Devindra: What's up, Internet, and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm senior editor, Devindra Hardawar. This week, I'm joined by podcast producer, Ben Ellman. Hey, Ben.

Ben: Hello, everyone.

Devindra: Hello, and special guest Jason Koebler from 404 Media. Hey, Jason.

Jason: Hey, thanks for having me.

Devindra: Thank you for joining us, Jason, because I feel like you're a good person to talk about stuff.

How you doing, everyone? Kind of the hellscape of what's happening in the US government right now. And we want to follow up with some comments we made about Elon Musk right after Trump's inauguration. We were joking that he really seemed more like President Musk than some sort of special advisor.

And honestly, That's kind of how it feels. Judging from all the meddling we've seen from Doge and his initiative and his lackeys in the administrative state, it seems like Elon Musk is taking a real strong hand in a lot of things, especially when it comes to money and funding. So we're going to dive into all of that.

And I don't know, just try to figure out where we're going from here, folks. As always, if you're enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice. Leave us a review on iTunes and drop us an email at podcastendingadget. com. I feel like my first question here for you, Jason, is what, what the heck is happening?

Because I don't know how we got into the situation where Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is now just so strongly determining what is happening with federal agencies, with funding. Do we have a sense? Is it just the money that Musk invested in the Trump campaign that has given him this leeway at this point?

Jason: Well, there's definitely a whoa dude aspect to what's happening. I mean, while you were saying that, I remember when Elon Musk talked about politics before, but he didn't really get behind Trump until the assassination attempt. And that was not that long ago. And now he's, you know, like this, with with the administration and in many ways seemingly dictating what is happening.

I mean, you made that joke about President Musk, and I think that started as a joke, like in the first days of the presidency. And now he's giving speeches from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. His son is talking to Trump and perhaps telling him to shut up, if you saw those clips. So, I mean, yeah, it really does seem like Elon Musk is dictating what is happening within the executive branch.

I think the thing that I've heard most in terms of what is going on here is that Elon Musk really seems to care a lot about policy and, and what is happening here, whereas Trump doesn't care about that sort of thing. And so he's saying you know, Elon, do whatever you want. And what Elon seems to want to do is gut these really important agencies.

You know, starting with USAID, which provides, you know, billions of dollars of aid all around the world is a really, Is like the most powerful soft power agency that the United States has. And then start, sort of going into the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after that. I've been talking to dozens of federal workers across the entire government.

And I feel like the message that I'm getting from them most often is, Oh my God, the Doge Bros are here today, or the specter of the Doge Bros showing up at some point seems to loom very large over really every agency at this point.

Devindra: And it's weird how they're saying, Oh my God, this is the Doge Bros.

The Doge Bros from reporting from Wired and other places. And they're 19, 20 year olds. One of them is like a freshman in college and they're all just Musk and Peter Thiel acolytes. This is the dumbest future. Like this, I did not expect, I don't know, our democracy to crumble like this, but really that, that is what it is.

And I don't quite know how to explain it, that Musk and his lackeys have gotten this this amount of leeway. To do all this stuff. So I remember something we learned from the first Trump presidency is that he really hated the job, right? He didn't like actually doing work. He was watching TV all day trying to like, you know, half ass as much as possible.

So what seems to be happening here is Musk is determining a lot of the administrative stuff. And I think the executive orders that we've seen, the deletion of all that stuff is from the folks behind project 2025, right? So it's like he's, he's split up the actual work of what it takes to be a president and he will show up for camera ops because that's what he loves.

So we're not going to talk about the project 2025 stuff, but A lot of those executive orders will have an impact in the tech world too. So we'll dive into that when we can. Brendan Carr, head of the FCC, like that's a whole other thing. That's a whole other episode of like how this is all going to dismantle so many things that we love.

And I know the little bits of a consumer friendly product group progress, the Biden administration administration did. Just kind of a man, just kind of a wild place. We're in you mentioned a couple of things, USAID. I have friends there, so I'm going to, I don't know. I feel particularly pissed off about this because of the potential for good with that agency, there are legitimate arguments like yes, soft power.

Yes. It's very easy to hide spies in there to help them, you know, manipulate things in other countries, but also. Legitimate good, right? Ben, there was something you wanted to point out. The actual tech angle, like one major tech thing that USAID workers

Ben: relied on. So for USAID, You are posted all over the world.

Devindra: Your family is there. They've settled there. Yeah.

Ben: And often in very remote locations, think about USAID being like the Peace Corps on steroids. You're doing similar work to Peace Corps stuff, like Getting into, you know, places in Sub Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia places that don't usually get foreign aid, and you are living there for a long amount of time.

But that also exposes you to some issues where there might be, you know, local terrorist groups or something of the like that might want to take your cache of aid that you want to, you know, distribute between, you know, X number of towns and villages. They have a piece of technology at USAID called ScryPanic that just like broadcasts your coordinates wherever you are in the world.

If you have cell service, it will say, Hey, this person really needs help. Send local authorities, send any like U. S. forces if they're around there, like this is a huge alarm bell. And there have been some mixed reports of. USAID workers and contractors just getting like bad token messages when they try to log into this like incredibly crucial piece of technology.

Devindra: I mean, I'm not, not surprised there are people I know that have been there. I'm not going to say their names, but over, over the weekend before a lot of this stuff was public, they were just like, hey, come home. They got messages like, hey, come home, you're, you're done. And these are people who have settled in other countries.

They have kids in schools. They have whole lives set up and it's kind of evaporating in an instance. I think the story was like wasn't that barred by a court? Like they're dismantling FEOSAID, but the damage has already been done.

Jason: Well, that's the thing. If you're in a really remote area and you're You're called home and, you know, a court at some point says, Oh, this is illegal.

You can go back. It's not necessarily as easy as, Oh, just go back to this incredibly remote place and, and spin up your project again. And so, you know, whether this is deemed constitutional or not, and whether you, you know, the, the administration complies with what ultimately happens, you know, lots of questions there.

It that the damage has already been done. Like you said,

Devindra: Yeah, it's kind of really hard to to fix this. Like from a lot of people I've talked to you, it seems like the overall damage that's potentially happening to the administrative government right now. This could take years, decades, like depending on how far they go, it could take a long, long time to fix a lot of these issues.

Ben: Well, can you be more specific about that, Devindra? What do you mean when you say like it could take years or decades to fix? Are we talking about data breaches? Are we talking about like soft power? I think

Devindra: it's like the, the actual infrastructure and Jason, you may be able to talk about this better, but from what I've seen, the actual infrastructure of things like, Hey, the consumer finance protection board that thing, that, That thing didn't exist until after the 08 you know, banking crisis and that's all Liz Warren's idea.

That, that whole thing there is to protect consumers and to prevent another banking crisis. Essentially, it seems like that is just going to disappear. We have DOJ people looking into the Treasury Department, right? And getting access to the federal payment system. There's a lot of reporting from security professionals who are like, What the hell are you doing?

Because this information is, is now, is highly protected, highly sensitive. And this stuff is going to get out there. There are a lot of arguments that many people in this government, including Musk and including Trump, are tied to foreign governments, like Russia, like potentially China.

Ben: That's a lot of hearsay.

It's a lot of, yeah, there's,

Devindra: listen, there's a reason Tesla is like the only foreign car, you know, manufacturer in China. They have a, they have a very close relationship there. There's a lot of, there's a lot of hearsay and there's a lot of hey, a lot of money has been transferred between these countries and these individuals.

Anyway we should get back a little to the top. Do we have a sense of what Doge is actually trying to accomplish versus what they're saying, Jason?

Jason: Yeah, I mean, so Doge is the Department of Government Efficiency, and they've been brought on nominally to detect fraud, waste, and abuse, is what both Trump and Musk are constantly saying.

And the way that they set this up was they took this agency called the U. S. Digital Service. Which was spun up under Obama after the healthcare. gov rollout disaster, and it's essentially this strike team of coders, lawyers, policy people, design people, who go from agency to agency and solve things. And, you know, there, there were hundreds of people who worked there, and Rather than create a fully new agency, they basically installed Musk as the king of this agency brought, he brought in a bunch of his people and one of the reasons why they, they use this agency was it has the status that allows for very easy hiring, which is why you have, you know, former Tesla interns and Neuralink you know, fellows and, and stuff like that running around the government right now.

And so, you know, yeah. I hate to even say this, but I feel like it should be said there is real the federal government is very bloated, it's a very bloated you know, apparatus, and so, anyone who works in government will tell you this, and there needs to be some sort of reform, but rather than follow any sort of like they just emailed everyone in the federal government said, Hey, you want to quit?

Which is not really, maybe that works if you're running Twitter, you know, we can argue about that, but when you're running, you know, the most powerful government in the world, it's. It's quite concerning. And so a lot of what DOJ has done has been stopped in the short term by the courts. We'll see how this sort of all shakes out, but basically they're going agency by agency cutting programs.

They don't like trying to fire people. They don't like sort of like intimidating people all over the federal government. And it's a mess.

Devindra: It's I think mess is just like the key word here. Even, even the fact that like Musk is taking over us digital services, right. Which is this weird thing. A lot of people have not really thought about, but I've always heard it from people, from engineers, especially from people who straddle the world of.

You know, politics and tech, it is, it was kind of a dream team because these were people who sacrificed a lot more money and like stock options and the power you'd get working for a big tech company to do civil work and to do I don't know, potentially legitimately good tech work. So we lose that.

Instead of that to it's these, it's these kids going around and just like dismantling things all over the place. There's been some recent news, by the way, like the the purported purpose of doge is to reduce you know, reduce make things more efficient. Sure. We've also seen stories like just yesterday, there's a story that an armored Tesla project is projected to win a 400 million state department contract.

I believe the language around that thing. Was changed to be armored Evie or something like that. And potentially that could also involve other companies too, like BMW. I think they're going to buy some, but it seemed it seems like they're gonna buy a lot of cyber trucks.

Jason: Yeah, I mean, this also feels quaint, but yeah, but like Elon Musk has so much business with the federal government and, you know, with a lot of these agencies that he is now gutting and installing, you know, loyalists and, and things like that.

And so it's you know, SpaceX and Tesla have received billions of dollars of government contracts. And then also some of the agencies that are being dismantled have been investigating his companies you know, the, the CFPB sort of notoriously has been investigating a lot of different, you know, Silicon Valley companies, USAID was investigating whether Starlink was shutting off internet for people in Ukraine fairly or unfairly, I guess it was, it was what they're investigating.

And so, Musk now sort of controls this, you know, I think during the first. Trump administration the idea of like you should divest from your companies and Conflict of interest and stuff like it feels quaint at this point, but oh my god, does it feel quaint? Yeah, but it's like I mean Elon Musk really we are really looking at like an oligarchy and we we are really are looking at you know sort of the people making the rules benefiting from the the you know loyalists that they're installing all over the federal government and

Devindra: Yeah, I mean who benefits is the question we should be asking whenever we see any of these stories and Often it's Musk or often it's people tied to him Or people within the Trump administration themselves or Trump themselves or their their family or something

Ben: Yeah, so Jason, can you tell us a bit more about the reporting that 404 did where you had audio from someone at the GSA, is that correct?

And they were saying something like, we're losing so much money, like they're basically talking as if the government had shareholders, but they don't.

Jason: Yeah, so I mean, I think that's probably one of our biggest scoops over the last week is we got audio from this meeting at the General Services Administration, which is the vaguest like possible name for an agency, but they basically do a lot of like cybersecurity stuff for the government.

They do a lot of coding for the government. They are in charge of all of the government's real estate. They're basically like a cross agency well, they're not an HR department, but they, they help a lot with a lot of different parts of the government. And within this, there's this technological services division that is made up of coders.

And the guy in charge of that now is Thomas Shedd, who is a former Tesla engineer. And basically in this meeting, he was telling folks there that one, they wanted to replace a lot of them with AI, which is wonderful. So basically they Yeah,

Ben: They wanted them to code AI agents that could then you know, 10x their output or something.

Is that right?

Jason: Yeah. They, they talked about making AI coding agents that could work for each government agency and then would be overseen by the few number of humans who are left. And yeah. You know, this is actually like a Silicon Valley dream that lots of companies are trying, like Mark Zuckerberg said that he wants to do this at Meta starting very soon, and the difference here, like I'm skeptical whether that will work in any sort of company, but the difference here is that the federal government Like, there's a reason why a lot of their software is clunky and old, and it's because it has to be designed to withstand, you know, cyber attacks, it has to be designed to run under any circumstance, so that's why a lot of the government's databases are on old mainframes and stuff.

And so, the idea that you're just gonna go start writing software all over the federal government with AI is quite concerning based on the people I, I spoke to. And then, yeah, they, they really do at least talk about the idea that the American taxpayer is a shareholder and, and they need to return some sort of investment for these folks.

And it's I don't know, that's, that's really not how government works and that would be huge paradigm shift. In, in how government is supposed to serve its people.

Devindra: At the same time, we are not talking about the I don't know, many, many millions, hundreds of millions in taxes that Musk and his companies are not paying properly, right?

So,

Jason: yeah, that's the elephant in the room that I'll just say very briefly is that a lot of these cuts are being done in advance of a massive Trump tax cut that's supposed to add trillions of dollars to the deficit. And so they are trying to balance the budget knowing that they're about to cut off a lot of revenue because they're going to give a giant tax cut to the rich.

Devindra: Gotta love it. Gotta love it. We saw the story yesterday that Doge apparently took 80 million dollars right out of the New York bank accounts. Oh yeah, but

Ben: before we get to that, let's talk about the Access that they have to the treasury department because that's a very murky situation Jason, I don't know if you have any like more specific information about this But yes, they just walked past security and everything and started like plugging stuff install their own security Well,

Devindra: it seems like really weird stuff.

Ben: Do you mean that they installed their own Rent a cops. Rent a cops. Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. There was the triple canopy cop that Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders didn't just walk past. So yeah, they started like rooting around in the IT stuff. There were questions of whether or not anyone had access to right access to how the Treasury spends money, which is like insane thing for a department under the executive branch to be able to do maybe they do, maybe they don't.

What is the like newest information on that, Jason?

Jason: Yeah, so this, this is a story that really wired has done amazing reporting on. I haven't done much on it, but I've been reading and I've been following it because it's so insane. And basically the, the latest as I understand it is that a federal judge said, Hey You can't do this.

And, and one of the reasons that the federal judge, you know, said get out and delete the information that you have until this is able to be appealed to a higher court is that the potential for damage for irreparable damages was so, so high and so urgent. I mean, you, you imagine something going wrong with how the U S government doles out money.

It's I can't think of a bigger. potential disaster, really. And there was some talk about whether or not

Ben: any of Musk's under 30 coders would even really understand how to muck around in the treasury payment system, because it's all in COBOL.

Jason: Right. It's, it's all, as I said some of these mainframes are quite old.

Some of these databases are very old. And, you know, this was, this was a highly secure. System that only a few people had access to because it wasn't something that you wanted anyone to be able to change. I think that there's still some debate about whether they had write access or, or read access.

I think it doesn't matter all that much. It's just you know, the federal government Musk is fighting it as though they want write access to be able to change things. And the idea that you could just stop payment. On a bunch of things because you you felt like it like that's sort of One of the fears the other fear is that they just break something accidentally And you know you think about social security payments not going out medicare payments not going out like all sorts of payments not going out and that Throws the country into like actual real instant chaos.

I think

Devindra: yeah, they announced that I mean early on One of the first like funding freezes that they announced that broke the Medicaid portal, right? So a lot of this stuff is like a house of cards, right? We don't know what relies on what or what depends on what? We saw the story yesterday by the way that apparently 80 million dollars was taken from a New York City bank account That was dedicated for FEMA funding And that was specifically around money for shelter and services.

I saw Kristi Noem. I saw people like celebrating this in the, in the Trump camp. And meanwhile, the New York, NYC comptrollers like issued a blistering statement saying what, what is happening here? Basically, New York City cannot take this lying down. I call on the mayor to immediately just pursue legal action.

They said in a quote eric adams is not gonna do anything apparently, right?

Jason: I mean eric adams was just had his the corruption charges against him dropped you know, he I saw a headline today that you know, obviously was like a take but it said donald trump is now the mayor of new york city because you know, he did this massive favor to eric adams the the mayor there and so, you know, who knows?

Wasn't that a

Ben: conditional situation too? It was like we're Like holding on prosecution until november or so. So it's basically like making The mayor of the biggest city in the United States

Jason: dance for his freedom. Yeah, that's actually a great point because the initial reporting was that the charges have been dropped, but they actually haven't been dropped.

They may be dropped, as you said, and so it's not a great situation. I think the fact that Doge was able to pull 80 million out of a New York City bank account is incredibly scary. The specifics there are not like it's a little bit of a murky situation. You know, we know that the money has been taken back, but we don't know sort of like how Where's it going?

Where's it going? And I guess there's a New York state law where you know, it has to be out of a commercial bank. And so how, how was the federal government able to seize money that had already been transferred via wire transfer, which you normally can't undo? And so there's some questions about What type of access do they have?

Like, why were they able to do this on a technological level? Let alone like a legal and political level. That, that broke just yesterday as you said. So I think there's a lot more to come there.

Devindra: I feel like my two word response to this stuff is just, seems bad. Seems bad that they were able to do that.

Seems bad for the implications for the future. Just briefly, I just want to mention we've also seen many, many examples because of what Doge is doing, because of like the the pushes from the Trump side to, to minimize references to DEI or anything like that. Whenever you see that, folks, remember what they're really saying.

And a lot of people are saying this on Blue Sky. What they're really saying is that we want to resegregate this country. You know, that's, that's really what's going on here, but it is wild to see companies like Google, you know, just really dance to the tune of what the Trump campaign is asking for. This goes beyond the whole like Gulf of America thing, which is on Google maps right now.

I feel incredibly stupid that we are living in this timeline, that that, because the president has decreed that, that that is how Google's handling this, but also the removal of things like. I don't know, references to Black History Month default calendar entries around diverse topics. That has gone from Google Calendar.

Nobody asked for that, but Google's doing that because they're like, Hey, I guess this is bad now to talk about these things or references to trans kids or trans medicine across other companies, too.

Ben: Yeah, and I don't know if this counts as like obeying in advance as people are talking about, you know, like the way you resist fascism is don't obey in advance, but like they could still be covering their own butts for any possibility of, let's say, Google crosses the administration somehow in a way that they don't like, and then they'll complain about having African American History Month.

On Google Calendar, because that really matters. That this is precisely

Devindra: obeying in advance.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah, but also use that as possible leverage to, I don't know, restart the Google antitrust

Devindra: case or something like that? It's just really weird that we live in a world where Costco and Ben Jerry's are now like, Among, among the corporate I don't know the major companies that are on the side of like progress, I guess.

Ben Jerry's was kind of always there, but Wild, just Wild, that is where we are at. It feels like we are living through a semi demolition man future or something, right? I don't know. Yeah, so

Ben: let's just whip around the rest of the departments that Doge has touched. USAID, fed to a wood chipper. That's what Elon Musk said.

He could have done fun things on the weekend, but just yes. Gleefully posted, fed to a wood chipper. Then you've got OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, where they've Done the fork in the road email, which is exactly the same email subject that was sent to all Twitter employees

Devindra: really helped that whole company, right?

Really brought them

Ben: in the weeks after Musk bought Twitter. So far, 75, 000 around 75, 000 federal employees, which is like 2. 5%, maybe a little bit more of the total workforce have taken the buyout offer. I've seen that number by the

Devindra: way, because it's attributed to an anonymous It's a single anonymous.

It's government official. So it's a lot of people are like, are they doing this to say like they're being more successful than they really are? We don't really know.

Jason: Okay. It's also very, very much worth mentioning that you know, a lot of the federal government turns over every year anyway, because of retirements and people going back to the private sector.

So this is not some huge win. It's a very small number of people overall.

Ben: Yeah, that's kind of the churn that one would expect from a workforce of two and a half million anyway. And so yeah, it might be a little higher for this time in the year. There's also a big question on whether or not These people are going to get the severance that they hoped for.

I think the newest news was that the resignation program was restarted by a judge after being held up for a number of days. And yeah, we'll see if people continue getting paid for eight months or so as they look for new work. If they don't, there are certainly going to be articles about people who expected to be able to use this income to, I don't know, pay for groceries, pay for childcare use it as startup costs for their food truck that they've always wanted to do or something.

It's possible that they're leaving, like retirement benefits on the. Table as well. We covered the Treasury Department. There's also some talk about how they're in NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is something Project 2025 said threatened American prosperity. That's really probably because it houses data on climate change.

Devindra: All those fires and major storms we just had, I think those are pretty threatening to American prosperity too, but you know.

Ben: But, I mean, there's also a question of, you know, if you don't have NOAA atmospheric information, ooh, does that mean that everyone's just going to have to buy more subscriptions to things?

Are you going to be able to sell a new pickaxe to all of the miners who want to know what the weather is going to be? That seems like a interesting area for privatization. And then the CFPB, that's doing nothing right now. It was told to do nothing. And then on top of that, Devindra, tell us more about how a bunch of names from the CIA were leaked.

Devindra: Oh, that was fun. I feel Ethan Hunt's entire team in the very first Mission Impossible did not need to die. Like they died to protect the knock list. Okay. And what apparently happens is that the Trump administration, maybe through some pressure by the Doge folks, basically pushed for the CIA to share names, full names of new hires over an unclassified email.

So Again, seems bad. Seems like that's a bad thing that should be, we should not be, you know, dealing with information like this, sensitive information like this. But this is, this is one of those stories where it just came and went in five minutes. It is such like a monumentally stupid thing that could be damaging to people's lives.

Seriously. But we're not actually talking about it much because there's so much other stupid stuff. Like it's just such an onslaught of stuff from this administration that we can't even keep up with all of this, but I'd want to point that out. I think that

Jason: when you say the damage is done and this could affect us for years and years and years, it's like, these are the identities of secret agents.

This is, you've burned them. Or you, you put them at serious risk and, and that's one of the things. I think also there's been this sort of like broader management by fear sort of thing you know, Elon Musk retweeted like the idea that, or not the idea, the identity of a judge's daughter who works in the Department of Education, which is another one that's on the chopping block.

And it just really feels You know, comply, or we will potentially put you, you know, in harm's way.

Devindra: Yeah, let's end, let's end on that. Is there, is there any sense, I guess at this point, like this is all still fresh. It, we're still, we're not even a full month right into, into this administration, but a lot of damage has been done.

Seems like it will be continue, like a lot of things will continue to happen from, from the DOJ team. I do wonder what sort of pushback we're going to see legally. Democratic leadership really is taking a hands off approach to a lot of this stuff. I'm seeing protests, I'm seeing strongly worded statements, but nothing major.

But it does seem like the courts are pushing back. I do wonder Where will you know, where will workers sit on this? Where will labor forces sit? How will people respond to this? It's weird how we entered 2025. I think a lot of billionaires and very rich people were worried about, Oh man, people really don't like us right now.

And what Elon Musk has done is essentially reminded everybody of why we should really dislike the super rich like Elon, like Musk himself and Trump. So I don't know. We don't know what's going to happen with any of that stuff, but Jason, anything you want to add? Yeah, I would say the

Jason: only silver lining is, you know, last week felt like.

A flurry of actions and really, really bad stuff. And then this week, there's, there's still some bad things happening, but some of that pushback has started to yield some results. Like the, the courts at this point have stopped a fair bit of this. And, you know, it's very interesting. I'll be interested to see which parts of, you know, these actions get appealed and which ones they say, okay, we're not going to do that anymore.

We're hanging on by a thread here, I feel, but like the courts are saying like, Hey, a lot of this clearly blatantly illegal stuff is illegal. And you know, that, that'll take us to next week when we'll see whether they comply or what, like what happens. But I think that like last week while I was reporting on this stuff, I was like, Oh my God, this is insane.

And then this week it's okay, some of our institutions are holding up, kind of, which I think is a little bit of a silver lining. A

Devindra: little bit of silver lining. Also just, it's a sign of like how slowly the law moves, I guess, in comparison to like how quickly these folks can do damage, right?

Because you can say, yeah, this is illegal, but then it's okay. That's

Ben: not going to keep them from exfiltrating data to. Possible private servers and then what happens after that? A

Devindra: judge can stop them for a couple days or a week as well And they push it to the supreme court and our supreme court is not going to do much to you know Protect us I guess at this point.

Ben: Yeah, so I think final question for everyone. Doge's stated purpose is find savings for the american taxpayer. What do you think the actual purpose is?

Devindra: We, I think we pretty much covered it, right? It's like who benefits, who benefits is mostly Elon Musk. It's mostly his cronies. I'm sure I would love to see something from Peter Thiel about like how he is like meddling with his own, you know, folks there too.

A lot of this stuff is going back to Trump, right? Like it's we saw the story that, what was it? 10 million. X is paying 10 million to Trump to the, I don't know, to Trump directly or the campaign because of X's initial Twitter suspension.

Ben: And this was all the way back after January 6th, right?

This is

Devindra: true. But a lot of people were saying X could have won that case, right? Like they, they didn't have to pay this money, but that's another example of a major, the media companies have been doing. It's just Hang to play nice with the new administration. And that's kind of where we're at and what we're seeing.

We've got a lot of stuff we'll need to be talking about at some point. We'll talk about Brendan Carr. We'll talk about Tulsi Gabbard at some point too, because our new head of national security, everybody. Most likely a Russian agent. I don't know what is happening. What, what have we learned from all the Mission Impossible movies, folks?

Apparently nothing, apparently nothing at all. I don't know. Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Where can we find you on the internet these days?

Jason: Yeah, I'm on blue sky Jason Kebler dot blue sky social. And then I'm at four Oh four media, which is four Oh four media. co.

Devindra: Awesome. Thank you so much.

And yeah, hope to have you back on soon.

Jason: Yeah, it's always fun. Thank you.

Devindra: Let's move on to some other news. And Hey, plain gadget news. You know, where I feel safe is when I'm just reading news unrelated to anything around politics or the state of the world right now. So let's talk about the iPhone SE4, which is, it was projected to drop at some point this week. We have been eagerly waiting for any update from Apple.

But hey it seems like if you like the cheaper iPhone, this could be a good option for you, potentially for around 500 bucks, I think more than the other one, still a single camera. But the idea is that it's going to be going away with the old home button design, and will, you know, likely have the notch and have a similar look to the iPhone 16 right now.

I, I kind of still, I wonder who this phone will be for if it's not actually that much smaller than the iPhone 16. Ben, I know you're an iPhone SE lover. What do you, what are you thinking at this point? Cause you're thinking of when to upgrade.

Ben: Yeah. And really right now I'm thinking that I should be upgrading to like just a base iPhone 16.

One of the reasons that I liked the iPhone SE was that it had a physical home button, but. Really? All signs are pointing to the fact that there's going to be no physical home. Was it really one of the reasons

Devindra: Ben? What, what do you do? What do you do with that home button? You just like

Ben: fingerprint unlock.

Devindra: You can no longer do on

Ben: iPhone. This is

Devindra: true, but you, you lose so much screen. It's funny, like when I go back and hold older iPhones, it's Oh man, all that screen real estate, which is taken up because you have to make the screen, you know, even between both sides, the, it's big bezel, it's big

Ben: bezel

Devindra: time.

It takes up so much space at the top and the bottom. So,

Ben: yeah. So that's why I liked the iPhone at sea and also just like the price I've said before on the show that like, I like the idea of. Carrying a phone where if I, you know, drop it down a storm drain or something that it wouldn't really ruin my budget to get a new one.

But we've gotten to the point where I want to be able to play around with Apple intelligence sort of stuff. And, that I've also proven to myself that I am less likely to drop my phone down a storm drain than I think knock on wood You really let's make sure that that doesn't happen But I think now I trust myself a little more that this one has held up for almost five years now I think I got the iPhone se 2 or 3 new around 2020 and it's time for a big boy upgrade, I'd say

Devindra: definitely time for an upgrade.

The thing about Apple hardware is that we've talked about this before. It does last longer. So even if it's an SC, like it would still last you a couple of years. My mom needs a new phone. I ended up getting her an iPhone 13 plus and I got it refurbished. It looks great. It's in great condition. These are, I don't know, these devices will just stick around longer.

If you are looking to save some money, I would recommend actually looking at older devices rather than maybe the the SEs. Although, I don't know this one may, if it's Apple intelligence capable. That's what I said.

Ben: We were talking about this at the show planning meeting yesterday. And I said, Oh, well, maybe I'm going to get like a 15 pro or something just because it's a little cheaper.

And you were like, no, you probably want to like mess around with Apple intelligence and all that. You probably

Devindra: want that too, but not, I'm just saying other people may not. But the other thinking is that if the SE4 will likely be Apple intelligence capable too. So that actually, once you have that demarcation line, then that's a reason not to go back to older iPhones.

My mom won't care. So I can put her on a 13 plus. But I think a lot of people may, although I see people are really pissed off now when they see they, when they've turned off Apple intelligence, apparently new updates, re enable it. And people are not liking that whole process, so.

Ben: Yeah, I've heard about

Devindra: that.

That's fair. That's fair. I've not it, I don't hate it enough. I do think notification summaries have been useful for me. I don't like it for news stories, but I do like it for just texts and stuff like that. So that stuff has worked. Alright. In other news, we also saw the story that Elon Musk wants to buy OpenAI for 97.

4 billion dollars. And Sam Altman says, no thank you. I think that's the end of that story. I don't think it's going to go anywhere. But it is kind of hilarious to think this is the, the next thing on Musk's I don't know, task list is to take over OpenAI now that it's actually doing something, I don't know.

Not useful, but something with buzz. And there's also,

Ben: A big question of how much he can actually devote time to any one of these things, then. Because he loves to talk about how much work he puts in at all of his companies and, you know, he's slept on the factory floor at Tesla or something.

They're sleeping at the Doge headquarters, apparently. Yeah, yeah. So, if you are currently very involved in American government, what are you supposed to do if the OpenAI bid goes through?

Devindra: It I don't, the board would not There's

Ben: only so many hours in the day, man.

Devindra: What are you gonna do? Listen, if you're powered by Ketamine there are many things, there are many more hours in the day available to you, you know?

You can be productive. Ketamine's not even an upper! The pictures of his eyes at the, at, I think it was the, you have to make sure

Ben: that those aren't photoshopped because I've seen a few that are.

Devindra: Some of them were probably photoshopped. But I do the just when you see Elon Musk speaking in person too, he does give off very much the Mr.

Burns on the you know, Mr. Burns is an alien into the Simpsons vibes. Yeah. This will never happen. But it's hilarious that Elon Musk is trying to make it a thing. Yeah. We should have a whole segment about his kid, about X, in the Oval Office telling. It seems like he's telling Trump to shush.

Ben: Yeah.

Devindra: You should go away, apparently.

Hot mic, kid. Hot mic. Gotta learn about this. If

Ben: you had told me in 2010, when everyone was very excited about Grimes, that Grimes and Elon Musk were going to have a son who was going to shush President Trump in his second term, I would tell you that that was dystopian fiction.

Devindra: Mm hmm. That, that feels like something right out of a sequel to Idiocracy, you know, and that, that is what we're living in folks speaking of I don't know, unintended outcomes of our current future.

Apparently France wants to build a gigawatt of new nuclear for AI stuff. You found this interesting, Ben. I'm not surprised that more countries. So the thing that I found

Ben: interesting from this article is finding out that France. Gets two thirds of its power via nuclear to

Devindra: begin with. France gets a lot of nuclear, and people in France are like, there are a lot of protests, there are a lot of people fighting it.

But this is where the argument gets, gets messy, because it's if you shut down those nuclear plants and your renewables are not ready, where is that power going to come from?

Ben: Yeah, there are also big questions like where France could end up you know, putting its windmills for if it wants any kind of wind power, like the U.

S. is uniquely well positioned to use renewables because of how much land we and we alone own. Oversea. It's the U. S. U. S. coast, and then international waters. That's not the case for a lot of places like Europe that has more densely packed sovereignty. And

Devindra: France is not a huge country in general, yeah.

Not much coastline. So

Ben: my general point of view on this is that if this is what it takes to get nuclear restarted as an idea for renewable energy and as a kind of transitional technology from. fossil based energy production to much more efficient completely green renewables. That might not be such a bad thing, and that might be the nicest thing that I say about AI all month.

Devindra: I don't know. I don't know if that extra power is just being used to produce, you know, crappy generative media. I don't, I don't know. It's, it almost seems like a wash because the problems of potentially introducing new nuclear and the waste of around new nuclear I don't know. It's a, it's a complicated topic.

I want to do an episode about that. Cause I I've had many feelings, many changing feelings about nuclear over the past few decades, and I don't know, it does seem like renewables or have been good. Going stronger than we thought, but they need power now. The thing is, building a new nuclear plant takes a lot of money, or it takes a lot of time, as well, in addition to money.

Yeah,

Ben: and a lot of concrete, which is a big greenhouse gas producer, too. So, how much of a wash could it actually be?

Devindra: Maybe they can have a windmill powered by Ennui. That will just be self sustaining.

Ben: That would be the truest, most renewable energy in France, absolutely.

Devindra: Lessai equals power. Let's move on to what we're working on.

Hey, you saw my review of the RTX 5090 NVIDIA's card. There are more cards coming, so I think you can do the math in terms of what's happening. I didn't get a 5080 to review, unfortunately, but we should be getting a 5070 Ti and a 5070, and I'm really, really eager to see what the 5070 does for that price point.

So, that's where I am. I'm also taking a look at the Asus ZenBook A14, which I wrote about back at CES. This is their sort of MacBook Air competitor. It weighs around 2. 2 pounds. I'm playing with it right now. It is very underpowered. But man, is it crazy light. It feels insane to hold, honestly. So, I'll have a full review of that up soon.

Yeah, let's move on to our pop culture picks. Anything you want to shout out, Ben?

Ben: I talked about The Ugly American before. I talked about how it is really well suited for like a prestige TV adaptation. And I think that it's become even more relevant in the last two weeks or so. It's really hard to overstate how much this book like shook up Washington in the late fifties, early sixties.

I think that you can pretty much directly trace the publication of this book that was done by a someone high up in the Navy. I think he was a rear admiral or something and a professor talking about basically how the U S is like, strategy for global development and anti communism because that was the same thing, especially in the 50s, was all messed up and had no understanding of the facts on the ground of these areas of the global south where the U.

S. was trying to exert influence. And you can trace that directly to the establishment of the Peace Corps and USAID. So If you want to understand some of the circumstances that led to these programs that are now being fed to the woodchipper go read that book. I think that would be a useful thing for Engadget listeners and viewers.

Devindra: Good shoutout. I will definitely, I remember I had a copy at some point in college. I don't think I ever got into it, but I need to go back. Alright, and for me, I just want to, hey! You want, you want to take your mind off of things because this has been a heavy episode and news has been crazy. There's some good stuff out there to binge.

I want to shout out Creature Commandos on Max, the one to watch for HBO. I wonder why. Creature Commandos, real good. It's a, it is sort of like, I didn't know anything about these characters before watching the show, but it's another James Gunn, you know, DC universe series, but essentially, what if it was the Suicide Squad, but they were monsters, and monsters like a robot that wants to kill Nazis.

He's fun, he's a good guy. That's all he wants to do. He's a good guy. G. I. Robot. And also the Bride of Frankenstein is apparently there. I think the the show's a lot of fun. Great voice work, Indira Varma is the voice of the bride, Alan Tudyk's in this like it's, it's just fun. It's the stuff that James Gunn does really well of like genre stuff that can be kind of extreme and kind of wild at times, but there's always heart to it.

Who's the, the, the one, the like weird wild creature, the dog creature, I forget his name.

Ben: Oh yeah, the one from the recent Suicide Squad movie.

Devindra: He gets a backstory in the show, and it is it's heartbreaking. James Gunn always knows how to break your heart. So I am looking for this show is fantastic, worth the binge.

And I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what he does with Superman. Cause dude knows how to balance genre and hearts and character really well. Also want to shout out common side effects, which is also on max right now. Yeah, this one is created by the guy who did Scavenger's Reign. Incredible animated series that is available now on I think that's on Netflix now too, but you can still watch it on Max.

This one is about a guy, it's an animated show about a guy who discovers a mushroom that can cure anything. Even potentially even death and this is a fun show that dives into sort of like our pharmaceutical industry our health care industry But it's also very much like a government conspiracy thing has great voice work as well Frickin Mike judge is in here.

Mike judge is an executive producer and he's one of the voices here. You can totally totally hear it It's good stuff. If you like a good thrillers, but also like funny You know, funny shows, like just funny comedies is very much an adult comedy. I think it's worth watch also like the voice cast in general, Martha Kelly, who has become like one of my favorite voices in animation and all sorts of stuff.

She starred in Carol and the end of the world. She has this great, like deadpan monotone voice and she plays one of the DEA. detect agents going after the guy who found the mushrooms. She is hilarious, even when she's not trying to be. It's fun to see. So yeah, Common Side Effects, definitely worth a watch.

I think three episodes are up right now on Max, the one to watch for HBO.

Ben: Thank you everybody for listening. Our theme music is by game composer, Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. The podcast is produced by me, Ben Elman. You can find Devindra

Devindra: online at Devindra on Blue Sky and Mastodon.

And I also podcast about movies and TV at the filmcasts at thefilmcast. com.

Ben: If there are any other fiction books that also dramatically affected American foreign policy, please send them to me at Hey bellman Blue Sky Social. Email us@podcastatengadget.com. You can leave us a review on iTunes, and as the producer, I can tell you it definitely helps leave us a review on iTunes and subscribe on anything that gets podcasts that includes Spotify.

Devindra: SAI equals power.