Hey everyone, it's Drex. And last Friday I posted a teaser for a new show called "UnFake". And that teaser, if you heard it sounded a lot like me, but it wasn't me. It was a synthetic voice, a fake me, and it was shockingly easy to make. And so for those of you who are now a little skeptical because of that little trick,

just so we're clear, this is the real me. This is my real voice. It's not always gonna be the case though, but at least during this new show called "UnFake", I'll always tell you when it's not really me or it's not really a person, but a synthetic voice or video, I'll tell you that, and that's really important as far as this new show goes: "UnFake".

Let me take you back to your childhood for a second. Like most kids, you were probably were into cartoons. I was. But you knew that the cartoon of a bill sitting there on Capitol Hill wasn't real, but you liked the cartoon and you learned something by watching it. But over the years, and especially over the past few months, the world has really changed.

The cartoons are obviously not real and nobody was trying to pass them off as real. But today there are some very believable fake things being passed off as real pictures and videos and movie shorts, commercials and news stories, and phone callers and social media posts, and even job applicants. It's becoming harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not in a very deep fake world.

And sometimes it doesn't matter if it's just for fun and you wanna be entertained, you can just suspend that concern over whether something's real or not and just enjoy the entertainment. But I think the problem is that with our willingness to accept everything at face value, a lot of it started with social media, our willingness to kind of accept everything as real or true.

That has built some really bad mental habits, at least for many of us. So, at least for me and for the new show "UnFake", I'm gonna be really clear about what's real and what's not. So today's show short and sweet. I posted some output on LinkedIn a couple of Sundays ago from a product called Notebook, LM Notebook.

LM takes a script or an article and almost really any other input you want to give it. In my case, I had written an article on LinkedIn, so I simply gave it the URL for the article and it turned that input into a podcast. The prompt and the idea was really simple. Please turn this document into a podcast because I learn better by listening.

And within a few minutes notebookLM gave me a 20 minute podcast. A man and a woman bantering back and forth about the topic in the article, but the man and the woman doing the podcast weren't real people. Their voices are machine created down to the MMS and ahs and all the stuff that makes the so-called podcast sound so real.

But again, the people aren't real. And it's a good example of something you should ask yourself from now on about everything you consume, written or audio or video. The question is, is this real or is it synthetic? Which should actually lead you to the next question. Can I trust what I'm seeing or hearing?

Is it true? That's probably the most important question, is this thing I'm seeing or hearing true or legitimate? Because there's gonna be times, and I'm gonna play one for you here in just a minute, where something can be synthetic or fake, but also be true and therefore very useful. And I know that sounds confusing, but it's not.

We're loaded with cool tech right now that was designed to be used for good, but somebody figured out how to use it for something bad. There's a ton of examples of that now. So the tech itself, you have to stop thinking about the tech itself as good or bad. The intention is what's important. The way that it's used, is that good or bad?

And ultimately, it's not whether the thing that you're seeing or listening to is real, right? But whether it's true. Or legitimate, or is somebody trying to mislead you? So don't confuse real with True. I do this still all the time. Okay, so for the balance of this episode of UnFake, I'm gonna play the notebookLM Synthetic Podcast.

Again, the voices aren't real. The podcast was created with ai, but the content is true and it's pretty good, I think, and it's worth a listen. Here we go.

(Insert Media)

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  📍 📍 Okay, let's dive into this picture, this scenario. Sebastian, he's a finance controller, lives in Berlin, but works remotely for this innovation lab based way out in Palo Alto. Right. And he's a massive fan of his CEO Chloe. She's a big deal on social media. You know, one of those innovators whose ideas are always making waves.

Okay, got it. So one evening late. Sebastian gets a text, it looks like it's from Chloe, asking if he can FaceTime. He's like over the moon. Mm-hmm. Finally, a chance to connect with his idol. Right. Ah, and that's the hook. That excitement, that personal connection, or at least the promise of one. It really sets the stage for what comes next, doesn't it?

Totally. Sebastian clicks the link and boom, there's Chloe on his screen, smiling. They have this, well, it feels like a really warm personal chat. She's asking about him. She even mentions the specific beer garden she loves in Berlin. Talks about walking along the Spree River. Well, really specific details.

Exactly. It feels genuine, like she knows Berlin maybe hinting they could meet up sometime. It's all just meticulously crafted to build trust like instantly. Deep trust. And that's the manipulation right there. Yeah. Because after all this warmth then comes the request. Yeah. Sudden. But she makes it sound almost casual.

An immediate transfer. 5 million euros to some subcontractor he's never even heard of, but she's right there on the screen smiling, asking him personally. Yeah. So Sebastian, he's completely bought in after that conversation. Sees her face. He just, yeah. Does it? Sends the money. No hesitation, no second thoughts.

Why? Why was it so easy? Well, it's that human factor, isn't it? He genuinely believed he was talking personally to his CEO, someone he really admired. Wow. The request felt urgent and because it seemed to come directly from this trusted, familiar face. Well, his critical thinking just got bypassed. Yeah.

Completely short Circuited and the twist. Oh, the twist is brutal. The investigation later showed the real coal. Chloe never called him, never texted him. She didn't even know who he was, didn't even know his name, didn't know the company. Had a finance controller in Berlin. This wasn't Chloe at all. This was, well, this is what we're calling the digital deception.

Okay, so this is huge. What does this mean for, you know, for all of us? mmm, we're going deep today into this digital deception. It's this new era of crime where. Ai, um, artificial intelligence, it isn't just blurring reality, it's practically erasing it, right? So our mission here is to explore how incredibly sophisticated these attacks are now the frankly staggering financial costs, and maybe most importantly, what it means for you in a world where.

Honestly trusting what you see online is becoming well uncommon, and we're drawing on some really powerful new sources for this stuff. That paints a pretty stark picture of just how fast this crisis is escalating. So how do they actually pull off this scam, the one with Sebastian? Okay, let's deconstruct it.

The sources point to a cyber crime syndicate operating from the shadows of the dark web. Basically their first step. Meticulous. Data mining. Data mining? Yeah. Scraping everything publicly available on Chloe. All her interviews, social media, YouTube, appearances, you name it. Then they took all that data and fed it into an AI model.

Probably one you can just subscribe to online to clone her voice, and apparently it was remarkably accurate. What really got me reading through our sources was how targeted it was. This wasn't random. No, not at all. They spent weeks watching the company, using LinkedIn, Twitter, figuring out who was in finance, and they didn't just find a finance person, they found Sebastian.

They knew he was this huge Chloe super fan. They identified his admiration as a vulnerability. Exactly. Then they dug up his personal cell number. It wasn't casting a wide net, it was like a laser guided missile. And Sebastian poor guy had absolutely no clue. He thinks he's FaceTiming his hero, Chloe, but really he's interacting with an AI avatar.

An avatar, yeah. And behind the scenes controlling it all. Artium, a 22-year-old computer engineer from Belarus. He's just typing messages into his AI chat tool and the avatar speaks them in. Chloe's cloned voice, mimicking her facial expressions almost perfectly. Wow. Like a digital puppet master. Pretty much a live interactive AI puppet show and the money.

Hours after Sebastian hit send, that 5 million was gone from the fake subcontractor's account, just vanished into a maze of untraceable cryptocurrency wallets controlled by Artium and his buddies. This is chilling because it's not science fiction anymore. It's not some Future Black Mirror episode. Hey, yo, this is happening now.

Every day all over the world, and our sources are saying these AI driven attacks, they're poised to replace the common spear phishing emails. You know, those personalized scam emails we're all trained to spot. Now they're saying it could happen in a month's time, a month. That's incredibly fast. It is. And if you zoom out, look at the bigger picture, the predictions get even scarier.

Our whole tell ya everything world where we do everything online, it's just thrown gasoline on the fire of the dark web's progress. It's like a train that's just accelerating and there are no breaks. It's amazing, or maybe terrifying, how these global cybercrime groups are adopting tactics straight outta spy novels.

Mm. Our sources call it espionage trade crafts, espionage trade crafts. Yeah. They're mastering impersonation using bullying tactics, playing on greed, but the most effective tool exploiting our fundamental human need to trust. How do they do that specifically? Well, they research us on social media, find vulnerabilities.

They might befriend people who seem lonely or they dangle fake investment opportunities, really pulling on people's heartstrings. Mm-hmm. They can basically wear digital masks. Steal identities. Hold sensitive information for ransom. Exploit critical data. Its psychological warfare on a massive, unprecedented scale.

This isn't just random hacking anymore, is it? Not at all. This raises a really critical question. What does this actually mean for us, for our security for the economy? Cybercrime isn't just crime, it's a massive business. It has growth strategies, profit verticals. It rivals some of the biggest legitimate corporations on the planet.

Bigger than bigger than Germany and Japan combined. No way. It represents quite literally the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. Think about that. The damage cost exceeds with the entire globe suffers from natural disasters in a typical year. Wow. And maybe the most chilling comparison, it's more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.

Just let that sink in for a second, and that is truly unbelievable. And who's behind all this? It can't just be lone hackers anymore. Definitely not. Our sources talk about a whole range of threat actors. You've got spies working for nation states, but also sophisticated new criminal syndicates. They're all investing heavily in stealing data.

Why? What are their motives? It varies some wanna boost rival economies, steal valuable technology, undermine democratic processes, or even prepare the battlefield for future conflicts. Espionage itself has changed. It's not cloak and daggered, dead drops in parks anymore. Wow. It's relentless nonstop cyber attacks.

So if cyber crime is this huge, this bloated, and the sources say law enforcement is essentially powerless to stop it. What on earth do we do? It means the game has changed. Cybersecurity can't just be about building walls anymore. It has to constantly evolve like an arms race against the attackers. So it's not just for big companies.

No, absolutely not. This is for everyone. Individuals, small businesses, large organizations, we can protect ourselves. But it starts with really opening our eyes, understanding the sheer scale of this threat, and honestly preparing for the worst before an attack happens. That sounds like a major shift in thinking.

It is, it's a crucial paradigm shift. We have to, as our sources put it, divorce ourselves from a purely defensive mindset. We need to become threat hunters instead. Threat hunters. Okay. What does that actually mean for, say, the average person listening right now? How do you become a threat hunter? It means being proactively skeptical.

It means double even, triple checking, unexpected requests, even if they seem to come from someone you know, digitally questioning that familiar face or voice on the screen. It means setting up your own personal trip wires, things that make you pause immediately before you click that link or transfer that money.

Right. Building in that moment of hesitation. Exactly. We have to be as relentless, as tireless as the cyber criminals are, but our goal is different. We're aiming for a safer, better world. So taking their tactics back, we have to take back the tactics they've exploited. We need to understand the psychology they use, creating false urgency, using flattery, projecting fake authority.

We need to learn to beat them at their own game, which means it means verifying any unusual digital request, no matter how authentic it seems. It means fostering a culture of healthy skepticism, both in our personal life and in our workplaces. Only by doing that, by actively hunting for threats instead of just waiting for them.

Only then can we really start to make the world safer from these attacks? Precisely. That's the path forward. Okay, so let's recap this deep dive. The fundamental way we trust and verify things online, it's under serious attack. AI is driving it, and the sheer profitability of cyber crime is fueling it like never before.

We've really painted a stark and, uh, pretty immediate picture today. Yeah. And it leads you with a critical question, doesn't it? Yeah. In a world hurdling towards 90% synthetic internet content where AI can perfectly mimic reality, how will you really know who you're talking to online? Mm-hmm. And what does that uncertainty mean for while everything, or basic human connections, our businesses, our institutions, something to really think about.

And that is it for today's show. I'm Drex -- The Real and True Drex, and I'll see you soon with more on the good and the bad and the ugly stories of synthetic media and how it can be useful, and how it can be used to trick you. Thanks for listening to this kickoff edition of "UnFake", part of the "UnHack-the-Podcast" series.

You wanna know more, you wanna stay in the loop? Go to thisweekhealth.com /subscribe and sign up. And thanks again for being here. Stay a little paranoid and I'll see you around campus.