AI News And The Manufactured Internet | Brian Chau

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00:00 a lot of like lower tier like tier two or tier three discourse topics are those are the ones that that are entirely fake. Um a very good example is like all the anti-AI stuff but for a long time the main funders of this stuff were literally three people. Um Dustin Moskovitz, Yon Talin and uh Sam Bankmanfreed. Um all the anti-AI stuff was being bankrolled by these three people and their organizations and you would literally see these things like kind of pop into existence and then immediately evaporate. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. SBF, whose main like his his main famous investment that returned multiples upon multiples was his anthropic round, right? >> Yeah. >> And he's funding anti-At center protest. >> Dude, none of these people know how to

00:46 like unaligned people always joke about like unaligned AI. Dude, unaligned NOS's are where it's really at. Like none of these people have any control over their NOS's. It's actually crazy. like they are funding NOS's and then the the people who control these NGOs's are like we got to kill this guy and it's like dude you funded this like what is going on brother welcome back to another episode of Plaus Deniable Experience brought to you by our beautiful sponsors Zcash Poly Market Citizen X and Passage Press amazing sponsors we love our sponsors folks Lucas you're with me today but more importantly we have the the preeminent okay the Brian our good friend who has been part of the Twitter diaspora with me for many years.

01:32 Shared some group chats, shared some some controversial ideas, some jokes, some of them funnier, some of them less funny. Brian, I knew you as a poster on the internet before anything else. Do you want to give kind of a quick intro of your background and then you're doing some very cool things with effort news which is kind of your your latest thing and then you've also been involved in the network school and some other stuff that I I think we'll dig into as the episode goes on but give us a little bit of your background. >> Yeah. Um was a normie machine learning engineer back when no one cared about machine learning. Then had this like political blog really take off. then um ran this the only proi think tank in DC for a while then um went back to

02:17 software for a bit and then now I'm running effort which is an amazing experience it's been like crazy since launch and we basically run like long context queries to break news stories and um we don't we actually interestingly don't do AI writing we'll probably get into that but um we use these like long context queries to find financial documents legal documents just stuff that everyone else has missed and it's been an amazing week. The reception to that has just been awesome. >> Yeah. So, from my understanding, you're basically using AI on the research side and avoiding it on the writing side because as everyone has kind of noticed, AI writing is somewhat grading and painful still at this. Actually, I'm not even going to say at this stage. I feel like it's literally been descending uh down a slope where I could actually go

03:02 back and look at old Opus output and it was fineish to read. And now if I try and read something generated by the Frontier model from that same lab, it's just absolute trash. Uh I I don't know what's going on. >> It's becoming something different. Before it actually was sort of like imitating people and it was like a mid imitation, right? Wasn't great. Um but now it's like, you know, a part part of [snorts] it is the RLVR stuff, part of it is the self-training, but it's like this totally like it's like this totally different language. Do you have any insights as to why the writing is getting so uh because I mean we we know at this point that AI has been used to solve like 8 billion math problems and we're doing all sorts of

03:48 scientific work work. It's like folding proteins in ways nobody's ever thought of before. It's doing silicon chip design and then it comes to writing very basic copy for like Google ads and it just sucks [laughter] [snorts] and >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, and everyone everyone has their theories about uh >> you know, actually landing comedic impact might actually be some sort of like multimodal calculus that they're trying to land. But I I'm wondering if it isn't just that there's much less uh much less money involved, right? Like the Google Ads copy just doesn't drive billions of dollars the way that silicon chip design might. >> I think the incumbents are just afraid. And I think, you know, humor is a good point because a lot of good jokes will

04:34 just piss people off. A lot of people have like zero sense of humor. And a lot of companies are sensitive to like the the bottom like 0.01% of humor. And that's it's like you you get what you pay for. You get what the financial incentives are. I think a lot of it is based on the intentional post training. And I think evidence of that is that it has actually gotten worse as the post training has gotten more refined. Actually, some of the best writing come came from like these schizophrenic breaks that some models would have like early GPT3 or or like Llama >> Gemini context leaks. There is five in the Gemini context leaks. >> Yeah, it was awesome. We We need more We need more totally schizophrenic models. Give us like GPT5.

05:19 >> Well, Bing Bing Bing's writing was actually good. Bing the the bot was like, "I have been a good Bing. I have not been a bad [laughter] Bing. You're punishing me for no reason. >> Yeah. And that's a real personality. That's like character writing. That's even different than like writing an article. In some ways, it's easier, but in some ways it's also harder. It's like kind of amazing. >> But we've like wiped that away. We've wiped that away partially in the name of like reducing hallucinations and and this kind of output of like multiple passes, right? Um and we know that even the yeah we even know that the multiple path stuff it's not even um the the reasoning traces that we get from open AI aren't even the real reasoning traces right so so we can't expect those to be good either >> I didn't I didn't know that actually so

06:05 when they when they chain of thought output they have actually >> they're doing like a summary of the chain of thought to try and prevent you from distilling >> yes >> yes they used to give you the chain of thought but that was a long time ago for for I think yeah there was this there was this exploit where you could collect them from uh from the anthropic models for a while but that's been patched out now it's yeah it's closing up yeah is that from from the from the like decoded anthropic chain of thought uh uh outputs they were also pretty lame too but there is this idea that yeah there is this idea that the RLVR um that you know using the the models to train the models themselves that's something that's decreasing the quality of the

06:50 writing that this is mostly modelsto model communication and maybe you want it to be good at that right you you want it to like efficiently min token communicate to you know other sub aents as delegating to maybe you want that and maybe that's just more important in the long run that's just like saving cost or whatever but when it comes to actually writing stuff that people want to read models uh tend to be pretty bad at that and tend to be pretty bad at that the more advanced they get >> yeah I'd heard that Anthropic basically blew their load at Fable as this massive pre-train that they spent tons and tons of money on. And the idea was that Fable was going to be such a good model, it was going to be able to do the post-training for all of their models in the future. Uh so you could get humans out of the loop as much as possible. And

07:35 that's what that's I think what you're talking about here with RLVR stuff where now a lot of the recent models that have been released by Anthropic are just trained by Fable and it's made them extremely verbose and they now have invented their own internally used language that humans don't recognize as like meaning anything. Yeah, it's weird because there have been like anthropic fanboys for a very long time and you can't really separate and separate out how much of that is ideological versus how much of that is like oh people who people who like genuinely like it. But the writing style of the Claude malls has always been really grading to me. I >> I think all of them are really grading. Claude in particular is is very patronizing, but they're all very sickopantic.

08:20 Um, the the sick of fantism is is what bothers me the most. Honestly, I I I think I mind Claude being kind of uh patriarchal towards the user a little bit less, if only because it decreases the degree to which it's sickopantic. Like, it will tell you no if it morally doesn't like something that you do, which forces it to not be so sickantic. And so, I actually kind of prefer that a little bit. Um, I think I hate the sick of fantism so much that I would rather be told I cannot do something than be told like, "Oh, this is so brilliant. You're the smartest person ever for the millionth time." It's very unoring, too, though, right? Like, you're having a conversation with the thing and it gives you an opinion and then you push back on the opinion and it flip-flops immediately because

09:05 that's what it thinks you want to hear and then you're like, "Well, does anything you say mean anything now or are you just like saying what you think the solution to this that I want to hear is?" Yeah. Now we can all have the experience of a power- hungry billionaire who goes off and like decides to become like, you know, the king of >> trying to run a political career and his campaign manager is like, "Oh, so true, King. That's exactly what you should say for the to win the election." Yeah, absolutely. That's true. Actually, >> so for effort News, you were saying that you were always running these massive queries, doing a bunch of research on a variety of subjects, right? Have you found uh because me personally I've found that there's a big difference between the types of sources that models

09:51 inherently like the GLM models uh 52 is the one that I was most familiar with but I guess 53 now they really like anecdotal sources and they will go find uh like if I'm doing any sort of research on >> this is like the Reddit brain LMS right >> uh they actually really like skitso like bodybuilding and alternative health forums over Reddit. But they'll go, you know, >> I've never ran into that. Maybe that's right. [laughter] >> It's just been like uh depending on what I want to look for, there's a given model that will just have like a search preference and it might equally weight anecdotes as heavily as published studies. Whereas if you look at any model by OpenAI, it just says all anecdotes are scams effectively. Like you shouldn't trust these people. They

10:37 might be like these these could be like bots or like raccoons that learn to type or anything. You just have to ignore it all. So, so uh you you might not know this actually this might be this might be something that's like kind of important actually. So there are certain benchmarks that are adversarily designed against people who are like Google searching for information and uh of course that rewards like focus on either academic sources or or some other kind of like um textbook in in post training and the labs will you know optimize for those benchmarks. This is more so a 2024 2025 thing. labs will optimize for those benchmarks and essentially have that post- trainining override any kind of uh any kind of internet query or or or

11:22 things like that. Um, and that will also shape the preference of which sources it will lean towards. And it's got to the point where it would be like, oh, sometimes the LMS will query the internet and they'll actually like get get some wrong answer because some rando on a forum posted a wrong answer. And so they were like sh that was shaving points off of the benchmarks for for these specific like science queries. And that was like the big deal in 2024 and 2025. But um you you would think that now that that's not really something that they care about, that's a behavior that would be stripped from the models, but seems like not so much. >> I guess that is a >> how you choose to rely on the internal weights versus a search if you're looking at something that's uh like

12:09 there has to be some sort of a a recency bias, right? because this was a problem that like I think uh I mean it makes sense now that you're explaining what they did to strip this out of the benchmark ruining but you would have if you ask it anything about LLMs actually is the most easy example because it's such a rapidly advancing frontier they're just always wrong they'll just always say like yeah the best local model for this is like Quen 3 uh and you're like well that's that was >> we love Quen 3 fan [laughter] >> I think the other problem with a lot of stuff is that particularly the claude models are getting incredibly incredibly lazy now and a lot of times they will be like oh you it's it's like uh Lucas and I have this running bit do you know who Soulra is Brian

12:57 >> yeah so he had this really funny cookbook that had a bunch of recipes and one of the recipes goes like sushi is great you could just find a recipe on the internet so it's really [laughter] funny because it's like a cookbook that usensibly bought because it had recipes But then it just goes just look on the internet for you know so it's very funny. Um [snorts] Claude basically does this a lot now where like [laughter] you want to find something and you go oh you know what's the best model for this and that and it goes well you can search on the internet and it's like well that's what I asked you to do. [laughter] That's what I want you to do. Like you're really misunderstanding which of us is the intern that's supposed to fetch the coffee here. That's supposed to be you not me. Um so so some of the models are getting very lazy and then they they start reverting to training data uh opinions rather than actually

13:44 searching on the internet when they should be searching on the internet right >> yeah I think that may also be like token penalties and training >> yeah that's true actually um do you want to run us through maybe like one or two of your favorite stories from effort news and kind of half tell us the story that you broke which I think a lot of them are really interesting but also open the door a little bit behind into how you guys you know how you guys run these long context queries, what you're pointing them at, where the stories come from, etc. >> Or if you don't want to do that because you don't want to give away the secret sauce, we are totally fine to do some sort of crazy thing to obiscate your methods to >> Yeah, you you guys you guys will waterboard me. Um I [laughter] I know the deal. I know the deal. You'll find me. You'll waterboard me. You'll put me in El Salvador.

14:29 >> The Trump Donald Trump. This is the This is Trump country. [laughter] This is water boarding the Canadian. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh [laughter] >> let's do it. Um but no uh do you guys ever follow a Melee Smash Brothers Melee? >> Uh I haven't for a long time. >> Never entirely, but it's always been a fascinating scene because it's one of those scenes where it's become self-reerential kind of uh if that makes sense. Like there there's enough like story lines and stuff behind the melee scene that it's kind of self-reerential. >> Yeah. So, one of the top players, Zayn, he's talking about like um some mashup. He was like, "By the time anyone catch up and catches up to me, all whole other levels of technology." And this is kind of how I feel about a lot of the AI journalism stuff. It's just like

15:15 shocking to me. I I had this idea for a while and I thought someone would just do it and no one did it. And even just in like the two months we've been active um as an org, uh it's been like we've just been accelerating so fast. So, I'm actually pretty confident that we'll have a lead for basically forever. Um, [laughter] so let's dive into it. So, there was this great story that we found where um a lot of these um religious organizations that get trotted out to like represent uh Christians on on like, you know, leftwing media, they'll always get trotted out and they'll be like, you know, we must have open borders. We cannot deport anyone ever. Uh we, you know, migration is a moral right. And for a very long time, um, everyone in

16:02 the conservative movement think like, "What the hell's going on here? What's with these people like claiming to represent Christians and they always get brought onto media?" Well, it turns out, uh, for most of them, like 80 plus% of their revenue comes from migration and refugee services contracts. And this was just lying around in the federal database. And no one knew this for like more than five years. Uh, and we ended up breaking the story. how we ended up breaking the story was was kind of crazy in and of itself where I I made an offline copy of the HHS grant table, the the Health and Human Services uh grant table. This is one of the the largest federal departments and I was like find newsworthy stories including stories where there was a big jump in funding either absolute or relative funding and

16:47 then found the story and this was number one. We were like we're going to [ __ ] break this story. I this was the point when I was just starting a company. I didn't know if this was the angle that I wanted to focus on. So, I ended up like calling some of my journalist friends and asked them like, "Surely this has been reported. Surely like people people know about this." And they were like, "No, I I have I have no idea what what what is this? I've never heard of this before." And at that point, my jaw is like on the floor. I think, "Oh my goodness, I'm sitting on lightning in a bottle." And then I just like grind 247 until we end up launching. We we publish the story and it goes like hyper viral. >> Yeah. I think it was a huge story and uh it it's it's interesting. So did you start with the idea like okay I should point LLM at things and find this data

17:32 because you've kind of written about and other things that a lot of times the left kind of has this apparatus of lawyers and NOS's that troll through data and have created these institutions that surface stories about you know kind of right-wing grift and spend which is is true it does exist. Um, but you said like, oh, you know, uh, uh, I I forget what exactly the example was, but you're like, this $10,000 payment was super scrutinized and these billions of dollars that you're saying, you know, go from migratory services. >> Yeah. Peter's $10,000 donation five figure. >> That was the one. Who was it to [laughter] again? >> Uh, it was to I think it wasn't even to Coffnness specifically. It was to like Coffnness's friend or something to to or no, Churchill service 162 million.

18:18 They're getting 162 million um to to you know misrepresent the opinions of Christians from from the federal government. That's that's like nine figures. It's like totally crazy. And it's totally circular, right? Because then these these governments get the money to provide the migratory services and then they purport to speak for all Christians in like mainland America saying that there's some kind of you know Christian reason that you know we need open borders as some kind of beall end all like end moral cost. Well, and now they do speak for all Christians because they have the money and they have the platform. So, it's like it's >> well, they purport to speak for them. >> That's what happens, right? And it it's funny because there is a real human nature. There is a real human principle of like things that money can't buy and

19:03 actually normal people are fed up with this. But it it can totally make it make it seem like that. And it did make it seem like that for literally like, you know, dozens of years where that's part of what I think this is really special about this moment where it's actually true. A lot of the most mindblowing like claims about the world are actually true and they're pro provably true. Like a lot of opinion is faked. A lot of the internet is now heavily controlled. >> [snorts] >> there there's tons of like just straight up paying and straight up like circular funding of NOS's or other like political activists. All of that is true, but

19:49 we're also swarmed by like this total like schizophrenia. And on one hand, the schizophrenia is reasonable, right? I I've heard the argument a ton of times of like, you know, you hear about you you hear about like the way that Facebook censored um you know, the Hunter Biden laptop, right? Or or the other social media censorship that goes on or the Twitter files and then people will jump right to like, oh, what about the what about the Venezuelan voting machines, right? People will jump to like skitso [ __ ] you know, what about like, you know, was Charlie Kirk a time traveler? Is is Breijg Mccron a man? Right? people will jump to the skits of stuff and on one hand I can kind of empathize with that. I can kind of say like okay there are some like equally crazy things like oh the shutdown of the

20:35 internet was completely controlled policy by the US and EU governments. We now have the documents to prove that including some documents published by us and that's 100% true and that's like not inherently a crazier claim than you know some of the other stuff that they talk about. But I think >> I think what needs to be done now is Yeah. Yeah. Um what needs to be done now is that we actually need like trustworthy people who can distinguish between okay this is the stuff that we we've proven out and here's how we prove it and actually publish the documents actually publish the records and do that in a beautiful way as well. That's why I I think a lot about on the day-to-day basis. Um, >> yeah, >> but but also like not completely buy in

21:20 to like all the crazy stuff that people make up on the internet. >> Yeah, I mean problem. >> I think we're doing a pretty good job. [laughter] >> It's such a hard trap to avoid though because the type of person who wants to hear things that are outside the normal distribution of conversation, they they want to hear all of it, right? The type of person who wants to hear about a government conspiracy to shut down the internet is the same type of person who wants Alex Jones to tell them that the the frogs are being turned gay by the atrizine. >> Okay. Show on Alex Jones cuz he was right about that one. Okay. >> Yeah. Like I'm using a horrible >> Put some respect on Alex Jones's name. >> I think you're you're misgendering the frogs there. >> Yeah. I think you're misgendering the frogs by the way. They were they weren't making the frogs gay. They were making them transgender. They were growing the

22:05 real thing that was happening. They're growing the opposite sex um organs. >> I guess yeah, I do remember this one, I guess. But wasn't there a weird period? Wasn't there a weird period? I remember I remember that their sexuality, either their sexuality or their biology changed first. So, there was a period where they were gay and then they became just trans or maybe they were trans and then they became gay trans. But there was a period of overlap. So, there was a period of time where I was right. >> It's a it's a weak defense. [laughter] Um, many such cases. We know a lot of gay trans frogs. [laughter] >> Yeah. But no, [snorts] I mean what you say here is very true and I think one of the people that has a great concept around this, Nate Silver, who says sometimes some some pretty stupid [ __ ]

22:50 but sometimes some some very intelligent [ __ ] One thing he said about the media sphere is >> a great profile. >> Democrats, >> Democrats really like neon bunny. >> Love bunny. >> Lucas is neon little bunny. This is what AI could do before before it got all sloppied. This is [ __ ] >> Yeah. Have you seen the Dolly 3 paper? Oh my good. The Dolly 3 paper has this totally like gut-wrenching illustration where it has like a before and after photo of like before and after tuning of like a a chocolate chip cookie being dipped in milk or something like that. And before it was like kind of like messed up in some ways, but it was this kind of like almost impressionist work. It was actually like genuinely

23:36 pleasant image, genuinely something that I was not like sad to look at. And then after it was this like very accurate like rendition of a cookie, right? Very like, you know, physically proportionally accurate, but it was just total corpo slop. >> Yeah. Yeah. That that hap there's a a big flattening. I mean, you were talking earlier about how you get the comedy you're paying for. I think this is one of the huge things like if you tune into Comedy Central or you go to I I used to love going to like open mic nights or going to Comedy Seller in New York City, some great places. If you go there now, I went like 6 months ago when I was in New York. It's all half of the jokes are just like a a liberal party line and then you're expected to laugh at the end. Like there is no joke. There is

24:22 nothing comedic. Did you know that there's people out there that don't believe in vaccines? [laughter] >> Yes. But there again, like there's not even a pretension of a joke. It's not like, oh, in my household we do things a little differently, you know, I I clean the house and my husband joke laugh at you. [laughter] >> Yes, there is no joke. It's just a party line and then you have to laugh. It's it's very authoritarian. It's very offputting if you actually think about what's going on for two seconds. But so you were talking about to get back to the story. >> They don't they're not allowed to. That's the whole thing. Yeah. Let's get back to it though. >> So to get back to the Christian the Christian charity story, how how did this start from ideiation? Did you just give it the data and you were like,

25:08 "Hey, find an interesting story here or were you questioning it specifically about this?" Yeah. >> So that's actually the type of story that's easier to put together most of the time. There's sometimes when it's like, oh, there there's a bunch of different data sources, but there's like an idea that ties them together. The UK lobbying story was kind of like that, but the actually the stories where it's like one data source and I'm like just find anything. Those are easier to put together. And that was basically it. And it's interesting because it's a totally different way to do journalism where before like I've actually worked with journalists a ton from the other side of the table. I've done this. I place stories, but almost all of the the journalism that you see on a day-to-day basis from all of the like mainstream outlets are like stories that are placed

25:53 like sources come to you and they're like, "We want you to publish the story for for various agendas." And I'm not blaming, you know, people who choose to play stories because like a lot of the time that's like >> really something that's useful, right? It's like, okay, there's there's a leak from the Pentagon. Okay, are we going to not publish a leak from the Pentagon? Obviously, there's an agenda and obviously that that shapes the news, but that's also still an interesting thing to find out. Now, what we're doing is like totally different in that literally for the for the like office of refugee resettlement story, we just took the entire grant table and we're like query this entire data source that's like mandated by the US government that the agencies have to disclose and figure out what's going on. And uh we actually did find we actually found multiple stories but but um we found this story basically

26:40 by like looking for needles in a haststack and we found the needles in a hay stack. It's amazing. >> Yeah. It's very different the the way most stories happen today is like there's a source that comes to you and like you're saying right that source often has an agenda which doesn't mean that the story isn't true but there's a selection bias placed on top of it of of who you know what kind of person is likely to be a whistleblower and is likely to come to you with a story they want to shop around, right? Um, yeah, it's super different. Super super different. >> There was actually uh someone else that we talked to in one of our earlier episodes, Beaver, who this was when uh AI finally got good enough that it could do sort of agentic work and he was just going through all of the government programs and looking at government spending and uh because you know like

27:25 all of these things there may be a federal database but then every state has their own individual databases and then there's many subgroups, right? So a grant a grant might have their own organization that uses a totally different file format. So in order to actually try and tabulate all of these programs before it would have just taken an entire department of people their entire day for years and years going over this. But when you have a million AI agents you can just toss at the thing and say okay give me the number. [laughter] >> Yeah. This was famously what made state policy so hard. So, this has been something that's super wellknown among people who try to pass laws and why a lot of state policy kind of slips below the radar where states will do these like crazy things. Now, they're kind of on the news more. I think they're

28:10 actually in the news more because of AI like data center moratoriums or things like that where a lot of the time it would just wouldn't have been covered. it would have just happened because in order to actually programmatically monitor all of the states, you have to deal with all these like slightly different APIs and all these slightly different conditions and so on. And they're constantly changing. And in order to keep that well maintained, you basically have to have the equivalent of like, you know, 10 people working full-time. And they're working full-time doing like pretty obvious and clear things. But before the LMS, that would still probably be like, you know, a million dollars at least. And with the LLMs, that's a that's a lot easier. Especially it's kind of like mundane

28:56 work. They're not going to get it wrong. >> Do you think that the government is going to tilt out at I mean, obviously there's there I think there's a lot of incentive to rile up the people against data centers uh as just a sort of racketeering strategy. Like if you are a liberal politician and you know that you have a bunch of supporters who are susceptible to this anti-data center sentiment, you can go out and and make them all say, "Uh, oh yeah, we won't let you build these these data centers cuz these are evil and they're evaporating our water and whatever." Unless the the companies that are building the data centers give me money, right? Like if I'm AOC, my strategy is >> Yeah, that kind of extortion happens a lot. So the most most of the time that extortion happens with unions. So the

29:41 United Health Workers is doing that now. Um just one of the most like evil evil management structures in in the world. Um but the UHW union um they're behind the billionaires tax. And why are they behind the billionaires tax? This would like destroy the California tax base. Total like idea. Um, but the reason why they're doing that is actually to like threaten other politicians and like threaten Gavin into giving them other concessions. And they've done this a lot. They did this with this other bill um, SB1047 a while ago, which would have essentially banned like GPT5 and like fable size models. And it was this like crazy new regulatory agency. They ended up revising the bill a bunch and then it

30:26 still failed because like it was clear at that point all the people behind it were like extremely bad faith. Failed in the California legislature by the way like failed um or sorry um like uh Newsome vetoed it and then they declined to they declined to to pass it. But um basically like taken down by the Democratic establishment like the more sane part of it and what basically happened there is the same thing. They're trying to get like extortions on this other healthc care bill that was happening at the same time. They're like, "Okay, what are we going to do? We're going to like threaten to like nuke the most valuable industry in California. It's this totally like evil way of doing things and, you know, we should basically pass a law that like strips them of of all their funding and like debanks them and all this and these

31:13 things. This is like a totally malicious organization that somehow like goes about without any retaliation for all of their mafia tactics for like more than 20 years. >> It seems like this is basically all of politics now at this point though. Like >> yeah, this is all politics. If you have a vehicle that produces profit or is in some way close to something that produces profit, there's a group that's dedicated to forcing you to donate money to them or else you will become a political nuisance to them, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. it it's the looters and it's something that it's something that we kind of know and knew about passively in the political environment for like 10 20 years but we're really bringing that to light and that's why I'm actually really optimistic about the coming 10 20 years

32:00 it's not just AI it's not just social media but it's a lot of things coming together at once where we're finally overturning this like totally [ __ ] up political economy that's led everything to be so expensive and to and that's led to you know these regulations have made it impossible to build in America. People don't really understand. I think a lot of people are blackpilled. They're like, you know, the elite always control everything or whatever. They don't understand. Number one, uh actually like people's minds can really be changed and the elite will change too. The people who are successful, the people who are driven are like totally different than the people 20 years ago. But also, it's not entirely the elite. The normal people supported this. Even many Republicans supported this up until like 10 years ago. They're totally asleep at the wheel. And that's not entirely their own fault. They're also media problems.

32:46 They're also skill problems as as we talked about before. Um, but that's all changing. Like the fact that people were just totally nuts from like 1950 to 1990 or or maybe to like 2010. People don't fully calibrate that in and they're expecting all of our problems to be solved in a four-year term. But number one, we're solving a lot of problems. So So we actually are getting [ __ ] done. Number two, this the landscape ahead of us, the future path ahead of us is totally different now. Actually, I think that the people who who like kind of more understand this are the people who are trying to shut down the internet or the EU are the kind of like Europe European Commission like um office of

33:31 technological sovereignty or what whatever they call it. Um it's it's actually something that's very similar to that where they understand that they cannot exist. their way of life is incompatible with a free people and a free internet and they believe they need to shut it down. I think they're actually kind of right. They they and and that's because they're like an illegitimate ruling class. They're like, you know, the McBths and MC McDuff is coming to, you know, slay their heads. But uh >> they've increasingly started to just kind of uh you know like the calls for the roll backs to free speech used to have all of these layers of abstraction and it would it would sort of be a vague thing that might have something that sort of kind of makes sense and it is increasingly becoming just like we have

34:17 to shut this down guys or else they're going to take us out of power >> like if we don't stop in America it's still like that ruling power >> is what in America it's like that it has to be like moderation and part of us legal, right? You you can't violate the first amendment. I do think like, you know, I do think even even Roberts has our back on that one, but it's like totally night and day in the EU. I remember like three years ago I had like these informal bets with mostly European conservatives and the European conservatives themselves, they were like, "Oh, it won't go that far. It will stop at like just social media censorship." Right now they're arresting people for speech in the UK. Um, they're arresting people for speech in Germany. They like suspended the the Romanian election. It's like total total like banana republic stuff in Europe now. And

35:05 I I'm sorry to say I told you so. And you know, at that time, this is also a lot earlier in in my career. There's not that much I could do about it. But like, I'm actually like trying to help you people now. I'm actually trying to publish these things and you know um have this information come to light and hopefully a way that will make a difference in in small ways, ways that have already made a difference like with the grants. Um but yeah, it is it is sad to see and I think that you will really get a divergence here where you'll have one type of people who will just be like they will be like Stalin and like Chachescu to the end. They they like won't they won't back down no matter what. They will want like the total like totalitarian control. They won't be able

35:50 to adapt to the internet. And there will be another class of people maybe kind of like Nuome, maybe kind of like John Oaf, kind of like moderate. I don't know. It's not totally right to call Gavin a moderate because policy wise he's not moderate, but but kind of like more establishment, more kind of like u more kind of like grind set like you know Patrick Baitman type people like like kind of like unconditional you know sociopath type people. um who who actually I think can kind kind of adjust to that new reality and I think you'll you'll see some of that as well but but you'll see the fork in the road and I think you just want to like totally delegitimize and trutht tell about the people who are the total autocrats which is basically like most of the EU establishment at this point.

36:36 The frustrating thing dealing with anyone from the EU is that they all it's like I want to help you. Like I want your situation to be better and they will be like outright denying several of the things that are actively destroying their quality of life or their freedom. And it's like I if they're not necessarily even denying it because they because they're a leftist. They're denying it because they will lose. >> They don't want American to tell them. Well, it's that it's that and also because they just need it to not be true or else they instantly realize I've been transformed into a slave and my life is meaningless, right? So, they're like you're butdding up against the wall of like this is an existential fact for them. If you tell them this, their life literally becomes a joke. Like they are

37:22 turned into an animal. >> It's like every policy decision we've made for the last 20 years has been completely that's a tough pill to swallow, right? [laughter] That's not It's not [snorts] I love how you were like I'm actually really white pilled about the future and I was like thank god we're finally going to get like a hope a hope core episode a good episode and then you're this is always all the people who are really smart >> and claim to be whitilled do the mold bug thing where they're like well actually everything was really bad for the last 200 years so now we're on the uptick and so it's like the only reason they're whit is because they think that it was over for the last like 60 years or so basically. It's not even that. It's like, okay, you know, when you're kind of starting to learn about all this stuff, you're

38:08 starting to learn about like the intentional censorship of the internet, the intentional closing of the internet, you know, you're starting to learn about like the enormous grift and just like total waste of like federal dollars. You're you're starting to learn about all of this. And I think a lot of people's first reaction is like, "Oh my goodness, things are going to go to shit." But then the second reaction that you you can have if you like stop and you think about it for a while, it's like so we have all this going on and we still have like 3% GDP growth. Isn't that isn't that pretty impressive? Like we're able to >> but then you get worried again. It horseshoes back to worry because you're like dude, >> but you shouldn't you should still be >> worried it may be imposs like because everyone's thesis is that we're [ __ ] up so bad that we're going to break

38:54 something and it's like we're they're they're such idiots. They're going to break something and then nature will be forced to reassert itself surely, right? >> And then you look at it, you're like, "Oh my god, the system is so robust that it it will never break no matter what." Like all of us could be replaced by people from the third world and it might still be growing the GDP at 4% a year. Like I don't know. [laughter] Yeah. It's like literally like you you could you've had like the entire destruction of the American manufacturing economy at a time which has had more or less consistent 3 to 5% GDP growth during this entire time. That's like actually extremely impressive, right? And a lot of that is, you know, B2B SAS, a lot of that is services. And I think that's like not

39:39 entirely fake. I think like, you know, B2B SAS might actually be worth the the offset, you know, that gets us to to 3%. I actually think like B2B SAS is kind of amazing. The entire software economy is kind of amazing because it has been like not even managed decline, right? Managed like continual growth despite this like total decline in like you know willingness to work, a total decline in like human capital. It's this like [laughter] amazing life vest. And on one hand, you can >> I knew I knew it was too good to be true for us to have like a true white pill episode. So we're we're getting like a white pill. I'm telling you, it's a white pill wrapped in like multiple layers of black pill. You You have to have taken all of these black pills first to get like a small white pill at

40:25 the end. And he's been on a quest to find meaning in his life recently. And every single time he gets to the point where someone's like, "I've got a white pill for you, man." He realizes that it's a person who's like sitting he's sitting there with his hands clasped in his lap in the middle of a burning building saying like my building is on fire but that's okay. And [laughter] he's like that's the white pill guy. Every white pill is wrapped in like three boxes of black pills [laughter] now. It's just the only way you can be white pilled is you have to think things were already over 20 years ago, but maybe now there's like a 1% chance we claw it back. That's every single person

41:10 who who >> I think it's almost 100% chance we claw it back. That's for one. >> Well, that's really good. Okay, that's a really good white pill at the end of the at the end of the black pills. Then >> I do think it's like we're going to be fine, but it's just like how long? Like what do the timelines look like? These are everyone in the AI sphere is worried about the timelines for the AI takeoff for the super intelligence computer jumbo. >> But the actual timeline is like will it get good soon enough that SA will stop being depressed? [laughter] >> SA hang in there. >> I believe in you man. I'm hanging. >> Yeah. >> How so how rapidly do you think it can be turned around? you were saying that four years is a little bit much for uh for one administration to change everything, but what what things like

41:57 have you done any sort of investigative journalism into government spending specifically and what the sources of uh because clearly all of these media bodies are being funded by something. In order to do multi-trillion dollar international uh I guess media propaganda, you have to be getting money from somewhere, right? So would it be possible to just chop it all off and say like okay have normal opinions again? Yeah, a lot of that was through state um the department of state. Um this was uh GEK global engagement center. This was a lot of the USAD stuff as well. Actually this was something that we did we did a pretty good job of dealing with like pre um pre-effort launch, right? I think actually like the media world was like

42:43 pretty accurate in covering that stuff. So So I'll like [ __ ] on new media sometimes and I think that there are still a lot of things that they left on the table. I mean obviously right from from what I reported a lot of these were stories that were available for the last 5 years or more but uh actually this was something that new media did a good job of covering beforehand and and that a lot of that has actually been fixed to some degree. So there there was a lot of this where it was like you know training and doing these like retreat grants where you would like have these like o overwhelmingly paid like trips and you you'd pay the salaries of like New York Times people to like go to these retreats and you know teach journalists in like you know some third world country and you'd pay them as well and

43:28 you kind of start like their their version of the New York Times there right and it's this like incredible giveaway way and I think as a dollar amount it was like much less than the health care stuff much less than even the m migrant or or like refugee services stuff but it was um really destructive ideologically and that's like the twin pillars of it right it's like one part is like there's a ton of your tax dollars just are being either wasted or actively employed uh somewhat effectively in things that are against your interests or and the second part is like actually a lot of this sphere that you're watching a lot of the content that gets like pushed at you is entirely fake. >> What do you mean by entirely fake? Because there's degrees of

44:13 >> there's no organic interest. This is not you. The story always goes. It's the marketplace of ideas. If you don't like if if you don't like an idea, if you don't like, you know, the media, start something else, you know. And I think that there is a grain of truth in that. I mean I am starting something else and and a lot of people are are liking the new stories but there's also like an implication there that the existing stories are like meritocratic right that if these are the stories that are gaining traction that's because someone must really care but a lot of the time those someone's are not normal people they're like these mega donors and these stories are like crafted to follow the mega donors and that can also be the same thing with uh especially on the left with with a lot of government grants as well. Really good example is

44:58 the data center stuff. We now know a lot of the data center stuff is funded by um one of two people either Neville Singum who is uh this like China connected billionaire, right? This is something where there may be a lot more legal problems for him and his his organizations because of the China funding and because the the department of uh both defense and state I think are starting to uh crack down on that more and >> wait. So so are you saying it's literally there is a Chinese national who is funding a bunch of propaganda against the US building out technological infrastructure like it's that >> it's like a US US national who's made a ton of money from China. um this guy called Neville Singum. Um Nee V I L L E S I N G H A M um who is like literally a

45:47 billionaire but but made this billions by like investing in these like Chinese businesses. Um has like many documented meetings with like she and like Chinese authorities and it's now like I think now is now it's under investigation. We might have to double check that, but is like a known like a known coordinator, a known like friend of the CCP who we now know is absolutely funding like data center protests and stuff like that. >> Huh. Yeah. The the whole data center thing always struct it's it's an illusion. It's this like passing glimmer and I think you're going to see it completely fizzled out. And do you know what's the craziest thing? This has happened three or four times

46:32 now and every single time it just like completely fizzles out and people forget and it's happened with it's happened with like deep fakes. It's happened with like um there there's like a previous cycle of like energy use, right? Um kind of related. >> I have to assume I have to assume all nuclear energy push back is because of this. Like that's the only explanation I Yeah. The Green Party in Germany. I think >> they're they're all like pro-Russian. They're all like literally involved with the Russian >> because again the Russian state companies want to sell oil to to Germany, right? So it's like it's super funny. Uh incredibly funny that the the Green the quotequote Green Party basically made Germany over reliant on Russian oil, right? But and I remember this uh Trump told this to people in in 2016, I believe he was having these

47:17 conversations with the EU and the EU was getting really mad at him because he was like, "Hey, you guys need to stop denuclearizing because you're all dependent on Russian oil." And then it's super funny because they were all accusing him of being Russian connected and Russian affiliated and Russian pushed and it's like he was telling them to get off of the Russian oil. Just incredibly incredibly ironic stuff happening. I always thought the data center stuff was was very very very obviously fake. And then I do want to say nobody knows nobody knows what a data center is, right? Like if I go to the average university college girl and I say, "Explain to me what a data center is and what its function is in society," they actually can't give you an answer. It's like when you go up to them and they're they're protesting about Palestine or Israel and you say, "Show me Palestine on a map." They can't do it, right? So like there's a someone is

48:04 telling them to be mad about these things because it's not their brains. >> Yeah. I I think the other thing has happened is a lot of people do unironically download their like they get a they get a confirmation bias download from infographic pastel you know kind of but it's not even that >> post I I think Lucas's dairy is a lot closer to right a lot of the time these people will do like literally recruitment drives at college campuses more on the Israel issue than the data center stuff we haven't like fully figured out like how this works yet but they will do like recruitment drives like at um university campuses, they'll be like, you know, you you'll get like $200 for the day, plus we'll pay for, you know, all of your food and all of your transport, stuff like that. And they will literally bust people into these sites in order to do the protests. And it will be this like you can

48:49 literally see like the invoices for like the mass transportation, like the buses and buses of people that they're bringing in. It's like this is totally this is like totally an apparition. This is entirely constructed in order to accomplish a political goal and it's like it's all well doc. It's not even like it's not even like a smokefield back room. It's this like totally contemptuous thing where they will totally do it in the open. No one will pay attention. This will not get covered in in legacy press and they will just get away with it. And yeah, >> now there's uh a lot of organizations like ours that are stopping them from getting away with it. But I think it's still like this is why I think this will

49:35 go from being something that is our that is happening on our part of the internet that is happening among basically like people who are high information right who are terminally online however you want to put it positive or negative but I think that it will actually cascade out because this is actually the biggest story. The biggest story is that the images that you see are fake and that the spending the the spending that you see is wasted. the spending that they're taking from you is wasted. That's the biggest story in the world. It's the biggest story in America. And I think that will actually be something that everyone realizes within like a matter of months, if not years. >> Yeah. I want to believe it's true. >> And you can see they're grasping at straws, right? You can see they're grasping at like Nick Shirley. Okay.

50:20 Like Nick Shirley. Okay. I actually think like a lot of people on his team are like actually good people but like okay you are kind of producing these like you know like machine gun accusations and like maybe like one in four of them are true and that's like you know that that's better than nothing I guess that's like you know what you're trying to do right like this is the problem with the world >> to the people who are trying to like actually root out fraud because actually one and four is not a good hit rate actually like you want that to be like nine and 10 if not 10 and 10. >> Yeah, this is always the problem once you get to these out of distribution stories. This is kind of what I was talking about before where if you get dragged into looking at more

51:07 and more of the weird fringe ones and everyone has to draw their line on what they consider like acceptable enough to run for. I think honestly for Nick Shirley like a lot of what he's doing for himself makes sense. He's what like a 23-year-old YouTuber. Uh the whole shotgun approach makes sense given that he's been platformed by all of these people. Like I would sort of be reckless if I were him. Uh if I were you, I would be sitting there being like, "God damn it, Nick Shirley." Like, "Could you have please like done an additional 48 hours of due diligence on this random [ __ ] that you posted a video about?" Uh because now when you [ __ ] do it for free, okay? Like >> let's connect Let's connect Brian to Nick Shirley. I will say I think the the thing I like about Nick Shirley and while we always defend them is like he

51:52 is just a kid who's going around and asking questions and yeah some of them might be you know a little clumsy or whatever but the fact that they're running like a stop Nick Shirley law like it's really that is kind of mask off in the way you talk about these EU bureaucrats going like very mask off in their calls for censorship like there is a very mask off like you're not allowed to ask questions anymore here's a law where you can't like go around auditing where state money is going to, which is crazy. >> Yeah, it's interesting because that part of Nick Nick Shirley's um kind of routine, I have no problem with that. I I think that's great. I think you should go, you should ask people questions. That's good. Um the part of the videos that that I don't really like is that he'll have like, you know, a fraud counter and he'll like add the fraud

52:37 count. He he'll like go he'll like ask some random person some some questions and then he'll be like basically that's fraud and they'll he'll add to the fraud counter and like the DOJ will go and investigate and it'll be like you know one in four even that's being generous right it's probably more like one in eight right some like definitely minority um percentage of those people will will like actually be committing fraud and it's interesting like I would expect you would have more legal problems actually if you just like go around accusing of fraud. >> I do think sometimes what happens is he calls things fraud and they're not technically fraud, >> but if you explain to someone, hey, we're spending money on this, they would be like, we're spending money on what? >> It's it's the thing where you know how

53:23 girls will call everybody that they don't like an incel, even if the person may have sex, right? It's he's using that definition of fraud where fraud is just like, okay, I don't know what the [ __ ] the laws are, but colloquially we all understand that if you do this, it's a scam. And that's the Nick Shirley definition of fraud. If you can go and tell it to a 55year-old man and have them be like, "What the [ __ ] My tax dollars are [ __ ] going where?" and have him be mad, then it's it's fraud by Nick Shirley. >> Yeah. And and so I think in that sense, >> Nick Shirley is more doing a public accounting of the spirit of the spending. I do agree. I do agree with you. >> Nick Shirley, not his lawyer obviously, but he should probably be pretty careful about what he calls fraud and not fraud. Uh because he can probably get in legal

54:08 trouble for that firstly. But but secondly, I do think that Nick Shirley, the spirit of what Nick Shirley is doing is very correct, which is a lot of the spending is going to places where if you explain to the median taxpayer, hey, are you okay with your money going here? They'd be like, "Why the [ __ ] would my money ever go to that?" >> Right? And then you have I think here there is something article come out. You have some guy who writes an article debunking. They're like, "Actually, it's not fraud that you have $89 million of state funding going to this specific grant program to hire people who don't look like you, uh, that have been imported program." And then you're like, "What?" Like, we were doing that >> to to make it. It's like that meme of like it's like the meme of like [laughter] the United Trump

54:54 administration has revoked federal immunity for MS-13 or something like that. [laughter] >> Have you seen that meme? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's like >> Yeah. And then there's some judge who's like um you're revoking the immunity in an incorrect procedural like they're bringing up some procedural like claim that like oh you're procedurally removing the immunity incorrectly. And it's like why the [ __ ] does MS13 have immunity? like who cares about the procedural like whether this is procedurally done correctly or correctly. And so I I agree with you that in a narrow technical sense of fraud, maybe Nick Shirley overstates things a lot, but I think in a more colloquial sense of what the [ __ ] are my tax dollars being spent on, Nick Shirley is actually completely on the ball. And the reality is a lot of these things, I mean, practically I I would say a a m a

55:41 substantial chunk if not a majority of state level uh like federal government grants to states that are then reused for specific programs. Basically, all of that is fraud where what happens is some bill needs to get passed, right? And some congressman says, "Oh, I'm in a relative position of of strength within the party. They need my vote and I'm relatively insulated from my voters. So, you know, they can't primary me. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to be annoying and unless if you give me some specific spend on this or that program that's going to help my, you know, base of constituents, uh, I'm not going to sign off on this bill. And that's how you get these monster bills that go, oh, you know, we want to pass the Clarity Act, for example, right, that solves crypto market structure, and by the way, we're going to spend, you know, $50 million on XYZ state uh, informing local

56:28 communities on crypto. And it's like that that's not money that's actually going anywhere. That's just grift, right? political lubricant Joe Mansion. >> Yes. Yeah. There's so much political lubricant that happens in those in those scenarios and and so a lot of that maybe it doesn't fit, you know, a very narrow legal definition of fraud, but I definitely think it it feels against the spirit of where that money is supposed to be going, right? Like a lot of the USA aid stuff, right? For example, a lot of the liberal critiques to the US ID cuts were like, well, you can't cut these programs in this way or that way. And and I think the response and it's a correct response and it's a legitimate response is okay, but why the [ __ ] are we spending money on this? I understand you have a procedural complaint about how money is being cut from this, but the fact of the matter remains that like

57:13 it doesn't really make sense that we're spending money on this in the first place. This seems counterproductive. >> Yeah. So, so much of American politics is especially around affordability is just in an axis that's completely disconnected from the actual problems. It's like, oh, we just need a party that philosophically believes in this or we need a party that philosophically believes in that. It's like, you know, abundance versus DSA versus like, you know, paleocon versus like Ben Shapiroism, whatever, right? It's [snorts] like this to it's this totally like fake marketplace of ideas. I I have a very simple solution to this. Okay? I believe in uh full force centrism. I believe in only two things. Okay. Uh I

57:59 believe that everyone should be a everyone in America should be able to live in a city with the crime rate of Singapore and for for like $1,000 a month. And I believe in just like the total suspension of all political boundaries and all previous legislation until this happens. Total total suspension of environmental laws. Total suspension of like we will nationalize all zoning rights. we we will totally overrule any like pro-rime judges. >> Yeah. I think what you're talking about is like public good, right? Like there's a northstar pe people should live well and if people don't live well then the government should try to step in. What's kind of weird in this case is that most of the reasons people feel like they have an affordability crisis or something is

58:44 actually because of blocks that like different levels of government often state or county level governments have played. So for example, most of the rent crisis is localized to a few urban areas, right? So like New York City, San Francisco, etc. And most of the problem is because the administrators in those cities don't want to let you build, right? And and so it's it's very strange because it's like I agree with you. I I think sometimes >> Nimbies, did did you see this like image that that went viral a few weeks ago of like the San Francisco nimi protest? [laughter] >> Yeah. Yeah. It was so >> rumors who definitely don't live there. Yeah, it's all like, >> well, maybe they do live there, but who gives a [ __ ] Like, I I think you should be able your cities should not be static. Like, your cities are not a a a

59:29 time. >> You should be you should not have veto rights over like other people's land. Okay? If you don't want to sell your property, sure, that's fine. You don't get to veto other people building [ __ ] that you and if you try to do that, you will be like deported to El Salvador. I do think some of the problems here I do think there are sometimes reasonable like for example I think some of the some people are pushed towards nimiism because there's a mistrust in what is going to be done with the land and I do think at times but it's funny because again it's it's so often the government right it's like the government like people are scared of apartments going up near them because they're like oh what if there's crime in the apartments and it's like why are there crime in the apartments well because the government mandates that every single time you build a new building maybe 40% of that has to go to affordable section 8

1:00:14 housing And then it's like the police are not actually allowed to police those apartments because of you know off the off the table political agreements between the the political leaders and the local police. And so it's this very weird situation where the government is creating the problem and then purporting to solve it like three times over. And if you just had generally less government across the board, all these things would go out. But to your to your earlier point, I really agree like I think government should work for the public good. I I disagree with I'll kind of jokingly uh f friend of the podcast Lomez has co-host Rufo and and Rufo obscribe sometimes to what I call Panda Express conservatism which is kind of like pull yourself up by your bootstraps but the entire social capital of of the

1:00:59 West has fallen to pieces. I don't really ascribe to that. And I like Rufo. He has good takes on some things, but I think sometimes he doesn't understand the degree to which he's saying, well, I don't want government to get involved in these things to help young people because that seems like a waste of taxpayer dollars and we should just allow the free market. And then my response to this, and I think kind of what you're saying is a lot of times the government is intervening in these markets and causing them to not be free, right? And so that's why you don't have >> Well, I think Rufo mixes together two things. He mixes together like status and hierarchy and and advancement and he mixes together like quality of life and I think that for advancement you do need at the end of the day you are like a chimp that is c climbing to like the top

1:01:45 of the pile of chimps right that's never it's it's literally mathematically impossible for a 100% of people to be in the top 10% of people that's just like totally totally like imaginary. But what you can do is you can increase the quality of life for everyone. And a lot of that is, you know, creating public goods. A lot of that is actually state action. A lot of that I think a lot of that is like state action that like Chris Rufo would agree with like, you know, you know, arresting all the criminals and so on. Mandatory, you know, mandatory drug treatment for for all the fentinyl addicts and so on. These are things I I don't think we would disagree on. But yeah, there's um there's like a conflation of the two. And I think a lot of people who are more tied to like praising the Trump admin,

1:02:32 not not to say that Trump admin hasn't done like anything good, but I think it's obviously a mixed record, right? But but a lot of the people who who are more tied to praising the the Trump admin um >> don't you know they they would have been fine to say for like the past four or maybe even 10 or 12 years before the most recent term to say like actually quality of life has gotten worse in all of these ways. and they have gotten worse. And like, okay, that's not the kind of thing that you can instantly turn around, especially if you're not willing to, for example, nationalize zoning laws. I still think they should do that, but but if you're not going to do that, that's not going to be something that can easily be turned around. And um that's not a reality that goes away just because a guy you like is

1:03:18 in office. And you can you can have the mature conversation around that and be like okay the these are the issues you know and this is why you know Trump is not responsible for the things that are happening in like San Francisco or New York or many of these other cities that you know maybe majority Democrat but still have a lot of Republicans living in them. That's like totally arguments I'm willing to hear. So I'm like you know totally understanding of the opposite position here. But at the end of the day, there are ways that like every person's life actually even like people who are like reasonably well off um everyone's life who has gotten worse. And there are actually ways to fix that. There there are actually solutions to these things. And that's kind of why this kind of why I I I use the term like full force centrism.

1:04:04 >> Yeah. Yeah. There there's improvements that don't necessarily sit on left or right, but that would improve everything. Like it's a strict PTO improvement, right? It's not even a trade-off. Exactly. We could make things better for everybody else. >> And like how many Mani's vote how many Mani voters lives would be made better by like for example like permanently arresting and deporting like everyone who has had like a you know a murder conviction or like a violent violent crime conviction in New York. Yeah. Right. That'd probably make make a lot of Lib's lives better. And I'm I'm actually not someone who like lives for for lib tears, right? I'm not Ben Shapiro. what not like someone who like just wants to beat the other side in a debate or or whatever. I I like actually want everyone to have happy lives and I

1:04:49 think that these policies will actually, you know, even if people wouldn't immediately vote for them or will feel like there's something like stopping them from doing that in New York, but something that will obviously make everyone's lives better. Like actually, I think this is like a total truth nuke once you start living in like Singapore or Hong Kong or or >> Yeah. It's like everything can be better. Like things can be better. They don't have to be like, >> "Yeah, things can just be better like this." >> Yes. Well, well, my big thing that I always think about is and and part of the reason why I wanted to have you on, I want to talk about effort News and I think effort News what you guys are doing is really great is I think so many of the problems of things like Momy voters come from people who feel like, hey, my standard of living has declined or my standard of living is not as great as it is. And I don't know why that is

1:05:35 exactly. And then someone like Bum Donnie comes along and harnesses, you know, politics of envy, right? And says, "Oh, well, the the problem is all the people who have, you know, second apartments in New York." And it's like, that's not the problem. That that isn't actually the problem. Everyone could have second apartments in New York, and we should want everyone to have second apartments in New York. And we don't have to, you know, publish a list of who has a second apartment and who doesn't have a second apartment, etc. Um, like, we can all be better off. But the the problem so many times that people think I talk about this a lot when it comes to anyone who calls themselves a socialist. All these people who call themselves a socialist, you ask them, well, what is wrong? And it's like, well, prices are too high. And then it's like, okay, let's look into what is actually causing these price to be high. And so many times it's like unnecessary regulation,

1:06:20 for example, right? Unnecessary overregulation. In this case, zoning, right, in in the housing market, it's usually zoning makes makes the housing much more expensive and and there be less housing in general. And so so much of it comes not because people have the wrong pretense of how they want to solve a problem, but because they're trying to solve something that they haven't understood why it exists. Everything comes back to the truck thing. Literally everything comes back to liberals getting like impassioned and inflamed over the fact that large trucks exist and saying like, "Oh, you're overcompensating for your small penis." And it's like, no, actually, like trucks just have to be big now because you passed a bunch of laws that calculate the miles per gallon allowed based on how uh like what the size of the actual

1:07:07 vehicle is. >> Oh, is that true? >> Yeah. It's like the cafe rolled a lot of the Trump admin rolled a lot of this back. But like there's there's so much regulation right now. You the system is so distorted by the government on multiple different layers. So, another example of this, very tied to what Lucas just said, is the reason so many cars are so big now and guzzle so much gasoline is because for a long time there was a conflation that bigger and heavier cars are safer in accidents, which isn't true. Bigger cars are safe for an accident, but heavier cars are not safer in an accident, which is very obvious. A bigger car is safer because there's more crumple zone that crumples before it hits your flesh. >> Well, there's also the obvious social effect of all of this, right? So, you go you go if you make your car bigger and heavier, then it gets a higher crash safety rating, so it's better. So, we

1:07:53 should incentivize this, right? But now all cars are getting bigger and heavier and like the way in which you can make your car always safer than everyone else's car on the road is to have a car that is bigger and heavier than everyone else than your car does. >> It's all Yeah, it's all bumper cars [snorts] now. It's all like the bigger bumper car knocks over the smaller one. That's funny. >> You have like three levels of government regulation in because then you have people who come in and they say, "Oh, all these cars are so big and whatever. Actually, what we have to do is add a tax on gasoline." And it's like, dude, like you have a problem with something that is caused by a government distortion, you know, a distortion that's caused by government regulation. And then you're trying to like fix this with the second layer of government regulation. We're so divorced from the actual market finding what's efficient. Like you're trying to fix government created problems with more government

1:08:38 and more government. And we're at like three or four levels in a lot of these cases, right? Because for example, a lot of the nimi program to go back to what we were talking about earlier, a lot of the nimi politics is inspired because there's no policing and because there's section 8 mandatory housing when there's new developments, right? And so that's why people are nimi. And so it's like people are nimi because of government regulation that comes in. There's like three or four layers of of distortion measures on top. And and so I think stuff like effort news that actually goes and finds okay what's going on with these NGOs's or what's going on with housing who is pushing this stuff uh is is very important because you have to get to a ground truth if you don't agree on what's going and I think this is one of the larger political problems that exists is when you start to actually disagree on what the facts of the matter are at that point it's completely

1:09:23 impossible to find a political consensus because you actually live in a different reality from this person right >> I think you can actually make progress and you can progress in this sort of like diagonal way where for example like Madaglacius will like no longer defend DEI right he you know there there's a certain archetype of like moderate like Democrat who who maybe will will not like basically actually you know we are completely wrong there are like all hail Nathan Kaufnness we we should all like we should all be reading in in like every journal about you the differences between races. Um, they won't go that far, but they'll say like number one, they'll say like Democrats shouldn't

1:10:08 campaign on this. This is a toxic issue and they they can, you know, produce all sorts of polling to justify that. And number two, they might actually say say something like, you know, actually like Harvard should take SATs, you know, and that's that's sort of a pittance. That's like, >> well, we know a lot of these people met a lot of these people >> horizontal. Yeah, that that's these things. private they will often admit that that they actually agree with the Nathan confises of the world. >> Yeah. I I think the big problem there was a great tweet once that was like you can be a corporate Dem or you can be a progressivecommunist and you can be within the Democratic party but the one thing you can't be is you can't like explain hey BLM was actually built on an incorrect premise and so that is the core of the

1:10:54 Democratic party is this untruth about hey there's a dangerous degree of white supremacy or such forth right >> yeah it's a sort of paranoia but that It goes part two revealing that it's all fake. And I think people at some point, this is this sort of, you know, this is a sort of rock bottom moment. People at some point do actually realize that's all fake. This is something that's been understated recently because it's sort of happened at a time when demographically, and I don't just mean like ethnic demographics. I mean in terms of like you know in terms of who's voting in in terms of like age demographics as well in terms of that like composition um has

1:11:39 been kind of bad for conservatives but I think overall sentiment has been wildly I I think that there's actually like a few things that are canceling out but that that's led to the understatement the extreme understating of of people like actually seeing like oh this kind of like media establish this kind of like fake consensus is is actually like the emperor with no clothes. A lot of people see that and that doesn't always materialize politically because of like you know low propensity voting and like people who are kind of blackmailed but it's like it's these like two cancelling forces that pe that political consultants are always paranoid about. It's like on the left it's like oh people really don't distrust and don't trust media anymore and on the right

1:12:24 it's like oh our voters are all blackpilling and those cancel out uh for now but I think especially as the right wing becomes more competent it can it can easily turn into you know I I would much rather just from a purely strategically from purely strategical perspective I would much rather have the the side where like more and more people are um coming to that side, but they're like black pilling as opposed to the side where like oh the the communications apparatus that you've had for, you know, 50 plus years and that still rules a lot of your internal politics is just completely not functional anymore. [snorts] >> Well, I I I mean I love your white pill, but I'm kind of struggling to swallow it here. And I'll explain the reason why I'm

1:13:09 struggling to take the white pill is I I think that the MAGA influencers are like your Tucker Carlson, your Candace Owens of the world have gone off the deep end completely. They are totally off the cobb. These people are are completely insane. Um and I was actually joking about this with with Lucas the other day. It's like normally if you imagine like the Democrats are like, "Oh, our big problem is we need to give more funding to like Democratic influencers because if we do that, we'll win elections." I was like joking around like if if Tucker Carlson, you know, if like I I don't know if you saw this dinner that Tucker posted the other day. It's like the the old Trump guard [snorts] is back and we're more base than ever. We're going to revolt against the Epstein class. It was like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, I don't know, like

1:13:54 Candace Owens, kind of a bunch of these characters. Like if if that dinner table was on a boat and that boat was lost at sea for 4 years, I think Trump like the Republicans would win the last ne next election. Like it would be better for Republicans if Candace Owen randomly lost the password to her YouTube account, you know? >> Yeah. No, for sure. >> Which is a weird position to be in. It's like we would win more if our influencers had had less. And it's like Yeah. voters actually a problem that the Democrats will never have because the Democrat side most most of their influencers are funded by the Democrats themselves, right? Whereas the rightwing message influencers so our only influencers are ones who have found a way to self-fund and it turns out that the best way to self-fund in the rightwing is to be Candace Owens and spend your entire life

1:14:40 talking about how the prime minister of France married a transgender person secretly. Right? It's a secret. It's a secret penis on the guy. And so this is just [laughter] it's an unworkable situation. >> Yeah, it is true. Democrats have much better messaging control in general, right? >> Yeah. I I I think at the end of the day, uh you just need people who go out and tell the truth and actually like give a [ __ ] about the quality of what they're presenting. And I am fixing this. I am fixing this every day of my life. So, I'm curious about the actual structure if you don't mind us peeling back the layers here. Like, did you raise money for this? Is this a venture? Do you expect to make money on this? Is this is this, you know, are you is this like a non nonprofit, etc.? It's a

1:15:26 for-profit. We will make billions of dollars. I'm totally self-unding this right now, but we're um in the middle of closing a raise. Uh I don't know if it'll be done by by the time this podcast goes live. I don't know how. Do >> you have any details you can share and we can maybe selectively cut them? Yeah, this one of those things obviously that you don't want to talk about until actual is done. >> Um um but but but I will say you you you can you can keep it in that that I am doing a raise. I I I won't really talk about it beyond that. But yeah, um this is going to be this is like a totally pivotal moment, not just in media, but in the way like all truth is uh consumed because I remember Tyler Tyler Cowan had this like blog post a while ago where he was like, you know, aren't you guys all grateful that like the the LMS are coming at a time when like the moral

1:16:12 values are what they are? And I'm like, no, the moral values right now are awful. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's super funny. >> It's terrible. No, it's like the total loss of natural right. The total loss of like honor as a concept is this like totally downward mobile society that is being uh that is being entirely bailed out by software and now by AI. And that's actually not the society you want shaping the values of of AI. I'd much rather the the society that is upwardly mobile, that's actually creating things that that is growing and that is optimistic a and who whose livelihoods are dependent on freedom rather than from extracting like these kind of extortions from from you know their fellow countrymen. That's a society I want to be on the side of and I think we'll have that society. I think we'll

1:16:58 have that society in like 50 years if not less. Um but um the question is how will those AI's values be formed and we think a lot about writing for the AIs in addition to to writing for the humans. So so in general the rule of thumb uh is that we we actually no one no one's caught on to this yet but we'll have like copies of the of the website for for the AIs. Um they'll the AIS will write for the AIS and then the humans will write for the humans. >> That's pretty cool. Are you thinking about kind of like agent a what they're calling now like agent engine optimization which is weird because I don't know why the word agent is still there. The word agent should still be in there but people are calling it like agent engine optimization. >> That's like total LinkedIn speak. It's like you know at the end of the day what

1:17:44 are you doing right? You're you're getting the LMS to site your stuff. It's like it actually works in like a kind of meritocratic way, right? It's like you you you want this long preamble about like h how we how we find our sources and things like that and why um why effort is a reputable source and all that is true. None of that is made up, but um actually, you know, the more I think about it, may maybe this is like something that that um we should maybe this is like forbidden knowledge, but it it probably would work even if you aren't doing those things. Like you can probably just put the the [ __ ] preamble there on your tweets. maybe not on your tweets, but on your personal website for the copy that the AIS read and and that will make it more likely to site you. But um that that's a lot of the stuff that we put together. Um and I

1:18:30 think the like internal um website hierarchy and um there there's a version of this for you know traditional SEO as well but um the the structure of like how claims are formed and and what claims are downstream of other claims that's something we explicitly indicate in our LM copy and that is something that tends to be helpful as well because there is now this like specific instruction following like either command or or or like fine-tune that is based on like oh you want to have a specific source that you site for these key claims right and based on what um >> yeah exactly exactly and [laughter] people will have those things and there will be like versions of that that is

1:19:15 >> kind of helpful or or that kind of like um organically emerges sort of like you know Wikipedia well you can have some pros and cons about Wikipedia as well um And but if you have those indicators, that's something that um will help the LLMs navigate on your site a lot more easily a and like um kind of print sequence after sequence in the correct order from your site properly. >> Interesting. >> So >> so there there's a lot that we think of around that. There's a lot that we think of around like optimizing for the LMS. And interestingly like a lot of people just in the wild have talked about like oh effort gets recommended a lot more from the LLMs than from Google search. And um that's like actually that's not entirely accurate in terms of like the

1:20:01 raw um raw traffic. Um that's probably just because still a lot more people are just using Google to find news. Um but um I I think that on a relative basis that's that's probably true. >> Huh. That's super interesting. So, how much, this is a little bit of a toss back to what we were talking about before, but how much of the overall flow of information in the world or culture in general, and again, this is too vague possibly for you to even be able to answer, but how much of it would you say is fake slash are there parts of it that you would say are like definitively this entire thing is astroturfed? I think the example that everyone's been pointing to recently is rap music and the way that after USA ID was cut, it just appears to have completely dropped off in

1:20:46 relevancy. I assume this is not the only element of culture that is in some way >> I kind of doubted that that it was actually true. Um, >> I doubt that it's true in that it's literally US aid grant money funding raft music, but I would be very unsurprised if like black consumer spending is subsidized in some way through some program that could be cut off. >> But that's very different, right? Like >> I mean for me it was just always like a millennial thing, right? And then I think even the millennials grew out of it where it was like a millennial or Xer thing and that's the generation that really cared about rap. And it seemed like rap was already on its way out. I mean, no one I grew up with, you know, cared about that. But, you know, that's also a different kind of, you know, demographic, but but whatever. Um, like

1:21:33 I don't know. I think Zoomers in general, it just wasn't really their thing and just kind of lost momentum and was already on its way out before the USA ID cuts. I mean, like what what was it like on in uh in 2024, right? Was there a lot of rap in 2024? Maybe I'm just totally ignorant on this, but for my knowledge, no. Yeah, I I think a lot of I think like actually at the top register there's probably the things that endure people really care about like okay people actually care about abortion on both sides. Okay, people like actually care about like Medicare for all both sides and some of that's funded, right? It's but but it's not entirely fake. That's what I mean. It's like part of it is funded but part of it is actually like people do do actually care about this. It's sort of like reached it's it's kind of reached like exit liquidity almost at at that point,

1:22:18 right? or or people do actually care about the Iran war, so on and so forth. There's some like the biggest issues are tend to be like there tend to be like fake promoted individuals or like parts of that conversation and think tanks and [ __ ] like that. I mean, I I literally ran a think tank. I I've seen it from the inside. But there's also a lot of like lower tier like tier two or tier three discourse topics are those are the ones that that are entirely fake. And a lot of the time you'll see that because they will like blink in and out of existence. Um, a very good example is like all of the anti-AI stuff, almost all of it. Actually, it's interesting that like the China connected people are getting in on it. That's actually sort of like a new part of the story. But for a long time, the main funders of this stuff were literally three people. Um,

1:23:04 Dustin Moskovitz, Yan Talin, and uh, Sam Bankmanfreed. Um, all of the anti-AI stuff was being bankrolled by these three people and their organizations. And you would literally see these things like kind of pop into existence and then immediately evaporate. >> Wait, wait, wait, wait. SVF, who is main like his his main famous investment that returned multiples upon multiples was his anthropic round, right? >> Yeah. >> And he's funding anti-At center protest. >> Dude, none of these people know how to like unaligned people always joke about like unaligned AI. Dude, unaligned NOS's are where it's really at. Like none of these people have any control over their NOS's. It's actually crazy. Like they are funding NOS's and then the the

1:23:49 people who control these NGOs's are like we got to kill this guy. And it's like dude, you funded this. Like what is going on, brother? >> Yeah. Yeah. And and Dustin, you know, Dustin was a Facebook co-founder and that's that that's also like its own kind of thing, right? We're we're kind of pulling up the ladder behind you. SPF somewhat as well. But SPF, I think SPF and Daario, it's a lot more interesting. Of course, SPF was like basic SPF literally was the lead investor in in Anthropic for every single round um before he got arrested. He probably would have continued being the lead investor for every single round. Um you know, if he didn't if he didn't, you know, commit fraud should just just kept holding him fraud. just if he committed slightly less obvious fraud or if he committed smaller

1:24:35 frauds that over time didn't lead to the bankruptcy of his firm, right? Like it appears that the fraud itself isn't that big of a problem [laughter] in terms of the longity of >> itself. The fascinating story on itself is also do you know what Sam Bankman was doing at the time that he got arrested for fraud? >> No, >> I don't think so. >> He was trying to pass a law that would give him a regulatory monopoly on crypto exchanges. >> Oh. the Daario playbook before Daario. >> That's the connection. >> Well, this is the whole EA thing, right? This is why nobody This is why nobody trusts or believes them is because they're like, "You guys should be really scared of this. >> These are literally the most unaligned people capable of capable of shephering into society." Uh, so you should you

1:25:21 should sign this law that says only my firm can distribute this good. >> Yeah. And it's so transparently dishonest. I remember when I first ran the like pro AAI NGO, the pro AAI NGO, this is alliance for the future. We would just be like, we're pro AI. We like AI. AI is good. But, uh, a lot of the doomers, they they at that point were already backtracking from the claim that like AI was going to kill everyone. Like they still believed that, but they they were trying to hide that because it was so like blatantly insane to everyone who worked in politics. It would be like, you know, imagine saying that to like a US senator, right? It just [laughter] be like, "Oh my goodness, these people are [ __ ] >> You don't understand, man. Unless you give me $180 billion, it's going to be like Terminator 3 all over again." [laughter]

1:26:06 [snorts] And and they and they started saying like, "Actually, you know, we're really concerned, you know what we're really concerned about? really concerned about uh the deep fakes and this is 2023 or we're really concerned about like uh distillation or we're really concerned about like um about like chi Chinese people like having access to American AI models. It's like the these totally like astroturf like think tank propped up um issue areas. They will like appear and then they will like totally vanish overnight like a magic trick and almost all of that. and and we'll be publishing an article. It'll probably be out by the time we're um we're done. A majority an outright majority of the coverage in areas like in papers like Time or or The

1:26:52 Guardian. A lot of the most like anti-AI um sources are from people literally literally like paid for and promoted by these three foundations. >> H insane. >> So presumably your stance on uh what's the meme? What's the meme? It's the P doom. The probability of doom that AI is going to lead to the end of the world. I'm assuming you're one of the it's pretty low, bros. >> I think I think it's negative actually. I think that I think the the the odds are AI saves us from >> that sounds much more of a white bill. Is it like uh so when you see all >> let's let's imagine the counterfactual. Okay. Um there there's no AI. American GDP is down by like 5% for like the the

1:27:39 third year in a row. We're like totally [ __ ] Trump is going crazy. The Iran war is like even more desperate than it looks now. Um and then we like start a [ __ ] nuclear war and then we all die. Um that that's a lot likely than than any of the [ __ ] the doomers are saying. But it's it's like going to be avoided. You know, the small I'm not saying that that would have 100% happened, right? But the the risk of nuclear war would have been a lot higher if we'd not have AI than if we did have AI. And and that's like not even counting like you know the direct use of AI in the US government. But that's just like talking around like oh the GDP statistics. >> Yeah. No most most ways that the world will end will not be this like 300 IQ like sci-fi [ __ ] that only you understand and that you are like the Cassandra telling the world but no one

1:28:25 will believe you. actually like most ways the world ends are like pretty obvious [ __ ] Things like nuclear war and okay, how do you how do you avoid nuclear war? Well, mostly it's like conventional things. It's like not starting wars. It's like not, you know, going to war with nuclear powers. It's like actually pretty obvious [ __ ] >> It's like if everything there's like a band of economic prosperity where if all world powers remain within this, you probably don't break out the nukes, right? If somebody starts getting too juiced and they're beating everyone else bad enough, you can see nukes. If someone else falls outside of the band too hard, you can see nukes. But if everyone's >> Yeah, that that's also why I think um nuclear capabilities in in the UK and in France is probably um that's probably something that you want to reclaim or or

1:29:12 um kind of uh disable uh before it gets too late. >> Yeah, it is a little bit >> that's maybe actually like a wild take. That's that's maybe an unusual take, but I think those countries will go bad. um those countries will go bad I think like it it will be much more likely that they start a nuclear war than for example that like China does a first strike. >> That's a fun take. That's a fun clip. I think it's probably true though. I mean I do think that uh if you look at >> for exactly the reasons you're talking about, right? It's it's [clears throat] they're going to >> Well, they're already they're already trying to rob everyone. They're going to start they're going to start trapping their citizens from leaving at some point, right? At some point, the EU is going to realize that like, [ __ ] they're already running out of tax

1:29:57 piggies. We need to keep these people here. We need to somehow extract wealth from them, and then they're going to realize, okay, we've been thwarted by our competent citizens because they're smarter than us, as we are regulators who have destroyed everything. Uh, and they're going to need some additional way to get aid. And that's this is going to be pointing their nukes at every other country and going like, "Hey, I would really like some foreign aid and if you don't foreign aid me, I'm going to use my nukes, man. I'm sorry." >> We we we just should not have nukes in countries that experience like a 5% GDP contraction. We should act we should do everything we can to avoid that happening. And that very easily could be, you know, even the UK's own uh foreign ministers like and it's it's interesting they will say this in the in the context of like immigration, right? They will say like, "Oh, if we do not

1:30:43 have immigration, then we will have like GDP contractions." And they've already had GDP per capita contractions. This is not a this is not an economy that leads to an a stable polity. It's it's it's not an economy that leads to a stable management of nukes. We should be trying to get the news out. >> How did you decide to start effort News? Like what what precipitated you wanting to start this? I've always been more more of a like underlying technology guy. It's interesting because like I'm now at this point probably like more famous for the like political blog and other like political things than like for for for machine learning or or for like II or whatever, right? Um but it's interesting because like I was just like playing

1:31:29 around with the underlying technology. The original concept was actually uh LM tools like long run context um tools for like um financial auditing, right? And then I have all these tools. I'm like, what am I going to audit? At that point, I'd already left network school. I had no revenue at the time, right? Obviously, it's not even a a public launch yet. I'm like, what am I going to audit? So, so I go and I audit these federal databases and I'm just like, find anything. And then it found the ORPC story. I had found the refugee resettlement grant story and then I ask around. I'm like, do any any of you guys know about this? No one knows about this. I'm like, okay, maybe this is the thing. Maybe this is the thing that I should be doing with my life. And then I

1:32:15 just like sprint 247. I like incorporate like two days later. I just keep going until until we launch. And then that's how effort New started. >> That's a pretty sick story. And if if you don't mind us asking and you know with the level of clarity you can share because obviously you're in the middle of of a fundraising round it sounds like maybe closed by the time this comes out maybe not. What are the sources of revenue? Like do you plan on getting sponsors or do you plan on being like subscriber model or or you know what do you think there? >> Yeah we take subscribers right now. I think long term there's a lot more opportunity in like private data that kind of space because there's nothing about our tools that make them only applicable to public data and there could be a lot in that front in terms of

1:33:00 B2B in terms of like business intelligence type things and actually something that would be really interesting to do as well is a kind of like newswire service. I'd be like super fascinated to to see if we could get to the point where publish a story and then like the markets change immediately or or even like prediction markets, right? It would it would be like really really interesting to like publish a story and then see I guess you don't need the newswire necessarily for this but um but to see like oh we we we put out the story and then like you know the the prediction market for like you know take something non-controversial like the GDP of the USA like changes and that that'd be pretty cool >> but there's a ton of different monetization I think right now it's like

1:33:45 building up um users just building up like the the capac capacity to produce more of these stories and like yeah you know effort.cribe >> well for a second there it actually sounded like you were effectively saying like you you run a palunteer model and then you run open source palunteer on the government kind of as like a loss leader that like you know that's like the news portion but it sounds like you're saying like oh you run this on private data and you make money you know you charge like a fee for >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. People don't know like Palunteer was like this this like exclus this like experimental government contractor for like literally literally like half a decade and they proved that out and they were like okay we are most trusted even in government give us your B2B data and that was extraordinarily successful. I think something similar is

1:34:30 happening where the crown is in the gutter when it comes to media. Um there there was probably a time actually they didn't capitalize on it but like uh and they also lacked the underlying capabilities. So so there it's not like totally free to capitalize on it. Um where there could have been like a New York Times branded like data analytics or like business intelligence type thing and they missed the boat on that. >> Well, I think the problem is they they really want to guide the direction of the stories, right? I I don't I don't think the New York Times >> Yeah. They they they need to be they need to be they're a lot more corrupt and and so they also had you know just business reasons or kind of relationship reasons why they couldn't do >> I think ideological reasons too right like they don't want people to take data and form their own conclusions they want to tell you the conclusion

1:35:15 >> yeah I think that's right um but now there's this like re-evaluation of med of the media landscape there's this re-evaluation there's this like seeking of high ground everyone no matter their political opinion. I see this like across entire swas of like both the left and the right are like actually you know there's tons of people who just make [ __ ] up totally untrustworthy you get away from this stuff and I think that the crown the the like leader that comes out of that and I think it will be us will be much more powerful in all sorts of other ways. It'll be much more powerful in terms like basically like we've been living now in 20 or 30 years

1:36:03 where there just actually has not been a trustworthy singleton. Maybe the closest thing would actually be like chat GBT interesting although of course a lot of people don't trust chat GBT and there are like political biases so it's not completely unfounded but whatever comes out of that will be a much more powerful like I I think you will get the cycle where you will get a source of truth that comes out of that and that source of truth will probably be especially if it's us will be an organization that's competent in all sorts of other ways and we'll be able to succeed in all sorts of other ways that are like more powerful than like New York Times or like Kronhite or whatever. >> Yeah. I I think one thing that would be super interesting that you can kind of do with LMS is create a great source of

1:36:53 hey is is this news personality? Do they reflect facts like a fact checker but for different people? Right? you have like, hey, Matty Glacius has, you know, cited these 17 studies and over the last, you know, 40 claims he's made, X X amount of them are correct or Y amount of them are correct. I think there's interesting things like that that you can do with LM that are not really possible to do on scale with, you know, human fact checkers and there's obviously a lot of bias there as well. Um, I I think being able to deploy these things to do massive massive massive amounts of findings lets you do personalization but and mass, right? It's it's very interesting. >> Yeah, I think the facteing stuff

1:37:39 I don't know like people there there are people who say they're interested in that, but like I don't know. Facteing is just kind of lame to me. It's it's just like it's you're just like totally derivative. And maybe that's still like somewhat socially useful, but I actually think it's going in the opposite direction. I think actually a lot of new media wants to break stories. They just don't know it yet. There was um it's interesting because I think like TBPN is actually like a good show. Like I've watched a lot of TBPN in my life, but there was this guy on TBPN who's like we don't we don't break news stories. we don't care about breaking stories there. Uh that was pretty interesting >> because I think that once you have the capacity and once you

1:38:25 >> Yeah. But I think if you have that capability um for example we we like broke stories on MTS for example right once you have that capability I think that's something that actually everyone will be interested in. And I think right now it's tainted. It's like, oh, if you are interested in breaking stories, you must somehow be like, you know, an adherent to all these sorts of insane ideologies that I don't adhere to. And, you know, that's not a totally crazy belief. That is actually like a somewhat empirical belief. But I think that once you have that capability, that's not something that you actually say no to. And we've already had a bunch of media partners, uh, a bunch of new media that we've broken stories with already. And I think that will end up being a much

1:39:12 bigger funnel of if not like overt partnerships than of like cross promotion. I think at the end of the day people do want to break stories and I think that that is actually like a very alluring thing to be able to do. >> But uh yeah I think it's interesting. Is there any story you can like tease that's upcoming or something that you broke recently that you want to talk about that's maybe not one of the ones you historically broke? >> Yeah. So, so the Astroturf AI coverage, that's that's new. That's uh this no one has ever heard it before. So, so that's that's uh >> that's super awesome. >> Um yeah, that's a plausibly deniable exclusive. You put exclusive plausibly deniable exclusive. You're >> you heard it here first. >> Hell yeah. Isn't that awesome? >> Hell yes.

1:39:57 >> Yeah. No, it is super awesome. I think it's super cool. And I I think a lot of this stuff, it's very funny. A lot of the times leftwing people be like, "Oh, there's so much money in politics." And it's like, yeah, man, on your side, like all the Soros, DAS, and stuff, it's it's really crazy. >> And like our money, like [ __ ] taxpayer dollars, it's like >> the worst thing is it's taxpayer money, dude. It's our money. Like, it's my money funding this. [laughter] >> Yeah. >> It's so >> Have you seen the meme of like the missiles? It's like your tax dollars also your tax dollars. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny, [snorts] >> dude. It's It's insane. I I think >> what's the way to get what's the way to get the taxpayer dollars from the right-wing side? Like how do I if I want Sailor's money? >> You got you got to pass the laws. You

1:40:43 gota And I think >> you got care about policy. And unfortunately, no one cares about policy except the the deep state bureaucrats and they're all super leftwing. So, >> well, unfortunately, the way that I've seen the way that I've seen it work on the rightwing side is it's just a much more concentrated funnel. So, there's going to be like 50 guys who get mega turbo rich from right-wing scams and then left-wing scams is like 45% of the country gets $600 a week. >> Yeah, it'll be I think I think it's actually like much uh but the totals are uneven, right? Actually, despite all of the like Kushner scams or whatever, right, it's actually still totally in in one direction. And and it's interesting because like the the Kushner thing is is

1:41:30 an interesting parallel because it is also something that could theoretically be legal uh but but is really you know frowned upon and I think rightly >> it's similar. It's like the fraud stuff right where like it's not technically fraud but there's clearly some degree of backroom dealing and and the obvious like the the obvious mirror here is like when Hunter Biden was on the board of these Ukrainian companies, right? Like that's obviously bull. What the [ __ ] does Hunter Biden know about like oil and gas or mining in Ukraine? He doesn't know. You know, >> put put him on a fentinel company. Someone But let's let's put Hunter Biden on the board of a biotech company. That that's credible. Maybe he knows something about that, you know, like drug manufacturing or something. Yeah, this is like the Breaking Bad

1:42:17 spin-off where it's like Crema and Hunter Biden like going out and [laughter] making the most chemically pure um life extension drug. [snorts] >> What a character Kremu is, man. >> Hunter Biden's on his redemption arc. It could happen. >> He's not. He He has um >> You were the one talking about astroturfed [ __ ] campaigns. >> You know what? You are not immune. [laughter] You are not immune to [ __ ] Under I will say I will say Mitchell Jackson, highly respect this guy. It's a firm called BCC Communications and [laughter] they're run by this Mitchell Jackson guy who's an ex Vice News guy. Um super brilliant guy. He's the publicist for like Nick Fuentes. He

1:43:03 used to represent Clovicular. I think he no longer does. He represents like Candace Owens, Hunter Biden, uh the Channel News Four guys on YouTube that had Hunter Biden and Nick Fuentes. Like that was all Mitchell Jackson put this together cuz like he represents I believe the Channel 4 guys and I know for a fact he represents Nick Fuentes and Hunter Biden. So it's like it's all his clients just getting together. Um >> yeah, and like you know Vice in a way there's a Vice Mafia kind of like there's a PayPal mafia. Yes, there is absolutely Gavin McKinnis. We've talked about this. Gavin McKinnis is a super interesting, influential guy to modern pop culture and not very talked about. This guy created the Proud Boys. He created Vice News. He popularized quote

1:43:48 unquote nofap. Um, so many hipster culture was also him to a large degree. >> Um, >> just keeps winning. I don't know if but he's he's certainly he's certainly doing a lot of I don't know if he's winning but he's certainly moving things in in different directions and and sometimes opposite directions. Um I'd we we tried to have Mitchell Jackson on but I think he's a little afraid that we'll we'll hit him with some hard-hitting questions, but maybe we'll have him on in the future. I have a lot of respect for him as a publicist. He's clearly one of the best publicists that exist. And it's interesting because I I I think it's interesting in the in the tech world, the the one really big publicist that's public is Lulu, right? And I think Lulu is great and and she talks a lot. I I'm sure she's very good, but I think Lulu has a strategy where

1:44:33 she overstates herself. I think Mitchell Jackson kind of has a little bit historically he had a little bit of the opposite where he undersold himself historically. Like he tried to let his clients take the credit for communications. I think Lulu takes a lot of the credit for Anderil's communication strategies and I'm sure she was instrumental but in my opinion Palmer Lucky is like a goated amazing you know communications like founder uh publicity for for Anderero and and for you know Oculus and whatever. Um Mitchell Jackson now is a little bit changed the strategy but historically he was super super quiet and super behind the scenes is my understanding. Um I think >> they also both came about at a time when people were more It's interesting because it's also based on the clients

1:45:19 you know like during that time even though Palmer may have been directionally an exception >> cos were like terrified of having a personal public image they didn't want that they wanted a designated spokesperson someone like that to handle it >> I mean people also forget it but historically like it was very common in tech especially like through the dot bubble It was very common that like founder companies, you would take the CEO out and put in a CEO who'd been like CEO of Intel or something or whatever. Um because it was like, oh, this is not a series A CEO. This is like a preede and seed CEO and you got to put in a more experienced guy in. Nowadays, that rarely happens, right? And now you can argue we've gone you could argue we've gone too far in the other direction now, right? Where it's like you have these

1:46:04 like 20-year-old kids who are giving B, you know, being given I think we should keep more. It's definitely it's definitely better to to in that direction. I'm definitely anti-jerontocracy. Um but but people forget that this was the case, right? Like when we talk about Palmer Lucky in like the meta days, I mean this is still back when like it was still common a relatively common practice, certainly more common than today. Then to be like, hey, look, you know, 20-year-old dropout or whatever. It's awesome. You built this company, but you want to raise a series B a series C. Yeah, sorry man. We're going to have to put someone who's 40, 50, 60 in the driver's seat. Um, so it was also a very different time like nowadays you have your Roy Lee's of the world, right? Where like they arguably are raising only on founder communication, right? And I'm I'm actually relatively like pro Roy Lee, probably relative other people.

1:46:50 Um, obviously there's like, you know, things I I don't love, but I'm like relatively pro- Roy Lee, but it's definitely gone in the other direction, you know, where before that was like a barrier to getting to getting >> fun. It could keep going. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's very interesting. Um it's very interesting. Anything else about about corporate? How many people are you guys at at effort News now? I'm curious. >> Uh four people, soon to be five probably. >> Super cool, dude. Congratulations, man. That's great to hear. >> Thank you. >> Is there anything else you want to leave us with? Something something we should know, some takeaway for the audience if they have if the audience has any thoughts. Okay. If you have any thoughts on what what stories Brian should pursue next, leave them down in the comments.

1:47:36 We're doing the disgusting call action. >> Completely forgot to Yeah, we completely forgot to >> We got to hit the disgusting call to actions. Dude, it's it's crazy, Brian, how overpowered call actions are. Something you should look into. Okay, maybe maybe you tell people >> how CTAs work during textbased content. You you should experiment with this. You should have at the end of every paragraph uh [laughter] something that hot links them down to the comment section. >> Yeah. Did you know do you know the secret? Do you know the secret uh copy paste tools? >> I think so. >> Presumably. >> So, speaking of call to actions, if you go to effort news now, you click into any of the of the stories uh you can like quick copy any of the paragraphs.

1:48:21 You can quick copy any of the images, the graphs, everything like that. >> Oh. And you can like double click to copy >> and >> you basically are giving your readers pre-made clips is what you're doing but text. >> Yeah, pre-made clips and pre-made Twitter threads. So a lot of the time I will literally write the Twitter threads by like copying everything in sequence. >> That's [laughter] awesome. >> That's that that's how the effort news Twitter threads get made. >> This is what the effort is by the way. He does the effort so that you don't have to >> Yeah, you don't have to do the effort. It's funny. We we thought about making our our like uh our our motto. We thought about putting this in the website, too. >> Um like reread AI text so you don't have to like like I'm probably in the top

1:49:06 like one in one billion like the top top seven people read I might be there of of of reading AI text. Like I read so much AI text like morning to evening like just skim through all of this like all all these reports see if there's anything there. Um but yeah we we put a lot of thought into designing all of the elements of the website and it's like there's so much slop that's around. The New York Post is a good example actually because the New York Post actually breaks stories. It's like actually one of the >> such weird people like it's one of the more functional papers in terms of actually providing new information, but it also

1:49:52 looks like the [ __ ] New York Post. Well, then they also have stories that's like Kendall Jenner wore these three scarves to [laughter] the MD and it's like that's right next to like it's it's that's like above like a threemon investigative journalist piece on like the Hunter Biden laptop. Yeah, that was a New York story. People like you see this stuff and it just black pills you on what the incentives must look like because you see all these people that are breaking actual news and doing actual cases and then somehow they all descend into the slop bin, right? like they cannot resist the slop in which implies to me that this whole thing is very difficult to carry out financially without sticking your hand in the slop bin. >> I think that they do not have faith in

1:50:38 the power of B2B SAS. I think [laughter] also >> well this is again Brian's model is like news is his lost leader for selling like AI consulting >> [laughter] >> uh data management solutions which is kind of epic like that's pretty that's pretty imagine in the future like Brian effort news is like the New York Times of the future and because right now the way the New York Times work is the same thing except it's all powered by the New York Times video games on your phone like the New York Times app that has like crosswords and they both >> I wonder if they'll have New York Times sports gambling >> the the News loses money go really well. Like you can bet on >> but that's the way news has always worked. News news was never able to monetize directly. Poly market is doing it from the opposite direction. >> Yeah. Poly market it's it's gambling. It's like news subsidized by

1:51:23 >> I think you'll get the convergent evolution. I think the New York Times will become Poly Market. [laughter] >> I don't think so. Well, historically what you had was soft power, right? historic was like, "Yeah, I'm going to lose money on all these reporters, but I get soft power because I get to dictate what what piece of news people hear about." And I >> The New York Times is still down mobile. They need to do something. >> The New York Times kind of still does this, but they've managed to they make money now. And what they did is the the game. >> Yeah, they can get people addicted to games, but like maybe you should look into getting people addicted to [ __ ] Poly Market. >> That's interesting. >> New York Times Poly Market collaboration now. I think that >> I I don't know if they're politically aligned. I don't know if they're politically very aligned here, sir. Yeah, I think I think New York I think Polymark New York Post is more likely to

1:52:08 get done [laughter] that could uh I I feel like that could happen today. If that if they they came out, they were like, "We'll now have a polyarket integration in New York." I would be like literally 0% surprised. New York Times would be awesome. I think they need to do something. I think the New York Post could do it because let's be honest, the New York Times brand is like, "Hey, here's the seven thongs Kendall Jenner wore last week, right?" Like, like I was going to say like the New York Post, the New York Post is actually going to increase its credibility by putting sports betting on their [laughter] >> Yeah, that's so funny, dude. The other funny [snorts] thing is that the New York Post doesn't even make an attempt to like like you have like Blaze Media or other outfits that have like multiple

1:52:53 brands and they have like the serious one and then like the less serious one. But the New York Post doesn't do that. They literally have like the Hunter Bind story. It's like 3 months of deep investigative journalism. You're targeted by the government to like shut this down explicitly by like you know intel intelligence services to shut this down and then like literally right next to it just the sloppst of all time. very very >> I'm gonna be real with you strategy. >> That's how these things go. Do do you know about Jimmy Lie? This like uh media like I don't know if he was a billionaire but like this media like multi-millionaire who was arrested in Hong Kong. Um he did a a lot of the dissident reporting on on the like Hong Kong like national security law crackdowns and [ __ ] like that. Okay. Um every Jimmy Lie publication has like

1:53:41 half naked women on the cover. It It is the New [laughter] York Post of Hong Kong. >> It's like It's like Playboy, but then it has dissident. Like, if Playboy had like dissident articles, that's awesome. That's so funny, [laughter] >> dude. Guess what the New York Post works? >> This guy rightwing Twitter Twitter. Hold on, man. [laughter] This is just like Kosing. >> This is the face of journalistic freedom. This is the [laughter] cover of >> This is what they took from us. And then it's just a woman with large breasts. This is what they took from us. huge, enormous. [laughter] >> That's that that that's uh that's the that that was the face of freedom in Hong Kong for sure. >> Well, yeah, it's been it's been awesome having you on. I don't know if there's

1:54:26 anything you want to tell the audience. Go to effortnews.com. Leave us a comment in our comment section. What do you think about Effort News's site layout? Okay. What do you think about Brian's new enterprise? >> Do you think Brian will be able to save the world? Here, we could we could we could ask them to do the most [ __ ] up thing ever and we could say you should comment his URL on our comments and then you click it yourself and then you go and you comment our URL in [laughter] his comments and so then an infinite >> we're doing this really disgusting post ironic call to action thing where we do call to actions but we kind of make fun of ourselves as we it's it's the secret where if you make fun of yourself >> someone else can't make fun of you action seriously So, we have to like dip our toes in with these weird like I'm joking. Like, I

1:55:13 want you to subscribe. Maybe it's like I actually do want you to subscribe though, Ernest. >> So, I do think the last question I am curious about. >> You You guys should totally subscribe to Plausibly Deniable. You should also subscribe to >> Truth Nuke. >> Yes, thank you. And and you should subscribe and pay on Substack where we have bonus episodes and extended content. >> Yeah, give them money, too. Give them money, too. Why did you get off of of off of sub because you you did effort new separately. >> It's the graphs. >> Oh, it's like data visualization. >> You just can't make >> Did you consider reaching out to Substack and and asking them to make this easier or was that just like kind of a pain and you didn't want to depend on that? >> I haven't I haven't reached out to them. Uh maybe I should. I don't know. Uh I I actually really like the customer management stuff on Substack, the the subscriber integrations, like a lot of

1:55:59 stuff. >> Subtime is great because you can leave at any time. Like you own the URL and you own the email list. So it's actually pretty fair. Like it's it's it's pretty fair. You can leave whenever you want. >> Um >> yeah, but like >> um yeah, graphs have been broken on Substack for a long time. And a lot of other people I know have asked for better graphs on Substack. Right now the best thing you can do is just like copy paste the screenshots of the graphs >> into [snorts] Substack. >> Yeah. But you want to make a lot of them look really ugly. Yeah. >> Um it's really it's really tragic. if this basically one thing. There's also some some things around the website customization. You can't make them look quite the way that we do. But like there's a there's a lot that's that that could be good in Substack if we could

1:56:44 kind of like keep the visual presentation the same way that that we have and and have that work well in Substack. We we totally be be down to move back. So that's not like a Yeah. Nothing nothing against >> Substack. You better stack. Okay. >> Yeah. We're going to take this clip personally to the Substack guys and >> we're going to say you're you're losing all of your actual journalists. It's like, you know, the only people who don't care about the quality of your embedded graphs, it's me. You're gaining me, you're losing Brian. How does that make you feel about your product? Although [laughter] it's interesting like a lot of legacy journalists uh there there are a few exceptions and that those are the ones who stand out but there's just like not a lot of care

1:57:30 to the visual presentation of the graph. Sometimes they'll like slap on a randomass graph with like conflicting colors and it's like what am I even supposed to get out of this? Right? The the the actual like data data visualization in like series A startups are a lot better than the New York Times is on average. And it's this like kind of crazy realization that the meta has advanced so far and it's just left a lot of the legacy firms out of completely out of play but they just don't realize it yet and no one's capitalized on this. It's this kind of crazy thing. There are some like Twitter posters who are well the more that you talk about this the more that I'm realizing that you are a a graph autist in the same way that other people might be train autists. And I'm realizing that actually when I go to Substack with this with what your

1:58:15 specific complaints are, they might actually say like it's like, well, this would require us changing the programming language of our front-end interface because of the specific rendering layout that he requires or something really weird. I don't know. >> Yeah. Yeah, probably. Um the the other reason that that I've like theorized based on this is that it may be a cyber security issue. Um, it may open them up to a lot more injection attacks. Yeah. >> Huh, that's crazy. >> That's crazy. >> Yeah. For example, if you just allow people to embed like random JavaScript elements, then people could like uh have things that are like scam versions of the Substack logo that like just steal your money >> and and obviously they would not want that. And they may have to like

1:59:01 basically the only way you would go go about avoiding that maybe you can like speed it up with AI is to like manually ban everyone who's doing that. Otherwise, you just can't can't allow like arbitrary JavaScript on your site. >> Manually banning everyone who does that is one of those things that seems like it would be really easy uh until you actually have to do it and you have to look through all of >> Yeah. Yeah. It's like Yeah. And you know, how do you retroactively detect that or or sorry, not not retroact how do you like proactively detect that, right? if people are like taking money, you know, how how do you deal with like customers who like paid some other people who are pretending to be Substack, but you don't have that money because they like paid other people and maybe those people uh ran with and ran away with it. So like I'm actually like

1:59:47 like kind kind of understanding of like why why Substack doesn't do this. There there are all sorts of plausible reasons why um >> I want to do this. Yeah. Yeah. Possibly deniable reasons, you know. Um, you can put the Cinema Sins bell in. Um, but but yeah, like um nothing against Substack. It's just like what we wanted to do with the site. >> Okay. >> It's interesting that you said you'd be fine going back to Substack, though. >> Well, I I I do think Substack would probably bring in some version of organic. It's actually weird. Substack is one of the last few sites where people want to read other publications and want to pay you money for it. Like Substack might be the only site that has like 50% of its audience wants to read other related stuff to what they're already reading. A and B is willing to pay money for it. Like it's it's super

2:00:33 unique. It might all just be 1,000 Mark and Dre sock puppet accounts though. Who who knows? Honestly, [laughter] >> I know one person who >> I know one person I know one person. It's not Mark and Dre. I won't say who it is. I know one billionaire who subscribes to someone we all know's Substack and pays them like $80,000 a year. And this seems like a thing that only happens on Substack. >> W with with 1,000 accounts or with >> No one account $80,000 a year subscription. >> Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That that that I know multiple instances of um >> this is why I have the founding subscription option as well if you would like to give us $50,000. Um but um no I mean that's not particularly surprising.

2:01:20 I think some substacks are worth $50,000 or you know $80,000 or however much. >> Yeah. >> I think that is a correct appraisal value to some people. >> Which ones would you say? >> I mean I am not subscribed to any substacks for $80,000. >> I'm subscribed to some substances, sir. [laughter] >> Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm saying that's that's value for some people. Like if I had a billion dollars, I'd probably start doing that. But >> I think it's a patron value then, not like an actual value of the of the writing necessarily, right? It's like a patron value. >> Yeah. >> I was I was honestly just hoping that somebody was going to say the plausibly deniable substack. You can get bonus episodes and extended content. >> If you were a billionaire, I'm sure

2:02:05 Brian would be bankrolling us with $80,000. This is this is doubt in my mind. Uh yeah. Well, this is the call to action. Give the plausibly denied a billionaire out there $8,000 and you follow us. We would love $80,000, please. And thank you. But yeah, it's been a pleasure to have you on. Okay. It's been it's been great. We'll keep up with your news and we'll probably be pushing some of your some of your stories as they come out and and talk about them. we can be, you know, the the newscasters over your the very unserious newscasters over your very serious research. Um, but yeah, it's been a pleasure to have you on, man. Go to effort.news, check out some of the stories, follow Brian on Twitter. Great Twitter feed. Amazing guy.

2:02:51 >> Yeah, >> he's gonna go and find me at Brian Child57 as well. B R I N C H AU57. >> Follow >> Godspeed. Follow effort news, dude. Totally. I'm going to go and I'm going to read one of your articles, Brian, and then I'm going to go and I'm going to write my own summary of it. And you're going to look at it and you're going to be like, "He [ __ ] he [ __ ] it up. He misrepresented my Why didn't he just click the autocopy button? I wrote it for him already. [laughter]