Zoë Schiffer: Deviants and freaks, the new name of our podcast. And this is, I mean, just going back to red teaming, that’s work that a trust and safety team typically does. And those teams—
Leah Feiger: We don’t have those anymore.
Zoë Schiffer: They’re not as big as they used to be. There’s just not as much work. So yeah, I mean, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Obviously within Meta, we’ve been talking to folks this week who kind of met the news with a sigh. The company has just laid off a large portion of the workforce. We’ve written about that. We’ve talked about that. And I checked in with people being like, “Well, how’s it going now?” The hack was kind of an excuse to talk to people, see how they’re doing. And they’re like, “I mean, as you’d expect, we’re asked to do two jobs now instead of one.” So you can imagine how that’s playing out.
Brian Barrett: I also, we were talking about AI regulation earlier and all this emphasis on national security and these high-level things, but again, not as much on consumer-facing products, which would be if you had say some sort of bureau that looked after consumer finances and protecting that, that would be helpful to have in this moment as well. We used to have one of those. Technically, I guess we still do. Not really. So all of this broader deregulation is coming at this moment when the tools that were once available are not. These new tools are very fallible. We’re going to see a lot more of this.
Leah Feiger: Can I bring us to a topic that has nothing to do with AI, guys?
Brian Barrett: Please.
Zoë Schiffer: Wow. I didn’t know one existed, but yes, go off, queen.
Brian Barrett: Also, I think we can probably try to find a way to tie it back in.
Zoë Schiffer: We can. We can.
Leah Feiger: No, absolutely not. Well, OK. This story is something that we have been thinking about, covering, looking at for a long time, but it is all about a DOGE whistleblower who just filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk. This all really started last year. On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB, filed a whistleblower complaint with a massive claim. He said that DOGE had compromised the agency’s data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB.
Archival audio: A whistleblower is coming forward with claims that DOGE not only accessed data from his agency but also took a substantial amount of sensitive data with them. According to a disclosure shared with Congress, “Around 10 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedia is worth if someone printed these files as hard copy documents.”
Leah Feiger: This was a massive claim, especially at the same time as you guys very much remember, DOGE teams were firing federal workers and accessing sensitive data across the country. We were in the height of this last year in April. Berulis went public in an NPR article. His name was attached to it, and he claimed a threatening note had been taped to his door, and he was already scared about speaking out. Fast-forward a little bit, Berulis has now filed a defamation lawsuit in a DC court against Elon Musk. He said that Musk made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake. This is a really intense claim for a variety of reasons, and what this all really harkens back to is Musk last year resharing an X post from a right-wing influencer claiming that DOGE had been cleared and that this whistleblower’s testimony was fake basically. After that happened—
