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This story is important both in honest merits, but also in terms of what it says about Trump two point zero and the way he's approaching this administration. Put this Washington Post hairs sheet up on the screen. I think they were the first one to break this news. Trump outs at least fifteen independent inspectors general in late night purge, So every cabinet level agency has one of these inspectors general.
We're supposed to be independent. They're actually supposed to have lengthy terms, so's you know, serving under one president to try to insulate them from political influence. And actually, during the first Trump administration, Trump had tried to fire a bunch of these individuals, and I think did fire some of them, and Congress reacted and a bipartisan manner was like, you know, we really need to protect the independence of
these roles. So we are going to require that you give Congress thirty day notice and that you give us ample cause for why you're letting all of these people go. So Trump says, don't care that there's a law that says that I need to give you thirty days notice.
I'm just going to do it anyway.
They were notified late Friday by emails from the White House Personnel Director that due to changing priorities, they've been terminated immediately.
The only ones.
Who were spared were the watchdogs at homely insecurity and justice, which is kind of interesting. Actually, I don't get to that more in a moment. They go on to say that dismissals appear to violate federal law, which does require Congress to receive thirty days notice of any intent to fire Senate confirmed inspector general. The legal uncertainty could create awkward encounters. On Monday that would be today when several watchdogs who were toltdal they were fired planned to show
up in their offices to work anyway. So there's one person who sort of oversees the entire inspector's general program, and he put on a letter saying, listen, this wasn't legal, so we don't accept it. So a bunch of these watchdogs are going to show up today anyway because they view it, I think, very clearly and accurately so as being unlawful. One of the fire watchdogs describe it as
a widespread massacre. They said, whoever Trump puts in now will be viewed as loyalists that undermines the entire system. The other thing that's interesting, weird whatever here, Emily, is that a bunch of these people that he just fired were his own appointees from the first term. So it's not like this was a bunch of like you know, libs put in by Obama or Biden. Many of these
people were actually Trump appointees. But one of the people who survived was an Obama appoint that's Michael Horowitz at the Justice Department, and apparently he liked him because you know, he had been critical, he had been critical of Trump, but he'd also been critical of Biden. I mean, that's their role is to try to be even handed, regardless whether it's a Republican or Democrat who's serving. The other one that he left in place was one of his
appointees at the Department of Homeland Security. That individual, KAfari, has been under investigation for years, but he had done something, and he's in charge of overseeing the you know, the crackdown on immigration, So it's important to Trump to have someone who's friendly there in particular. And he had also put out some report that Trump had you know, Trump had appreciated, but you know, some of these some of these people that he fired had been really critical of
different Biden actions. The Inspector General at the Veteran's Affair oversaw multiple investigations of how the Biden administration handled the agency's troubled effort to build a massive electronic health record system. Another one uh Trump appoint at the Interior Department who was fired, had released a lengthy investigation concluding that when the US park Police led law enforcement officers in de crowd of mostly peaceful protesters, that he actually he sort
of backed up Trump's version of events there. You guys remember the whole Lafayette Square situation. His report said that it was about a pre planned effort to build a fence around the park to protect officers and not because Trump had like sicked them on these peaceful protesters. So you would think that would be something Trump would like. But nevertheless that person has fired as well.
Yeah, and Chuck Grassley responded to this and said, there may be good reason the IG's were fired. We need to know that. If so, I'd like for their explanation from President Trump, regardless of the thirty day detailed notice removal that the law demands was not provided to Congress. Jonathan Turtley, by the way, agrees with that Chili professor at GW Law, somebody who has agreed with a lot of Trump's decisions.
And it's like a you know, regular Fox News kind of a guy.
I think he's a contributor. Yeah, he's willing to go out on a limb for some of Trump's decisions, but not this one. I think it is because with the Senate appointed positions, that is so clear. And what's interesting is that you can kind of pick up on scuttle butt about policy priorities in the conservative world, you know, these igs, we have to have a plan. I don't know if this was in Project twenty twenty five. I
don't remember it. Maybe it isn't. I'm forgetting, But yeah, i'd actually never heard that there was a plan to gut IG's and it seems like Chuck Grassley hadn't heard that either, as somebody who would have a significant interest in it, because he says there may be good reason the IG's were fired. We need to know that if so. John Barrasso, the Senate majority whip, told Fox on Saturday, quote, sometimes inspector general's inspectors general don't do the job that
they're supposed to do. Some of them deserve to be fired. And I'm sure, by the way that that's true. But I don't know what the evidence is. I haven't heard people talking about the evidence when it comes to these particular these particular confirmed positions. And one of the interesting things also is from an anonymous source in the Washer Post story that actually makes a pretty good point, which is that igs do what Trump says he wants to do,
which is cut down on waste, fraud, and abuse. That's right, And even if some of these particular igs weren't doing the best job of that it. Now, by just gutting them right off the bat without going through the formal process, you are undermining. Like, whoever is confirmed in the future is going to look like a political actor in a way that they wouldn't have before, and they shouldn't look
like political actors. Let's say a IG comes out with a great report on the EPA, and this is somebody who's confirmed by appointed by Trump, confirmed by the Senate, Well, it's just gonna be They're gonna lack the credibility that they otherwise would have, yeah, commenting on the waste, fraud and abuse at the EPA. So this one could really come back to buy Trump.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's possible. I also think it's possible that, I mean, he's doing so many things so quickly that it is just hard to like focus on any one, you know, particular outrage and I mean, so you're right down the line, however, thing's unfold It's possible
that it does come back to bite him. It's also possible that, like everyone just capitulates and forgets and moves on, and you know, I think that's kind of what he's betting on and paying attention to which direction things going is really important because again, put actually C two up on the screen. This is some of the Republican reactions you mentioned. Chuck Grassley probably the most noteworthy because he's you know, he's rock solid like conservative, knowing no one
call him. I don't think a rhino, right, I'm correct about that. Yeah, he pointed out like this, didn't thought this was illegal. Senator Susan Collins express confusion. You're not confused, you know what's going on here. Lisamerkawski loaded then the lack of notice, expressed worry over the abrupt dismissal. Obviously, the Democrats came out very upset about this. You could put their reactions up on the screen.
Next.
Chuck Schumer characterized it as a chilling purge, a preview of the lawless approach. Jerry Connolly labeled dismissals as a Friday night coup and an assault on transparency and accountability. Elizabeth Warren called it a purge, accused Trump of dismantling constraints on his authority. So obviously they're being very aggressive. But you know, like I said at the top, I
mean just on the merits. It's important because genuinely, some of these Inspectors General have done important work on behalf of the American public and on behalf of taxpayers to understand whether it was Trump or whether it was Biden, or whether it's before that, where there had been failures, where there had been corruption, where there had been things that had been just done improperly or unlawfully, et cetera.
Am I right that Horowitz is the one who did the Hunter Biden the Joe Biden report about the classified documents?
Was that him?
Or no? That would? That's right? And Trump has said that he's keeping Horowitz because.
He liked thet But in any case, I mean, they have done genuinely useful work that reporters and taxpayers rely on.
So it matters for the merits.
But I think it is one more indication, and we already have many of these, that Trump two point zero is taking a truly maximalist approach, because there's not even a fig leaf here that this is legal. I mean, you had the thirty day period is there's no exceptions
for it. You have to give Congress thirty day notice, and he didn't, So it sets up a showdown what happens next, you know, do Republicans just decide like, well, he's our guy, and we're just not going to put up that much of a fight and we don't really want to cross him, and we're just going to accept this. What happens when, I mean, you have to the next whoever is going to be next hast to get confirmed if their predecessor was fired illegally, Like what does that look like?
And so.
We're going to see how these sort of showdowns really unfold and whether he is able to do things that are just like clearly unlawful and get away with it because you have this, I mean, the birthright citizenship, the executive Order. Birthright citizenship is kind of part and parcel the same type of approach. A federal court has already smacked that down and said like this is preposse, this
is like the most preposterous thing I've ever seen. Effectively, but he feels like he can effectively do whatever he wants, and the Sproome Corps basically told him that that was true.
So is he going to abide by the scored order?
Is he just going to keep moving forward doing what he wants to do and firing him he wants to fire and all that.
This is one of the I think the most important storylines, not just for the first week, but I mean this is this is going to be a significant snl of all places. Had a really funny sketch kind of poking fun at the lin Menuel Miranda millennial moment of Hamilton back in early Trump days. But Trump was like, yeah, maybe maybe we need a king in the in the sketch. Yeah, And you know, Republicans, I can evage at a period of time when Republicans were just utterly horrified at the
executive overreach of the Obama administration. And I think some of those complaints were entirely valid because there was a sort of stretching of the executive branch in a way that if you are a sort of ideological conservative, you would say, these are power You're usurping powers that belong to Congress. And it's actually fueling this vicious cycle where Congress just becomes more and more weak because they're punting
everything over to the executive branch. They know that they can't get it done through, for example, the reconciliation process because it's not strictly related to the budget, and so I mean, some of this is Trump rolling back powers that I don't think belong to the executive but not all of it is at all. And actually, interestingly, this was I was looking this up, well, you were going through that. There was some talk about this in the Project twenty twenty five circles, but not I mean, not
a lot. This was pretty low key. I think it was public citizen that picked up on something. A couple of people that were involved in Project twenty twenty five said about purging igs. But genuinely, like this is if that was a serious a serious point, it was really low key, and that shows how significant Trump is literally taking the blueprints that were drafted over the course of
the last four years. And a lot of people thought they'd be giving those blueprints to Ron de Santis, for example, a strict Tea Party freedom caucus, like true Chip Roy style, like limited government dude. Although what's happened at the state level is testing probably some of his old ideological allegiances. But all that is to say, Trump is like just taking the conservative movement's blueprints, and some of it I'm like, oh yeah, like some of this is from my perspective
as a conservative. I'm supportive of it, but a lot of this is significantly testing the conservative movement's actual commitment to reigning in the power of the executive branch, and this is a great example of that. So how many people are going to speak out and get mad about it in the same way that they would if Obama did it?
Oh?
I imagine if Biden did that.
Yeah, imagine if this was common in office right now and she had done it, I mean, or had launched a shit going before she It's just like unimaginable.
Well, imagine if they had been seriously imagine I Kamala Harris had been inaugurated with the oligarchs right.
Oh, oh, I know, I thought a lot.
Would imagined or gas right if she was there with Zuckerberg and Bezos and Musk flanking her like, and then immediately doing a presser announcing basically like, we're going to support these people spending five hundred billion dollars, these tech oligirks to eliminate your jobs.
I mean, that's the.
Goal of these tech AI developers is to literally eliminate all need for human labor.
And Biden might as well have been flanked by them in twenty twenty because that's the way his administration proceeded. But this is so so brazen.
I actually don't think that's fair because the one place where Biden really broke from the neoliberal the Obama Clinton neoliberal consensus, and the you know area where he was most significantly different on economics was this approach to antitrust.
Trump a little bit too. The Google suit was started under Trump.
Under that is true he did, and I don't think we're going to see any of that this time around. But you know, there the thing with Biden is that there was a story to tell about, uh, you know, oligarchy and inequality and breaking up these tech giants and why it matters to you, right, why these aren't just like theoretical high falutin things that happening in some court that really doesn't impact you, like how it connects. But first of all, I don't think that he really cared that.
Much about this.
He cared about you know, NATO, that was like where his brain was. I think these were people under him that were more invested in this direction. Number one, number two, like he was a million years old and couldn't articulate anything about anything. So you end up with a situation where he pissed off all of the Mark Zuckerberg's and Elon Musk's of the world, and genuinely they felt like, oh, there could be some sort of constraint on my you know, on my endless power and wealth.
So they were pissed off while she was a few.
I mean, how many Wall Street Journal op eds were written about how terrible Lena Khan was. Probably over one hundred and literally that's not exact. Literally Matt Stuller kept track of them. So they're furious, they hate him, they know what he's doing, but the public has no idea and are never bought in and invested in this project. And so when it's you know, usurped and ended with
a whimper. And by the way, Kamala Harris gave some indication she wasn't going to continue in that direction either, so you know, keep it's yeah, I want to be fair and point that out, but but yeah, so it made sense to them, we're gonna line up behind this guy who's gonna basically give us whatever we want. But but yeah, if it was Kamala with those guys behind him, like, oh, the freak out would be insane, and you know, and justified.
We sew like rightfully so, but Trump because he thinks, he just thinks he can get away with anything, and he might be right.
He can right now because the uh, I guess they And this is you know, in a weird way connects back to what we were talking about with AfD in the other block. It's yeah, there have been years and this isn't to say that Trump is blameless, but there have been years of such terrible policy making that Trump was able to successfully exploit that and come in and he now has the support of the public on a
lot of different things. Not everybody, but there are a lot of different I mean, he has significant support to shake up Washington. And so when you look like you're shaking up Washington, people can't pay attention to every tiny little thing that's going on, so it looks directionally right, and so I mean, there's just not a lot of energy or appetite to push back on Trump after Democrats and I think we have a list here of how democrats or we have a graphic here showing how democrats
crats reacted to the firing of the Inspectors General. This is D three. It just Democrats are going to have to come up with a way to make this persuasive. Here you have Chuck Schumer saying this is a quote chilling purge and a preview of the lawless approach that he expects Trump to take. Jerry Connolly and Virginia said the dismissals were equal Friday night coup and a quote
assault on transparency and accountability. And Elizabeth Warren called out a quote purge and accused Trump of dismantling constraints on his authority. Now let's stick with the Connolly criticism there where he says this is a quote assault on transparency and accountability that covering up for Joe Biden for years. By the way, this is not both sides as them.
It is saying that it makes it easier for Trump to get away with a quote assault on transparency and accountability when the people who are accusing him of assaulting
transparency and accountability have zero credibility to do it. And that is one of the major two major political parties in this country, and one of them just covered up for a president who was ailing in front of your eyes, told you that your eyes were lying to you, and is now wanting to be upset about transparency and accountability. So it actually is not good for the entire country that Democrats have so little credibility on that question, because it will make it a lot easier for Trump to
then quote assault transparency by purging inspectors general. Yeah, unlawfully. By the way, if he had gone given them their notice and done it, that would be another thing. But he didn't.
Yeah, And I mean the same thing is true with regards to oligarchy, Like if you want us, if you expect the country to take you seriously on these things, you can't be like Ken Martin, the guy who is likely to be the next day and c chair being like, well, we'll take money from good billionaires. It's like, no, how about just there are no good billionaires. How about just it's bad when billionaires, when unelected billionaires run our parties
and our government. How about that as a direction. And so in my view, that's the choice they have in front of them. They can either effectively like capitulate to trump Ism, which is the direction they're likely to go in and the direction they have been going in, see you know, supporting the Lake and Riley.
Act, et cetera.
Or they could have a real like whose side, are you on moment and decide that they're going to excize this influence a big money within their own party so that they can offer an actual different vision and direction that has some credibility. But yeah, I mean, it's just this is the storyline to watch, not just the moves that Trump's Trump makes that are already quite maximalist. But what's the response. Is there any check on him whatsoever?
Or can he just do whatever he wants even if it's like brazenly unlawful.
And does it end up coming back on Republicans in the midterms. A lot of that will depend on how Democrats are able to claw back some measure of credibility if they are able to, but Trump is definitely making that a little bit easier on those questions.
All right, let's go on and get to Arnault Bertrand to talk about Deep Seek.
This is a huge.
Development which has absolutely rocked Silicon Valley in terms of Chinese AI development.
Here he is.
Very happy to be joined by Arnaud Bertrand. He described himself as an entrepreneur who tweets too much, but I have found your insights both with regards to China in general.
But this AI development.
In particular, I even brought you up earlier, Arnau in the context of this fight with Colombia. So great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us.
Right, thank you as o wise, very good to be here.
Our pleasure. So I've teased this a couple times in the show. But this is huge development from a Chinese company which was able with a fraction of the dollar amount to develop an AI competitor to chat, GPT and all of the other sort of like big players in the space. In fact, by some metrics, this new release of it's called deep Seek is outperforming the prior competitors
in the field. This has blown up all sorts of assumptions about AI development, about where Chinese companies were in terms of their technological.
Sophistication, about the success of Biden.
Administration policies trying to limit high tech development in terms of China. So are no, just take us through a little bit of what happened here so people have the backstory.
Sure, So what happened doctorin started in December when deep Seek released a first modern called V three, which already made a lot of waves because it was rebuilt to have been trained for only five point five million dollars, which is absolutely nothing in this industry. I think open Ai spends five billion dollars a year, so one hundred times less basically, and uh, and that one was already extremely good, already performing a lot of the models on
on the on on the important benchmarks. And then open Ai you know, released a new model called OH one, which is really you know, supposed to be the top of the range. And then right behind just last week, deep Sick released its own new modern called R one, which performs or is on par with with Open the Eyes h top of the ranch modern on on almost all bench parks. And they released it, and that's the
important bits. They released it open source, meaning that basically anyone can download it for free and use it as they please. It's it's it's really open source and an ma TL sense meaning that you can really, do you know, use the other how however you want, which is a huge difference to Open the Eye. It's called Open the Eye because originally the philosophy behind it was that it was meant to be open, open source and so on.
But famously they've they've taken a much more closed roots where they don't realize their mothers in open source, and you know, they don't disclose much about the mother It's all behind sort of a black well. It's sort of bit hidden. And so that's why a lot of people are shifting to UH, to d sek now. And now it's even demos downloaded app in the US as of today, it's UH. It's number one. It's over taken all the other apps, including including tipt wow.
And you know, our friend Matthew Stoller made an interesting point in his newsletter Big where he said, when you compare what China was able to do here with what AI technology is basically the United States or AI companies basically the United States have been able to do, it almost makes the United States look soviet. It looks, you know, like a Leviathan that is just just trudging along compared
to this alternative method. So could you do do you think maybe there's something to that parallel or note or is there is there something that we can take away from the way American AI businesses are organized in comparison here.
I mean, I think the interesting irony is that maybe there was a bit too much funding in the AI industry in the US for its own good. They're a bit too much of an easy life, because the reason why Deepsy I think, was able to come up with such a good and efficient modern is because they're very
much operating under constraints. Right. You had the export controls, the semiconductor export control and so China in many ways doesn't have a choice if they want to compete with the US, given they don't have, you know, such access to funding, the latest chips and so on, and they need to come up with much more efficient technology. So I wouldn't say it's it's exactly the same situation as
as the Soviet versus the West of the time. It's it's a most the situation where you know, you you the US kind of rested on its low arms and and uh, you know, I did to be tweezy and was operating in in too good an environments on China because of those constraints the the US put on them, they actually have to come up with simply better technology if they want to compete on I think that's largely what happened.
I think another piece that you've been pointing to ar now, which I find really interesting is China does not our country, by and large, a lot of the smartest grads that come out with technical degrees or technical know how, a
lot of them don't go into science or research. They go into like financial speculation effectively, and the Chinese government has looked at them and said, that's not the direction we want to go in, So they crack down on salaries for you know, the financial industry, and that creates incentives for the best and the brightest lo and behold to go into this sort of research and tech development.
So talk about that piece a little bit if you could.
Yeah, I think it's one of the most interesting angers of Deep Sick because it was actually a side project of a Hatch fund and that was released quite coincidentally about uh less than one year after China did crack down against the finance industry. This uh this this you know,
overly high compensation in the in the financial industry. Kepting it and there has been you know, you you you here in China a lot of miscontent in the finance industry professioners because, yeah, they can't make as much money on it's the industry is becoming less attractive for graduates on the and they're seeing a bit of a brain
drain from that industry. But That is very much the point I think that the Chaine government is UH is aiming for because they're looking at the US and they're seeing which is a shame when you think about it. A lot of the top gradiates from Harvard and IT and you know, all the Aleage Ivy League schools often
go in the finance industry. When I mean, think what you want about the finance industry, but if you have pure genius, arguably their brains would be of more use to society they were to develop new technology like like AI or working on you know, curing cancer or or things like that. And and I think this time gole is is UH is fascinating because I mean, it's it's it's difficult to put a direct correction. Did they do
that side project exactly because of that or not? But at least it's it's an interesting, interesting coincidence.
M Yeah. In the stock market, we're already seeing some of the effect of this in the stock market. Okay, can you talk a little bit more about why it's affecting stocks in the way it is and what we could expect see going forward as the deep sea deepep reckon reckoning goes on yeah.
So I was looking at it actually a portfolio just now. It's very depressing. So Nvidia just so is losing twelve percent today, and yeah, the whole tech sector is down. And basically because there was this assumption that AI was all about compute, like more chips you could get better on models, right and on the Deepsy kind of destroy that assumption because they don't have a lot of compute and they were able to come with a better model
because they had you know, better algorithms, better software. And so what's happening is simply that those assumptions around building a mood for us AI company with compute, with those massive data, some tools like you know, the Stellgate project that Trump open AI on so and just announced, those are you know, very much questioned right now. And that's what you're seeing I think in the in the stock market.
Yeah absolutely, I mean so much of the stock market value is built on this sort of like hype around AI, and so I mean it's incredibly deflating literally to see this company be able to you know, build a comparable product for vastly less. I will say I've seen some theories that they're not being straightforward about the amount of compute that they actually used here, most notably the scale.
AI CEO Alexander Wang and I think he was at the World Economic Forum, claimed that he thinks that they are hiding the ball on exactly how many chips, like what size of the mega cluster that they're using.
Let's take a listen to that and get your reaction. On the other.
Side, the Chinese labs, they have more h one hundreds than people think. You know, the these are the highest powered video chips that they were not supposed to have. Yes, my understanding is that is that deep seek has about fifty one hundreds, which they can't talk about obviously because it is against the export controls that the United States has put in place.
And I think it is.
True that, you know, I think they have more chips than other people expect, but also going to go forward basis, they are going to be limited by the chip controls and the export controls that we have in place.
What do you make of that.
Well, it's difficult to say one way or the other. But the good thing but Deep Seek is that when they release the modern so firs where the ready is the open source, so it's sort of you can see what's in the modern and they released on extremely detailed
paper with it. So he research sho and just go through the paper and you'll try to achieve the same outcome, which is the based on what they're saying they did in the paper on see if if that's true or not, or or or if what the method urgy that they're saying they posted in the paper is wrong on on debating about the number of chips. So I can't say.
Yeah, well I agree.
I read some analyzes you know that looked at the paper and said, well, here's the key innovations that they use to achieve so much more efficiency, way beyond my technical know how. But people who seem to know what they were talking about were like, oh, that's how.
They did it.
I see, he's very creative and efficient and efficient technological development here.
Uh.
One more I wanted to get your response to our no is Sam Altman weighed in, obviously this is a very bad development for him because he has bet so much on, you know, now the Stargate program. I know he'd been sort of battling with Microsoft for more and more money for larger and larger data centers, and you know, now this sort of blows that whole direction up.
Let's put this up on the screen.
D three from Sam Altman, he says it is relatively easy to copy.
Something that you know works. It is extremely hard.
To do something new, risky and difficult when you don't know if it will work. Individual researchers rightly get a lot of glory for that when they do it, it's the coolest thing in the world. And of course this was largely seen as being directed at the deep Sek development. What do you make of these comments from Sam?
Deep seek is definitely getting a lot of glories, so I'm not sure exactly what it means. I think something very interesting, and I think a big sign is what Mark Andresen is tweeting recently. I don't know if you if you if you forget what is what is tweeted Because obviously Sam at mine is biased. I think Mark Andrison is slightly more of a neutral part. He here because he's an investor and he literally tweeted count fram
about the exact good. But that Deep Seek was the most impressive, one of the most impressive breakthroughs it's seen in its entire career, and that silicons varies mostly gender investor, the guy we invented the browser, so you know, it's quite it's quite something, right, he.
Said, one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I've ever seen. And just to clarify that Amen tweet was from back in December, so presumably about the initial relation of deep seek.
But okay, yeah, yeah, so yeah, yeah. The new murder is also quite a bit. It's more of a breakthrough than than the three, which was the one in December.
My last question for you, Arno is.
Are there is there a legitimate reason to keep AI closed source as open AI has has decided, because, I mean, there are risks inherent in AI development. I mean there's a whole field of AI safety, a lot of concerns about what it could do in terms of the labor market, especially when it's being wielded for profit by companies like Microsoft. There are also some more for reaching concerns about AI.
You know, once it's AGI and you have this level of artificial general intelligence and then super intelligence that you know, effectively supplants human beings as the you know, the smartest creatures on the planet. What does that mean do they decide they want to keep us around or not, so there are these sort of like further reaching concerns about
AI development as well. Do you see any drawbacks in the open source model that not only deepseek has pursued, but also the Meta has gone in the direction of a more open source model as well.
That's a good question. I honestly see more drawbacks with the cruise moder because at the end of the day, if it's closed, it's it's it's a limited group of individuals who you don't have control over, and you know, our oligachx effectively like billionaires and that that take all the decisions when it comes to AI, which you're right, is going to be extremely disruptive. It's an extremely powerful technology.
So would you rather have that being controlled by a small group of billionaires were you know, very much can't relate to the general public, or would you rather have the general public anyone who can you know, have an influence of that on that with the the open source model, I think, I mean anyway that technology has risks, will have a big impact, will impact jobs and so on. Uh, But I feel more reassured with the idea that anyone will have to say on how I developed that it
is open free. Anyone can come up with uh, you know, startup around it freely on his own computer, rather than it being kind of uh developed secretly out of our hands.
And what we've learned from our own private tech companies semi private tech companies over the last decade is that you will also have similar levels of censorship and political corruption whether they're private or public, they get co opted or no.
Yeah, yeah. On censorship, it's it's an extremely good good point because people often you see a lot on Twitter, you know, people saying that the deepstick mother is uh is censored, and it's true that when you go on deepstick dot com because it is hosted in China, it is indeed censored because you have censorship lose in China and sun where anyone can download the modernate in open source you need however they want. If they want to turn it into a tool that you know, even generates
anti China propaganda, they can write. So that's what I mean by me being more reassured that its open source because anyone can do whatever they want with it, whereas open ai, if it's so and so on, it's also stands on in its own way. There's absolutely nothing you can do for it.
Yeah, that's that's true.
And I did see the comparison of people asking just very straightforward questions about like the Israel Palestine conflict on ch GPT versus Deep Sick, and I would I would say that the deep Seak version was much less censored in that particular instance than the Open AI.
The open AI version.
Exactly every country has their own baas by the end of the day, open source metals because you can then under the donother yourself on input your own Yes, Nik, it's your own right.
That's what I need.
I need the world to reflect my personal bibar No.
Thank you so much.
This is so helpful getting your breakdown of these developments and what it ultimately means.
Great to see you.
We are very fortunate to be joined this morning by Andrew Callahan of Channel five, who is out with a new documentary called Dear Kelly. Great to have you Andrew.
Welcome.
Hey, thanks so much for having me and I'm a big fan of Breaking points. I appreciate you guys for the platform. It's early morning, thanks to y'all, so thank.
You for having me on.
Thank you for waking up for us. We appreciate that we are likewise big fans. Let me give people a little bit a taste of the trailer here, and then on the other side you can tell them the backstory of what inspired you to follow this one individual.
Let's take a look.
Why did the framework created by QAnon and Trump propaganda cause an innumerable amount of people to jump head first down the rabbit hole, endangering their safety, lives, and freedom.
I thought I had it figure out.
I pointed fingers at the fear mongering twenty four hour news cycle.
There's nothing fake about CNN and.
At radio hosts who sell supplements and T shirts to paranoid libertarians. But deep down I didn't really know that was until I met a man named Kelly J. Patriot at a White Lives Matter rally in Huntington Beach, California, and asked him one question, what's the most painful piece of truth that's hurt you?
Guy stealing my home? His name's Bill Joyner. Financially he wanted to destroy me. He destroyed my twenty five year business, separated and devastated my family. So that answers your question.
Dude, sounds like he sucks.
I don't think he's a good guy. In my opinion, he's a bad guy and he's heard a lot of people. But then again, look what the Democrats are doing to others. Krby Bryant was assassinated by the plins.
I don't fucking die homies straight up.
So what was it that caused you to be sort of captivated by this guy and to really follow up with him and figure out what was actually going on there?
I think that it came from like a just not being satisfied with like my kind of deep dives into like the Maga far right for a long time. I had just followed Trump campaign trail across the country filming for my first project on HBO, and I felt like I had sort of been able to document the craziness and like a time capsule, but never really been able to understand what economic and social factors actually cause people to become radicalized, especially dudes through later in life like Kelly.
And I never really was able to actually dig deep.
But in his story about Bill Joyner and the foreclosure of his house and his family being separated, I saw a window and a chance to actually figure out.
The why of how people get like that in the first place.
Yeah, and you're probably this like central chicken or egg question that a lot of your work is based on, which you know. I think one of the reasons people love your work is you come to this idea that, like, there are a lot of very good people who do a lot of crazy things and get caught up in the fringes, and you include some interesting stats about January sixth, and for example people's debt levels, like whether they were there on January six if they had particular levels of debt.
There's just a big proportion of people. I didn't even realize that there were numbers attached to all of this. I mean, you could see it when you were there. But can you tell us a little bit about how this experience with Kelly either changed modified added nuance to the way you see the world that you know, maybe there are some people who come into all of this stuff with prior difficulties and then it changes them or is it just you know, a one way street.
Yeah, that's a great question.
I mean, before I started documenting Kelly, and this is filmed over the course of four and a half years, I didn't realize that so many people who like were so deep in that QAnon rabbit hole had just normal lives like in twenty twenty that were completely derailed by financial hardship, and particularly how that coalesced with like political psychosis. I don't like using the word misinformation because it's not like everything they read is.
Totally false or consumes false, but.
It's just being locked in this echo chamber of like twenty four to seven outrage content for a long period
of time. And definitely learned a lot about just people like that in general, but also about myself as a documentary film and how emotionally invested I want to be in the outcome of like a subject or someone that I'm documenting, Like by the end of the film, especially like after the intervention to spoil it a bit, not too much, I was so emotionally invested in Kelly turning over this new leaf that it became.
Like more important than my own life.
And I don't think I ever want to get that involved again, because I mean, I had filmed three hundred and fifty hours of footage in total, and I ultimately baked it down to eighty nine minutes, But it was like my personal expectations were tethered to his in a way that I'm not sure was super healthy.
I think for me, as a democratic socialist who thinks a lot about like class analysis, the way you approach this really played into some of my sort of mental preconceptions because you're like, there was a material harm that happened to a lot of these people and it sort of pushed them in this direction of radicalization. And that's
both true and not true. In Kelly's case, like he did genuinely go through this foreclosure, which for any one is a you know, horrific situation, but the way he portrayed it.
Was also not entirely accurate.
And then when you're still many years past that financial hardship and there's still you know, and you've had these this severing of relationship with your kids and you're not being there for them as you know, as a father, and they're having to have these you know again, I don't want to spoil it too much, but they're coming to you saying this has really hurt us, and you have a chance to turn over that new leaf, and that's not necessarily.
The direction that you want to go in.
It makes it just makes the picture a little more complex, right, It's not as simple and straightforward.
A sort of.
Math equation of you know, financial hardship plus loss of connection. I mean, you actually have a sort of like formula you lay out in the beginning doesn't have to lead to this, doesn't always lead to this.
There are other choices.
It's not always like as clear a picture as you're telling yourself in your head. You know, did it kind of challenge some of your conceptions coming in as well?
Yeah, definitely.
I mean I started when I was twenty two, when I finished when I was twenty seven, Like the first shoot being the White Lives Matter rally on April eleven, twenty twenty one, and the last shoot being three and a half weeks ago with our friend Uncle Pill at a skate park in San Diego. You can see my approach like kind of morph throughout the whole thing, because midway through, like twenty three twenty four, I'm like, I'm gonna be able.
To figure this out. I've got everything.
Diagnosed, I have all the ducks in a row. I'm going to make sure that he's able to turn over a new leaf. The one thing that I noticed, too, is that I didn't mention this in the movie very much, but the whole the idea of self narrative was also very important in his sort of inability to turn over that new leaf over time, because it's a comforting self narrative for him to have this heroic, black and white good versus evil Bill.
Joiner, you know, screwed me over.
And you know, the way that morphs with the political movement in general is very two dimensional, you know what I mean, the idea there's this like nebulous dark force out there that's just it exists.
We don't know what it is, but it's.
There to rob everything from the working, red blooded American patriot.
And it might not be my book, you may might not be shared by years.
However, we're all united in our fight against the evil forces.
And in a way that's comforting to people in his position because it stops them from actually picking up the pieces. Right.
That's why I was, you know, he was spending fifteen hours a day putting up leaflets saying Bill Joyner stole my home. That time easily could have been used at you know, maybe getting an entry level job and trying.
To save up money to start from the bottom. But that's a lot.
It takes a lot of humility to be able to bring yourself back to that level and start from scratch. It's easier to revel in the past while simultaneously leading a hero's narrative that keeps you in a revenge mind stain.
Well, and actually I just want to jump on to that point because one of the interesting things that you touch on is how he grew up in a mobile home and I think it was Iowa, and so he may have been ultimately a bankruptcy attorney, but there was something I think traumatic and I'm curious what you make of this for him about losing his kind of upper middle class, if not upper class status, and that for him was maybe like the truth that he didn't want
to grapple with you. Hear his kids saying that it was like the house. It was he could not give up the house. And he's still driving is banged up BMW, even though it's kind of big dent in the hood as your camera's caught. It seems like there was something about growing up poor that made him cling to the kind of fantasy of having made it.
Yeah, definitely, because he sort of achieved the American dream, which is just class mobility in general. I mean, especially nowadays with the costs of living very few people can go from living in a mobile home in their lifetime to being cemented as a community member in an upper class s gated community. So he hit that at point, and I think the material obsessions were his way of holding on to what that meant to him, like internally.
And you see this all the time. People hit the lottery.
Rappers get a bunch of money, they spend it more on like material items because they have a sort of imposter syndrome in general, because they didn't grow up in the same way that their peers did.
Because most people who are rich grew up rich.
Was very little crossover, and so I felt, like, you know, he felt it was a huge blow to his ego and also, yeah, self perception and self narrative to be to be foreclosed upon.
Are you Are you still in touch with Kelly Is he? Is he happy as guys back in the White House?
Now?
Yeah, he's.
I mean, he's actually pretty excited about the film. Like a lot of people look at the end of the film and they think, like, oh my god, he must feel so bad about it, you know, but at the end of the day, there is a lot of small victories that have been secured throughout the process of the film, like him not caring so much about Bill Joyner, which is his boogeyman, evil, predatory lump guy that he claimed
ruin his life. Him not caring about Bill by the end is a huge strive forward if you consider that in the opening scene it planned Parenthood, he's almost like passing out from anger yelling about Bill.
So, I mean it might not be this. He's never met people want.
Yeah, he's never met him, and you know, I'm being sued by Bill right now, which sucks. So but I also haven't met Bill either.
Wow.
So more Uh, there's more story to unfold there. Yeah, with you versus Bill Joyner. Maybe you'll be next the next one like Bill Joiner rude my life.
Next time you're on it, Andrew, it's just going to be you talking about Bill Joyner.
Seen, there was.
One other thing I wanted to ask you about, Andrew.
We could put f one up on the screen. You put out a very like, you know, pretty aggressive post here about Elon Muss, none of which I disagree with, but in any case, it's sounds like a little bit of a break from the way you normally approach things because a lot of times you sort of let your you know, your your work, and the characters you follow speak for themselves, and I was I just was curious what led you to take this more aggressive approach, And
after having watched the documentary, actually it made me wonder if if that was part of your evolution to make being more directly personally outspoken.
Well, I mean a little just like Elon Musk has been doing like Nazi dog whistle stuff on Twitter for like five or six months.
Now.
I know this because I grew up on four Chune, like back in the day that the pre censorship free Internet, when like half the people were Nazis and half to beeople were anarchists like back in the day, but it was like either you were part of anonymous or you were like a seriously like like like Charlottesville person. And so I know that he's been doing these like weird not even dog whistles, just like straight up following Nazi accounts, reposting Nazi shit. And then when he did that, I
don't know, I just got triggered. I kind of felt bad when I posted it because I'm supposed to be like neutral and maintain composure, but that was for sure a Hitler salute, and it's you know, it's a Hitler salute, not just because of the obvious body language, but because the guy has been paying homage to like Nazi ideology and accounts on X for the past like six to
eight months and so. But the comments are crazy. So many people are like going to batch for elons or like he's just giving his heart out to the people. I was like, dude, if you give your heart out to the people, you go like this, appreciate you, guys, Thank you, guys, heart goes out to you.
You don't do this siegile.
But you know, I think we're in this era where you know, he could do it and say seghile, I don't think people would care to find out a way to rationalize it and be like, dude.
He's just so autistically. You don't know if you've met an autistic person, but you're always.
I guess, yeah, have you considered you're just being ablest right now?
Andrew, see now now the the what's it called the sites are on me?
Yeah that's right.
Yeah. I was just like, that's the thing with we're all like downstream of fortune culture now that people who are not being ironic get away with the shield of irony and and to like, in some fairness, it actually does make it hard to you know, it doesn't mean that irony trolling is right, but it does make it hard to like sometimes decode. But I guess Andrew, having spent time on Fortune, you speak the language probably better than most.
Yeah, I definitely do.
And not to mention, he's not from the United States and he has a lot to say about migrants coming here and ruining shit, whereas this guy is from South Africa, of all places, the most racist place that ever exists in the history of the world, and he's coming here and he's manipulating information that seems pretty treasonous and like some foreign interference.
To me, it's just crazy to think that Trump ran his.
Whole campaign on getting the deep state bureaucracy out of offish and now it appears that he has like a private, you know, council of tech oligarchs backing him entirely, so it appears that the deep state was elected.
Well, I personally appreciate the new outspoken mode of Andrew Callahan, so I hope we hear more of it. And of course I always look forward to to your work tell people where they can watch Dear Kelly.
You guys can watch Dear Kelly at www dot Dear kellyfilm dot com for the low rental cost of five dollars and fifty five cents, or if you're feeling generous, you can buy it forever for fifteen dollars and fifty five cents.
It's worth and he's got some lawsuit costs against Bill Joyner, so help him out with that. Guy.
Shout out to Bill, Shout out to Kelly, Shout out to Breaking Points.
Thanks Andrew, great to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Appreciate you guys.
All right, really interesting getting to talk to Andrew. I really did. I found the film very thought provoking. Yeah you enjoyed it too, right, Oh my gosh, Yeah.
Yeah I did. And I actually one of the things I know you talked a little bit to Andrew about what moved you, but one of the things that really moved me was this isn't a spoiler. He just ends up becoming very emotionally involved in Kelly's life and weirdly like close with him. Yes that it surprises you towards the end of the film. It's not a spoiler. I really recommend people watch it play out because that experience as a viewer is really compelling.
Yeah, it was interesting to hear Andrew talk about like that that was something he really had to learn as a documentarian, that that that took a very emotional time. I mean he's Andrew's really young, right, that was like a real emotional toll on him and a learning for him through this process. But in any case, I hope you guys enjoyed the show today. Definitely check out the documentary.
Sager supposed to be back tomorrow, so he will be in this chair and Emily and Ryan will be here on Wednesday, so you got all normal shows, normal shows planned for the week. In any case, have you guys have a fantastic date and I will see you back here tomorrow