On this episode of The Dossier Podcast, we have Brian Chau on the show. He’s the CEO of the newly launched Effort.News, which Chau argues is a genuinely new model for investigative journalism. We talk about the stories sitting untouched for years — what Chau calls “crowns laying in the gutter” — simply because nobody wants to comb through millions of pages of grant tables, financial disclosures, and legal filings. Where most outlets have tried to use AI to write, Chau says that’s backwards: the models are still poor writers, so Effort.News writes everything by hand and uses AI purely as a reading and pattern-finding engine.
We also discuss the broader trends in the AI field and the politics infiltrating the space, including current doomer/safetyist world, and the business factions and ideologues currently clashing over who gets to control the future.
You can find Effort.news here and follow Brian on X @brianchau57.
