Zoë Schiffer: Deviants and Freaks, the novel name of our podcast. I mean, I mean, back to red teaming, that’s the work that the trust and safety team typically does. And these teams-
Leah Feiger: We don’t have those anymore.
Zoë Schiffer: They are not as substantial as they used to be. There just isn’t that much work. So yeah, I mean, it’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out. Of course, we at Meta talked to people this week who greeted the news with a sigh. The company just laid off a huge portion of its staff. We wrote about it. We talked about it. I reached out to people and asked, “Well, how’s it going?” The burglary was an excuse to talk to people and see how they were doing. And they said, “I mean, as you might expect, we’re now being asked to do two tasks instead of one.” So you can imagine how this plays out.
Brian Barrett: I, too, have talked before about AI regulation and all this emphasis on national security and these high-level things, but again, not so much about consumer-facing products, which would be if you were to say that some sort of office that looks after and protects consumers’ finances would be helpful at this point as well. We used to have one. Technically, I think it still is. Not really. So all of this broader deregulation is happening at a point where the tools that were once available are no longer available. These novel tools are very unreliable. We’ll see a lot more of this.
Leah Feiger: Can I move us to a topic that has nothing to do with artificial intelligence?
Brian Barrett: Please.
Zoë Schiffer: Wow. I didn’t know such a thing existed, but yes, go away, queen.
Brian Barrett: I also think we can probably try to find a way to tie it back together.
Zoë Schiffer: We can. We can.
Leah Feiger: No, absolutely not. Well, OK. This story is something we’ve been thinking about, discussing, and analyzing for a long time, but it involves a DOGE whistleblower who just filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk. It all really started last year. On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT employee with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed a whistleblower complaint containing a massive claim. He said DOGE compromised the agency’s data and apparently extracted it from the NLRB.
Archived recording: The whistleblower claims that DOGE not only gained access to his agency’s data, but also took with it a significant amount of sensitive data. According to the disclosure to Congress: “approximately 10 gigabytes of data, which is the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias if someone printed these files on paper.”
Leah Feiger: This was a huge claim, especially since at the same time, as you recall, DOGE teams were laying off federal workers and gaining access to sensitive data across the country. We reached the peak this year in April. Berulis went public in an NPR article. His name was attached to it and he claimed that a threatening letter had been taped to his door, but he was already afraid to speak out. Swift forward a bit, Berulis has now filed a defamation lawsuit in DC court against Elon Musk. He said Musk made him a target for further violence by falsely stating that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was false. This is a really robust claim for a number of reasons, and what it all really brings to mind is that last year Musk shared a post on X from a right-wing influencer claiming that DOGE had been exonerated and that the whistleblower’s testimony was essentially false. Then it happened-