Ep 162: Brian Chau Built an AI That Uncovers Fraud — It Just Found a $21 Billion Racial Wealth Transfer

Brian Chau (0:00)

I'm exposing government spending, I'm exposing misconduct, I'm exposing possible fraud. The crazy ex-anthropic guy, he was part of this left-wing NGO. They're going from one version of doom to another. We run these long-running AI queries 24, 48, 72 hours, connecting the dots between all of these financial payments.

Joe Lonsdale (0:21)

You won an IOI gold medal as a competitive programmer.

Brian Chau (0:24)

The people that I did IOI with, some of them founded billion-dollar companies, some of them made a theoretical breakthrough, and here I am in the dirty news business.

Joe Lonsdale (0:34)

We're excited to have you here to break your latest story. Brian, what did you uncover? Let's highlight a few other recent investigations.

Brian Chau (0:40)

They funded the journalist writing the article, the publisher, the subject of the article, and all three experts quoted in the article. There are people who will complain about this, but I think this kind of transparency will be embraced as just like a fixture of reality.

Joe Lonsdale (1:04)

Brian Chau is the youngest American to win an IOI gold medal, one of the top programmers in the world at a young age. A lot of his friends have gone on to build companies worth tens of billions of dollars, have solved important math and physics problems. He's taking a different direction. He's an investigative journalist who started Effort.News. Why is he doing investigative journalism? Well, it turns out there's new possibilities with AI. They can look at government data, can look at what's going on in our society, and find all sorts of crazy stories. Tens of billions of dollars of grift, all sorts of schemes none of us have heard about. Brian's getting a huge amount of attention for his journalism, which you hear about the one we're going to break today on the episode. Really excited to have with us today Brian Chau of Effort News. Brian, thanks for joining us.

Brian Chau (1:45)

Thank you for having me.

Joe Lonsdale (1:46)

Brian, you've won an IOI gold medal as a competitive programmer. You were in Forbidden Courses at UATX a while ago. That's how we originally met you, our university's program. A few years ago, welcome to the show. Tell us a bit about your background. Where are you from?

Brian Chau (1:58)

Yeah, so it's always interesting when people ask me this because I have very few memories of my childhood. But I was born in San Jose. When I went to high school, my parents moved me to this magnet school in Canada called Wolburn Collegiate Institute, which was known for two things. It was known for producing something like 20% of Canada's IOI medalists, this like big international programming contest.

And it was known for doing something similar with robotics. So I did that. I did that program. Ended up being the youngest person in North America to win an IOI gold medal.

Joe Lonsdale (2:35)

How old were you when you won?

Brian Chau (2:37)

I was 15

Joe Lonsdale (2:38)

Very good. Wow. And then you went to the University of Waterloo for a bit in machine learning, but then you left to work on AI policy in DC. Tell us about that.

Brian Chau (2:46)

Yeah, it was this very crazy time because when I was studying and going into machine learning, it was not a political issue at all. It was just like, oh, it was just something you did. It was like writing software, it was like writing like Postgres, something like that. And it was not a particularly political issue. But then around 2023, it really went into the spotlight or 2022, I think, really went into the spotlight. First with Biden's AI executive order, which had all sorts of crazy stuff. And then with Chachi BT and that entire release into the public sphere. And at the time, I had just been writing like a political theory blog about like Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt and all these like, all these thinkers that people have, that people read about in theory, that like went viral for all sorts of other reasons.

And I ended up being in a place where I was talking a lot increasingly about machine learning and what was happening and this increasing wave of pre-censorship that was happening in DC.

And at one point, I was just getting really frustrated and I wrote out like my entire plan of how I think an organization in DC to fight it against this stuff would work. And fortunately, some people actually offered me money to run this organization. And what was that called? Wildly successful. The organization was called Alliance for the Future. We ended up doing a lot of work in repealing the Biden executive order, but also putting together the directives that would make sure that that entire apparatus that it created in the executive branch would end up being repealed and the equity mandates being removed and all these other mandates being removed.