertainment. Even I find myself, because I'm covering this stuff, I'm like, this is occupying a certain amount of my time that otherwise would have gone to insert things that I would have done instead of this. And so when you take a populace that is desperate for distraction and you give them like real life geopolitical warfare as video game, it is wild to that point.