The Truth Behind DeepSeek

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I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the 404 Media co-founders, the first being Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hello.

And Jason Kebler.

Hey.

Sam will join us for the second half of the show.

Right now, there is one story which is basically across all of tech, all of AI, and Emmanuel wrote about it.

The headline is, Deep Seek Mania Shakes AI Industry to Its Core.

Emmanuel, first off, let's just keep it super basic to start.

What is DeepSeek and where did it come from?

Because to a lot of people, it feels like this just happened overnight.

Yeah.

DeepSeek is an AI model that's developed by

a Chinese company of the same name that itself was spun out

from a Chinese hedge fund.

And

yeah, it was, I've heard about it several times.

Like, I follow the frontier model space, which is a way to refer to the leading AI models.

And it released last week.

The AI community was very excited about it.

Whenever one of these models is released, there's a bunch of benchmarks that people run to see how it compares to all the other models.

It scored very well on the benchmarks, was beating OpenAI on some things, was beating Lama, which is the open weight model from Meta.

Again, this is normal.

Like the newest thing is usually pretty good.

And the hype started to build more and more as people learned more about how it was made.

And now we're at the point where I'm surprised.

I think like my best way to measure how impactful

a particular piece of news is is when I hear about it from my mom.

I almost never get a text asking what this or that is in the news and i got a text from her yesterday which was just like hey do i need to worry about this chinese ai thing

well what was she potentially worried about and and i mean i'm not i'm not trying to put your mom on blast it's more it's just uh

it's symptomatic of this isn't just hype there's almost like worry and concern.

Yeah, yeah.

Totally.

And I think for me, as someone who's like followed it from the beginning, I was totally prepared for everything that was about to happen.

Over the weekend, it became very clear that this was going to have an impact that is

going to escape.

the AI nerd community and going to have like a real impact on the market.

And I think that's why I heard about it from her.

I don't watch CNN.

She watches a lot of CNN.

And I'm sure that she just turned on the TV in the morning and it's one of those screens that's showing you all the stocks and everything is red.

And the news anchors are like, China, AI, america

world war three question mark you know just like and she was like uh oh i'll i'll i'll call my son who knows computers wait but let me let me take a shot at explaining like why people are freaking out because uh it is true that this is a chinese developed uh large language model the model is called r1 uh the one that they released and then the ChatGPT competitor is just called DeepSeek, and you can use it on your phone.

So it's the top app in the App Store.

So there's the sort of normal, like, oh,

Americans are using Chinese tech.

We're worried about that.

But the big thing is that this was developed using old chips and fewer chips than normally are used.

And

they spent somewhere around like $5.6 million or something like that on training, which is a number that, as you explained in your article, we should be skeptical skeptical of.

But like the

argument that the people who are freaking out are saying is like Open AI and Nvidia and all American tech companies have spent a ton of money training their AI models.

And by a ton of money, I mean billions and billions and billions of dollars.

Here is a Chinese company that comes along.

and spends frankly like $5.6 million.

If you take that at face value, which I don't know if we can, that's like peanuts for any AI startup.

Like that's essentially no money.

It's performing better than OpenAI's most advanced publicly released model.

I think it's the,

it's 01 is OpenAI's most

advanced model, I believe.

And it's free.

It's released for free.

And it's,

and they did it using old chips because China cannot get the newest NVIDIA chips because of export controls.

So the narrative in people's heads is like

China beat the U.S.

with less money and old technology.

What the fuck?

Is that right, Emmanuel?

Like, is that the argument for why people are freaking out?

Yeah,

that's totally accurate.

And

the

like the

single headline

that dominated Monday morning and what sent the markets into a frenzy is that this impacted NVIDIA's value.

Ever since the AI boom took over the world, NVIDIA has been the primary, I mean, you could argue TSMC,

which is like further up the supply chain or further down the supply chain, further up the supply chain and chip manufacturing.

But NVIDIA has like

the key designs that, and and chips that are powering

this AI revolution.

And

Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Microsoft, all these companies, when they're building AI, they are paying NVIDIA for massive amounts of chips in order to train their AI.

So Elon Musk very proudly announced last year that XAI, which is X's or Tesla's or Elon Musk's AI company, has a cluster of 100,000 NVIDIA chips.

And

those clusters just keep getting bigger.

And like at the moment, all these companies are kind of eyeballing their path to like, can we make a cluster with a million chips?

Cause that's going to give us a much stronger AI model.

And that's been the paradigm we've been in for like the past three to four years.

More chips, more compute, more training data equals better AI.

Whoever has the best and most

is going to win the AI race.

And if you believe what these people say about how important AI is going to be, you're going to like dominate the world.

And more advanced chips, crucially, because NVIDIA will release new ones every single time.

And the idea is the American companies will be getting those.

So it's not just quantity or expenditure.

It's, as you say, the access to the latest and greatest, allegedly the greatest.

Yeah.

And at the highest level, these companies are competing for like, oh, Nvidia just announced a new design and they're competing like, okay, well, put me down for a million chips, you know, and they're finding about who's going to get them first because it's so important to have these chips in order to win the race.

I believe they call this like a digital moat or something, where it's like, we like U.S.

companies will get the awesome chips, and China will get like old tech.

And that will naturally just keep American tech companies ahead of Chinese tech companies.

If I can give a Ray crude analogy to explain it, it's like the Americans are only, they get the PS5s, the Chinese companies can only have PS3s, maybe even a PS2,

but they made a really sick game for PS3 and PS2.

And everybody's like, damn, maybe you just don't need the latest console.

I think that's it.

I think that's a good thing.

That works for me totally.

Like, imagine suddenly, you know, a Chinese game developer releases a PS2 game that looks like a PS5 game.

Everybody's like, hey.

What are we doing wasting all this money?

And they're like, we made this in a weekend.

Yeah.

with uh with like some spare parts.

Um, I think we'll get back to the stocks in a second, but who are some of the big names reacting and how are they reacting?

I'm thinking of A16Z, are they and what are they saying?

Yeah, everybody's reacting.

I mean, uh, obviously, before it became world news, it was huge in the AI space, so everybody had a take.

Uh, Mark Andreessen, who's one of the co-founders of A16Z, uh,

he said,

I think it's to be seen if he's correct, but I totally understand the sentiment.

He called it AI's Sputnik moment, and that is referring to the Russian satellite, which

got ahead of the United States in the space race and was kind of an oh shit moment for the United States to say.

We're in a more competitive space with Russia than we realized about

space exploration.

And, you know, it's the Cold War, so it's the weaponization of space and all that.

And that kind of accelerated the U.S.

space program.

And I think that is the analogy he's making.

It's a wake-up call for American companies to realize that

these

sanctions that America, or sorry, sanctions is probably not the right word.

These export restrictions on AI chips that the Biden administration has put in place

for the reason of

hobbling their ability to compete in this AI race, right?

That's not going to cut it, right?

And the idea that we just have a massive amount of capital and we're just going to throw it at these AI problems with these bigger and bigger clusters, which has

people expressed doubt about the technology and theory behind that starting last year.

But

this is tangible proof that that is not going to cut it.

The U.S.

needs to be

competitive in more areas than just capital and access to chips.

We have to,

not we, the U.S.

has to have innovative research.

They have to have the best talent.

They have to realize that the Chinese universities and research that are happening in China are not to be dismissed.

These are real competitors that can make real progress that leapfrogs the American AI companies despite all the advantages that they have.

So

another take that I've seen is the sort of China surveillance and China

censorship take, which is like, if this,

if this, or, you know, there's going to be other models that come out very soon.

Like, as you've reported on, as we'll talk about, like, these models will get leapfrogged.

This will happen over and over again.

But, like, at the moment, there's a bunch of people using DeepSeek.

It's the top app in the App Store.

People are showing that it's censored in the way that you would sort of like expect Chinese technology to be censored.

The obvious example is like, if you ask it about Tiananmen Square, it will not answer.

And then people also saying like, hey, this is Chinese propaganda, Chinese surveillance, blah, blah, blah.

I'm not sweeping that under the rug.

I'm just saying that's an argument that people are talking about.

You raised the very good point that Chat GPT is also censored in several ways.

Can you just talk a little bit about that and that aspect of the concern?

Yeah, I think

the way I think about it is to go back to one of the earliest stories that I did at 4-4 Media, which is about

this guy named Eric Hartford, who takes these open weight models like Meta's Llama.

And he, because they're open weights and he can modify them, he creates uncensored versions of these AI models.

And Joe,

I know this always gets to you that they use this terminology, but

open AI, they would consider a censored and woke model, right?

Because it won't tell you how to make a bomb and it won't

tell you about the Hunter

Biden laptop or so.

I don't know if that one's actually true, but it restricts what it says about the election.

And

something that we bring up all the time is that it kind of refuses to engage with anything remotely sexual,

things like this.

And

the argument that the people who make the uncensored models have always made, and this is an argument that Mark Andreessen has made as well, and he has funded Eric Hartford and he has funded these group of small developers who create uncensored models because

they argued that, okay, maybe the way that OpenAI censors its models doesn't bother you because you happen to align with their ideology because you live in America and you're American and you don't want the AI to engage with these questions.

But if we accept that paradigm, should another country create another dominant AI model and they have their own censorship based on their culture that we don't agree with, we have to live under that, right?

So that is the argument for the uncensored model.

And this moment, this deep seek moment of it

showing people that it is possible that we will live in a world where

the AI that is dominant is made in China really freaks people out because we then have to accept

Chinese restrictions and Chinese culture and the way that impacts their AI model, right?

It's very similar to the TikTok argument.

It's like social media is bad, but we accept it.

But at the moment it becomes a social media that is dominant as Chinese, people really

freak out.

And it's the same dynamic here.

Facebook does bad things, TikTok does bad things.

We are more willing to accept the bad things that Facebook does because it's our social media company as opposed to the Chinese social media company.

And you're seeing the same thing here.

And I think in a way, though I have a lot of

criticisms of the uncensored model argument and community, I think this really proved their point where

if you allow for censorship or restrictions on an AI model,

just like as a theory of how AI should be managed, then you also have to accept it when it comes from a different country.

And that obviously really bothers people.

Right.

And it should be mentioned quickly that DeepSeek is an open weights model, meaning you can tweak how it works and you can run it locally, although we don't have all the information on how it was trained.

So it's not fully open source.

Yeah, but it seems really trivial, to be fair to DeepSeek or the people who

are using it and defending it.

It seems really trivial to get around this Tenement Square

restriction.

You have to run it locally.

I've seen people use different languages to get around their restrictions.

It's like this is a form of jailbreaking.

But I saw someone engage with DeepSeek in Hebrew, and it just answered all the questions.

I saw someone get around it by using LeechSpeak, where you replace letters with numbers, and then it also engaged with the questions.

That's my primary language.

I was going to say it's a manual language.

It's a restriction that is there, but the idea that the problem with this particular model of deep seek is that it's restricting information that the chinese government doesn't want people to have sort of i don't know unserious because it it's it's open weights and you can get around it and yeah

um

I think with all of these takes flying, oh, and I'll just say, I think Perplexity has actually added support for it as well, where you can now interact with this model through Perplexity.

And I, you know, I presume they're running it locally in their own ways, right?

Not locally to the user, obviously.

So, there's all of these takes flying around, but you kind of have one main one in the article.

And I'm referring to, you know,

even though this is a pretty significant event, is it kind of impossible to tell what's going to happen with the AI industry based on it?

Like, what's all your main takeaway from this?

I think my main takeaway is that

the AI space is moving very fast and is developing at the rate of

like rapid scientific discovery.

And that is the schedule that is that it's on.

And that is very hard to predict.

We don't know where it's all going to end up.

Some people who are kind of cheering and waiting for the AI bubble to burst really hope that this downturn in the market that is instigated by NVIDIA and AI companies is going to, this is, this is the AI bubble popping and now it's all going to go away.

I'm skeptical of that.

Maybe that happens later.

I don't know.

I don't make predictions.

If I was able to make predictions about the stock market, I wouldn't be talking to you.

I'd be on my yacht.

But so it's like AI is moving at the pace of scientific discovery, and the markets are moving emotionally.

You know, it's like we're seeing like an emotional reaction

in the market.

I am doubtful that this will hold.

I am doubtful that this is terrible for NVIDIA in the long term because they are still the dominant hardware player in this space.

It is possible that later on China, especially because we're imposing these export restrictions on them, will develop their own supply chain for the chips that does devalue NVIDIA.

But at the moment, NVIDIA is the main player.

And, you know, like one obvious argument about that is: okay, DeepSeek has discovered these new,

far more efficient reinforcement learning strategies that allow them to develop models that are better for less.

But

the research is out there.

NVIDIA is going to figure this out.

Facebook is going to figure this out.

There was a report in a Wall Street Journal, I think, that

Meta has several war rooms just trying to reverse engineer, recreate this stuff.

But the American companies will catch up, and then they'll have these new efficiencies and the access to chips.

And that will just make them better and more efficient, you know?

So, and I also think, you know, we talked about leapfrogging.

Meta gets ahead, Google gets ahead, these companies kind of vie for the top spot,

developing,

depending on whose research is latest and best.

For a while, their mistroll, which is this French AI company, was really far ahead for a minute.

And people didn't freak out about that, I think, because it's a European company.

And the markets didn't freak out about that.

They weren't like, oh my God, OpenAI is doomed and Meta is doomed because this French company suddenly has a better model.

When it's a Chinese company, people, I think, react emotionally because China is perceived as this adversary of the US and the West.

And that's why I think people are freaking out.

And I think it's very plausible that a few weeks from now, OpenAI will release a new model.

Everybody will agree that this is the latest and best, and

we'll go back to where we were, which is rah, rah, rah, America, and the future controlling AI.

Yeah, it seems one of my favorite things.

I'm going to go to my war room to determine what this means.

I think you're in it right now.

It's okay.

I'm always in it 24-7.

All right.

We'll leave that there and we'll be right back after the break with another story.

We'll be back after this.

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All right.

And we are back.

And then Sam is now with us.

We're going to talk about a story that she wrote.

The headline is: memos to federal employees were written by people with ties to Project 2025 metadata shows.

A lot going on in the headline.

Maybe let's just start with what are some of these memos that were sent by the Office of Personnel Management, which for those people who don't know is basically the U.S.

government's big HR department.

That's how I think of it anyway.

Yeah, it's honestly, I will admit, I had not heard of

this office

before this week.

It's like there are so many like literal, little like federal offices

that I think a lot of people are learning about for the first first time because they're in crisis thanks to the Trump administration.

The only reason anyone would ever know about OPM was it got hacked like

seven years ago.

And

yeah, that's the only reason anyone would have ever heard of this office, I feel.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But they're sending these things, which are impacting a ton of people.

And

what are they?

Like, what are they telling people to do or not do, I guess?

I mean, they're, so they're sending a bunch of memos, which memos are public on their website.

So anyone can go and look at them and download them as PDFs, but they're sent out to

federal workers and federal departments.

And

obviously, this is a big thing right now because Trump is

working on firing a lot of federal workers in order to, I don't know, like sow chaos, instill people who are loyal to him, doing all these kind of like loyalty checks with federal workers

and seeing if they,

you know, gutting like DEI, obviously, is a big one that's been in the news lately.

So these memos go out and the memos say, you know, it's, I can just, I can read you like some of the titles.

They're pretty self-explanatory, but some of the ones that we looked at just from this week were one was called Guidance on Presidential Memorandum Return to in-person work, which

one of the things that Trump has done is said, you know, all federal workers have to return to the office.

Whereas before they were allowed to work remotely in a lot of cases, now everyone who's a federal worker has to be in the office.

And that's what that memo is about.

And then there's others that are about like

obviously diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

There are, you know, it's just like a, it's a lot of them are like kind of dry, but then some of them are pretty,

you know,

unprecedented/slash spicy in general.

It was a hiring freeze as well, right?

Yeah, there's a hiring freeze one for like federal workers,

which is obviously not something that happens every day.

I don't know if it's happened, you know, in the last four years, certainly.

So yeah, they're going out to federal workers basically and saying, this is what you need to then disseminate to your department.

Yeah.

Whatever it is.

So we'll get to the metadata in a bit and the authors and that sort of thing.

But there's been,

I would say, a ton of chatter around these memos.

And, you know, there's a lot of posting on social media, I would say.

There's all of these Reddit posts.

You know, some are going to be more believable than others.

Of course, you have to take everything a pinch of salt or, you know, go and verify it as we do in some cases that we can.

And I mean, even just beyond sort of these memos, there are like multiple journalists tweeting that they've never seen sort of this many leaks in a way.

And I know these memos are public, but it's just sort of associated with the massive

reaction that federal employees are having.

It's like a lot of them, it seems, are leaking to other journalists as well.

But my question for you is, how are federal employees reacting

to these memos?

Like, are you seeing a lot of pissed off?

people online.

Yeah, I mean, we've, I think all of us at this point here at 404 at this point point have had folks reach out to us who are federal workers.

There's just, there's a ton of them, you know, like they're, and they're across all different sectors, all different industries working on lots of different things.

So,

um, you know, they're like you said, they're hitting up journalists and saying, This is what I'm seeing.

Um, and they're freaked out, obviously.

It's like it's a big deal.

Um, they're worried about their jobs, they're being forced to do stuff that they don't agree with.

Um, you know, like we'll talk about later, like scrubbing websites and things like that, uh, that have to do with like, um, you know, diversity and inclusion and those sorts of things so yeah they're they're worried

but at the same time it's like there's just not a ton that they can do

um

from the inside it's they're federal workers so if they want to like do some kind of protest it's a federal crime um i mean i assume but yeah it's like they're they're very

disheartened, it seems,

about the whole entire situation because they're,

you know, they're being told to do stuff that they morally, um, ethically don't

agree with as people.

So, yeah, I don't think everybody's, I mean, people will be mad, understandably, depending on your own circumstances, about the need to return to office or something like that.

But broadly, many people are simply mad because they don't agree with the incoming administration for various reasons.

Yeah, and like not agreeing, and they're like, not like supporting Trump at this point.

It seems like that's a firewall offense, you know, which which that is very unprecedented.

That's, you know, it's something that

we're seeing, we're going to see more of in the coming days, I think.

But like,

not like being gung-ho about what he's doing seems to be something that puts you on the chopping block as a federal worker now,

which is horrifying.

Yeah.

I think one of the tricky things is that

the administration has shut down effectively so many different parts of the government and has also made it very difficult for government employees to talk to outside contractors.

And for anyone who's not familiar, like

many, many, many, many,

like technically third-party contractors actually are basically government employees.

This is just like how the government works.

And

it's like, there is so much happening because essentially anyone who works for any of these massive agencies can is being affected in some way, shape, or form.

And, you know, these are literally millions of people.

And so trying to tell that story is very, very difficult

for us as a small team, but also for like the media in general.

And, you know, I think you can create like a coherent narrative of what is happening where it's, you know, the Trump administration is just like pausing the government and it's having all these knock-on knock-on effects.

But getting into these specific effects is like essentially impossible because there are so

many.

Yeah, the scale is almost unfathomable in a way, and you can't really communicate it in a single article necessarily or whatever medium you're using.

Just because we're talking about OPM, and I guess we'll touch on this in the subscribers only section as well.

But considering OPM, they have created these sort of tip lines, right, Jason, where people can email in to,

I mean, basically rat on their co-workers when it comes to them running certain DEI programs.

Can you just talk about that briefly?

And I think you saw that in some of the memos and maybe wrote a little bit about it, or yeah, I don't have the memo in front of me right now because there's a couple different ones, but and a couple of different email addresses.

That's what I mean.

I think it's like D

E I A info at opm.gov or something.

And yeah, D E I A Truth at opm.gov, where literally they're just asking people to rat on their colleagues who may be trying

to smuggle in

diversity, equity, and/or inclusion by any other name, which is really wild and is pretty McCarthy-esque.

There's also this thing where I believe it's hr at opm.gov, where it's a sort of master email where the federal government can email every single federal employee, which is not a

like not a capability that they had before.

There was never like a system to email millions and millions and millions of people at once.

And so there's been a few tests of this system over the last few days.

And a lot of federal employees thought that it was initially a phishing exercise because they sent this email from this like random new email address and asked everyone to respond to it and just say like, hello, or like, I got this.

It's the worst reply all thread in like the history of email.

Like, people are going to be going, oh, hey, oh, sorry.

I hit reply all to millions of federal workers or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But

basically, it's like this, this relatively obscure HR

agency has just

taken it upon itself

to become

the investigators of the federal government, more or less.

Yeah.

It would be a crazy HR move in a corporate context.

Like, we would be reporting on that, right?

Somebody leaks us an email from inside some sort of AI company or tech company or whatever, saying, Hey, please rat out your co-workers who are trying to do certain things around diversity or other programs or whatever.

But this time it's the government.

I don't know.

It's just crazy.

All right.

Let's get back to your story, Sam.

So, OPM is sending out these

memos.

They're signed by senior officials, I think,

but

there's interesting stuff in the metadata.

What did this data show exactly?

Yeah, so they're all of the memos are, like you said, they're signed by,

let's see, hang on.

It's Charles Ezell, Acting Director at U.S.

Office of Personnel Management.

So it's like, that's a very normal person to be sending these memos because he's the director of OPM.

And then sometimes they have a second author, like a second signature, but that's who they're ostensibly coming from.

That's who they want you to think that they're coming from, I guess.

But then if you go in, and this is something that someone found on Reddit

pointed this out, which I don't think many people would ever go to this length to try to look at this metadata.

But like you said, it's like people are looking and talking about portions and sections and little dark corners of government correspondence that they haven't before.

This person on Reddit said that if you go, if you download the PDF from the OPM website, from the public website, and then open it, and I opened it in Adobe Acrobat, but you can open it and then right-click and go to like the document properties.

And I think on Mac, it's slightly different, but

in the document properties, you can see the author and the author is someone different.

It's someone who's not listed on the front of that that letterhead.

And that was definitely something worth digging into.

And

it turns out that the authors that are listed here,

that the metadata says at least, are people who've been longtime Trump supporters, longtime boosters of his agenda, and even in some cases,

people who helped

work on or create systems that set up a very scary agenda called Project 2025, which I think a lot of people have heard of by now, but it's still amazing that some people haven't,

considering that

seems to be what we're in.

I mean, it seems to be what's happening.

People connected to it have, I mean, I remember straight after the election, they were like, okay, actually, yeah, we can come mask off now and say that Project 2025 is the agenda.

So there are two names you point to in the piece.

Let's just take them one by one.

The first piece of metadata says that the

return to in-person work memo, it was signed by that senior official of OPM, as you said, but the metadata included the name Peters,

Noah, as in Noah Peters.

Just briefly, what did you include about that person?

Yeah, so the Noah Peters

that this seems to be,

his LinkedIn, and this is why I say it seems to be him, is his LinkedIn now says he's a senior advisor at the OPM, whatever that means.

But, you know, it's like his background is what's concerning here.

It's that he

is an attorney.

He represented a guy named Jared Taylor, who is a really fun Google.

But he is,

I forget the exact wording, but he's widely known as a white nationalist.

And he sued Twitter in 2018 for banning his account

because he's a white nationalist.

And he lost that case, but that's the guy who was representing him, is Noah Peters.

And then, you know, Peters has been kind of writing and talking publicly about how Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed people at a Black Lives Matter protest,

should receive restitution from the media

because he's been acquitted and the media reported on his

case.

It's things like that.

It's like he's,

yeah, just a guy that, like,

you don't love to see his name come up

in one, in this context, which, you know, he's writing apparently an in-person return-to-work memo.

Yeah.

Not the sort of person you would jump at the chance to ask, could you write a US government memo to go out to all federal employees?

Okay, well, that's the first one.

And then the second one is for the memo called

Federal Civilian Hiring Freeze Guidance.

What was the name on that document, according to the metadata?

Yeah, so the metadata says that that one was authored by James Shirk.

And Shirk is also up on Google.

Just, you know, guys that I wish I didn't have to know the names of.

He was a special assistant on domestic policy in Trump's first term, and now he's back.

But in the meantime, he was working at the Heritage Foundation, which is the think tank conservative group that

architected the Project 2025 playbook.

And then he was also on the Trump transition project called America First Policy Institute.

And what's really important here, and why it's important that he apparently, seemingly wrote a memo called Federal Civilian Hiring Freeze Guidelines, is that he came up with the classification that makes it easier to fire federal workers.

That's called Schedule F, that removes their employment protections, makes it easier to get rid of them.

And that is mentioned several times as a really key part of Project 2025 because Project 2025's playbook, which is a long, it's like 900 pages or something, a long book.

Yeah, I read all that.

Yeah.

And you go, yeah, well, you can go and read it on your free time lister.

We won't do a dramatic reading.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's like mentioned, like Schedule F, which is the

classification that Shirk invented,

comes up often because it's this kind of this real linchpin to get rid of a bunch of federal workers to then

reinstall people who are loyal to Trump.

And that's a huge part of Project 2025's entire mission.

Without that,

it's really hard for them to get any of the other stuff that they want to do done.

They need to overhaul the federal government in order to push forward a lot of these plans.

And a lot of their plans are things like restricting reproductive access, mass deportation, and again, firing tons of civil servants and reinstalling

these people who are ride or die Trump.

So, yeah, he's a big one.

And

I think those are the two you mentioned, right?

Those are the two.

Yeah, they're, and, you know, if you go through, and you can, people can look at this themselves.

I, I've seen a couple people say online that the documents were, are now

like the metadata is scrubbed.

That's not what I found.

I was still able to see the author data when I checked earlier today.

But, you know, you could go through and like do this yourself.

You can look at it yourself and see the different authors and see that they're not who is on the front

of that actual letterhead.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, that would be a normal thing.

It's like, you know, if you have like someone writing

your memo for you, because you're the director of OPM, that's, that seems, I was like, okay, fine.

But like, these are not just like guys who report to the director.

Like, if anything, the director is probably like taking calls from them.

Right.

I would imagine, you know, obviously we don't know a lot of this stuff for sure, but

yeah, they're not just like average like administrative assistants.

They're

they're people who wrote the playbook for fascism.

You know, that's, that's what we're working with.

They're not a secretary or assistant.

Right.

Yeah.

So Sam touched on this.

And I think just to sort of ask you, Jason, a slightly different way, like,

why is it important

to know

who the people who seemingly wrote these memos are?

Like, why does that matter?

You know?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's important because Trump swore up and down that Project 2025, he had nothing to do with, he knew nothing about, was not going to be involved with, blah, blah, blah.

You know, that is what, like, the Democrats tried to tie him to Project 2025, and rightly so, because this was obviously the playbook from the beginning.

It was the transition plan from the beginning.

But this is like hard evidence showing that these people are immediately in the government, are immediately writing like incredibly consequential memos and are immediately having an impact on government.

You know, unclear whether like anything resembling normal politics matters now or will ever matter again, but it's just evidence that, yes, like Project 2025 was the plan the whole time,

is the plan now.

These people are in the government, are enacting policy, are making decisions, are writing memos that have real impacts on people's lives and how people interact with the government.

And to the extent that like anyone gives a shit about any of this stuff anymore, which I think that they should,

theoretically that matters.

Yeah.

And Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 this whole time when he was running because it was poisonous.

And because most people hear the things that were laid out in it and they're like, oh, that's

Christian nationalism.

We don't like, we're not into that.

That's like, and he distanced himself from it on purpose.

He was like, well, that's, that's not really what I'm into.

I'm just, you know, for the economy or whatever the fuck.

But,

you know, Biden was like, well, what about Project 2025?

And then just kind of let it go.

And then it came out that, you know, Trump immediately started hiring like over 100 Project 2025 architects into his administration.

So.

I would like to throw a curveball at all of you at the end of the show, like I do often, which is while we've been talking, the White House did a press conference about the New Jersey drones that we have been talking about multiple times on the show in the past.

And the White House press secretary said, quote, this was not the enemy.

And they were authorized to be flown by the FAA, the drones that were being sighted above New Jersey for like weeks.

toward the end of last year.

And I reported on Road and Francon and Rea had done this podcast about how this happens all the time.

It's a media-caused panic.

You know, talk of conspiracy theory and aliens and all of that is like very dumb because we've seen it before.

And I think it will be very, very, very interesting to see how the media covers this, how social media covers it, how like right-wing influencers talk about it, et cetera,

because

The Biden administration said the exact same thing.

They said, these are FAA hobbyist drones and or like, you know, we know what they are more or less, and it's no big deal.

And when Joe Biden said it, or Joe Biden's press secretary said it, it became the biggest deal.

And it was on every single cable news channel for weeks.

And everyone was talking about it endlessly.

And now here, here's Trump and Trump's administration saying the exact same thing.

And everyone is going to fall in line immediately.

The media is going to do a story saying, oh, it was no big deal.

They're never going to talk about it again.

And it's like, that is a really big problem.

It's a really, really, really, really big problem.

Because when the government, like under a Democrat says, hey, like, here's what's going on.

And the response from half of the nation is, this is bullshit and it's a conspiracy.

And like up and down across, you know, the sort of cable news ecosystem.

you pull on all of these like frankly whack jobs to shriek about something for a while and it becomes this like entertainment value proposition

like that is not that is not a media media ecosystem that we can abide and it's like it's really it's a really bad problem and it is related to what we're talking about here because uh it was clear to everyone that project 2025 was going to be the plan forever because that the republicans spent years and years writing this down a thousand pages putting people in positions of power and in positions to enact this like on day one.

And Trump was able to say, like, oh, actually, no.

And it went away for a large segment of the population.

And it's just like that, that capture of

our like information ecosystem is very, very bad.

And I'm sorry.

This is not on our podcast document, but like no one is going to care about the drones ever again.

It's crazy that this is happening.

One clarifying question, and maybe you don't know, but since you put a curveball on us, I'm going to

strategically

bat it back.

I don't know, I don't know, and watch baseball.

But the quote from this press conference is that after research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the

FAA for research and various other reasons.

So there were government drones.

They were being flown by the government.

Or, like,

how are we supposed to read into that?

Or how do you think

Griffin's?

I mean, so that's a great question because

getting authorized by the FAA does not mean that they're being flown by the government.

It means that they have flight clearance from the FAA.

So it could be, you know, university drones.

It could be hobbyist drones.

It's like you have to get a license to fly a drone now if you're flying for specific reasons.

So it could mean that.

And then the rest of this quote, which you, you know, tried to gotcha me.

I did.

I deliberately left out.

Said many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational, and private individuals that enjoy flying drones, which is sort of like what we were saying when we were doing our reporting on it, because a lot of people are flying drones for like whatever reason.

And there's not

like you do have to get an FAA license in some cases, but they then don't control control where you fly.

And so, um, but the, but the, the way I'm reading that second part, the many of these drones were also hobbyists.

Um, again, maybe I'm reading too between the lines here, but to me, that sounds like, well, there were the FAA authorized ones, and then people started flooding the airspace with their garbage drones or trying to jump on it, basically, which is kind of what you said earlier.

right it's like yeah i mean so so i mean i'm curious like you know there were a bunch of drones being seen and there's things things being flown all the time.

So it could be like

you could sometimes you need specific FAA authorization to fly a specific flight path if it's near an airport, for example.

You know, the Trump administration has not released these documents about

like what the authorizations are.

So it's unclear.

Yeah, it could be, they could be government drones to some extent.

I believe there's another quote in here where Trump was saying something at some point.

Quote, look, our military knows where they took off from.

If it's a garage, they can go right into that garage.

Not sure what that means, but

good point.

Good point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would guess that it was a mix of military drones, perhaps like NOAA or NASA drones,

maybe like university research type stuff, and then also hobbyists.

And, you know,

I mean, maybe this will continue to be some big conspiracy.

I know that this was a month ago and people haven't been talking about it since the sightings magically went away around Christmas when people were like paying attention to something else.

And there wasn't coverage.

Exactly.

I know.

And there wasn't coverage.

But,

you know, there's a Guardian article that we're talking about.

Like, I wonder if this is going to, I mean, it's not going to because it shouldn't,

like, lead CNN and Fox News and all that for hours and hours and hours upon end.

Like, kind of doubt it.

Yeah, fair um all right we'll leave that there but i'm sure i mean jason you should probably go write about the drones now probably for tomorrow yeah you just dictated a blog so please go get that

we'll do a text to speech yeah yeah yeah um

well uh until then we will leave that there.

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