The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:04

Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hit the worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.c0, as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.c0.

Joseph: 00:30

I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are 2 of the 404 Media cofounders. The first being, Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:39

Hey.

Joseph: 00:41

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 Matt and Emmanuel wrote about it. The headline is DeepSeek mania Shakes AI Industry to its Core. Emmanuel, first off, let's just keep it super basic to start.

Joseph: 01:01

What is DeepSeq and where did it come from? Because to a lot of people, it feel like this just happened overnight.

Emanuel: 01:08

Yeah. DeepSeq 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.

Emanuel: 01:53

It scored very well on the benchmarks, was beating OpenAI on some things, was beating, llama 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 learn more about, how it was made, and, now we're at the point where I'm I'm I'm surprised. I think, like, my best way to measure how impactful a 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.

Emanuel: 02:34

And I got a text from her yesterday, which was just like, hey, do I need to worry about this Chinese AI thing? I mean, what what what what

Joseph: 02:42

was she potentially worried about? And and I mean, I'm not trying to I'm not trying to put your mom on blast. It's more it's just, it's symptomatic of this isn't just hype. There's almost like worry and concern. Yeah.

Emanuel: 02:55

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 gonna have an impact that is, gonna escape the AI nerd community and gonna have, like, a real impact on the market. And I think that's why I heard about it from her.

Emanuel: 03:18

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 3 question mark, you know, just like and and she was like, uh-oh. I'll I'll I'll call my son who knows computers.

Jason: 03:39

Wait. But let me let me take a shot at explaining, like, why people are freaking out because, it is true that this is a Chinese developed, large language model. The model is called r one, 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.

Jason: 04:05

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 some somewhere around, like, $5,600,000 or something like that on training, which is a number that, as you explained in your article, we should be skeptical of. But, like, the the argument that the people who are freaking out are saying is, like, OpenAI 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 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars.

Jason: 04:51

Here is a Chinese company that comes along and spends, frankly, like, $5,600,000. 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 o one is is OpenAI's most most advanced model, I believe, and it's free.

Jason: 05:23

It's 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 are is like, China beat the US with less money and old technology. What the fuck? Is that right, Emmanuel? Like, is that the is that the argument for, like, why people are freaking out?

Emanuel: 05:50

Yeah. That's totally accurate. And the, like, the 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 on and chip manufacturing. But NVIDIA has, like, the key designs that and chips that are powering, this AI revolution.

Emanuel: 06:36

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 or Tesla's or Elon Musk's AI company has a cluster of a 100000 NVIDIA chips. And those clusters just keep getting bigger and, like, at the moment, all these companies are kinda eyeballing their path to, like, can we make a cluster with a 1000000 chips because that's gonna give us a much stronger AI model. And that's been the paradigm we've been in for, like, the past 3 to 4 years. More chips, more compute, more training data equals better AI.

Emanuel: 07:28

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 gonna be, you're gonna, like, dominate the world.

Joseph: 07:38

And 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 the, as you say, the access to the the latest and greatest. Allegedly greatest.

Emanuel: 07:53

Yeah. And like the 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 1000000 chips, you know, and they're finding about who's gonna get them first because it's so important to have these chips in order to win the race.

Jason: 08:05

I believe they call this, like, a digital moat or something where it's like we like, US companies will get the the awesome chips and China will get, like, old tech, and that will naturally just keep American tech companies ahead of Chinese tech companies.

Joseph: 08:21

If I can give a crude analogy to explain it, it's like the Americans are only they they get the PS fives. The Chinese companies can only have PS threes, maybe even a PS 2, but they made a a really sick game for PS 3 and PS 2. And everybody's like, damn, maybe you just don't need the latest console.

Jason: 08:43

I think I think that's it. I think you that's that's

Emanuel: 08:46

pretty much it. Totally. Like, imagine suddenly, you know, a Chinese game developer releases a PS 2 game that looks like a PS 5 game. Everybody's like, hey. What are we doing wasting all this money?

Emanuel: 08:56

You know? Right.

Jason: 08:57

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

Joseph: 09:00

Yeah.

Jason: 09:00

With, with, like, some spare parts.

Joseph: 09:03

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 a 16 z. Are they and what are they saying?

Emanuel: 09:16

Yeah. Everybody's reacting. I mean, obviously, before it became world news, it was huge in the AI space, so everybody had a take. Marc Andreessen, who's one of the cofounders of a 16 z, 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 it was kind of an oh shit moment for the United States to say we're in a 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.

Emanuel: 10:02

And that kind of accelerated the US 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 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 gonna cut it.

Emanuel: 10:35

Right? And the idea that we just have a massive amount of capital and we're just gonna throw it at these AI problems with these bigger and bigger clusters which has, people express doubt about, like, the technology and theory behind that, starting last year. But this is this is tangible proof that that is not gonna cut it. The the US needs to be competitive in in more areas than just capital and access to chips. We have to, not we.

Emanuel: 11:06

The the US has

Jason: 11:07

to

Emanuel: 11:07

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

Jason: 11:32

So the 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 gonna be other models that come out very soon, like, as 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 deep seek. 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.

Jason: 12:10

The obvious example is, like, if you ask 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 it under the rug. I'm just saying that's an argument that people are talking about. You raised the very good point that ChatGPT is also censored in several ways.

Jason: 12:38

Can you just talk a little bit about that and that aspect of the, con

Emanuel: 12:45

Yeah. I think, the way I think about it is to go back to one of the earliest stories that I did at 44 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 they use this terminology, but, you know, OpenAI, they would consider a censored and woke model. Right?

Emanuel: 13:23

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 it restricts what it says about, the election. And, something that we bring up all the time is that it kinda 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 Marc 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 sensors 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 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.

Emanuel: 14:37

Right? So that is the argument for, the uncensored model. In 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, you know, Chinese restrictions and and Chinese culture and the way that impacts their AI model. Right? It's very similar to the TikTok argument.

Emanuel: 15:07

It's like social media is bad, but we accept it. But at the moment it becomes a social media that is dominated as Chinese people really freak out. And it's it's the same dynamic here. You know? Facebook does bad thing.

Emanuel: 15:19

TikTok bet 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 a AI model, just like as a 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.

Jason: 15:58

Right. And it should be mentioned quickly that, deep seek 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.

Emanuel: 16:15

Yeah. It it seems really trivial to be fair to to DeepSeq or the people who, I mean, are are using it and defending it. It seems really trivial to get around this 10 men square restriction. You just have to run it locally. I've seen people use different languages to get around the restrictions.

Emanuel: 16:35

It's like this is a form of jailbreaking, but I saw someone, engage with, deep seeking Hebrew, and it just answered all the questions. I saw someone get around it by using leak speak where you replace letters with numbers, and then it also engaged with the questions.

Jason: 16:49

That's my primary language. So I

Joseph: 16:51

was gonna say it's a manual language. So it

Emanuel: 16:54

it it's a it's a it's a restriction that is there, but it 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 is sort of, I don't know, unserious because it it's it's up their weights and you can get around it and yeah.

Joseph: 17:16

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 in 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 gonna happen with the AI industry based on it?

Joseph: 17:47

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

Emanuel: 17:50

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 gonna this is this is the AI bubble popping, and now it's all going to go away. I'm skeptical of that.

Emanuel: 18:30

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.

Emanuel: 18:39

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 in in the market. I am I I am doubtful that this was 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.

Emanuel: 19:09

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, DeepSeq 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 gonna figure this out.

Emanuel: 19:49

Facebook is gonna figure this out. There was a report in the Wall Street Journal, I think, that, Meta has several war rooms just trying to reverse engineer, recreate this stuff. Wow. 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.

Emanuel: 20:11

You know? So and 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 is latest and best.

Emanuel: 20:28

For a while, their Mistral, 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.

Emanuel: 21:00

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

Joseph: 21:17

Yeah. It seems more of

Jason: 21:18

a question. My war room to determine what this means.

Joseph: 21:22

I I think you're in it right now.

Jason: 21:23

It's your catch. I'm always in it 247.

Joseph: 21:28

Alright. We'll leave that there, and, we'll be right back after the break with another story. We'll be back after this. Alright. And we are back.

Joseph: 21:51

And then Sam is now with us. We're gonna 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 US government's big HR department.

Joseph: 22:19

That's how I think

Sam: 22:20

of it anyway. Yeah. It's honestly, I will admit, I had not heard of the 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 time because they're in crisis. Thanks to

Jason: 22:38

The the other only reason anyone would ever know about OPM was it got hacked Yeah. 7 years ago. And Yeah. They yeah. That's the only reason anyone would have ever heard of this office, I feel.

Sam: 22:51

Yeah. Yeah. But they're

Joseph: 22:52

sending these things, which are impacting a ton of people. And Mhmm. What are they? They like, what what are they telling people to do or not do, I guess?

Sam: 23:03

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, you know, working on firing a lot of federal workers, in order to, I don't know, like, sow chaos and still 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 returned 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.

Sam: 24:07

Memories 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, kinda dry, but then some of them are pretty, you know, unprecedented slash spicy in general. There's a hiring

Joseph: 24:37

freeze as well. Right?

Sam: 24:38

Yeah. There's a hiring freeze one for, like, federal workers, which is obviously not something that happens every day. I don't know I don't know if it's happened, you know, in the last 4 years, certainly. So, yeah, they're they're going out to federal workers, basically, and saying, this is what you need to then disseminate to your department.

Joseph: 24:59

Yeah. Whatever it is. So we'll 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.

Joseph: 25:16

There's all of these Reddit posts, you know. Some are gonna 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 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.

Joseph: 25:46

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?

Sam: 26:01

Yeah. I mean, we've, I think all of us at this point here at Fort Fort, at this 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.

Sam: 26:14

So, you know, they're like you said, they're hitting up journalists and saying, this is what I'm seeing. And they're freaked out, obviously. It's like it's a big deal. They're worried about their jobs. They're being forced to do stuff that they don't agree with.

Sam: 26:29

You know, like, we'll talk about later, like, scrubbing websites and things like that, that have to do with, like, 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, from the inside. It's either federal workers, so if they wanna, like, do some kind of protest, it's a federal crime. 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, ethically don't don't agree with as people.

Sam: 27:13

So

Joseph: 27:13

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.

Sam: 27:30

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 that is very unprecedented. That's you know, it's something that's, we're seeing we're gonna 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.

Joseph: 27:56

Yeah. I

Jason: 27:57

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.

Jason: 28:55

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

Joseph: 29:13

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, 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?

Joseph: 29:35

Where people can email in to I mean, basically rats on their coworkers 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 and maybe wrote a little bit about it or?

Jason: 29:50

Yeah. I don't have the memo in front of me right now because there's a couple different ones, but,

Joseph: 29:55

it's And a couple different email addresses

Jason: 29:57

as well. I think it's like d deiainfo@opm.gov or something. And, yeah, deiatruthat 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@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, a not a capability that they had before. There was never, like, a system to email millions and millions and millions of people at once.

Jason: 30:49

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,

Joseph: 31:06

I got this. It's the worst reply, all Fred, in, like, the history of email. Like, people are gonna be going, oh, hey. Oh, sorry. I hit reply all to millions of federal workers or something.

Jason: 31:18

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, I basically, it's like this this relatively obscure HR, agency has just taken up taken it upon itself, to become the investigators of the federal government more or less.

Joseph: 31:35

Yeah. It's 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 coworkers who are trying to do certain things around diversity or other programs or whatever. This time is is the gov I don't know.

Joseph: 31:59

It's just crazy. Alright. 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.

Joseph: 32:17

What did this data show exactly?

Sam: 32:21

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 US 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.

Sam: 32:37

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.

Sam: 33:24

I think on Mac, it's slightly different. But, in the document properties, you can see the author, and the author is someone different. Someone who's not, you know, listed on the the front of 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, like, 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's seems to be what we're in.

Joseph: 34:14

I mean, they've been there.

Sam: 34:15

To be what's happening.

Joseph: 34:16

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 Yeah. 25 is the agenda. So there are two names you point to in the piece. Let's just take them 1 by 1. The first piece of metadata says that the, the return to in person work memo, it was signed by that senior official of OPM, as you said.

Joseph: 34:44

But the metadata included the name, Peters comma Noah, as in Noah, Peter's. Just briefly, what did you include, about that person?

Sam: 34:56

Yeah. So the Noah Peters, that this seems to be, his his LinkedIn and this is why I say it seems to be him. His his LinkedIn now says he's a senior adviser at the OPM, whatever that means. Pretty good. But, you know, it's like his his background is what's concerning here.

Sam: 35:16

It's, that he 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, you know, widely known as a white nationalist. And he sued Twitter in 2018 for, banning his account, and because he's a white nationalist, and, he lost that case. But that's the guy who was representing him as, Noah Peters. And then, you know, Peters has been kind of writing and talking publicly about, how, like, 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, his case.

Sam: 36:05

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.

Joseph: 36:19

Yeah. Not not the sort of person you would jump at the chance to ask. Could you write a US government memo

Sam: 36:27

Right.

Joseph: 36:27

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?

Sam: 36:45

Yeah. So the metadata says that that one was authored by James Shirk, and Shirk is also a fun 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 the project 2025 playbook.

Sam: 37:20

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 to 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.

Joseph: 38:02

Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that.

Sam: 38:03

Yeah. And you'll yeah. Well, you can go and read it on your free time list. No. No.

Sam: 38:07

We won't do a dramatic reading. Yeah. But, yeah, it's like mentioned, like, schedule f, which is the the classification that SSHRC 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 wanna do done.

Sam: 38:39

They need 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, you know, tons of civil servants and reinstalling, you know, like, these people who are right or guy Trump. So, yeah, he's a big one. And

Joseph: 39:05

I think those are the 2 you mentioned. Right? Those are the 2.

Sam: 39:08

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.

Sam: 39:26

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.

Joseph: 39:34

Yeah.

Sam: 39:34

And it's you know, that would be a normal thing. It's like, you know, if you have, like, someone writing, you know, like, 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.

Joseph: 39:54

Right.

Sam: 39:54

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?

Sam: 40:07

That's that's what we're working with.

Joseph: 40:09

They're not secretary or assistant.

Sam: 40:11

Right. Yeah.

Joseph: 40:13

So Sam touched on this. And I I think just to sort of ask you, Jason, in a slightly different way, like, why is it important to know who the people who seemingly wrote these memos are? Like, why why does that matter? You know?

Jason: 40:30

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 that is what like, the Democrats tried to tie into 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.

Jason: 41:10

You know, unclear whether, like, any 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, you know, 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, you know, theoretically, that matters.

Sam: 41:47

Yeah. And Trump distanced himself from project 2025 this whole time when he was running because it was poisonous. And because most most people hear, you know, the things that were laid out in it, and they're like, oh, that's, you know, Christian nationalism. We don't like, we're not into that. That's like and he distanced himself from my own purpose.

Sam: 42:06

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 kinda let it go. And then it came out that, you know, Trump immediately started hiring, like, over a 100 project 2025 architects into his administration.

Sam: 42:29

So

Jason: 42:30

go figure. Like to to 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 had 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 the, you know, drones that were being sighted above New Jersey for, like, weeks, toward the end of last year. And that I reported on wrote and Frances and Ray had done this podcast about how this happens all the time. It's a media caused panic.

Jason: 43:11

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, etcetera, 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 gonna fall in line immediately.

Jason: 44:02

The media is gonna do a story saying, oh, it was no big deal. They're never gonna 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.

Jason: 44:16

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, it was clear to everyone that project 2025 was going to be the plan forever because that the Republican spent years years writing this down, a thousand pages, putting people in positions of power and and in positions to enact this, like, on day 1. And Trump was able to say, like, oh, actually, no.

Jason: 45:16

And it went away for a a large segment of the population. And it's just like that it that capture of our, like, information ecosystem is very, very bad. And I'm sorry we this is not our podcast document, but, like, no one is gonna care about the drones ever again. It's crazy that this is happening.

Joseph: 45:38

One one clarifying question, and maybe you you don't know. But since you put a curveball on us, I'm gonna Please. Please. Strategically bat bat it back. I don't know.

Jason: 45:48

I don't

Joseph: 45:48

I don't I don't watch baseball. But the quote, from this press conference is that after research and study, the drones were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the f f f FAA for research and various other reasons. So there were government tracks. They were being flown by the government or, like, how's how how are we supposed to read into that? Or how do you think, Griffiths

Jason: 46:14

is gonna read? So that's a great question because,

Joseph: 46:17

getting authorized or flying by?

Jason: 46:19

Authorized 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.

Jason: 46:36

So it could mean that. And then the rest of this quote, which you, you know, tried to gotcha me,

Joseph: 46:42

is I deliberately left that out.

Jason: 46:44

Said many of these drones were also hobbyist 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 where you fly. And so,

Joseph: 47:09

But the but the the way I'm reading that second part, the many of these drones were also hobbyists. 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 all trying to jump on it basically, which is kind of what you said earlier. Right? It's like Yeah.

Joseph: 47:30

If we need it, you know?

Jason: 47:31

So so I mean, I'm curious like, you know, there were a bunch of drones being seen and there's things being flown all the time. So it could be like it 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 to these documents, about about, like, what the authorizations are. So it's unclear. Yeah.

Jason: 47:57

It could be they could be government drones to some extent. I 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.

Jason: 48:12

Not sure what that means. But

Joseph: 48:14

Good point. Good point. Yeah.

Emanuel: 48:17

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason: 48:18

It I 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 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.

Joseph: 48:45

And there wasn't coverage. Exactly.

Jason: 48:47

And there wasn't coverage, but, you know, I there's a Guardian article that we're talking about. Like, I wonder if this is gonna 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, kinda doubt it.

Joseph: 49:05

Yeah. Fair. Alright. We'll leave that there, but I'm sure I mean, Jason, you should probably go write about the drones now, probably, for tomorrow or

Sam: 49:14

something. Dictated a blog. So please go get We just do a we'll do

Joseph: 49:18

a we'll do it this.

Jason: 49:19

We'll do a text to speech. Yeah.

Joseph: 49:21

Yeah. Yeah. Well, until then, we will leave that there. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, oh, Now Play Us Out. But if you are a paying 4 or 4 media subscriber, we're gonna talk about how GitHub is showing how the administration is scrubbing material from its websites and across the web in real time.

Joseph: 49:42

You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.c0. We'll be right back after this. Alright. We're back in the subscribers only section. We're gonna talk about a couple of pieces.

Joseph: 50:07

I think Sam wrote the first one. Trump's administration is taking down sites about gender identity all over the Internet. So as you open the article, Trump signs this executive order This is only 2 sexes. How are government agencies responding to that? By scrubbing their sites or being told to scrub the sites?

Joseph: 50:31

Like, what is the response that you bring up, here?

Sam: 50:35

Yeah. So this, I first saw because someone was, actually, Ari Drennan, who is a journalist, posted about this on x, but she posted that the the Social Security Administration site, you you used to be able to go to a page about, like, information on changing your sex identification records with Social Security, administration, but that page was gone. So I was like, oh, that's interesting. Let me look at some other pages. And now you it said you're not authorized to access this page.

Sam: 51:13

So I assume they had just kind of, like, made it private on the back end instead of, like, deleting it. We saw this happen with when a lot of health insurance companies deleted their, like, mastheads and CEO pages and things like that. Same kind of move to kinda make it hidden instead of making it completely deleted. But, then I kinda poked around on the Social Security site, which, to be clear, lets you, go in. It's very it's a very simple process, and it's just kinda, like, walks you through, let you, change your records, basically, to show what your sex identification is.

Sam: 51:51

But a few pages were down. It wasn't just that that one, which, obviously, nobody assumed that this was a fluke to begin with, but it was more widespread than we thought it was initially. There were pages from, the administration's main LGBTQIA site that were down. You know, they they were things like gender identity information, just kind of explaining, like, what you could do or to, like, self attest to the Social Security Administration, what your gender was. It like, these are really, like, innocuous, like, long established, informational websites.

Sam: 52:29

Nothing crazy.

Joseph: 52:32

And and and what's what's being removed from the informational websites? Exactly. Because with with the social security ones, you say, it's more like a website somebody interacts with. Right? They, like, log in, that sort of thing.

Joseph: 52:44

And then they're also removing just information from websites. Like, what are they taking out? Yeah. Exactly.

Sam: 52:52

Yeah. So what with one of them, with the, the one that Ari had spotted was just a page that said, you know, you can make this change by requesting a replacement Social Security card. We'll mail you a free replacement after we update your record. Your Social Security card doesn't say your sex on it or your gender. It just says your name.

Sam: 53:12

I don't know what else it says, but it's like this it's

Joseph: 53:14

not like a Social Security number. It says

Sam: 53:15

your Social Security number. No. I remember signing it when I was, like, a kid. It has my awful little signature. There's not a lot of information on it, but it changes your record with them.

Sam: 53:27

So it was a link to, like, a questionnaire about, like, you know, figuring out what you what kind of paperwork you needed. There was a link to, like, a PDF about, how to do this, like, what office to go to, the form itself that you needed to bring. There was a link to that. Stuff like that. It was like how like, a page about, like, how to get your Social Security card is still up.

Sam: 53:50

So it wasn't like they took the whole thing down, but they took down specifically these pages, which yeah. It's like a very targeted thing

Joseph: 54:00

that official position of the US government. Right? So they're gonna remove, basically, the options we have to do that sort of thing. So you you see those websites and other people spot it as well. And then Jason kind of took it with another approach and started looking into, well, I think this story is just about 1 GitHub.

Joseph: 54:21

And maybe we'll talk about another one in a minute. We'll see. But, Jason, you then wrote this piece called GitHub is showing the Trump administration scrubbing government web pages in real time. We'll get to the questions I have in in the documents in a second, but it just came to mind. Like, are you basically seeing the commits and the sort of the reflection of what Sam was seeing in GitHub, or are they kind of unrelated?

Joseph: 54:49

You know what I mean?

Jason: 54:50

Yeah. Yeah. They are sort of related. So, not every government agency is on GitHub, and not every government website is, you know, administered through GitHub in any way, shape, or form. This specific article that I wrote, centers on an agency called 18 f, which was created by Obama after health care dot dot gov was a disaster.

Jason: 55:18

Like, the rollout of Obamacare was a mess and people couldn't sign up. And so he tried to start a cool government agency, like, literally, they called it 18 f, and it was supposed to be the start up within the US government. And it was supposed to attract Silicon Valley talent. And, basically, it'd be this, like, Skunk Works for, hey, solve these, like, cross governmental tech challenges, more or less. And as part of them being cool, they were, like, everything we do is gonna be open source, and so they have a GitHub.

Jason: 55:53

And they like, which for people who don't know, GitHub is a website, that's now owned by Microsoft to that open source community and lots of government lots of, like, software engineering firms use to keep track of their code bases and their documentation and stuff like that. So, basically, like, the GSA, which is the agency, It's the general services agency. The best thing

Joseph: 56:18

you can do is that nobody's ever Yes. Fucking heard of.

Jason: 56:21

I've heard of it because my old roommate works there, from, like, a long, long, long time ago who I've not talked to since this, has has taken he's not ever been a source for me. He's just one of my friends.

Joseph: 56:32

I love you. You should put on that disclaimer, and that's good. But yeah.

Jason: 56:35

We've always we've always made fun of him because we're like, oh, you work you do general services. Yes. Okay. Like, what what does it mean?

Joseph: 56:42

What does that even mean?

Jason: 56:43

Yeah. But GSA basically is, the federal government's landlord. So, like, they keep track of all of the federal buildings that the government owns, and then they also set, like, a lot of guidelines for other government services. So they or government agencies. So they essentially, like, help other agencies figure out what different rules should be and best practices and how they should make their websites and stuff like that.

Jason: 57:14

But, anyways, 18 f falls under the GSA, and they have a GitHub. And since Trump has been inaugurated, because of the way that GitHub works, you can see every commit that they're making, which is, like, every change to documentation that they have. And this includes things like tweaks to internal handbooks, employee handbooks, and also changes to external websites. And so they are deleting anything that could possibly be considered diversity, equity, inclusion. They deleted something called I believe it's called diversity bot, which is a Slack bot.

Joseph: 57:55

Yeah. Which which look it looks it it attaches to your

Jason: 57:59

Include bot. Include your bot.

Joseph: 58:00

Yeah. And it attaches to a Slack instance, presumably run by a government agency. Right? And it deliberately looks for is it terms that could be considered,

Jason: 58:13

not I have it I have it up. So it says, inclusion bot is integrated into Slack and passively listen for words or phrases that have racist, sexist, ableist, or otherwise exclusionary or discriminatory histories or backgrounds. When it hears those words, it privately lets the writer know and offers some suggested alternatives. So

Sam: 58:31

Is that the elevator one? Do you remember that meme? It was like, guys, I'm stuck in the elevator, and it was like, you're using exclusionary language. Try again. And they were like, oh, you can't get

Jason: 58:42

me. Yeah. It sounds like that. So they got rid of the documentation for InclusionBot. So big memory hold InclusionBot to show that it doesn't that it, like, never existed, and then they also got rid of InclusionBot from Slack.

Jason: 59:00

They also got rid of a page called, DEIA Resources, which is just, like, about accessibility and things like that. They got rid of our web page called psychological safety, and then they also very notably got rid of a page about sorry. There's so much, so I've I've had to, like, be scrolling around a little bit. But it's it's about, accessibility and, essentially, different pages about how you can make government web pages more accessible to people who are blind or vision impaired, which is pretty fucked up.

Joseph: 59:40

So, like, on on one side, you have stuff that would quite explicitly fall under the executive order. You know what I mean? Especially come when it comes around sex and gender and that sort of thing. You have those things and well, there's an executive order. So, like, that's the official position of the US government.

Joseph: 01:00:02

So we have to start removing stuff or whatever. And then but it also sounds like they're just removing anything that even has a slight hint of, like, diversity or inclusion or, like, I don't know, the Slack bot. Like, was that really is that really a massive pain in the ass for you just to have that or some of, like, this other documentation as well? So it it while Sam was looking at sort of public facing stuff and seeing that removed, the GitHubs are revealing almost removals internally as well. Is that sort of what we're learning?

Jason: 01:00:36

It's it's both internal and external. So some of them are, you know, here's employee tools or employee handbooks or employee databases that have had things removed. And what was interesting to me is that it it's basically a version history, so you can see the specific things that they removed and not why. But, usually, the commits will have a title, and a lot of them say new executive order, or they will say DEI guidelines or DEI rules, and they'll remove it. I don't wanna talk too much about what I have coming because I've learned that GitHub is very useful for finding other, like, this is happening across the entire government and many different government pages have GitHubs where, like, bigger changes are happening related to this, and I'm writing about that now.

Jason: 01:01:30

I don't know. I it won't be up when this podcast goes up, but, I guess, check our website in the next day or 2. But something that's just been very interesting to me is that GitHub has been showing like, GitHub has been revealing all of this because of how GitHub works. And it's not that the Trump administration is trying to hide that it's doing this. It's like they're being very blatant about what they are doing.

Jason: 01:01:59

But I think that seeing the specific little changes, there a lot of them are very petty. A lot of them are wrong, as in a lot of them have nothing to do with DEI. And it's just it's just like a really interesting intersection of politics and this tech and how it works.

Joseph: 01:02:21

Yeah. I think that's a really, really good place to leave it, to be honest. So we'll leave that there. And as Jason said, he's gonna keep, looking into some other ones as well. There's some pretty interesting stuff.

Joseph: 01:02:35

If it does come out, I'll try to add it to the show notes. But apart from that, I will play us out. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.c0. You'll get unlimited access to our Rascals and an ad free version of this podcast.

Joseph: 01:03:01

You also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a 5 star rating and review for the podcast. Somebody did that recently. I was gonna read it out, and I forgot to put it in the document.

Joseph: 01:03:18

So I'll do that next time. This has been 404 Media. We will see you again next week.