941: How China Built Deepeek AI for 95% LESS Money

Brian Nichols  0:07  
Well, hey there folks, Brian Nichols here on The Brian Nichols Show, looking forward to today's Yes, of course. Fun filled episode brought to you from our lovely cardio miracles Studios here in eastern Indiana, if you're looking for the best heart health supplement in the world, head over to cardiomyocol.com or if you're joining us on the video version of the show, throughout the episode, you'll see these little, little QR codes pop up over my shoulder. Go ahead, give them a scan for cardio miracle, plus the other phenomenal sponsors that support us here at The Brian Nichols Show. And I'd of course be, I'd be, what's the word I would be lamented to say, I don't know word, amp America. I'm just gonna go ahead and say amp America. There are phenomenal sponsors here at The Brian Nichols Show, because they bring you the news you need to know without the corporate media bias or fluff. So head to amp America, where we have news articles, opinion pieces, politics and more. And yes, they are a phenomenal sponsor here of The Brian Nichols Show. So one more time, give amp America some love them. You do, go ahead and tell them that Brian sent you. But for today's episode, folks, we're gonna dig into the world of tech. And for you, long time listeners, I'm sure you've been listening to the show, you say, Brian, but your day job is it not in the world of tech. And to that, I would say, you're right. It is. But I sell tech, right? I'm not dealing with the legalese and the policies and all that kind of fun stuff that happens behind the scenes. I'm just helping solve problems by selling value with some of this newer stuff, like usable AI, right? And talking about all the other things that are out there. But for today's conversation, yes, we're gonna take a little bit of a turn towards the policy conversation, and again, candidly, not an area that I'm super well versed with. But, you know, I said maybe the team over at net choice could help us out today, and they're gonna do just that. We had our good buddy, Carl Zabo in the show in past episodes today, though, we are being joined by a brand new friend, Patrick hedger, who's joining us here from net choice. Patrick, welcome to Brian Nichols show. How you doing?

Patrick Hedger  1:59  
Hey, thank you for having me. I'm doing great,

Brian Nichols  2:04  
great to hear for folks playing along on the home game. That is the second time we did our intro, because stream yard, which is what we record here on updated, and I lost like 30% of my settings. So apparently, Patrick had to sit there as I'm mouthing all the intro to myself and nobody else, apparently, because I was not being hurt. So Patrick, thank you for being patient with me today, and thank you for joining us lots to discuss all thing in the world of tech. But before we do that, do us a favor. Introduce yourself here to The Brian Nichols Show, maybe give folks a little bit of an understanding of who net choice is and what you guys are doing in the world of tech policy. Yeah, absolutely.

Patrick Hedger  2:40  
So I've spent my entire career in sort of the free market advocacy and policy world, and I kept finding myself on the same side as net choice on a lot of really big, important battles for the future of technology, for the future of the internet. And net choice is a principles based trade association that is advocating for an internet built on free expression and free enterprise, and that's a mission that I wholeheartedly support, and so I was pleased to join the team last October.

Brian Nichols  3:07  
Great to have you on board. I'm looking forward to digging into said policy, which let's talk to start out today. You know China. We hear China talked about all the time. Patrick in the news, are they friend? Are they faux? Let's go back to like, what 2010 2011 when there was the whole episode of The Office where Michael and Oscar are debating whether or not China is going to be a threat in the future, that episode just feels more and more prescient as we watch it in 15 years later, 10 years later, but here we are today, and China has definitely been making a big play in the tech space, and right now, as we're recording here today, Patrick, the new thing, the hot, sexy thing on the market, is this brand new AI app that they developed called Deep seek, which it looks like if it is what they say it is, has changed the way that we develop AI forever, because when you had chat GPT spending $100 million to use all these Nvidia chips, and it was just massive amounts of data sets China's like, hey, we can do that with 5 million and, oh, by the way, we have a newer AI technology that we're leveraging, which doesn't make sense to me. Maybe you can explain it to us today, but they can, apparently, like, localize the intelligence and learn, like, based in the context of what's being talked about. And then I've heard that this is opening it up, where we can put AI onto these little devices that we carry around in our pockets that are more or less super computers. So it sounds like, Patrick, there's a lot here with deep seek that could be great. But also, I mean, again, elephant in the room came from China. So is it so good? Let's talk about that. Patrick, what? What's your expert take on deep seek and the Chinese approach to dealing with AI and tech in this space?

Patrick Hedger  4:53  
Yeah, so I'll start, I'll caveat that I'm not a computer scientist. I'm political scientist and a public policy guy, but I'll do. My best here, you're exactly right that we should be at least a little bit skeptical of where it came from. In my previous life, I got to live in Hong Kong, and I learned very quickly that you take anything that Beijing says with a huge grain of salt. That said, this is an open source AI model, and so we are able to independently test it and affirmed that it's a pretty good model. It's a pretty powerful model. But this whole backstory about how they did it so affordably, and how they did it on inferior processing chips and things like that, that's worth a little bit of scrutiny. I don't think they trained it for nearly as affordably as they said they did, and there's a lot of open AI walking so that other apps, like deep seek could run, and there's been some allegations of perhaps some corporate espionage happening behind the scenes that said China is where they are, right? It's a good model. It's an impressive model. And regardless of how they got there, it should be a bit of a spot Sputnik moment, right? I mean, they have the technology to produce a competitive AI platform, and so we've got to then look back and say, What can we do in terms of public policy, in terms of investment policy, things like that, to make sure that we're always staying a couple steps ahead, because we want the future of the Internet to be built on us values. I think everybody agrees with that right classically liberal values that are undergird the American system. That's what the future of the internet should be based on. That's what we believe the future of technology should be based on. Again, free enterprise, free expression. And so trying to or doing anything that allows us to see that ground to China is a pretty dismal picture.

Brian Nichols  6:40  
So let's play devil's advocate here, Patrick, because you, you hinted at this, right? But, Patrick, it's open source, so can't be too bad, get it?

Patrick Hedger  6:54  
Yeah, there's, there's trade offs with anything, right? So there are some certain bend. There's significant benefits with it. With open source, you're able to drive innovation. You're able to have entrepreneurs, even folks like this company in China, are able to innovate at a much higher rate. And overall, that's generally good. And there are certainly some things that we have learned from deep seek that our AI companies are going to be able to utilize and adapt. So we that's an important thing to have, but we always really want the cutting edge to be here in the United States. I think that's a really important principle that we and I think this is something that President Trump has actually been really great on. So far as he's he seems to have recognized that winning on AI is paramount. Winning on AI is winning the future. And a great example of how important this is to him is that within the first 48 hours, even, I think it was 24 hours of taking office, right, pretty busy time for for anybody starting a new job. He took time to talk about AI and talk about this Stargate Project, which is a private, private sector funded initiative to build out AI data centers and energy infrastructure to power those data centers. So for him to take time to recognize that, for him to continue to be harping on AI, and for him to call deep seek a wake up call, think he really gets this, and I think the rest of us ought to be paying attention and ought to be pushing our politicians to make sure we stay at the forefront of innovation and technology.

Brian Nichols  8:23  
So AI has become the buzz word of what the century. And that's actually like, no pun or no, no tongue in cheek, like it literally is like the number one thing in the 21st century, I think, besides the advent of the Internet, right to where we are today, AI has definitely taken that jump forward. I can't tell you how many companies in my day job I see with their brand new names, you know, company, company name.ai, and I'm like, Oh, another one. It feels like, you know, the internet bubble getting ready to burst again. But different conversation for a different day. But when we look at AI, right? Like in my world, in the day job I work in the world of customer experience, we call it CX, and we're seeing AI come in and really help, like, it's helping make things more efficient, more effective, and it's empowering the agents. Because in our in our world of customer experience, we believe that's going to be people who are leveraging AI are going to be the ones who replace the people who aren't, not so much this whole doom and gloom, like, oh my god, AI is gonna replace everything. Like, none of that stuff, which I'm sure, you know, give it five years, 10 years, that might be a different conversation. But let's cross that bridge when we get there. But I mean, Patrick, that's a use case in my world. Like using AI to help empower customer service agents, or helping the members or the customers when they're reaching out for help. Like, to be able to do some self service options. Like, let's have a conversation, what we call an IV, a an intelligent virtual agent, and have, like, a dialog and actually feel that I'm getting my issues resolved. But I'm able to add context. I'm able to, like, you know, there's more to just pushing a button, yes or no. Like, press one for English, two for Spanish. Like, none of that stuff. But that's where we are today. Okay, where do you see, I guess, with, like, the advent of things like deep seek, like, do you see the AI world changing or going down pathways that maybe we really haven't considered versus, you know, most people just open up chat GPT, and they're like, Let me have a fun conversation with chat GPT. And that's like, the, like, the the epitome of their use of AI?

Patrick Hedger  10:20  
Yeah. So, I mean, I think AI is going to follow the path that we see of pretty much any technology, right? Right now we're at the gigantic cell phone with the battery pack that you have to sling over your shoulder Good Times calls, right, right? That's sort of where we are with AI right now, which is really exciting, because I've even found in my job that AI is very useful, and it's an it's a massive productivity enhancer, right? I'm able to put in 100 page bill and ask AI and ask it, hey, what are the key provisions of this bill? And it gets it right pretty quickly, and it's accurate like 99.9% of the time. So, so if we're at this sort of almost Stone Age of AI, and it's already this powerful, I think the future is very exciting, and I think you're exactly right to say that this is something where people that are able to utilize AI are going to find themselves to be more productive, and it's going to be a productivity enhancer for the average worker, versus this sort of substitution effect that a lot of folks are really are afraid of. I mean, I like to point to folks and say, Look, right now, certainly, technology causes disruptions. It's important that we have programs and policies in place to address those things. But at the end of the day, there are more people alive today than ever before doing more types of jobs than ever before, and we're at pretty high employment as well. So the technology destroys jobs. Look, get rid of the wheel, Ban, fire, things like that, right? We don't want to fall into that kind of fallacy where we're limiting ourselves, because the rest of the world is not going to do that. And I think that's what deep seek really teaches us, is that, you know, if we were to pause or try and regulate AI to an extent that we're addressing all of our potential fears and things like that, we're going to hold ourselves back and not get any of the benefits with any type of technology. There's a trade off, right? Any policy, there's a trade off, and it's about maximizing the good from these things. And I think that if we take too much of a precautionary approach to AI policy, we're going to find ourselves behind, and we're going to find a world where new internet users, particularly like in Sub Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, they're really starting to get access to the global Internet. For the first time, they're going to be using an internet that's dominated by Chinese firms instead of an internet that's dominated by American firms.

Brian Nichols  12:31  
And we're going to talk about the Chinese firms here a little bit more in detail in a second. But like, I just want to go back to something you just said, because I want to paint the picture for folks of this use case, right? Because you mentioned, I guess, you know, wheels or cars or whatever it may be, should just, you know, get rid of those too, because that is exactly what I see happening right now, right? Like I've heard so many folks, and this is a different conversation, but I'll show you how we're going to tie it back here, right? I hear so many folks who, like they are doom and gloom about AI and very much, I think, in the same mentality of like, oh my goodness, we have this thing called an automobile. What about the horse and buggy drivers? No, like that mentality. But then on the flip side, let's make it like, real. Like, based on our current policy conversations, I see non stop people being like, Oh, you don't support unfettered immigration. Well, who do you think is gonna pick your plants then, and your corn and your your we who's gonna go out there and do that then? I'm like, Well, maybe AI media automation. Like, I don't know where we're gonna be in five years, but based on what I'm seeing in the marketplace and the rapid advancements in this technology. Doesn't sound like it'd be too, you know, too far out there. I mean, Patrick, that is in my kind of my world right now that I live in, both for my day job, but also in this world of politics. I just see that we're having the same debates that we had 100 years ago, 75 years ago, 50 years ago. It just, it's a different iteration of that debate based on whatever the new, the shiny new thing is of the day, is this just a human thing? Like, we're we like the status quo, we don't like change. Like, is that it?

Patrick Hedger  14:13  
Yeah, I think, you know, people are comfortable and they, they don't. Disruption can be painful for some folks. But yeah, I think it's important to kind of look back at that history and understand that, you know, we wouldn't be where we are without the kind of permissionless innovation that we've seen throughout history, right? And we've always taken an incremental approach to regulating technology and also tried to regulate specific harms, specific outcomes, instead of trying to overly regulate the technology as a whole to prevent all of those things, right? And I think looking any technology has a misuse, right? And so if you're committing fraud with Photoshop or you're committing fraud with AI, there shouldn't really be a difference in the statute. There fraud is fraud. So to try and say, we're going to create this new AI regulatory state or system or agency, it's just going to create. A lot of paperwork, it's going to create a lot of deterrence to the investment that's necessary to take us from this sort of model T phase of AI or giant brick cell phone phase of AI, take us to the next level, where this is a mass deployed technology. It's able to be utilized in any number of different use cases and and, you know, to an earlier point, I think you were getting at be deployed in a way where you don't have, you know, the infrastructure that we're building for AI will be able to power a lot more AI, right, not today's use cases. And so by shrinking the technology, shrinking its energy demands and data demands and things like that, you're going to be able to deploy it a lot more, and you're going to be able to have a lot more people utilizing that technology to enhance their own productivity. Almost all technological revolutions that we have seen are major productivity enhancers. And I, you know, I think a lot about a quote from the great Thomas soul, Who's he? And he talks and defines economics as the study of how to allocate scarce resources to meet. And here's the key part, unlimited human wants. And so AI is really going to unlock our way, the way we use resources, and those resources include humans, right, right, human work hours and and, and unlock that in a way that's going to allow us to meet a lot more economic demand for things that people can't even imagine yet. So I'm very optimistic about it, but it's, you know, certainly, we need to be ready for potential disruptions. We need to be ready to help people, you know, transition into an economy that's got a lot of AI deployed in it. So those are important conversations that we need to be having, but trying to stop this from ever happening, just gonna leave the country behind. I

Brian Nichols  16:49  
mean, that proverbial genie has already gotten out of the bottle, in my opinion, like AI is here, and I don't see it going away. And, you know, we started our conversation today about deep seek in China is the fear, I guess, Patrick, is it because China is such a geopolitical foe that we look at, I mean, this, this, this is a conversation that goes beyond deep seek. It goes into the Tick Tock debate, right? I know there's a whole thing we were going to talk about, about temu being leveraged as like a weapon against Amazon, right? So, like, is this just another iteration, not even, let's remove the tech conversation, right? But let's go more towards, like, the political side. Is the fear around a lot of these newer technologies specifically coming from China? Is it due to the fact that it just, it's got the China name next to it? Or is there, is there actually nefarious things and be that deep seek, be that tick tock, or be that temu, right? Like, is it? Is it actually a real threat that we need to start taking more and more seriously? Well,

Patrick Hedger  17:55  
when it comes to something like AI and it come, deep seek is a great example we've I'm sure lots of folks have seen that. People have tried to test out deep seek, and they have found that deep seek will not produce truthful answers about certain topics. Tell

Brian Nichols  18:07  
me about Tiananmen Square, correct, correct, no. And so this

Patrick Hedger  18:11  
kind of gets at a point that I was making earlier, is that I think we should want the 21st century internet to be built on and built by Americans, and that there's a sense of openness, truth, things like that, that that undergird the systems that we're building, and that the rest of the world has access to really quick.

Brian Nichols  18:30  
And I'm not going to try to interrupt, but I just, I want to challenge that a little bit, because let's, let's go back, like, two years, well, not even two years like, Oh, back a year ago, like Google Gemini was getting in trouble, because you would say, Make me, you know, make me a picture of a Nazi soldier. And it would like, spit out images of like African Americans as as Nazi soldiers in some name of dei or, you know, go to the Twitter files and you see where, all of a sudden a government entity like the White House, in this case, was actually having direct relationships with Twitter to say, hey, so there's going to be this article coming out about Hunter Biden, the son of the sitting president. Yes, that's disinformation. Flag it or ban people entirely, like the New York Post from even sharing it. So I hear you, but like, do we not see the the conspiracy for corruption right here in our own soil.

Patrick Hedger  19:24  
Yeah, I think stopping that kind of jawboning that we did see is part of what we need to do going forward to ensure that we have great AI investment and competition. Those things are really important and to any particular flaws or things like that, with existing systems, competition is the best remedy for these things, and you're not going to have competition if you've got government suffocating companies and trying to Job own companies one way or another, or creating new overhead AI, regulatory regimes that are micromanaging the type of investment and use cases that we have for AI. So this is all kind of part of the umbrella of a good AI strategy going forward, which is keeping government out of the way, whether it's the government again, trying to pick winners and losers in terms of use cases and firms, or government picking winners and losers in the information space as well. They shouldn't be doing that anyway, because of the First Amendment. But there are some policies that, you know, we've been supportive of at net choice, that there's a bill by Rand Paul, for example, that would prevent the government from doing the kind of job owning that we saw. It sort of codifies the executive order that we saw Trump put in place as soon as he took office here in his second term, to try and prevent the future, future abuse of government power over technology firms to censor content. I think everyone agrees that that's a problem, and it's something that needs to be stopped putting your finger on the scale and then using the threat of regulatory damage, right, the ability to lean on a company in one area, and then potentially, if you don't get what you want, there putting regulatory pressure in another to affect that. And we saw a little bit of that, and it's incredibly toxic, and that's not how you build a great AI ecosystem going forward. So that kind of stuff has to stop. I think we've got a good, good opportunity here with the Trump administration to make sure that stuff doesn't

Brian Nichols  21:21  
happen again. Patrick devils advocate, time again. But let's just say that we go to our free market approach, and may the best not man, may the best artificial man win. What happens? If you know, we remove all the fingers off the buttons, right? We remove all the weights off the scale, and we just say, company versus company, right? Go do your thing. And what if? What if deep seek wins? What if Tiktok wins? What if temu wins? Is there not an argument from some of our more, I would say, you know, friends on the side of the side of a Nichols, the friends who are more empathetic to using government power, is there not an argument to say, Well, China won. Now what?

Patrick Hedger  22:10  
Yeah, so in winning and losing, in this case, there's clearly losing, right? And there's also winning, but I don't think in the world of innovation, the finish line is constantly moving down the road, and so it's always about making sure that you're getting closer to that than the other guy at any given point in time. And sometimes, sometimes we'll fall a little bit behind, but as long as you're you're keeping pace and staying ahead for the majority of the time, right. Again, we're at the very infant stages of what we know of as AI, and it's not like this is again, ever going away as a technology? It's it's going to change, it's going to improve, just as computers have, just as cell phones have, just as the internet itself has, and so that again, there's no real finish line here, but it's important to always kind of stay ahead and and I think if you look at the US system versus what we see overseas, whether it's the European Union or China, they will always have that greater urge for the command and control. We've seen that even with China a little bit in recent years, where you had China opening up and bracing more market policies and things like that, and then all of a sudden, there's kind of been a retrenchment into the central planning under Xi Jinping, and China's economy has suffered recently because of that, and so I think we've been we have got a great opportunity to kind of use that to our advantage, to kind of stay out ahead of the Chinese when it turn when it comes to research and development and and being on the leading at a edge of technology,

Brian Nichols  23:37  
because, like, my my gut is telling Me, like this just feels like a conversation that I was having with some folks in like 2019 with Huawei

Patrick Hedger  23:47  
Huawei Huawei. I'm not

Brian Nichols  23:49  
Chinese, and I don't pretend to be that. That's probably better for many reasons across the board. But like when I look at Huawei, Huawei Hua Hawaii, whatever it's called, for folks who are not familiar, Huawei was a was, is a phone company, a technology company based in China, and they had had, and have some pretty awesome products, like, from a technology standpoint, a UI standpoint, interface standpoint, like, their cameras are out of this world. Their their user friendly applications are out of this world. And yet, it's Chinese product. And then got the big, you know, the big red X from the US government saying, Nope, no, Huawei allowed. So Huawei is now relegated to being a China centric, Chinese only company. And I guess, like, you know, let's just pretend Patrick, that like in 2019 the US government didn't do that. And the US government was like, ah, you know, free market. Let's see what happens. And let's say Huawei had taken over the market, and like they they replaced Android, or they replaced iPhone. As crazy as that might sound, let's just pretend they did, right? And then let's just pretend that we found, you know, flies in the ointment with Huawei, and we see, oh, they have been spying on us citizens at that point. And I'm painting the picture, by the way. Of worst case scenarios, because this is where most of the folks will go. So like, in that kind of an example, and replace Huawei for Tiktok, or replace Huawei for deep sake, like deep deep seat, not deep sake, deep seek. If those became kind of like the status quo options, is there a threat? Because we're now building those status quo options based on the fact that they are Chinese companies, which, from a free market standpoint, shouldn't matter, except China obviously has this. Uh, what are they the CCP, what does that stand for? That communist or Chinese Communist Party, or whatever it is, right? So that's obviously a big red flag. There is there? Is there any merit to that fear there? Patrick, well, if anybody's

Patrick Hedger  25:42  
using technology as a weapon, there's certainly a case for government to intervene. That's that is, I think you'd find very few people that would disagree with that notion. But again, I think it's really important to focus on, what are we doing to prevent that eventuality? Because that's where we're at right now. And there's a lot of focus about, well, what are we going to do about China while we're not thinking enough about what we've done to ourselves? And that, I think, is what's been really kind of been missing from this conversation. A lot, there's a lot of oh, there's fear about deep sea. There's fear about other things, the other types of technology that are out there, instead of looking at the barriers to creating better systems ourselves, yep, and that is something that has been entirely missing from this equation. We're not going to, I think we're, I fear that we're not going to add red tape and get ourselves ahead in any particular situation, right? What are we doing in terms of incentivizing research and development here in the United States? Right? A lot of those good, beneficial research and development. Tax incentives have been allowed to lapse. I think that's a big problem, right? We still have it's great that the corporate tax rate came down, but it came down to about middle of the pack, and other countries keep cutting. So how are we, you know, continuing to bring major companies back into the United States to invest here and do research and development here? Let's look at what how we're treating our existing champions in technology. Every major company that you can think of that is involved in this AI space right now is either under investigation or already being sued by the federal government for antitrust, and companies that largely all compete with one another are being labeled monopolies and are still in court. I mean, even with the transition from the Biden administration to the Trump administration, these cases are ongoing. So remains to be seen with the Trump administration is going to do in terms of settling those cases, but that's a lot of time, resources and hesitancy on the part of these companies, right? If you're, if you're being sued by the federal government on antitrust grounds, you're going to be really hesitant to make a major investment in a potential new startup that's at the cutting edge. So I think we can cross the bridges on national security as they present themselves. The government's very good about, you know, finding national security things to do something about. We really need to be focused on never letting ourselves get into that position well,

Brian Nichols  28:02  
and this is, like, the Mark Andreessen argument right before the election. He's like, Yeah, I sat down with the Biden team. Wasn't Biden because Biden doesn't know what he had for breakfast, let alone you know what's happening for AI policy. But I digress. And he sits down with the Biden team, and they're like, Listen, don't, don't invest. Don't invest in this world. There's only gonna be like, three companies that we're gonna allow to be in this AI space. We're gonna partner with them. So it's just, it's a fruitless venture, don't and he said that was the moment I decided, yep, okay, we're gonna go vote for Trump, and not just vote for Trump. We're gonna enthusiastically support and champion Trump. And I think that's speaking to, you know, kind of that, that Pro, truly pro market, pro free enterprise type of system to work because you're right. Like this, this is how you you test ideas, test products. Right is in a true free market, and may the best app win, and in those use cases where tick tock is weaponized, like, Okay, make that argument right. But let's not just do a universal ban saying this is bad because it came from China, which, speaking of which, there is always a segue somewhere, Patrick and today's segue is going over to same church, different pew, a different technology company. But this one also from China, and also rivaling one American company in Amazon, temu. Everybody has, you know, heard, heard of temu at this point. I think, where you go and you spend $2 for, like, you know, some, you know, some version of a very expensive product, only to get, like, a just goofball version of it. When it arrives at your door, you're like, Oh, this is supposed to be a brand new laptop. And you get it, and it's just like, you know, two pieces of plastic shoved together with a screen. They call it a computer, stuff like that. And we've seen temu definitely reach into more and more of the American purview, going back to what last year Super Bowl, where they had, I think, two or three Super Bowl ads. So like that was kind of like the moment I was like, oh, temu is actually here, and they're actually trying to compete in America. And that kind of opened my eyes that this is something more than. Just a place where you go and order the the goofy version of the the actual like legitimate products. So talk to about talk to us about temu. I know they're using some legalese behind the scenes to try to go after companies that we know and love, like Amazon. So what's the story here? Patrick,

Patrick Hedger  30:14  
yeah. So what we found out just within the last few days, actually, is that the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration, famously chaired at the time by Lena Khan, was going after Amazon, creating a case to go after Amazon for monopolizing retail, monopolizing online retail. And one of the ways they were doing that and trying to build that case was looking to one of Amazon's greatest competitive threats right now, which is an E commerce giant temu, which is a Chinese based company, to build their case against Amazon, and that is just super problematic for everything that we just discussed in our conversation, right? How are we going to stay ahead? How are we going to ensure American companies are staying ahead in any kind of market or technology space when their own government is pulling one of the ropes right, trying to pull them down, that that is a huge problem. And unfortunately, it wasn't an isolated case with with FTC reaching out to tehu to get their perspective on their case, on the case against Amazon, what we've seen is that the Biden administration also was cooperating and even assisting European governments, particularly the European Union and its investigations and laws against American companies. The Digital markets Act and the digital services act over in the European Union, they essentially outlawed a lot of things that aren't even illegal under us, competition policy in a way to kind of specifically target American firms. And the Biden administration was openly bragging about this. You can see press releases on the Department of Justice's website saying, Yeah, we met with the European Union. We're going to help them, and that. So it's just kind of crazy to me that we've had for four years, essentially an administration that was not just antagonistic, but allergic to innovation, allergic to America's tech champions. So we're hoping that the I mean, it's hard to do worse than the Biden administration was on these fronts. So we're hoping that this sort of new openness to AI from the Trump administration is a sign of much better things to come. Can somebody

Brian Nichols  32:21  
just clip what Patrick said? It's worse to do, worse than the body administration just cut off the qualifier in this use case, because I think that's across the board, like I look at the past four years, and this will be my final thoughts before I turn things over to you to bring us home bear, Patrick. But like the past four years when I went in actually, then you rewind a little bit further. Let's go back to 2019 2019 I was what you'd consider to be like, a tried and true classical liberal libertarian, whatever small l libertarian. I believe that folks, by and large, were libertarian at their core, and that they would want to embrace free market, you know, free enterprise, free free expression, like all that kind of stuff, free right across the board. Um, and by free, not like, you know, free dollars. So I was talking about, like, the freedom to be able to do things. And then COVID happened, and I saw what an allergic reaction there was by the public, by and large, to the idea of freedom, medical freedom. I don't want to put this experimental vaccine in my arm. Well, you're anti science and you want grandma to die. That's what you care about, right? No, no. I'm expressing medical freedom, that idea. And then you couple with the Biden administration taking power, and then the manifestation of that mentality of No, no. We don't like freedom. We like freedom where we want it and where we say. And then I see what the Biden administration was doing, both on screen, but also behind closed doors, and like, oh, man, I used to go crazy. And I was one of these people at first, until I saw the writing on the wall where it's like, oh, Twitter can ban this name, horrible person here, because they're a private company. They can do what they want, damn it. I would. I got my pull over my eyes there, because then Twitter files happens and you see no the FBI literally had an office at Twitter HQ telling them, yet you should get rid of that person, what? No, holy cow, like I was making that argument, like they're a private company, they can do what they want. And then you see the different areas that you outlined here today, where the Biden administration, and I'm gonna just emphasize the administration part, because this, again, wasn't just Joe Biden. This is his entire team. This is his entire regulatory agencies that were behind him. And they were going after the the ideas of freedom, right? They were going after tech freedom. They were going after medical freedom. And that, for me, like that, was the moment that, dare I say, I kind of became, I'll say radicalized, because I'm saying it in a tongue, in. Cheek way Patrick like that was for me, the moment I realized that not only are there a lot of people who are un libertarian in our public, they're not just libertarian at their core, waiting to realize I'm a libertarian, but rather, there are people who they they don't like freedom, and they will support, be it, voting for enthusiastically cheering whatever it may be folks who will leverage the use of government to get rid of freedom, to curtail freedom, and that was like the moment I said, Okay, it's either we are in the position to stop these abuses from happening, and if so, that requires us doing this scary thing called leveraging power, right? But then understanding. It's like, you know the Jordan Peterson quote, I'm gonna butcher it too, but it's like, I don't want, like, just a good man. I actually want a dangerous man who knows how to be good, right? I don't want just a good government. I want a dangerous government who knows how to be good to stop people from going and using these tools of power to like, turn people's freedom of expressions into like, Nope, that's hate speech or nope, that's medical misinformation, right? Like, I'm done with that. So I say all that, thank you, because you are helping fight the tech freedom side of things and helping bring these issues to a very real, you know, real marketplace where people are demanding alternatives that we've had four years of, you know, the government pushing their thumb down tech censorship standpoint, I think the 2024, election was a very, very big eye opener for a lot of folks, particularly in the tech space. And not only are people by and large, done with the censorship, but they resoundingly voted for a change, which we are now definitely seeing with Donald Trump in office, Operation Stargate, or of the hell it's called, with a $500 billion being funded in private equity towards these AI tools. So it's happening. Change has arrived. That's my final thoughts for today. Patrick, what do you have for us for your final thoughts? And of course, where can folks go ahead, reach out to you and support the amazing team over at net

Patrick Hedger  37:04  
choice. Yeah. I mean, just kind of wrapping up our entire conversation, you know, you brought up a great question about, well, you know, what do we do about if, you know, a hot, potentially hostile technology controlled by potentially hostile actor becomes the market dominant force, or something like that. That's not going to happen if we continue to do what we know is the secret sauce of American innovation, which is openness, free exchange of ideas, real free market capitalism. Right, the cream rises to the top. It doesn't get subsidized to the top. Right. We're not picking winners and losers. As long as we get back to that, which we unfortunately had a bit of bit of a pause on during the the Biden administration, as long as we get back to that secret sauce, America will always stay ahead, because there's always going to be that next entrepreneur in the garage that's cooking something up that is going to change the world. And I fundamentally believe that it has been true throughout history. It's going to remain true. And so that's what's really important that we get back to work. We'll find ourselves, we'll find ourselves behind the eight ball, no doubt, if we continue to do what the Biden administration did right, a rejection of free speech, or a rejection of of open true open competition, protecting competitors, not competition itself. We abandon all of those things. Follow the path that Europe has taken. Right? What major technology company exists in Europe? I mean, where is their Microsoft? Where is their Google? Where is their Amazon? There? You can't think of one. I can think of Chinese counterparts, but I can't think of European counterparts. And so it's really important that we don't follow down that path where you do see a lot of explicit censorship, you do see trying to command and control every last little bit of innovation that happens there, and that's a recipe for disaster, and we're trying to prevent that from happening here in the United States. That's ultimately our mission. Again, net choice is a trade association, but we, you know, we are a principles based Trade Association. Our guiding principles are again, making the internet a place for free enterprise and free expression. And you can find what we do@netchoice.org

Brian Nichols  39:13  
and that's why you guys have been recurring guests here in the program, because you guys are fighting the good fight, and like you do it when it's not always the most popular thing. And that's how, you know, you got a good organization, um, you know, when we had Carl on the show, many a time we're talking about the tech censorship that was happening behind the scenes. And you know, we were doing so with very real like, threats of being censored ourselves and like that speaks to why you guys are doing what you're doing, and why it's so important. So folks, if you got some value from today's conversation, you know what I'm going to ask you to do? First and foremost, you got to hit that little Share button down below if you're watching us over on the YouTubes. And if you got some value, head to the comments and let us know, because that's how the YouTube algorithms actually tell people, people are having a real conversation about this, and direct more people to the video. So that's number. One. But number two is that if you are noticing, like, you know, and I know we didn't get to this today, Patrick and I apologize, but if you notice, like, you know, local politicians or state politicians starting to, you know, dip their toe into this regulatory world or this anti competitive world, reach out to Patrick and the team over at net choice, at the very least, that can help guide you towards the different arguments or the different resources you can leverage to just stand up and fight back, or I'm just guessing you guys know a few folks in your little Rolodex there, Patrick, to help fight the good fight at a state and local level. So we're gonna include all those links there in the show notes. Folks, please again, support the team over at net choice. And with that, Patrick, any final thoughts or final words? We go ahead and wrap things up today. No,

Patrick Hedger  40:42  
that's great. I really enjoyed our conversation. And, you know, I again, I think people should, if anything, be optimistic about the future. We're solving incredible problems with technology, and I'm really excited to see what the next 1020, years holds. And I got to be honest, it's been, you know, it's been great. It's been great. And to see that a lot of this is happening right here in the United States, that you know for everything you know everything that's happened over the last few years, for us to still kind of be on the cutting edge, whether it's this new supersonic plane we saw out in the desert recently, whether it's Elon Musk parallel parking rockets, or whether it's whether it's aI we're really at the dawn of a potentially new golden age of technology, and if we get the policy right, that's going to benefit everybody, as

Brian Nichols  41:27  
our good buddy Patrick bet David says the future looks bright, and I can't agree more with that. We're going to go ahead and put a pin in today's conversation again, folks, if you got some value, go ahead, give it a share. If you're joining us on the audio version of the podcast. Make sure you hit that like button and subscribe button. And of course, you can subscribe to The Brian Nichols Show wherever it is. You listen to your podcast, Apple podcast, Spotify YouTube music or elsewhere. Also, The Brian Nichols Show is a video show as well. So you can go ahead and find us on YouTube, on rumble, on x and on Facebook. Yeah, Facebook. So go ahead, give us some love, and when you do, head down below and let us know your thoughts on today's topic. But with that being said, thank you for joining us. Brian Nichols, signing off here on The Brian Nichols Show for Patrick hedger from net choice, we'll see you next week. Instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, hey there, folks, Brian Nichols here on another fun filled episode of The Brian Nichols Show. Yeah, I am your humble host, joining you from our lovely cardio miracle Studios here in actually sunny and warm Eastern Indiana. We're not here for the weather report, though, so don't worry, that's the last of the weather talk. The Brian Nichols Show is sponsored by our phenomenal sponsors over at amp America. Head to amp america.com, for all the news you need to know, without the corporate media bias or fluff. We have articles, news, opinion pieces, podcasts and more. Head over to amp america.com Also, The Brian Nichols Show is powered by our awesome sponsors, of which you can see over my right shoulder here on on the YouTubes or on X or whatever it is you're consuming your video content here today, if you'd be so kind, please go ahead and scan those QR codes to support our sponsors. Or if you're an audio listener or you're like, I don't want to scan that QR code, Nichols, I don't know what you got there. Go to over to Brian Nichols. Show.com you can find all of our sponsors listed, including our awesome sponsors, cardio miracle, blood of tyrants, wine, plus their amazing brand new liquid freedom, energy, tea, mud, water and more. So folks, with that being said, really excited for today's conversation. We are going to talk all things tech, which I know for you long time listeners, you're like Brian isn't your day job in the world of tech. How do you have any energy to talk about more tech during the day? And I hear you. But this is actually not like the Tech Tech, this is the policy behind the tech that we're going to talk about today. And with that, like how we have gotten to a point where you have so many folks who are freaking out over these brand new AI tools that are out there, or these big technology companies I'm looking at Deep seek, or Tiktok, or the likes. So joining us here on The Brian Nichols Show. Today we have not returning guests, a returning organization, net choice. We previously had been joined by our good buddy, Carl Zabo, but today we're being joined by Patrick hedger from the great net choice, Patrick, welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. How you doing? You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai