So Rob, before we get into fake experts and all of the kind of investigations that you've been looking at, how did you find your way into journalism?

I ended up after university, a friend of mine ran a listings magazine up in Manchester, now long defunct and I think he actually skipped the country owing the tax man a lot of money and there's no diving instructor in Thailand.

But that was in the mid 90s.

And at the time, I was really I was a lot of my interest was kind of inspired by the fact that I could get into clubs free and meet techno DJs.

And so I worked for that.

And then after a couple of months of doing that, I was like, OK, well, maybe I'll do a journalism post grad.

So I did that.

When did you first realize that this wasn't just a kind of a couple of, you know, a handful of examples, but actually something massive that was happening?

That's a good, good sign.

Well, there's two things here.

I think that, uh, it pays to be on alert all the time and just expect to see rubbish which is either from a real expert but has just been crashed out in two minutes using AI or from a fake expert, and again, the copy is by AI.

It pays to always be sort of sniffing the wind with that kind of stuff, particularly on, in areas where you're thinking, "Okay, why does a guy from, like, a parking app have an opinion to offer about sort of geopolitical tensions in, in the Ukraine or something like that?" Where it's just like, it's just clearly somebody shopping for links.

I think that going back to a good old school phone or video interview is, you know, it's a useful step, because although, you know, you can deep-fake, it is possible to impersonate people's voices, I think that the process of doing a phone interview is just a lot more real than the whole email thing.

It's like, you know, they have to be available on a certain phone line at a certain time.

You know, it's a UK number.

Do you wanna just give us the quick rundown on that one?