With Tulsi's Hearing this Week, Establishment Attacks her with Lies About Snowden & 702; China's Leap Forward in AI U.S. Journalist Arrested in Switzerland for Criticizing Israel
The DC establishment spews baseless lies about Edward Snowden and FISA Section 702 ahead of Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation hearing in a desperate attempt to smear her. Plus: the release of the Chinese AI model "DeepSeek" has upended Silicon Valley; journalist Garrison Lovely joins to discuss its impact and what comes next for American AI companies. Finally: U.S. journalist and co-founder of "The Electronic Intifada" Ali Abunimah was arrested in Switzerland for criticizing Israel.
-------------------------------------
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube tonight.
Donald Trump nominated two lifelong Democrats for key positions in his cabinet, RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence.
And it just so happens that Senate Democrats are most determined to sink those two nominations.
But it is not just Democrats united in their opposition, especially in the case of Gabbard, whose confirmation hearing finally begins this week.
The U.S. security state and therefore their corporate media servants are determined clearly to destroy her nomination and are engaged in an escalating and intensifying smear campaign based on lies to accomplish just that.
If you had any doubt about that, Obama's former CIA director, John Brennan, who just had his security clearance revoked for lying to manipulate the 2020 election, ran to some MSNBC weekend show on Sunday to warn of the dangers of confirming Tulsi Gabbard.
One of the old archaic sites that still remain for defending establishment Republican foreign policy, the National Review, did the same over the weekend.
That's John Brennan on the one hand, Obama's CIA director in National Review, the ground zero for establishment Republican neoconservatism on the other.
The two primary attacks on Gabbard are that, number one, she supported NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden after he revealed domestic warrantless eavesdropping programs that courts found to be unconstitutional and illegal.
Presumably, we'd all be better off not knowing about those illegal and unconstitutional spying programs.
As well as her previous opposition to the most extreme spying powers under Section 702, which allowed the NSA and the FBI to spy on Americans' communications without warrants.
Somehow in Washington, concerns about domestic spying abuses against Americans is considered evil.
And they're using outright lies, as we will show you, to sabotage Tulsi Gabbard's nomination as a result of it.
For years, the U.S. was convinced that as long as you relied on the geniuses in Silicon Valley, you would not only obtain, as we have, but maintain permanent dominance in artificial intelligence, exemplified by the supreme chat GPT of Microsoft and OpenAI, as well as other highly touted AI models from Google and Meta.
Several days ago, however, a Chinese hedge fund released its own AI chat program called DeepSeek.
And to say that it shocked Silicon Valley is to understate the case severely.
DeepSeek performs at least as well as ChatGPT's best model, and in some cases better.
And it was developed for a tiny fraction of the cost, succeeded despite U.S. sanctions on China to receive NVIDIA chips long thought crucial and dispensable for developing advanced AI models.
And it turns on its head long-standing assumptions about the massive amounts of computing power and resources needed to train sophisticated AI models.
Garrison Lovely is a freelance journalist who has long reported on AI. He is writing a book on all of this entitled Obsolete Power, Profit, and the Race for Machine Superintelligence.
His reporting on AI has been widely published in multiple news outlets and we are happy to have him here tonight to navigate through the significance of what China has done here and why it has sent such shockwaves through Silicon Valley and parts of the US stock market.
And then finally last October we interviewed American journalist Ali Abunima about the growing repression in the West to crack down on Israel criticism and pro-Palestinian advocacy That was when his colleague, Aza Wynne Stanley, had his house raided in the UK by virtue of his critical reporting on Israel.
On Saturday, Abunima himself was arrested in Switzerland, where he had traveled at the behest of Swiss citizens to give a speech on the war in Gaza.
Although he was just released a couple of hours before we aired this program, all of this continues to exemplify what we have spent ample time covering, the intensifying crackdown against free speech in the West and in the United States, all in order to shield and protect Israel.
Before we get to all that, a few program notes.
We are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
If you do so, it works on your smart TV, it works on your telephone, it works on your Xbox, a whole other long list of devices.
And once you download it, and if you activate notifications, which we hope you will, it means you can follow the programs you most like to watch on this platform.
And the minute any of them start broadcasting live, you'll be notified by text, email, however you want.
You just click on the link, begin watching.
You don't have to wait around.
You don't have to be late.
You just watch the minute.
It starts broadcasting live on the platform.
That really helps the live viewing numbers of each Rumble program and therefore the free speech cause Rumble itself.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms where you rate, review, and follow our show.
It really helps spread the visibility of our program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday nights, we're done with our live show here on Rumble.
We moved to Locals where we have our live interactive after show.
That after show is available only for members of our localist community.
So if you'd like to join, it gives you access to those twice a week after shows where we take your questions and critiques, hear your feedback and suggestions.
It gives you access to a whole variety of other interactive features.
We publish a lot of original, exclusive video content there.
We publish professionalized written transcripts of every program we broadcast here.
And most of all, it's the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The leaks of Edward Snowden, ones that led to the Pulitzer Prize for the journalists and the newspapers that reported them, that led to all sorts of reforms around the world and protecting that led to all sorts of reforms around the world and protecting people's privacy, that took place back in 2013 is when it began and went through 2014
there were obviously a lot of lies that were told about what Edward Snowden did, what the reporting entailed, the reasons that he came forward as a whistleblower.
And over the years, enough evidence had been compiled in order to debunk those lies and demonstrate the actual truth to the point where the U.S. government even, though still trying to arrest him and put him in prison for life, has renounced some of the most extreme lies, including the idea that he was a Russian spy or that he had tried to sell or pass his material to adversary governments.
And despite all that debunking...
Many years later, these things continue to be asserted by people who have no idea what actually happened in the Snowden reporting.
And the same is done about Section 702, the law that was passed in 2008, designed to give the U.S. government for the first time the right to spy on, to surveil the telephone calls and other communications of American citizens without the warrants required by law.
The evidence of abuse of that law has mounted over the years.
Many people in both parties have been velling to not permit it to be renewed unless there's serious reform, and yet every three years Washington succeeds under both parties in coercing the Congress to simply pass it without reforms.
And these two issues, the lies about Edward Snowden and his whistleblowing and the powers and scope of Section 702, are becoming particularly intensified over the last couple of weeks because the confirmation hearing of Tulsi Gabbard To be the Director of National Intelligence for Donald Trump is about to take place in the Senate.
There is a consensus that her nomination is the one that is most likely to be rejected, that it's running into certain kinds of trouble.
And the establishment sectors in Washington, particularly the U.S. security state, that fears her precisely because she's criticized her abuse in the past, are going full-time to spread lies about Her views on Edward Snowden, her views on Section 702 in order to demean her character,
destroy her reputation, depict her as a traitor, and an unreliable stewardship of our nation's intelligence, even though Tulsi Gabbard has spent her entire adult life in the U.S. military fighting in the wars, volunteering to fight in the wars that many of these people advocated and profited off from and never got near fighting.
The fact that Tulsi Gabbard is and long has been a supporter of Edward Snowden, based on the view, which is indisputable fact, that he took once-secret programs of how the U.S. government was spying on American citizens without warrants, programs that once they were revealed, U.S. courts ruled were unconstitutional and illegal, and he made them public.
American population, American citizens, and the rest of the world could understand what was being done to the Internet, a clearly noble act.
He sacrificed his life to do it.
The chances that he was going to end up in a U.S. prison were extremely high.
He did it simply for, out of obligation to blow the whistle on what the NSA was doing in secret in converting the internet, once a tool of potential liberation into a tool of unprecedented surveillance and coercion.
Here is Tulsi Gabbard on Joe Rogan's program in 2019 talking about these issues. - Edward Snowden, the charges against him stem from this illegal operation that In many ways, he's very patriotic.
I mean, he let us know.
And at great cost.
So you would give him a pardon?
Yeah.
We've got to address why he did the things the way that he did them.
And you hear the same thing from Chelsea Manning, how there's not an actual channel for whistleblowers like them to bring forward information that exposes egregious abuses of our constitutional rights and liberties.
I remember the very day that I woke up.
I looked at my phone, started looking through the headlines, and saw those headlines about how the NSA was mass surveilling all of us and collecting our phone records, collecting our cell phone records.
And I was shocked.
So that was something that Snowden uncovered, something that I don't know that even as members of Congress we would have been aware of.
So now that we're aware of it, then hey, we can take action to close those loopholes, to change those policies, to protect our civil liberties, to protect our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights as Americans.
Was the NSA going to disclose that information voluntarily on their own?
Absolutely not.
We would have had no idea.
We would have had suspicions, but then again, we'd have tinfoil hats on, and Snowden was the guy that really made it.
Abundant and clear to everybody.
Not only are they doing that, but they're also lying about it.
And even Obama was talking, oh, we're just collecting metadata.
Metadata?
No, you're not.
Reading messages, you can do anything.
This is just not an accurate assessment of what was going on.
And it was outrageous to people.
And you had, I think he was the director of the Department of National Intelligence at that time, James Clapper, who sat before a committee in the United States Senate and blatantly lied.
He was asked very directly, are you collecting this information?
And he said no.
Are you collecting this information on American citizens?
And he said no.
And yet, he's somebody who you see on TV almost every day as an expert in this country, without any consequence lying to the American people.
Isn't that ironic?
I really think this shows you everything.
James Clapper occupied the position to which Donald Trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence.
And we all know in the Senate, in March of 2013, he went to testify in the Senate and was asked by Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat of Oregon, in a now notorious exchange, are you, the NSA, collecting large dossiers of intelligence and information on the communications of American citizens?
And he said, no, sir, we're not doing that.
And then Senator Wyden asked it again, and he said, no, we're not doing that, not wittingly.
And that was when Edward Snowden was preparing to hand-dust the archive.
He hadn't yet done it, though.
He was making preparations.
And that event, watching James Clapper go before the Senate and blatantly lie by denying that the NSA was doing something that in his hands Snowden had the proof that they were doing, was the final straw that basically compelled him in his mind to come forward, even though it was risking his own life and his own liberty to do.
James Copper was never fired.
No one in Washington said that he was unqualified, that he became somehow inappropriate to hold that position.
Because in Washington, what matters is servitude to the U.S. security state, even when it abuses its powers against American citizens.
So here's Tulsi Gabbard, one of the very few figures of national prominence, by no mean the only.
Most of them are now found in the Republican Party.
Defending Edward Snowden and what he did based on the view that as American citizens we should not allow our government to spy illegally and unconstitutionally on us.
We have a duty to protect the Fourth Amendment and only Edward Snowden and his decision to come forward enabled us to know about that and therefore to do something about that.
Other people in Washington who also support Edward Snowden have been standing up and agitating for a pardon.
For him, something President Trump said he came close to doing in his first term but didn't for reasons I've gone over before.
Here is Thomas Massey, the always principled Thomas Massey, the congressman from Kentucky, who has long advocated for Snowden.
He posted a poll.
Should President Trump pardon Edward Snowden?
There you see, based on his followers, yes, pardon Snowden, 93.9%.
Obviously, that's not a scientific poll of any kind, but it is a poll showing that people like Thomas Massey and the Republican Party, Rand Paul has also advocated this previously, as has Matt Gaetz, believed that Snowden should be pardoned.
Here is the podcast host.
I'll just say that he's popular among some people, Lex Friedman, but he also went on to Twitter this week, I'm not sure why, and said Snowden should be pardoned.
He's kind of a protege of Joe Rogan, so I suppose that's not surprising.
Snowden has been on Joe Rogan's program twice.
Rogan has definitely become an outspoken supporter of Tulsi Gabbard, as you saw in that clip.
Now, there's no question that the, not just the Democrats, but the people in the CIA and the NSA and the Senate Democrats who are gearing up to try and defeat Tulsi Gabbard intend to use that support for Edward Snowden, as well as her concern about illegal spying, as the main points of attack against her.
As though defending the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of American citizens and opposing unconstitutional abuses of power by the U.S. security states somehow render you ineligible or unqualified for a high position in the Intelligence Committee?
Those are exactly the kind of people we should want.
Running those agencies are people who don't want those agencies breaking the law and violating the Constitution to spy on Americans.
Here from the New York Times today, laying the groundwork for...
Tulsi Gabbard's defeat, there you see Tulsi Gabbard's unorthodox path to Trump's intelligence team.
Ms. Gabbard grew up in a secretive offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement and has made a dizzying journey from conservative to liberal darling to Trump ally.
And here's what they report about the...
Way in which Congress is seeking to sabotage her nomination.
In the run-up to her hearing, Ms. Gabbard has struggled to explain views that rile some conservatives on the Intelligence Committee considering her nomination.
One concern is her defense of Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor, now a Russian citizen, who leaked highly classified documents about mass surveillance techniques to the Guardian and the Washington Post in 2013. Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican, who chairs the Intelligence Panel, has said he should, quote, rot in jail.
Snowden is an American citizen.
He has always been an American citizen.
His position has always been that he wants to come back to the United States, as I will get to.
He did not choose to be in Russia.
They purposely trapped him in Russia precisely in order to then turn around and say, oh, look, he's in Russia, therefore he should be discredited.
Over the weekend, Obama's former CIA director, John Brennan, who has been caught lying more times than almost anyone in Washington, which is obviously saying a lot, he just had his security clearance stripped because of the role he played in spreading the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation to help Joe Biden win the 2020 election, went on MSNBC and here's what he...
And this is what all these kind of establishment people and liberals are doing, is they're trying to appeal to Trump and saying, Mr. Trump, we respect you so much and the important job you're doing.
Don't let Tulsi Gabbard ruin it.
By being the director of national intelligence, will she be able to manipulate you by withholding information she doesn't want you to have or giving you false information she thinks you should?
Here's what he said.
Again, it's the President's Daily Brief, but also the role that the Director of National Intelligence, Director of CIA, play in order to ensure that the people who have to make those decisions in the SQA Council are fully informed about what the reality is, what the intelligence is, what our intelligence gaps are.
And if they withhold things or if they skew things, it really is going to be detrimental.
Real quick before we let you go, Director, do those agency heads have, in that moment you're describing in that room, have that realization that, wait a minute, that's not what we told you?
I mean, in other words, how does that coordination become undone?
When the person who's putting the final brief has skewed the information?
Well, I like to think that Secretary of State Rubio, who is very familiar with the intelligence profession, is going to be speaking up because you have the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, others who are going to be there.
So you want to make sure, again, that you have people who are informed, but also people who want to know the truth.
Right.
And not just people who want to give President Trump what he wants to hear.
That is so, so dangerous.
And none of the six presidents that I work for ever wanted the intelligence community to give them what they wanted.
They wanted the intelligence community to give them what they needed.
No prior president has wanted the intelligence community to give them what they wanted.
Is he at all familiar with what happened in the Iraq War because he was working then for the intelligence community under George Bush and Dick Cheney?
Where Dick Cheney repeatedly went to the CIA and to the intelligence community and battered them?
to produce reports saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in an alliance with al-Qaeda regardless of whether or not they were because he wanted to be able to justify the war in Iraq.
This claim that Tulsi Gabbard is going to manipulate the intelligence to try and keep things from Trump is completely fabricated out of nowhere.
John Brennan is a pathological career trained liar and he's been caught lying so many times.
Now, I'm really somebody who does not use the word lying.
Or lies casually.
I try and be very discriminating about when I use that term.
Otherwise it gets overused and it loses its meaning.
So when I say that establishment foreign policy ideologues in Washington are lying about the Edward Snowden case and about Tulsi's support for it and about 702 and her concerns about that in order to sink her nomination because they want somebody who is not a critic of the U.S. security state but a servant of it.
I want to demonstrate that to you in a way that is both singular, because I'm going to show you a specific case of it, but very generalized as well, since these are the lies that are constantly told to demonize anyone who supports Edward Snowden or Edward Snowden himself.
It's really quite an amazing example because of how blatant and easily demonstrated these lies are.
It comes from National Review, one of the very few sites left.
He explicitly defends the sort of neocon, Republican, Bush-Cheney-era foreign policy.
There are a lot of people who do and pretend they don't, but they are very open about the fact that they do.
It was by Rich Lowry, the longtime editor of that magazine, and he read an article, No to Tulsi Gabbard, and wrote a long article about why she should be rejected and...
The two main points that he makes are the same ones.
They're in coordination with what Washington is doing and the CIA is doing.
And he just outright lies in order to make this argument.
Here's what he says, quote, I just want to highlight this so that you see just how incredibly dishonest this is.
I can't even overstate what a lie that is.
The United States has always been able to.
Monitor the communication of non-Americans located outside the United States.
Nobody needed Section 702 enacted in 2008 to accomplish that.
The reason Section 702 is controversial, the reason why so many people in both parties, including Mike Johnson before he became a speaker, said that they want to reform it or want to get rid of it is because it permits the spying of communications on American citizens inside the United States.
And it had always been the case that if the NSA or the FBI or the CIA was listening to a call and an American citizen was on it and they discovered that and they had no warrants, they had to disconnect.
They weren't allowed to and aren't allowed to under the Constitution listen to our communication with no warrants.
That was the program Dick Cheney and George Bush secretly ordered in 2002 for the NSA to start listening to Americans' calls without warrants, without stopping and going to the FISA court to get a warrant.
And it was widely agreed to be illegal and Nancy Pelosi's house Look at this blatant lie here to try and justify rejecting Tulsi Gabbard because she's concerned about 702 by saying that it permits the spying on non-Americans outside the U.S. Nobody is against.
Not even Edward Snowden, not myself, certainly not Tulsi Gabbard, is against the U.S. government spying on non-Americans outside of the United States.
Every country does that.
No one's against that.
The issue is and always has been that this Section 702 permits spying without warrants on the communication of American citizens that have been repeatedly abused, and yet there's nothing in this article that suggests that.
He adds, this is a little like a Secretary of Defense nominee being opposed to building tanks.
No, it's not.
It would be like a Secretary of Defense nominee being opposed to building wasteful tanks.
Tanks that we don't need that we're buying to fill the coffers of Raytheon and General Dynamics.
Or a Secretary of Defense who is critical of the fact that we fought too many unnecessary wars.
There's nothing...
Inconsistent about that or anathema about someone with those views holding that position.
You want somebody who's critical of the abuses and excesses of the agency in charge of the agency so they can fix that.
Then he goes on to the next lie.
Gabbard co-sponsored legislation expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the federal government should drop all charges against Edward Snowden.
The resolution went nowhere because not everyone was as sympathetic to a figure who illegally absconded with classified information about the NSA's metadata tracking program, handed it over to Julian Assange's WikiLeaks, a group that deliberately imperiled U.S. service personnel abroad and subsequently defected to Russia.
Snowden is quite simply a traitor and a fugitive from U.S. justice.
A DNI pick taking his side is like an AG nominee thinking the mob gets a bad rap.
There are so many lies in this one passage.
And again, I'm using lies very cautiously, very specifically, very deliberately.
So, first of all, he said that Edward Snowden took the NSA's documents and handed it over to Julian Assange's WikiLeaks.
That never happened.
Nobody thinks that happened.
Anybody with the most passing familiarity with the Snowden story knows that Snowden never gave a single document to WikiLeaks.
Nobody claims that.
Nobody believes that.
I have no idea where he pulled that out from.
I mean, everybody knows who knows anything about the Snowden story, and I'm not saying you have to know about the Snowden story, but if you're going to go to a magazine...
And write an article didactically opining on it as a reason to defeat Tulsi Gabbard, you should at least know the basic facts because if not, you're going to humiliate yourself, which is exactly what Rich Lowry did.
He wrote an entire article urging Tulsi Gabbard's rejection based on two claims.
One is that she supported Snowden, one is that she opposed Section 0702, and he blatantly had no idea what he was talking about when it came to either and therefore said blatantly, demonstrably false claims.
Stoning gave...
That archive to journalists, myself and Laura Poitras in particular, when he met us in Hong Kong.
And he gave it to us with the proviso that we work with media outlets, in my case, The Guardian, and in her case, The Washington Post.
Nobody ever claims that he gave a single piece of paper to WikiLeaks.
And Snowden never released any documents.
He only gave journalists, myself and Laura Poitrasi's documents, and relied on us with his guidelines to decide what got released.
Whatever got published was because she and the Washington Post or myself and the Guardian or whatever other newspapers we worked with around the world decided it was in the public interest to be published.
But WikiLeaks never got a single document from Edward Snowden.
It's just completely made up.
And then this idea that...
He subsequently defected to Russia.
It is true that he's physically in Russia.
The idea that he defected to Russia is absolutely false.
When Edward Snowden left Hong Kong, which he was doing because the U.S. government had issued an extradition order to the Chinese government in Hong Kong, Hong Kong authorities to detain him and they let him go.
He had bought a ticket and his plan was to go to Latin America, to either Bolivia or Ecuador.
Ecuador was the place that had already given asylum to Julian Assange and he was going to seek asylum in South America.
And he bought a ticket that went from Hong Kong to Russia, Russia to Havana, Havana to Latin America.
The Cubans had guaranteed him safe passage to travel through.
Cuba to get to Latin America.
Obviously he had to be very careful in the route he was taking because he couldn't go to any places where the U.S. could get his hands on them as they were desperately trying to do.
So his ticket that he bought and the diplomatic agreements he had reached was for him to go to Russia and pass right through on his way to Havana, on to Latin America.
Once he got to Russia, however, He had learned that his passport had been invalidated by the Obama State Department while in error and that the Cubans had withdrawn its promise of safe passage to him so it could no longer guarantee that if he flew to Havana as originally intended,
they would not arrest him and turn him over to the U.S. And the proof of this is that Obama officials themselves, while trying to smear Snowden by saying, oh look, he went to Russia, Boasted of the fact that they were the ones who trapped them there when he was trying to leave.
I read about this back in August of 2021. Obama's national, one of his top national security advisors, Ben Rhodes, wrote a book.
And in it, he bragged about the fact that he was the one who forced Snowden to stay in Russia when he was trying to leave.
There you see the article.
Ben Rhodes' book proves Obama officials' lies and his own about Edward Snowden in Russia.
They've been saying for years, oh look, he's not a patriot.
He went to Russia, our enemy.
Even if he had gone to Russia and sought asylum there, can you blame him?
The U.S. government was trying to put him in a national security prison for life.
You hear a lot of these people, I remember John Kerry always saying he should man up and come home as though what he did wasn't courageous enough.
Taking all those documents to alert his fellow citizens to what was being done to their privacy, with a 98% chance he was going to end up in prison his whole life, that's not courageous.
In order to be courageous, you have to crawl back to the United States and submit the rest of your life to a U.S. prison system that is among the most notorious, especially when it comes to national security crimes.
But in the article, this is what I wrote, quote, now we have absolute definitive proof that Snowden never intended to stay in Russia, but was deliberately prevented from leaving by the same Obama officials who exploited the predicament which they created.
The proof was supplied unintentionally in the memoir of one of Obama's senior national security advisors, Ben Rhodes, and in the book entitled The World As It Is, A Memoir of the Obama White House.
It is hard to overstate how dispositively Rhodes' own book proves that Obama officials generally and Rhodes specifically lied blatantly and cavalierly to the public about what happened.
A level of sustained unconscious lying that can be explained only by sociopathy.
The only reason Snowden is in Russia is because of the actions of Rhodes and his fellow Obama officials to deliberately trap him there.
First by invalidating his passport so that he could not board any international flights, and then by threatening the Cuban government that any chance for normalization with the U.S. would be permanently destroyed unless they withdrew their guarantee to Snowden of safe passage through Havana, which they then did.
Here's Rhodes in his own words, in his book, boasting about what he regards as one of his successes.
This is Ben Rhodes, quote, There was one other more important signal.
Around the time of our second meeting, Edward Snowden was stuck in the Moscow airport.
Trying to find someone who would take him in.
Reportedly, he wanted to go to Venezuela, transiting through Havana.
That's not where he was going.
He was going to Ecuador, Bolivia, but whatever.
Doesn't matter.
He's saying, I know he wanted to leave Russia.
But I knew that if the Cubans aided Snowden, any rapprochement between our countries would prove impossible.
I pulled Alejandro Castro aside and said I had a message that came from President Obama.
I reminded him that the Cubans had said they wanted to give Obama political space so that he could take steps to improve relations.
Quote, if you take in Snowden, that political space will be gone.
I never spoke to the Cubans about this issue again.
A few days later, back in Washington, I woke up to a news report.
Quote, former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden got stuck in the transit zone of a Moscow airport because Havana said it would not let him fly from Russia to Cuba.
A Russian newspaper reported, I took it as a message.
The Cubans were serious about improving relations.
So I just want you to think about just how unbelievably dishonest and deceitful this is.
If you ask any establishment creep in Washington why they think Snowden should be considered a traitor or unpatriotic or whatever, they'll say, oh, he went to Russia.
Obviously he was working with Russia.
And those very same officials admit that Snowden never intended to stay in Russia.
He was passing through Russia.
They purposely trapped him there.
And if you go back and look at the news accounts at the time, there were reporters on the flight from Moscow to Havana that he was supposed to be on, and he wasn't on there, and that's because of the reasons I just said.
It'd be like locking somebody up in a garage or a basement with padlocks and keeping them there for a week and then criticizing them because they miss work.
That's...
Everything about Snowden being in Russia is all because the U.S. government forced them to be there precisely because they knew it would allow this sort of false propaganda.
Here from Reuters, June 23, 2013, which is the day Snowden left Hong Kong to fly to Moscow on to Cuba and then South America, quote, U.S. revoked Snowden's passport, official source.
The United States government has revoked the passport of former national security contractor Edward Snowden, official source familiar with the decision set on Saturday.
It was not immediately clear how Snowden was able to travel and the official offered no details.
An aircraft thought to be carrying him landed in Moscow on Sunday after Hong Kong let the former U.S. NSA contractor leave the territory despite Washington's efforts to extradite him to face espionage charges.
Can you believe these people like Rich Lowry and John Brennan?
And these Democratic and Republican senators say, how can you possibly support Edward Snowden?
He's a Russian spy.
He's in Russia when they're the ones who forced him to be there when they know that he never wanted to be there in the first place.
Now, as far as whether or not Snowden gave documents to WikiLeaks, in retrospect, I mean, again, anyone who knows the bare minimum about this story knows that's just not what happened.
It's just a completely made-up fact.
I have no idea what, in Rich Lowry's brain, produced that.
It's not even a good lie.
It's not a convincing lie.
It's laughable.
And in fact, during the Snowden reporting, WikiLeaks often attacked Snowden and us because they were angry they didn't have documents and because they disagreed with the way that we were reporting it, meaning they thought we should have released it all or released it much more quickly.
And that wasn't what Edward Snowden wanted.
They weren't working together at all.
WikiLeaks never got any documents.
Here is what Edward Snowden himself said in July of 2016 when WikiLeaks was attacking us.
Quote, Democratizing information has never been more vital and WikiLeaks has helped, but their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.
Meaning, WikiLeaks have been complaining because we weren't releasing it all.
Obviously, if they had the documents, they could have released it all, but Snowden didn't give it to WikiLeaks because that's not how he wanted it released.
And then in response, Julian being Julian, and as you know, I'm a huge defender of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, but this was a moment of conflict between us on the one hand and them on the other, precisely because they didn't have these documents.
He responded to Snowden this way, quote, Opportunism won't earn you a pardon from Clinton, and curation is not censorship of ruling party cash flows.
Hear from the New York Times when this happened July 30th, 2016. Snowden and WikiLeaks clash.
Over how to disclose secrets.
Quote, WikiLeaks is often criticized for releasing documents without editing or regard for the sensitive information they may contain.
Mr. Snowden, on the other hand, has said he chose to work with journalists in 2013 to selectively release NSA documents in order to limit the harmful consequences of exposing what he called the abuses of government surveillance.
Vanity Fair in 2014, Julian Assange goes where Glenn Greenwald wouldn't.
Though they're often lumped together as crusaders against state secrets, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and journalist Glenn Greenwald don't always see eye to eye.
Their differences spilled into public view this week when the WikiLeaks Twitter account took Greenwald into sight.
The intercepted task for redacting the name of a country where the U.S. government is recording every phone call.
And just to give you the very quick synopsis of this, but just to make the point about how stupid it is to think that Snowden gave the documents to WikiLeaks, we were reporting these documents the same...
The Washington Post had the archive as well with Laura Poitras.
And when the Washington Post reported one of the stories, they reported about a program where the government was collecting every single phone call being made in these five other countries and storing them so that they could just go back and listen to whatever calls they wanted.
Every single call en masse in five different countries.
And the Washington Post decided to withhold the identity of all five countries.
And I thought that was wrong.
I didn't think those countries should be withheld.
So we went back to re-report those documents, but this time disclosed the countries where it was being done.
They were places like the Bahamas.
I mean, not even U.S. enemies.
And we decided to publish four of the five countries and withhold the fifth because the government convinced us that publishing the existence of that program in that fifth country could put innocent people in Jeopardy!
They always said that, but usually they didn't convince us, but in this one case they did.
And Snowden's directions to us were, he was a very conservative whistleblower, don't publish anything that could endanger innocent lives.
And so we withheld that fifth country.
We published the four, not the fifth.
WikiLeaks said, how dare you withhold this?
You should release it all, and that's what led to this dispute, which is fine.
It's a fair dispute.
It's an important debate about how government secrets should be released, but Edward Snowden had a much different philosophy than WikiLeaks, which is why he did not go to WikiLeaks, despite the claims of Rich Lowry in his National Review article demanding her, Tulsi Gabbard's, rejection.
Here from BuzzFeed News, May of 2014, Julian Assange is angry at Glenn Greenwald and he's not going to take it anymore.
War of the whistleblowers recounts more of this sort of difference that we had in the way we did.
And again, we were guided by Edward Snowden, who again never released a single document.
He came to us and said, I want you to be very careful and very cautious in what you release.
Only release what is necessary to know.
For people to understand what the NSA has done to the internet, but don't release information that might endanger people or that isn't in the public interest.
And for that reason, the vast majority of the archive was not published.
He was as careful and cautious of a whistleblower as I could possibly get.
Here, the New York Times, although they're now in the camp of the Democrats, speaking about Snowden like he's some spy, some Russian spy.
They published some of the Snowden reporting.
The Guardian shared some of the documents with them and they actually did some of the Snowden reporting as well.
And in 2014, they editorialized in favor of Snowden, quote, Edward Snowden, whistleblower.
This is the New York Times editorial page.
Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the NSA's reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights.
All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency's voraciousness.
The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures hurt the nation's security.
Many of the mass collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight as the presidential panel recommended.
Here from Reuters, August of 2013, the Guardian teams up with the New York Times over the Snowden documents.
I mean, this was so well reported.
Who had the documents?
And it was never WikiLeaks.
As for that other lie, we've gone over Section 702 many times.
Here from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in January of 2025, Decoding 702. What is Section 702?
Remember, the National Review said that Tulsi Gabbard should be rejected because she opposes 702, which allows the government to spy on non-Americans outside the U.S. Completely the opposite of what 702 is.
And then EFF says, quote, I posted and documented these lies in Rich Lowry's National Review article, and of course, to this moment, they have not corrected it.
They have no interest in correcting it.
The job is not to journalistically examine Tulsi Gabbard's record.
It's to destroy Tulsi Gabbard's reputation and sink her nomination on behalf of the U.S. security state.
And if that has to be done by lies, so be it.
Just as a reminder from The Guardian, September 20th, the NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal a court rule seven years afterwards.
Courts looked at these programs we were able to report that the NSA was doing and concluded they were both illegal and unconstitutional.
Is there anybody who really wants to claim that Americans would have been better off not knowing about that?
And as that first clip with Joe Rogan and Tulsi Gabbard demonstrated, there's no such thing as a whistleblower channel in Washington.
You'd think if Edward Snowden had picked up the phone and called Dianne Feinstein.
Or these other pro-surveillance senators and said, oh, I have a bunch of documents showing that the NSA is spying on Americans.
They already knew about that in ways that violate the Constitution.
Do you think they would have done anything other than called the FBI on him?
That's why he did the most conservative thing possible to get the story out, which was work with journalists.
He could have uploaded it all through the Internet.
He didn't do that.
He could have sold it to foreign countries.
He didn't do that.
He could have handed it out to America's enemies.
He didn't do that.
He came to journalists and asked us.
And emphasized and insisted that we be very careful on how we report it, and that's exactly what we did.
And yet, just constant lies.
Here from Alex Plitsis, in response to Lex Friedman's view that he should be pardoned, quote, Snowden stole so many files that he couldn't have read the titles, let alone the contents, compromised them, and then fled to Russia.
He's a traitor, not a hero.
He doesn't deserve a pardon.
And then A.G. Hamilton, who's very popular among the hardcore pro-Israel neocon crowd, said, Snowden shopped U.S. secrets to various adversaries to find those who would protect him.
That is an absolute, complete lie.
Not even the U.S. government claims he shopped U.S. secrets to adversaries to find those who would protect him.
These people just make this up.
If it was about exposing something bad, he would have limited the information released and shared to allege wrongdoing.
He also would have stayed home and faced the consequences.
Instead, he fled and handed a ton of secrets over to America's adversaries.
Also an absolute, complete lie.
I asked him, what is your basis for claiming he handed a ton of secrets over to America's adversaries or that he shopped them around to America?
Of course he didn't answer.
There's no basis for it.
He's not a hero.
He's a traitor and he deserves to spend his life in prison.
Isn't it amazing that these people who never risk anything Who never stand for anything, who never do anything, feel so inferior in the face of people who do, who actually risk their own liberty or self-interest for a noble cause that they just have to lie about these people and impugn their motivation, calling them a traitor, saying he's a coward, hiding in Russia.
A coward?
Like whatever else you can say about Edward Snowden, there's nothing cowardly about taking millions of top secret documents under the nose of the NSA, going to Hong Kong and meeting journalists, choosing Hong Kong on purpose because it's not part of mainland China, it's a symbol in his view of democracy choosing Hong Kong on purpose because it's not part of mainland China, it's a symbol in his view of democracy and independence and civil liberties, but still a place where we would be protected from the CIA, and hand them over knowing that he was likely to spend the rest of his life
It's easy to call someone like that a coward if you are somebody who would never and have never done anything remotely.
As courageous as that.
Just to make clear, it's not just Senate Republicans, but also Senate Democrats, especially them now, on these committees saying Tulsi Gabbard should be disqualified because she supports Edward Snowden.
Here's Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona on CNN. Is she somebody you think is up for the job?
No, and here's why.
Edward Snowden, here's one example, committed crimes against our country, should be in prison.
We are a less safe country today because of what he did years ago.
The damage he has done still exists today.
She offered legislation to pardon him and people like him.
Still would not admit that he committed crimes against the United States.
He should be in jail.
And she is, A supporter of his.
I don't get that.
I should say that in 2013, when we did this reporting in 2014 as well, we had a lot of support from the right, in part because it was about Obama, in part because there was a long strain in the American right against government spying and for privacy.
There was also a ton of support among liberals in the left, including Democratic members of Congress.
But that was 10 years ago.
Now the Democrats are completely aligned with the U.S. security state.
They view the CIA and the NSA and the FBI as their political allies because those agencies were so vital in trying to sabotage Trump that you will not find a Democrat barely willing to defend Edward Snowden even though they were doing so 10 years ago.
And now Tulsi Gabbard's defense of Edward Snowden, something that was common among American liberals just 10 years ago and even within the Democratic Congress, When again, Edward Snowden did the biggest favor possible for the NSA, which is expose the fact that they were violating the constitutional rights of American citizens.
And then finally, just on this whole claim that Snowden was a Russian spy or working with the Russians, do you know that not even the NSA back in 2014 Who obviously, the people at the top of the NSA hated Snowden with all their passion.
Even they were willing to acknowledge that there was no evidence that Snowden was a spy for any foreign country, that he was acting on behalf of any foreign country.
And in fact, it was more likely than not that he wasn't.
Here from The Guardian in 2014, NSA Chief Michael Rogers.
He was the chief of the NSA. Edwards noting, quote, probably not a foreign spy.
Quote, new NSA director plays down speculation that, quote, our gentleman in Moscow was working for a foreign intelligence agency.
And he went on to say he's a true believer in what he was doing.
We have no evidence whatsoever that he worked for any foreign adversary, that he gave documents to any foreign adversary.
The U.S. government has never claimed that.
And then just 10 years go by.
And America is such a propagandized place that as long as you just keep repeating lies, even ones that have been definitively debunked, They can make their way into a news outlet by a respectable journalist, Rich Lowry,
who's been the editor of National Review, who just, I don't even think he's deliberately lying, I just think in his brain, he has a script of what happened here, was too lazy to go check, didn't care enough to go check, spews a bunch of lies and falsehoods, but so many people have this in their brain that these things are true about Edward Snowden, even though so much evidence, what I've just presented to you, Demonstrates definitively that it's untrue.
And now it's being intensified because it's a weapon being used to try and suggest that Tulsi Gabbard is somehow unqualified or inappropriate to head this intelligence agency because she's somebody who believes the U.S. government should not be abusing its spying power and violating the Constitution in the way that it spies on its own citizens.
The fact that that is disqualifying, where is James Clapper lying to the Senate?
In front of everybody and then keeping his job for the next three years and then getting hired by CNN is considered respectful, tells you all you need to know about Washington.
And if Tulsi Gabbard is not confirmed, it will be because of this rotted characteristic that continues to define that city.
There is evidence that suggests that drinking two to three cups in the morning could slash your risk of death by 29 percent and cut your chance of heart complications by nearly half.
But that's not the only benefit you get from your coffee.
It also could be helpful in fighting censorship while tasting excellent.
That's why I'm so proud to have 1775 Coffee as a supporter of our show.
This isn't just coffee.
It's a rebellion in every cup.
It's hand-pecked at high altitudes and sourced from single-origin farms.
1775 Coffee delivers bold flavor.
And real benefits that Starbucks sugar company can't touch.
Boost your metabolism, protect your heart, and stay sharper than a debate on free speech.
Whether it's beans, grounds, or pods, every sip of 1775 coffee takes a stand against sugar-packed mediocrity.
Head to 1775coffee.com, use the promo code GLEN for 15% off, and you can improve your mornings with coffee that...
fuels bold flavor, uncompromising quality, and really boosts the cause of free speech for which Rumble stands every day.
Garrison Lovely is a freelance journalist and reporter in residence at the Omidyar Network.
He writes the Obsolete newsletter and is the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence.
His writing on artificial intelligence has appeared in multiple outlets around the country.
As we discussed at the beginning of the show, there is a major development in artificial intelligence, namely that China has unveiled.
A model of AI that is as good at, in some cases better than, the most touted American model, which is ChatGPT, even though China developed it, at way less cost than it took ChatGPT to develop it, even though it's open source, whereas the code for all the Silicon Valley models are not.
It has sent enormous shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and the AI community, and as a result, large parts of the American stock market as well, and so we are delighted to welcome...
Our guest this evening to help us sort through this.
Garrison, it's great to see you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Great to be here.
Alright, so there's obviously a layperson's understanding of these issues, which is the one that I have.
The Chinese model is called DeepSeek.
Oddly, everyone's acting as though it just came out today.
It actually came out last week.
I've spent some time using it.
Use ChatGPT as well to a kind of lay person.
To me, it looks similar.
There's this reasoning feature that it's capable of doing where it will show you its reasoning before even giving your answer.
That clearly seems to be new.
But what is it about this model that has shocked so many people in the American tech industry?
Why is it considered such an advancement?
Yeah, I think there are two major things.
One is that it's the first Chinese model that's really at the frontier of what's mobile.
On a large range of benchmarks, its performance is basically the same as the top-performing American models.
And then the second is that it's the best performing open wait model, which means that the model waits are published online and people can use them, download them, run them on their own servers.
This contract.
It's proprietary where you can only interact with them through that feature or through an API.
You can actually modify the waits yourself.
One of the things that has been emphasized that I guess seems so surprising to a lot of people is that the model that had been promoted by Silicon Valley, by OpenAI and Microsoft and Meta and Google as well,
in AI, was that it's going to take this immense amount of resources, of processing, of chips, of programming and training that only someone willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars could possibly be capable of.
And according to the open source model of this Chinese chat, It was basically developed as a side project for infinitely less cost.
And I think that is what has developed so many shockwaves in this industry as well.
Why were the Chinese able to develop this for such a tiny fraction of the cost long assumed to be necessary for workable programs?
Yeah.
Well, first thing is that those cost numbers are disputed by some people.
I think it is much cheaper than GPT-4 or Claude or other American models.
And it was able to do this by using a number of algorithmic improvements, some changes to the architecture, changes to the amount of decimal points that are used in the training process, some very technical things.
And then also, once you have another model that you can base your answers off of, you can do what's called distillation and train off of those responses.
And so there were some...
Things going around where if you asked DeepSeq what it was, it would say, I'm ChatGPT, which implies that it was trained on a large number of ChatGPT outputs.
And then the final thing is that we're in this new paradigm of AI, which is known as inference compute or test time compute, where you can have the model think for longer before it gives you a response.
And this is actually just more...
It requires less upfront costs.
You can use a base model that's been trained and then have it think, so to speak, on a task and give you a result.
And that can make up for having it be a little upfront.
You can kind of shift around where you put the resources and get really, really top-end performance.
Yeah, so I get the claims of the Chinese about how much this cost, about how many hours it required, how much processing power was needed.
At the same time, from what I gather, from what I understand, if you look at the computations as accessible through the open source publications, you can see that it is running on a much different approach to how these computations are being conducted in a way that requires far less processing power, far fewer resources.
They don't have such long...
They maybe use 90% of the data that I read as well that there's a feature where certain components of it can sleep.
The expertise when it's not needed kind of sleeps and only wakes up when it's summoned or when it's required.
That also reduces significantly the amount of power that is required.
So despite the skepticism over the specific numbers the Chinese are offering, is there really any doubt that this is an advancement, at least in terms of the much reduced...
Computational power and processing resources that are required?
Yes.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I should have stated that more clearly.
Like, this really is an advance in the efficiency of the models.
And it's something that I'd imagine all of the US AI companies are picking through the data and picking through the paper to figure out, like, what can they use to make their own models more efficient.
Right.
So there are critics of Silicon Valley, long-term critics, particularly in the area of monopoly power.
People like Lena Kahn, who just left the FTC, who has challenged Silicon Valley in a lot of different ways in terms of its concentration of power.
But also people in the Trump administration, both the first one and the second one, they're the ones who brought the suit against Google.
Who have been arguing that the concentration of power, the monopolistic centralization of power in Silicon Valley is basically killing innovation because they don't really have competition by virtue of monopoly power.
By definition, they don't.
And monopolies typically focus only on maximizing their power and their leverage and their profit and really not caring that much anymore about innovation since it's no longer necessary to solidify their market position.
And that could be a reason why the Chinese seemingly passed these American companies by without really even trying that much.
It was kind of a side project of this hedge fund company that was throwing a little bit of resources at it, relatively speaking.
Do you think that criticism is valid?
Yeah, I think that...
There's definitely something to it.
So if you look at OpenAI, much smaller organization than Google DeepMind, but it managed to really shock the world with ChatGPT and is more or less stated the lead of the industry since then.
And DeepMind had way more engineers, way more money, had all of Google's data and resources.
And yeah, I think there's just something to be said for smaller, more dynamic organizations.
Really being the sources of innovation.
And then Anthropic has done the same, leaving OpenAI and coming up with their own approach to these things.
I would push back on the side project framing.
I think that this is cute and it's fun.
And the company that makes DeepSeek started as a quant hedge fund.
But I think that this is a major focus of what they're doing.
And if you look at an interview with the CEO from July, he says, Yeah, that's fair enough.
I think, yeah, you're right.
It is kind of a cute story, but, you know, I think the bigger point is the seeming, I mean, I think there was this kind of assumption, almost like an arrogance, that the U.S. had locked down dominance in artificial intelligence, that because of the massive resources required, it would be very unlikely that other people would catch up or certainly would surpass.
The leading American companies can get kind of out of the blue, seemingly, at least like that's the reaction of a lot of people.
You have the Chinese releasing this model that's not only as good, but if you look at it from a resource perspective, and again, there's this reasoning attribute I don't know a lot about, but it definitely seems innovative or novel.
I've, you know, interacted with it.
I've tried it as something that ChatBGPT, at least as a moment, doesn't do.
That seems to be the story.
Some of the most important players in the tech industry, like Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, who's invested in a lot of AI and companies that produce it, he described it as our Sputnik moment.
And at first, when I saw that, I thought, oh, wow, even these U.S. tech titans are kind of blown away by the Chinese advance.
And I thought about it a little bit more, like, what does that really mean, the Sputnik moment?
That was when the Russians launched a satellite into space and it shocked the U.S.
And what we did was invest massive amounts of resources to make sure we kept up with the Russians, the Soviets, and then surpassed them.
Do you think that the reaction of the AI industry in the United States is going to be, this is really alarming and you need to give us a lot more resources to make sure we stay ahead of the Chinese?
So I want to separate out what the industry will say publicly and then the reaction internally, right?
The Sputnik moment is a great opportunity for people like Marc Andreessen or the leaders of these AI companies to say, like, yes, we need more and more money from the US government or expedited permitting or whatever it might be to keep up.
Internally, I think there are some people that are freaking out.
There's some reports that like at Meta, there was some real concern because Meta's whole thing with AI is like, we're the best open weight AI company.
And then this small company that people hadn't really heard of and only was founded like a year and a half ago, comes out and releases something that's produced.
Embarrassing for them.
It's a real challenge to their dominance.
But it's also a thing that they can all learn from.
And they can use the advancements to make their own models cheaper, to improve the unit economics on serving them to millions of customers.
One other thing I would say is that the DeepSeek reasoning approach is actually following OpenAI.
I think it's more of a case of whenever somebody leads in AI, people behind them can follow it.
It's kind of like the four-minute mile.
Once you know that this sort of reasoning approach where you spend more time thinking, so to speak, about Harder problems gets you really good results.
Then other people can replicate it very quickly.
And Google has its own reasoning model that is comparable to DeepSeek's model.
Anthropic is rumored to have one that's even better than OpenAI's.
And OpenAI has not yet public, called O3, which actually has the best benchmark scores and the hardest benchmarks by a substantial amount.
And so I don't think that this means that DeepSeek or China is in the lead on AI. But I think the gap between at least DeepSeek and the leading AI companies in the United States has shrunk from a year or two to like maybe four or five months.
Let me ask about that last part about the idea of building on the advancements and kind of copying, in a sense, what other programs have done.
I think one of the things that has made the Chinese What product so distinctive is that it's entirely open source.
So everything can be checked.
Everything can be understood about how it functions.
They published a paper with all the code describing exactly how it was built and how it functions.
And the American companies, the leading ones at least, have not done that thus far.
There's a lot of people who believe they should.
Jack Dorsey came on Twitter today and said, open source everything.
But what are the implications for the fact that Deep Seek is open source and ChatGPT and the models of Google and Meta are not.
Yeah, I mean, it's a big kind of, like, rhetorical cue, at the very least.
You know, OpenAI was founded as an open source organization, and they really, you know, committed to being open source at the beginning and then didn't, famously.
And I want to push back a little bit on the open source framing, though, because open source software, like the stuff that powers most of what we do on the computer, is pretty different from open-weight AI systems.
One big difference is that when you publish the model weights, it's just like an inscrutable array of numbers, right?
Like people can't really go line by line and check them.
You can just see a black box and you can see the black box work, but it doesn't really tell you that much about what it's doing.
And so I think a lot of the security benefits that people claim about open source software don't necessarily open weight AI models.
DeepSeq has also not published much, if anything, about the data that it trains on.
And this is a thing that Meta also doesn't do, even so there are models.
And so I think there's this kind of sneaky thing that's done where people publish the model, It's an open weight model, and then they get a lot of credit for it.
But we still don't know a lot about, like, what kind of copyrighted material is this model trained on?
Is it trained on the outputs of other models?
Does that violate the terms of service of these organizations?
And I think it's notable that they don't include that information because there's probably a good reason for it.
Yeah, well, it's also interesting because the...
The material on which ChatGPT and these other programs are training are also controversial.
The New York Times and other news outlets are suing because they're training on journalism and content produced by these news organizations, paying nothing for it, and then charging the public for the benefits of work that wasn't their own.
So how that works out is also going to be, I think, important for the evolution of this industry.
Let me ask you about the angle of the sanctions that had been imposed on China because there was this assumption that nobody could really make big advancements in AI without the sophisticated chips from NVIDIA. And as a result, NVIDIA has become this gigantic company.
And the US government under Joe Biden had sanctioned any attempt to provide or to sell these chips into the Chinese market, trying to keep these chips away from the Chinese precisely to prevent advancements in AI.
And for a while, they were allowed to get sort of more primitive or less sophisticated chips.
And now those have been sanctioned as well.
And that's another reason why I think a lot of people were surprised, because even under these sanctions, the Chinese were able to develop a program that takes immense computational power without these NVIDIA chips.
And as a result, NVIDIA... I think it lost like 17% of its stock value in one day, the biggest one-day drop of any stock in American history, something like $660 billion off of its market capitalization.
Based on the idea that, wow, maybe NVIDIA chips aren't actually necessary in order to fuel this industry.
The New York Times suggested that maybe the sanction backfired in the sense that by preventing the Chinese from being able to have this massive computational capacity, they were forced to develop shortcuts that enabled them to develop a very sophisticated AI model at much less cost and with much less power.
What is your view on...
The implication of this, of the Chinese ability to do that, despite being under the sanctions with NVIDIA chips.
Yeah, there's a lot there.
I think that the sanctions for control of NVIDIA chips, there's kind of a lagging thing.
They took place in 2022, 2023, and then there were some updates very recently.
And so it takes time for them to take effect.
I think one notable thing is that the CEO of DeepSeq said that money has never been a problem for us.
Bans on shipment of advanced chips are the problem.
And then an engineer in December said nothing can stop us on the path to AGI except for computational research.
So at least people working at DeepSeq think that the chip bans have actually been making things harder for them.
Now, it's possible that it also made things more efficient, and those efficiency gains can offset a lot of the restrictions.
But as we move into this paradigm where you spend more of your compute on inference, where you're talking to the model or having the model generate reasoning steps, it makes compute even more important in a way, where it's like, before you had one big model, you trained it, and it was relatively cheap to talk to it.
But now it's like you have maybe a big model, maybe a smaller model, but to have it do useful things, you need more compute.
And so China has way less compute than the United States because of the export controls, because it has a smaller economy, because less in them.
And that translates into less ability to useful work with AI systems.
They give it like a work thing.
And so I think a lot of the discourse around the export controls vis-a-vis DeepSeek has been, like, a little bit overblown or kind of misinformed or not really, like, making sense.
Last question.
I think it was the first time I ever talked about AI and ChatGPT and the like without even alluding to the dangers that a lot of people believe this technology presents.
They've been well discussed.
I'm wondering if you think that the kind of freakout that we're seeing in the tech industry in the United States, in the stock market and the like, will accelerate pressure to move forward more quickly now that the Chinese have closed the gap in a way that might make companies more unwilling to be so constrained by all these guardrails.
I think there was an engineer from OpenAI who resigned last month, but he published The Reasons today, and he sort of said, I'm terrified where all this is going.
We've seen people saying that.
That's debated, well debated.
But I'm just wondering if you think this particular shock that came out from China will potentially make those problems worse.
Yeah, I think that this is already where things were headed.
Competition.
Drives a lot of risky behavior, the fear that the adversary is going to do it, but worse, you know, drove the nuclear weapons buildup.
It drove programs like MKUltra and, you know, the Soviets' illegal bioweapons program in the 70s and 80s.
And I think, yeah, many of the riskiest things that we've ever done as a species have been driven by competition, and in particular competition between nation-states.
And so I was just in D.C. last week, and the vibe there is very much like the United States has to beat China.
DeepSeek was on people's minds a lot.
It was discussed a lot.
And it is worrying because, you know, if you cut corners on safety, you can release models faster.
You can just, yeah, do more things.
And if it costs something to make your model safer, Competitors are just not going to bear that cost, or the ones that do will lose out to the ones that aren't willing to bear that cost.
And so, yeah, it's a really, really worrying thing, and I would love if there were more of a focus on making sure that these models are safe and that they're deployed safely.
Yeah, it's something they talk a lot about, they make promises a lot about, but you really wonder how...
Much that we'll be able to withstand all of these competitive pressures, especially now that there's this new concern that China is progressing a lot more rapidly than people anticipated.
All right, before I let you go, I know you're working on a book.
Do you know yet when it's coming out?
And where can people find your work beyond that?
Yeah, it'll be out, I hope, in the spring of 2026. And it'll be available across all places people buy books.
And you can find my work at garrisonlovely.substack.com.
You have the obsolete newsletter on the intersection of AI risk, economics, and geopolitics.
All right, Garrison, thanks so much for taking the time.
It was super illuminating.
I really appreciate talking to you and appreciate your time.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
All right, have a good evening.
One of the topics we have been covering most over the last year or so is the very steady and aggressive attacks on free speech in the West.
Including the United States in an effort to shield Israel from growing criticisms, especially as the evidence of what they really did in Gaza begins to emerge.
There's going to be a lot more criticism and horror about what Israel did in the West and therefore a lot more attempts to repress and silence its critics and to even, not just stigmatize, but criminalize its speech.
And we've gone over so many instances where people have been fired en masse.
Laws have been proposed and even implemented in the United States, executive orders that are designed to attack core free speech rights in order to silence Israel's harshest critics and people who are defenders of the Palestinian cause.
Last October, we interviewed Ali Abunima, who is a longtime critic of Israel.
He's an American citizen who runs a website called The Electronic Intifada that reports very critically on Israel.
And we interviewed him in October because his colleague had been the subject of a very aggressive search by the British where they seized all of his telephones and computers, obviously investigating his criticism of Israel.
And then Abu Nima himself this weekend went to Switzerland at the invitation of Swiss citizens to participate in a conference on the war in Gaza.
And when he got to the airport, he was detained and questioned.
He was released, but then he was arrested the next day and held for two nights with no charges of any kind, obviously in retaliation for his speech speaking on Israel, his critical speaking on Israel and his defense of the Palestinian cause, which exemplifies just how extreme these assaults on free speech in the West are becoming in order to protect this one foreign country on the other side of the world.
Here was his site, the Electronic Intifada, on Friday.
EI's Ali Abunima arrested in Switzerland.
The Electronic Intifada's executive director, Ali Abunima, was arrested by Swiss police ahead of a speaking event in Zurich on Saturday afternoon when he arrived at Zurich Airport on Friday.
He was questioned by police for an hour before being allowed to enter the country.
Abunima's arrest appears to be part of a growing backlash from Western governments against expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Earlier today, the Swiss authorities finally released him and then deported him from the country.
There you see the electronic intifada's headline, Switzerland Deports, EI's Ali Abunima.
And then Abunima himself appeared after three full days of being in detention and then arrest and prison and told the story of what happened.
And he said the following, quote, I'm free.
I wrote this on the plane, and I'm posting it just hours after landing in Istanbul.
On Monday evening, I was brought to Zurich Airport in handcuffs in a small metal cage inside a windowless prison van and led all the way to the plane by police.
That is, after three days and two nights in a Swiss prison, cut off from communication with the outside world in a cell 24 hours a day with one cellmate not even permitted to contact my family.
On Saturday, in a police interview in the presence of my lawyer, they accused me of, quote, My quote, crime?
being a journalist who speaks up for Palestine and against Israel's genocide and settler colonial savagery and those who aid and abet it.
I came to Switzerland at the invitation of Swiss citizens to talk about justice for Palestine, to talk about accountability for a genocide in which Switzerland, too, is complicit.
Now, let me just say again, this is an American citizen.
He was born in the United States, has lived the United States his whole life as an American citizen.
He's a journalist, and if any other American citizen on any other issue had been arrested in Switzerland, And then kept in a prison cell, cut off from the outside world for three days and two nights.
Most Americans would be up in arms.
But as we well know by now, when it comes to free speech, when it comes to American citizens, people who claim so much to believe in both, so many of them have a gigantic Israel exception so that they're willing not only to overlook this but create justifications for it.
Because while they wave the banner of free speech and American patriotism and American First and all that, they're much higher and supreme cause is Israel and everything else is subordinated to it.
And that's why we've seen so many people who got rich off waving the banner of free speech, of branding themselves America First advocates and censorship opponents, either tolerate or justify or even cheer the withering assault on free speech in the West in order to protect Israel over the last year.
Here from I-24 News yesterday, the state counselor and the head of the Department of Security in Switzerland, Mario Fair, justified the decision to detain him to the newspaper NZZ. Quote, we do not want an Islamist Jew hater who calls for violence in Switzerland.
The entry ban was issued by the FedPOL, the federal police officer following a request from Zurich authorities.
And that is somebody with a long history of...
Advocating for Israel.
And so there's no question that Abu Nima's advocacy for Palestine, his criticisms of Israel, are directly linked to the reason he was detained.
They're saying, we don't want a Jew hater here in Switzerland.
A, B, the same exact thing as if somebody was opposed to affirmative action and they got arrested in Switzerland and someone said, we don't want a racist here in Switzerland.
Somebody believes there are two genders and they go to a European country and get arrested and they say, we don't want a transphobe here, somebody who is inciting violence against trans people here.
Conservatives would be up in arms about it, especially if it weren't an American citizen.
But because the issue here is a view that so many conservatives, especially pro-Israel ones strongly dislike, which is criticism of this one sacred foreign country, you won't hear many of them, if any, standing up in protest and every time I've talked about this, I've every time others have talked about it, I've seen a lot of justifications for it, unsurprisingly, the same way you do for censorship throughout the West directed at any other Israel critic.
Here's the incident I mentioned from October, also reported by the Electronic Intifada.
UK police raid the home and seize devices of EI's Aza Winstanley.
And then October 18th, we had Ali Abunima on to talk about...
The erosion of free speech as evidenced by that invasion by the British police of his colleague's home, his journalist's colleague's home, and obviously he didn't know at the time that he too would be victimized by it in a much worse case, but here is part of what he told us.
Yeah, so this happened on Thursday, October 17th.
Asa got a knock on his door just before 6 a.m.
London time.
He lives in London.
And there were 10 officers from the counter-terrorism division of the Metropolitan Police.
That's the main police force in the UK. I mean, this should be a massive scandal.
You have this incomparably devastating award that the West has paid for and armed that Israel has carried out in Gaza.
Love that war, hate that war.
There's no denying that it's a polarizing topic that merits all sorts of intense debate.
And at the same time, you have a growing framework of repression and censorship designed to shield Israel and punish those who believe that Israel's war was criminal or a war crime.
And as the evidence emerged of what Israel really did there, as the horrors become even more evident, this repression is only going to increase.
And we've seen extreme examples.
Over the last year, just as a couple reminders from Reuters in April of 2024, police shut down pro-Palestinian gathering in Germany over hate speech fears.
Both France and Germany, actually, at the very beginning, banned pro-Palestinian protests, even though pro-Israel protests were still permitted.
Here from the BBC, October 2023, French police break up pro-Palestinian demonstration after a ban on pro-Palestinian protests.
So you have entire Western countries banning any demonstration of pro-Palestinian expression and sentiments or criticism of Israel.
In the U.S., you've had efforts to shut down student protest movements.
A radically expanded definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives and as we reported last week, Harvard.
To all but outlaw, really to outlaw, a whole wide array of common criticisms of Israel.
And as I keep saying, as a free speech advocate my entire life, first as a lawyer, then as a journalist, it's bad enough when you lose your free speech rights because your own government...
Says it's too dangerous to your country or to your national security or to social stability to permit free speech.
That we're in the middle of a crisis.
We have to curb free speech.
We heard that during World War I and World War II and during the war on terror.
That's bad enough.
But when you're being told, and not just told, but when it's happening, that you have to lose your free speech rights because some foreign country doesn't want to be criticized and they have enough influence inside your countries to make those criticisms.
And that becomes extra dangerous and extra repellent and extra offensive.
And this latest arrest of an American journalist in Switzerland is only but the latest of a long series of cases, almost all of which we've reported over the last year and three months, that exemplifies exactly that dangerous trend.
Thank you.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, system update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all their major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow our show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday nights when we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals where we have our live interactive after show.
We take your questions, respond to your critiques and feedback, hear your suggestions for future topics.
So if you'd like to join, it gives you access to the twice a week after shows, to multiple interactive features we have there.
It has a lot of original exclusive video content.
We don't have time to broadcast here.
We publish those there.
It's a place where we have professionalized written transcripts of every program we broadcast here.
They're published there the next day.
And most importantly of all, it is the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, of course, for those who have been watching this show, we are very appreciative and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
