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28 January 2026
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Miss Evers Boys from Movies That Move We -01/2/2025
my thoughts and trasncript + video
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2835&type=status
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28 January 2026
This event began 01/28/2025 and repeats every year forever
What she misses is a crossroads of three things. First, the studios want to maximize profit, which means they want to use media properties they already own and attract the most sales. Second, the properties studios own are quite old, decades old, centuries old and tend to be created by white people of european descent filled with mostly characters described in appearance or culture as white of european descent, which has the problem of not being as attractive to non whites than non white characters. Third, the modern buyers of media content are not overwhelmingly , overwhelmingly meaning seventy five percent or more , of white European descent and the studios want to cater to them.
The three elements show the problem. The studios always want to save money+ not risk money, which means the studios are not going to buy new non white European characters or use lesser known non white European characters that many, including many non whites of European descent, don't know.
So with the desire to maximize profits + risk least investment revenue this means changing white European characters they already own into non white European characters is most efficient.
This is what I think many, Black or non black are missing. When I think on most popular movies in the last thirty years, few are of a new property. Every star wars/star trek/marvel/dc film is of an old property. Every biopic is of an old property, that being a famous person. Little that makes the most money is new, is unheard of.
Even nosferatu which has made a splash is again, is old. So, if old properties are the fans are buying, and all the old characters owned by studios is white, simple arithmetic to save money or risk less revenue is to change characters already owned to fit the non white European buyer.
And again, prove the studios wrong, not with artistic judgement videos or human communal statement videos but by sales.
Consider DC has access to Milestone and yet, it never occurred to them to give milestone characters their own movies. Here is a comic imprint made by non white Europeans, mostly blacks, that has a gallery of non white European characters made by non white Europeans. DC made birds of prey changing white European descent characters.
Marvel treats black panther as their non white world movies. Black panther 1 had more black people in an action sci fi adventure than ever before. black panther 2 added first peoples of the Americas taking namor the submariner and changing his character's design dramatically. But this was cheaper, and the profits prove the studios right.
The biggest problem with this issue is, and I can speak of this as a writer. New characters or lesser known characters haven't proven to have big money legs. Notice I didn't say they couldn't they haven't proven it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czf2k-WJ6iU
MY COMMENT
The problem the studios have is they want to always save money + risk the least revenue developing+ gain the most buyers in modernity which has many more buyers not of white european descent than ever before, and based on financial results of films, year in and year out, it only leads to one conclusion and that is race swapping. To restate my point, the financial returns of the film industry prove their race swapping actions correct, against other options.
TRANSCRIPT
0:00 before we get started I have a brand new 0:02 short film that is releasing on this 0:04 channel very soon I love this short film 0:06 I think it's the best one I've done yet 0:07 and I really need your guys' help for 0:09 feedback for this short film so if when 0:12 I drop it which is going to be before 0:14 the end of January I would really 0:16 appreciate if you would give it a watch 0:18 and please I highly recommend you watch 0:21 this short film to the end because it's 0:23 the best one I've done so far so without 0:25 further Ado let's get on to the video 0:27 one of the big controversial things 0:29 that's been going on and talked about a 0:31 lot for years now is racebending 0:34 characters and I haven't really thrown 0:37 my hat in the ring to talk about it yet 0:39 other than saying you know talking about 0:41 things like Batman cape Crusader that 0:43 just because you race bend a character 0:45 does not mean that the show is going to 0:47 be bad or that it needs to affect 0:49 anything but there were a couple maybe 0:52 three things that I read and that had 0:54 happened that made me finally want to 0:57 make this video because something really 1:00 got under my skin regarding this entire 1:03 conversation now race bending characters 1:06 it's very controversial does it ever 1:08 affect story is it wrong to ever race 1:10 bend a character we've seen it happen a 1:13 lot with some very iconic characters 1:15 lately that they get race Bend and it 1:17 causes a lot of tension and infighting 1:20 over this now when I was growing up 1:22 there were a lot of projects that did 1:25 have technically race bent characters 1:27 that I loved one of my favorite movies 1:30 growing up and what I think might even 1:31 be the best adaptation of Cinderella 1:34 ever was with Brandy and Whitney Houston 1:37 when they did the Roger and Hammerstein 1:39 or Stein's version of it and that was an 1:41 insanely successful movie when it aired 1:44 on TV and I loved watching it growing up 1:46 also in my teen years getting into the 1:49 Avengers and all that you had Samuel L 1:51 Jackson as Nick Fury and that is a race 1:53 bent version of the character from the 1:56 comics but everyone seemed to love 1:58 Samuel Jackson as Nick I don't remember 2:00 there being any sort of controversy over 2:03 it and so you can see that in the past 2:06 there were these times when race bending 2:08 a character would not be a big deal and 2:12 most people I think just assumed you 2:13 must have gotten the right person for 2:15 the role and would go from there but 2:18 however I would like to point out for 2:19 something like Nick Fury in uh The 2:22 Avengers I don't doubt that there was 2:24 some conversation behind the scenes 2:26 going on about you know the Avengers the 2:28 original six were six white people let's 2:30 get somebody in here who's non-white 2:32 somebody like a high caliber actor so um 2:36 we can maybe get a different sort of 2:38 audience because Hollywood has had that 2:39 thinking of for decades that they need 2:41 to introduce non-white characters to get 2:44 different demographics to hopefully 2:46 watch their film so that was the way it 2:49 was it wasn't really seen as a big deal 2:51 and I think we just went through a 2:53 period of time when racebending any sort 2:55 of character like it it didn't really 2:57 seem to anger people enough or make that 3:01 much of a controversy for Hollywood when 3:03 they did it for example you had Jessica 3:05 Alba as a Latina actress um playing Sue 3:09 storm who's a white character they did 3:11 make her wear makeup to whiten her face 3:14 a bit and that would not fly today you 3:16 had oh I can't remember the name but 3:18 Michael Clark Duncan but he did a RAC 3:20 bement version of Kingpin for Ben 3:23 Affleck Daredevil and then you have um 3:26 ight Shyamalan decided for whatever 3:28 reason to get white actors to play the 3:30 characters in his Avatar movie which I 3:34 definitely do not approve of because you 3:37 know you should have gotten Asians to 3:39 play Asian characters but anyway uh for 3:42 whatever reason he got away with it at 3:43 the time and so I think that that just 3:45 shows that there was a time in history 3:48 where race bending was just like for 3:50 whoever it was being done to it was not 3:52 seen as such a huge deal that it would 3:54 prevent it from happening in the first 3:55 place and this was after a time where 3:57 decades ago it used to be very difficult 3:59 for for a non-white actor to get a good 4:01 role it there there were very very 4:03 limited roles back then decades ago and 4:06 if you go and listen to actors doing 4:08 interviews it was very limiting the 4:10 kinds of roles they were offered if you 4:11 weren't a white person so we can see how 4:13 it's changed over time but now uh the 4:17 race bending of White characters has 4:19 become super controversial and why is 4:23 that well because they've pushed it so 4:25 hard and they've pushed it in such a way 4:27 that it's in ently cause tension like 4:31 for example um another thing I can say 4:34 growing up is that there used to be some 4:36 cartoon characters that occasionally 4:37 would be raceman like Liz Allen from 4:40 spectacular Spider-Man that cartoon in 4:42 the original uh comic she is a Caucasian 4:45 blonde girl and they made her a Latina 4:48 in the cartoon and I never had a problem 4:51 with that I enjoyed that version of Liz 4:53 Allen and I never heard anyone who 4:54 didn't have a problem with that and why 4:57 well Liz Allen that look for the 4:59 character it isn't as well known and so 5:01 I don't think people notice it as much 5:03 also there was justification and once 5:05 again they've been trying to 5:07 diversifying things like that for years 5:08 now but there was justification for Liz 5:10 Allen because she was another white 5:13 blonde character from Spider-Man she had 5:15 the same look as Gwen Stacy so changing 5:18 her per race making her look different 5:20 that it just it just act added an actual 5:23 diversity to the cast so that every 5:25 character had their distinct look 5:26 different ethnic background and I think 5:28 that that really worked another 5:30 character that was race bent in a 5:32 cartoon X-Men evolution Amara AKA magma 5:35 she was a character who was another 5:37 Caucasian blonde from the comics but 5:39 there were already a lot of Caucasian 5:41 blondes on the New Mutants team that she 5:43 originated from and they made her Latina 5:46 in X-Men evolution and once again 5:48 probably trying to diversify with that I 5:50 thought it worked though you know it was 5:52 helpful the characters all have their 5:54 distinct looks I actually really like 5:56 that version of Amara so you see in the 5:58 past it can work and not cause 6:01 controversy so how did race bending 6:03 characters start to become so 6:05 controversial for a couple different 6:06 reasons number one you'll notice when it 6:08 comes to characters like magma or Liz 6:11 Allen these were characters that weren't 6:13 very well known or I would even say in 6:15 the case of Nick Fury it was a 6:17 combination of even Nick Fury wasn't 6:19 that well known also um back then they 6:21 didn't do race bending as much they 6:23 didn't push it as hard I don't think 6:25 that people expected anything other than 6:27 they probably just got the right actor 6:29 for the role 6:30 but the problem that has happened these 6:32 days is they have been doing it to more 6:34 and more iconic characters like Mary 6:37 Jane Watson that is a character who is 6:39 very very iconically a redhead a white 6:43 redhead that is an iconic look for the 6:45 character it is really it really defines 6:48 her so when you did that when you cast 6:51 Zena as the character in culture 6:53 Michelle Jones but she's sort of pseudo 6:55 MJ it caused a lot of backlash and this 6:58 is what you see 7:00 when they race Bend characters that are 7:02 more wellknown why well because people 7:04 have an expectation for the character to 7:07 look like they do in the source material 7:09 when it's that iconic like I would say 7:12 the same thing and I've talked about 7:13 this before when it comes to like you 7:15 know Brandy and Cinderella I love that 7:17 movie I love her take on Cinderella 7:19 Cinderella is a story that's been told 7:21 by every culture every ethnicity it 7:23 really doesn't matter fairy tales can be 7:25 a lot more loose than that and I would 7:27 say the same for a lot of the fairy tals 7:30 from Disney but and while I would say 7:33 please like no one should attack the 7:34 actors and actresses over this stuff I 7:37 do think that Disney has set up their 7:39 actors and actresses up to fail when 7:42 they choose to race Ben characters in 7:44 their liveaction Disney movies why well 7:47 because while you can tell a new story 7:50 with these characters and these versions 7:52 but there with the Disney Live Action 7:54 remakes with the people who watch them 7:56 they want the whole thing with them is 7:58 that they're shot for shot remakes of 8:00 the original they're supposed to be 8:01 remakes of the original so when you set 8:03 up the expectation that this is Ariel 8:05 for example in the RAS B that character 8:08 then you start to cause controversy 8:11 there is why doesn't this character look 8:13 the way she does in the original and 8:15 does it matter that much well in this 8:18 case when I'm talking about the little 8:19 mermaid no it doesn't there's no reason 8:21 why someone couldn't play a good version 8:23 of uh The Little Mermaid that's a 8:26 different race but the problem with it 8:28 is that here's what happens you'll get a 8:30 character like Mary Jane or Ariel or 8:33 whoever it is you'll get a character 8:34 where people have a certain expectation 8:36 of how they're supposed to look uh based 8:39 on how they were from the source and 8:41 people might be critical because it 8:43 doesn't look the way that it does in the 8:44 source and that's just fandom you know 8:47 like fans want things to look the way 8:49 they were in The Source material they 8:50 want events to play out the way they did 8:52 in the material uh we'll have more 8:54 examples of that in a minute but like 8:56 that is a part of fandom when they 8:57 things are iconic from the mat material 9:00 The Source material they want that to be 9:01 reflected and here's what I've seen 9:03 happen over and over and over again in 9:05 the past decade is that they will they 9:07 will race been an iconic character 9:09 people will get upset by it and then the 9:12 response will be like you're just racist 9:15 like the only reason why you could 9:17 possibly dislike this change or find it 9:19 questionable or just not be really into 9:22 it is because you're are racist you just 9:25 cannot stand seeing a black person get a 9:28 role like this get a big role like this 9:31 and that is the only reason why you 9:33 don't like it and so because disliking 9:36 something like that gets you called a 9:37 racist you know that's a very 9:40 inflammatory terrible word to call 9:42 someone or to be accused of that in 9:45 invites anger that invites Anger from 9:47 the people who initially perhaps just 9:49 wanted a character to look the way they 9:51 did in the source material and now all 9:53 of a sudden they are in have been called 9:55 an inflammatory term that creates anger 9:57 that feeds it back to more anger at the 10:00 person that they cast in the role where 10:02 it was race bent which indeed I I 10:04 imagine I can I don't have to imagine 10:06 the people who' have been casting these 10:08 roles do not like having anger pushed 10:10 back at them so that will come back to 10:12 the way that they communicate with the 10:14 fan base or the audience and so on and 10:17 on and on it goes on like that and the 10:19 tensions rise now once again be before 10:22 it wasn't really controversial to race 10:25 benen characters so much now part of it 10:27 once again is happening because they 10:29 started doing it to more and more iconic 10:30 characters they start doing more 10:31 frequently and the other problem is they 10:34 grandstand about it so much because once 10:36 again I think before people would just 10:38 assume that if you got a role it was 10:40 because you were the right person for 10:41 that role but now Hollywood has just 10:44 grandstand it so much about look at us 10:47 we we put uh non-white characters in 10:50 this project we're putting more 10:51 diversity more non-white characters look 10:53 at us aren't we good people aren't 10:55 aren't people just going to be so happy 10:57 to be represented it's always BR 10:59 standing from Hollywood posturing about 11:01 how good they are doing this stuff and 11:02 the more they've talked about it the 11:04 more they've called attention to it it's 11:06 made people realize this is not just 11:08 happening because they happen to find 11:10 the right person for the role it's 11:12 happening because they have institutions 11:14 behind the scenes that demand this 11:15 they're doing this because of agendas 11:18 not because they just found the person 11:20 for the role and that once again blows 11:22 it up to be much more than just you 11:24 wanted to see this character look the 11:26 way it was in The Source material it 11:27 starts to become about modern-day 11:30 politics it starts to become about 11:32 agenda pushing it starts to become about 11:34 something so much bigger than that there 11:36 people are now seeing that these things 11:37 are not happening just because they 11:39 found the right person for the role and 11:41 that makes you think you know you could 11:43 have gotten the right person for the 11:44 role maybe or the person who looks the 11:47 way you wanted that character to if they 11:49 didn't have these institutions if they 11:51 weren't posturing about this and once 11:53 again that feeds more tension that is 11:56 all that has happened with this stuff is 11:57 feeding more tension to the point where 12:00 we now see explosions if ever any person 12:03 is playing a race bent character whereas 12:05 before it didn't used to be such a big 12:08 deal now I've been of the opinion for 12:10 years that it doesn't it shouldn't 12:12 matter that much race spending a 12:14 character usually if it doesn't affect 12:16 the story if they found the right person 12:18 for the role like once again Jeffrey 12:20 Wright playing Commissioner Gordon he 12:22 did such a great job at that character 12:25 as that character but some things have 12:28 made me change my mind a little bit 12:30 because of the hypocrisy I see and these 12:33 are some of the things that made me want 12:35 to make this video for example the other 12:37 day I was talking about how I do not 12:39 understand why people want Kiki Palmer 12:41 to play Rogue not because of her race 12:44 but because I just don't see the 12:46 character in her maybe she's been in 12:48 something that I haven't seen where she 12:49 reminds people of the character I just 12:51 don't see it and the point of me saying 12:53 that it's not about her race is me 12:55 saying that if there was an actress that 12:57 just completely embodied the role and 12:58 she happened to be A different race then 13:00 I could understand it but I didn't 13:02 understand this one and someone under 13:04 that Community post wrote that um it it 13:08 should it that race never matters to a 13:11 white character story that it rarely 13:13 ever is relevant to a white character 13:14 story and that that's why it's okay to 13:17 race Bend White characters obviously 13:19 that's what we're talking about here 13:20 because in this day and age they would 13:22 never dare to try to race Bend uh or 13:25 outright race bend a black character and 13:29 that got under my skin a little bit 13:31 because I'm like but it has happened 13:33 when it's relevant to the story Snow 13:35 White that was a big one they had to go 13:38 in and you they already revealed this in 13:40 the international trailer completely 13:42 changed the story to explain a different 13:44 reason why she's called Snow White 13:46 because they had to ca cast a brown 13:48 actress to play her because um for a 13:51 character who's described as Skin as 13:53 white as snow that's how she's defined 13:55 as but Disney in the day and age when 13:57 this was made just would not have a 13:59 white lead as this character so they had 14:02 to change it to honor the day I was born 14:06 my father named me Snow White and this 14:09 is an example a prime example where they 14:12 had to change the story because they 14:14 couldn't cast a white actor for the 14:15 character and it got nothing but 14:17 ridicule once again I don't know what 14:19 they're thinking about this it got 14:20 nothing but ridicule this decision 14:22 another example they did is the 14:24 Fantastic Four uh years ago they cast 14:27 Michael B Jordan to play Johnny dorm and 14:29 that creates problems because uh 14:31 Invisible Woman They cast as a blonde 14:34 white woman like she was in the comics 14:36 but um they're supposed to be biological 14:39 brother and sister but they had to 14:40 change that for Fant for stick because 14:43 they couldn't have four white leads and 14:45 if you think that this isn't happening 14:46 this has been a major conversation stuff 14:49 happening behind the scenes in Hollywood 14:51 that is part of the reason why they had 14:53 such a hard time casting for the new 14:54 Fantastic 4 is they're having a hard 14:56 time with a movie that has four white 14:59 characters as they are in the comics and 15:02 they can't have that they can't have a 15:04 movie with four white leads anymore but 15:06 you see it did change the source 15:08 material this does happen when you're 15:09 changing the source material for me 15:12 personally though it's like you know 15:14 true diversity in real life is sometimes 15:17 imbalanced like in the 90s and and the 15:20 these are shows I grew up with Loving 15:22 Family Matters all black m cast Fresh 15:25 Prince all black main cast I think 15:27 sometimes they brought in a white 15:28 characters like a villain or something I 15:29 didn't care Disney was really patting 15:31 itself on the back of being like we 15:33 hired an all Asian uh cast for Mulan and 15:36 I'm like yeah you should have because 15:38 Mulan is set in China centuries ago you 15:41 know sometimes you're going to have it 15:43 where your cast is disproportionately 15:45 black or Asian or white in fact that's 15:48 just the way it is that's what diversity 15:49 truly looks like we don't all have 15:52 perfectly uh uh quotas filled out in 15:55 real life that's just the way it is and 15:57 if you're not a racist that shouldn't 15:59 bother you that's just the way life is 16:02 so it's like there shouldn't be a 16:03 problem if you just happen to have four 16:06 white leads for Fantastic 4 as is 16:08 accurate to the source material cuz 16:10 there's other stuff like black panther 16:12 that should be a black man cast like 16:14 that's what true diversity looks like 16:16 but you know that comment that person 16:18 made bothered me because it's like no 16:20 one would ever say that blade or cyborg 16:24 should ever be A different race and I 16:26 would agree cuz those are who the 16:27 characters are so it's like for example 16:29 with Rogue yeah I would like I could 16:33 like in the past I could completely 16:34 understand you found the right person 16:35 for the role the the super official 16:37 races the change but you found the right 16:38 person so it's fine but I'm like yeah I 16:41 would like Rogue to hopefully be played 16:43 by a white actress why because she's 16:46 been white in the comics for 40 years 16:49 yeah that that because it's accurate to 16:51 the source material I would like sorg to 16:53 be black because that's accurate to the 16:55 source material in terms of race 16:56 spending there has been controversy 16:58 about colorism about are they hiring 17:01 light brown skinned actors to play Black 17:04 characters uh there's been some 17:06 controversy about that like Sunspot in 17:08 the various adaptations he's had he's 17:10 supposed to be black in the comics and 17:12 it's important to his character and his 17:13 origin for him to be black and fans of 17:15 that character have been upset that he's 17:17 always lighter brown skin and AD ad 17:19 adaptations and I would agree with them 17:22 why because I know what Sunspot is 17:24 supposed to be in the comics people want 17:26 storm to be cast by a darker skin 17:29 black actress and I'm like yes because 17:32 she while storm and the comics was born 17:35 in Harlem she grew up in I think she 17:37 moved to Cairo Egypt she grew up in 17:39 Kenya for a time like that should be the 17:41 characters now from that I think that 17:43 it's okay for someone to also say I 17:45 would like this character to be white 17:48 solely because that's the way that they 17:50 are in the source material and that's 17:52 fine because all this race bending has 17:55 done is it's caused tension it's caused 17:57 hate to the actors that they do it to 18:00 it's caused a lot of division and and 18:02 things blowing up out of proportion to 18:04 become even bigger than just a simple 18:06 casting in a show you know here's the 18:08 real big Crossroads of thinking is for a 18:11 long time I've always been like you know 18:13 if you've just found the right person 18:14 for a role then race bending is okay but 18:17 the problem is that it only ever goes 18:19 Runway like back in the day when they 18:21 cast uh mostly non-puerto Ricans in fact 18:24 only one Puerto Rican to play a Puerto 18:25 Rican character in Westside Story um uh 18:28 one could also say that the actors did a 18:30 good job with their roles but would it 18:32 be was it still right for them to take 18:34 roles away from Puerto Ricans no and so 18:37 that's sort of the crossroads I come to 18:39 with my thinking on this stuff is that 18:41 there is a double standards with it and 18:44 recently the latest controversy over Ray 18:46 spending came over the upcoming 18:47 Spider-Man cartoon where Norman and 18:49 Harry Osborne are black and all I saw 18:52 for this was ridicule not from white 18:55 people so much but black people I just 18:57 saw so many people on YouTube or Twitter 19:00 and these accounts of from black people 19:02 making fun of this because they don't 19:04 actually want it and it was a completely 19:06 an unnecessary change and I watched a 19:08 video that was actually from a black 19:10 person and and he said something that 19:12 really stuck out to me in it and it was 19:15 that um they keep saying this doesn't 19:16 matter it doesn't matter it doesn't 19:18 affect the story so why should it bother 19:19 you and he said if it doesn't matter 19:22 then why do it and it's insulting 19:24 because it makes me feel as a black 19:27 person that you don't see me me as 19:29 legitimate unless I have to have 19:30 something else that came from a white 19:32 person it's annoying and there's going 19:34 to be people saying oh it doesn't matter 19:36 calling demingo is a good actor and he's 19:38 voicing the character you are 100% right 19:41 so if it doesn't matter why do it and 19:45 and that's the whole thing with this 19:46 race bending is so many times it's been 19:49 uh forced and unnecessary and people see 19:52 that and all it's done is drive up 19:53 tension so here is my proposal How about 19:56 if a character is supposed to be black 19:58 then cast a black person if a character 20:00 is supposed to be white cast a white 20:02 person and that way you won't have so 20:04 much tension from groups and and all 20:06 this infighting and arguing and and you 20:09 don't have to focus so much on people's 20:12 race all the time and I think that's 20:14 where we're headed right now you can 20:15 really see how Disney has been affected 20:18 by this and the Tangled live action 20:20 remake and I am completely against a 20:22 tangled liveaction remake but all of the 20:24 the rumored castings for it has then 20:26 Sabrina Carpenter or Florence Pew so a 20:29 white blonde woman to play a white 20:31 blonde woman good fine I think that 20:34 Disney has learned from the Snow White 20:36 movie that it is just ridiculous to 20:37 force it when it doesn't make sense and 20:39 at this point you know it's it is a 20:41 little crazy because as I said race 20:44 bending used to not be a big deal he 20:45 used to get away with it used to be able 20:47 to do it it used to not be a big deal to 20:49 see a non-white person play a 20:51 traditionally white character but they 20:53 made it a problem they made it so that 20:56 now people see it as Force they see it 20:58 as just agenda pushing they don't see it 21:00 as natural to the story they don't 21:02 assume that the person must have gotten 21:03 it because they were right for the role 21:05 they've spoiled it in effect because a 21:08 lot of this stuff that we've been seeing 21:09 this activism in media is just there and 21:12 it just spoils the very thing that 21:13 they're trying to promote so um yeah 21:16 that's my stance on Race bending 21:17 characters I think once again you could 21:19 have gotten away with this uh once upon 21:22 a time I think that there is a big 21:24 minutia in it and it just kind of 21:25 depends on the standards of the day 21:27 about um what is considered morally 21:29 acceptable or not but at this point it 21:31 would just be best to cast people the 21:34 way they were from The Source material 21:35 so you won't have such a fury about it 21:38 but that's all I got for you guys today 21:39 are you mad about me I was nervous about 21:41 talking about this topic but I figure my 21:44 maneuver ears resolution going forward 21:46 is to not be so scared of talking about 21:48 these hot button topics and the more 21:50 that we talk about it and they're just 21:52 normal about it I think the less the 21:54 people out there who will just scream 21:56 racist at you will be able to be 21:58 prominent but that's all I got for you 22:00 guys today what do you think of this 22:01 video yell at me in the comments thank 22:03 you patrons as always for supporting me 22:05 even as I'm covering these topics uh 22:07 once again new short film coming out 22:08 soon and I will see you guys next time
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https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11424-economiccorner008/
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28 January 2026
This event began 01/28/2025 and repeats every year forever
TikTok is the first non usa website to be the biggest esocial website in online humanity. If bytedance sells TikTok wholesale it is a financial mistake Bytedance should sell tiktokusa not tiktok. In Europe/South America/Africa/Asia tiktok is the big leader in the world, selling it completely to a usa buyer is a usa win. It is like the Japanese automakers making manufacturing plants in the usa, when they through competition won the economic car market, it is a usa win. Make TikTokusa TTU and make sure tiktokusa has contractual arrangements that demand an integration/association with TikTok.
Profd , a member of aalbc cited below, said
The next 4 years could be a wild ride in that regard as oligarchs get to pick and choose freedoms.
This morning, I saw the handful of faces of people who could buy ByteDance i.e. TikTok. None of them were Black.
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11431-tiktok-service-restored-ban-suspended/#findComment-71294
Here is my issue. I don't mind a black buyer, though I think financially it is better to have a collection of black owners working together as a group. But for me the larger issue is the argument focuses on buying tiktok, instead of investing in a better online service for black people.
The film industry of Nigeria, commonly called Nollywood needs an online interface like a tiktok, I rather invest in that.
I know my words may seem like an attack to PRofd but they are not. My entire life, I have always heard the most financially capable blacks always emphasize investing in non black enterprises and never a word to owning a black owned enterprise. In my life, all to often, it is black people who are financially least capable or incapable who talk about owning black and not investing in non black. The internet is a huge place. Tiktok was not born because chinese were selling to the usa, tiktok is a clone of a chinese website to chinese people.
I rather a set of black investors invest in AALBC than tiktok.
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28 January 2026
This event began 01/28/2025 and repeats every year forever
DeepSeek and the quality of usa finance
MY THOUGHTS
600 billion dollars. Nvidia lost 17th percent of its value in a day . Like many USA firms or industries outside military products, they are weak from the 1900s to today.
DeepSeek said it cost 5 million dollars to produce a product rivaling any comparative computer program in storage/speed/calculation at 1/20th of the cost. So this proves the value of the usa firms is incorrect. which is my issue. Tesla was given such a high value. The USA's financial environment allows for a bloating of firms, like Nvidia, like Tesla that to be blunt, have each lost huge market shares which they shouldn't. The fact that the best electric cars are made in china exposes Tesla's management to me. The fact that Nvidia who was part of an industry that biden gave billions of investment to and are playing catchup exposes the chip industry in the usa. The fact that OpenAI and Anthropic isn't open source, and have been outed for their financial dysfunction, demanding such investment while not making the code public exposes them.
Yes, I will use this economic corner to share DeepSeek information as best I can. But my agenda is actually not about DeepSeek but the financial argument that the USA has a problem in the investment in technologies. There are those who believe that the one world has already been created and the USA is really the binder to all governments, in that mindset, no one is competing because the usa is really, the interchange between all governments. Human history proves fissures that are wanted, eventually become real, even if it takes a long time. The lesson in Chinese industries to all non white European governments, is to consider how they research , how they approach technological development. Is it about the Massachusetts institute of technology M.I.T. , is it about Stanford, is it about nepotism? I remember being a college student and I remember so often it was blacks who graduated from an oxford or an M.I.T. that would be given opportunities but didn't have the imagination or passion to do well with them. And the reason is simple, as anyone non white european knows, many people, including many asians that go to college in the usa are more interested with the appearance of intellect than being an ambitious creative. And for the record, the black people two generations earlier than mine, in my bloodline, earned multiple degrees or graduated from the ivy league schools, so my position is not about not going to an ivy league school or gaining multiple degrees, which i find so many black people love to suggest in a very enslaved way when another black person speaks of imaginations speaks of passion. Getting degrees for too many Black Descendent of Enslaved people is a Keeping up with the Jones act, to compare to other blacks in a view display to whites, not an important act to creativity or learning. The second article below may convince you, of my point in this economic corner, which has been uttered by many Black DOSers since the end of the war between the states in the usa.
I quote the first article below, and the source article the quotes are from are present.
Liang told Chinese tech publication 36Kr that the decision was motivated by scientific curiosity, not a desire to make a profit. “I couldn’t find a commercial reason to start DeepSeek even if you asked me,” he said. “Because it’s not commercially viable. Basic research has a very low return on investment. When OpenAI’s early investors gave it money, they probably didn’t think about the return they would get. Rather, they really wanted to do this business.”
...
While OpenAI o1 costs $15 per million incoming tokens and $60 per million outgoing tokens, the DeepSeek Reasoner API based on the R1 model offers $0.55 per million incoming tokens and $2.19 per million outgoing tokens.
...
To train its models, the High-Flyer hedge fund purchased more than 10,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs before the US export restrictions were introduced in 2022. Billionaire and Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang recently told CNBC that he estimates that DeepSeek now has about 50,000 NVIDIA H100 chips that they cannot talk about precisely because of US export controls. If this estimate is correct, then compared to the leading companies in the AI industry, such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, this is very small. After all, each of them has more than 500,000 GPUs.
...
This also calls into question the feasibility of the Stargate project, an initiative under which OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank promise to build next-generation AI data centers in the United States, allegedly willing to spend up to $500 billion.
Deepseek provides detailed technical reports explaining how the models work, as well as code that anyone can look at and try to copy.
Code on hugging face
https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
The code on GitHub
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
referral
https://fortune.com/2025/01/27/deepseek-just-flipped-the-ai-script-in-favor-of-open-source-and-the-irony-for-openai-and-anthropic-is-brutal/
ARTICLES
Where DeepSeek came from and who is behind the AI lab that shocked Silicon Valley
Taras Mishchenko
Editor-in-Chief of Mezha.Media. Taras has more than 15 years of experience in IT journalism, writes about new technologies and gadgets.
28.01.2025 at 09:56
A new artificial intelligence model DeepSeek-R1 from the Chinese laboratory DeepSeek appeared as if from nowhere. For the general public, the first mentions of it began to appear in the media only last week, and now it seems that everyone is talking about DeepSeek. Moreover, in just a week, the DeepSeek app has overtaken the well-known ChatGPT in the US App Store rankings. The model has also skyrocketed to the top downloadson the Hugging Face developer platform, asdevelopers are rushing to try it out and understand what this release can bring to their AI projects. So, logical questions arise: where did DeepSeek come from, who is behind this startup, and why has it made so much noise. I will try to answer them in this article.
Where DeepSeek came from
Given the history of Chinese tech companies, DeepSeek should have been a project of giants like Baidu, Alibaba, or ByteDance. But this AI lab was launched in 2023 by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund founded in 2015 by entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng. He made a fortune using AI and algorithms to identify patterns that could affect stock prices. The hedge fund quickly gained popularity in China, and was able to raise more than 100 billion yuan (about $15 billion). Since 2021, this figure has dropped to about $8 billion, but High-Flyer is still one of the most important hedge funds in the country.
As High-Flyer’s core business overlapped with the development of AI models, the hedge fund accumulated GPUs over the years and created Fire-Flyer supercomputers to analyze financial data. In the wake of the growing popularity of ChatGPT, a chatbot from the American company OpenAI, Liang, who also holds a master’s degree in computer science, decided in 2023 to invest his fund’s resources in a new company called DeepSeek, which was to create its own advanced models and develop general artificial intelligence (AGI).
Liang told Chinese tech publication 36Kr [ https://36kr.com/p/2272896094586500 ] that the decision was motivated by scientific curiosity, not a desire to make a profit. “I couldn’t find a commercial reason to start DeepSeek even if you asked me,” he said. “Because it’s not commercially viable. Basic research has a very low return on investment. When OpenAI’s early investors gave it money, they probably didn’t think about the return they would get. Rather, they really wanted to do this business.”
According to Liang, when he assembled DeepSeek’s R&D team, he also didn’t look for experienced engineers to build a consumer-facing product. Instead, he focused on doctoral students from top universities in China, including Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Beihang University, who were eager to prove themselves. Many of them had published in top journals and won awards at international academic conferences, but had no industry experience, according to Chinese technology publication QBitAI. [ https://www.qbitai.com/2025/01/241000.html ; identity of workers at DeepSeek]
“Our main technical positions are mostly filled by people who graduated this year or within the last one or two years,” Liang said in an interview in 2023. He believes that students may be better suited for high-investment, low-return research. “Most people, when they are young, can fully commit to a mission without utilitarian considerations,” Liang explained. His pitch to potential employees is that DeepSeek was created to “solve the world’s toughest questions.”
Liang, who is personally involved in DeepSeek’s development, uses the proceeds from his hedge fund to pay high salaries to top AI talent. Along with TikTok owner ByteDance, DeepSeek is known in China for providing top compensation to AI engineers, and staff are based in offices in Hangzhou and Beijing.
Liang positions DeepSeek as a uniquely “local” company, staffed by PhDs from leading Chinese universities. In an interview with the domestic press last year, he said that his core team “didn’t have any people who came back from abroad. They are all local… We have to develop the best talent ourselves.” DeepSeek’s identity as a purely Chinese LLM company has earned it popularity at home, as this approach is fully in line with Chinese government policy.
This week, Liang was the only representative of China’s AI industry chosen to participate in a highly publicized meeting of entrepreneurs with the country’s second-in-command, Li Qiang. Entrepreneurs were told to “focus on breakthroughs in key technologies.”
Not much is known about how DeepSeek started building its own large language models (LLMs), but the lab quickly opened their source code, and it is likely that, like many Chinese AI developers, it relied on open source projects created by Meta, such as the Llama model and the Pytorch machine learning library. At the same time, DeepSeek’s particular focus on research makes it a dangerous competitor for OpenAI, Meta, and Google, as the AI lab is, at least for now, willing to share its discoveries rather than protect them for commercial gain. DeepSeek has not raised funds from outside and has not yet taken significant steps to monetize its models. However, it is not known for certain whether the Chinese government is involved in financing the company.
What makes the DeepSeek-R1 AI model unique
In November, DeepSeek first announced that it had achieved performance that surpassed the leading-edge OpenAI o1 model, but at the time it only released a limited R1-lite-preview model. With the release of the full DeepSeek-R1 model last week and the accompanying white paper, the company introduced a surprising innovation: a deliberate departure from the traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) process that is widely used for training large language models (LLMs).
SFT is a standard approach for AI development and involves training models on prepared datasets to teach them step-by-step reasoning, often referred to as a chain of thought (CoT). However, DeepSeek challenged this assumption by skipping SFT entirely and instead relying on reinforcement learning (RL) to train DeepSeek-R1.
According to Jeffrey Emanuel, a serial investor and CEO of blockchain company Pastel Network, DeepSeek managed to outpace Anthropic in the application of the chain of thought (CoT), and now they are practically the only ones, apart from OpenAI, who have made this technology work on a large scale.
At the same time, unlike OpenAI, which is incredibly secretive about how these models actually work at a low level and does not provide the actual model weights to anyone other than partners like Microsoft, these DeepSeek models are completely open and permissively licensed. They have released extremely detailed technical reports explaining how the models work, as well as code that anyone can look at and try to copy.
With R1, DeepSeek essentially cracked one of the holy grails of AI: getting models to reason step by step without relying on massive teacher datasets. Their DeepSeek-R1-Zero experiment showed something remarkable: using pure reinforcement learning with carefully designed reward functions, the researchers were able to get the models to develop complex reasoning capabilities completely autonomously. It wasn’t just problem solving-the model organically learned to generate long chains of thought, check its own work, and allocate more computational time to more complex problems.
In this way, the model learned to revise its thinking on its own. What is particularly interesting is that during training, DeepSeek observed what they called an “aha moment,” a phase when the model spontaneously learned to revise its chain of thought mid-process when faced with uncertainty. This sudden behavior was not explicitly programmed, but arose naturally from the interaction between the model and the reinforcement learning environment. The model literally stopped itself, flagged potential problems in its reasoning, and restarted with a different approach, all without being explicitly trained to do so.
DeepSeek also solved one of the main problems in reasoning models: language consistency. Previous attempts at chain-of-thought reasoning often resulted in models mixing languages or producing incoherent output. DeepSeek solved this problem by smartly rewarding language consistency during RL training, sacrificing a slight performance hit for a much more readable and consistent output.
As a result, DeepSeek-R1 achieves high accuracy and efficiency. At AIME 2024, one of the toughest math competitions for high school students, R1 achieved 79.8% accuracy, which is in line with OpenAI’s o1 model. At MATH-500, it reached 97.3%, and at the Codeforces programming competition, it reached the 96.3 percentile. But perhaps most impressively, DeepSeek was able to distill these capabilities down to much smaller models: their 14 billion-parameter version outperforms many models several times its size, showing that reasoning power depends not only on the number of parameters but also on how you train the model to process information.
However, the uniqueness of DeepSeek-R1 lies not only in the new approach to model training, but also in the fact that it is the first time a Chinese AI model has gained such great popularity in the West. Users, of course, immediately went to ask it questions about Tiananmen Square and Taiwan that were sensitive to the Chinese government, and quickly realized that DeepSeek was censored. Indeed, it would be futile to expect a Chinese AI lab to not comply with Chinese law or policy.
However, many developers consider this censorship to be an infrequent extreme case in real-world use that can be mitigated by fine-tuning. Therefore, it is unlikely that the issue of ethical use of DeepSeek-R1 will stop many developers and users who want to get access to the latest AI development and essentially for free.
Of course, for many, the security of the data remains a question mark, as DeepSeek-R1 probably stores it on Chinese servers. But as a precautionary measure, you can try the model on Hugging Face in sandbox mode [ https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 ] , or even run it locally on your PC if you have the necessary hardware. In such cases, the model will not be fully functional, but it will remove the issue of data transfer to Chinese servers.
How much did it cost to develop DeepSeek-R1?
To train its models, the High-Flyer hedge fund purchased more than 10,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs before the US export restrictions were introduced in 2022. Billionaire and Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang recently told CNBC that he estimates that DeepSeek now has about 50,000 NVIDIA H100 chips that they cannot talk about precisely because of US export controls. If this estimate is correct, then compared to the leading companies in the AI industry, such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, this is very small. After all, each of them has more than 500,000 GPUs.
According to NVIDIA engineer Jim Fan, DeepSeek trained its base model, called V3, with a budget of $5.58 million over two months. However, it is difficult to estimate the total cost of training DeepSeek-R1. The use of 60,000 NVIDIA GPUs could potentially cost hundreds of millions of dollars, so the exact figures remain speculative.
Why DeepSeek-R1 shocked Silicon Valley
DeepSeek largely disrupts the business model of OpenAI and other Western companies working on their own closed AI models. After all, DeepSeek-R1 not only performs better than the best open-source alternative, Llama 3 by Meta. The model transparently shows the entire chain of thought in its answers. This is a blow to the reputation of OpenAI, which has hitherto hidden the thought chains of its models, citing trade secrets and the fact that it does not want to embarrass users when the model is wrong.
In addition, DeepSeek’s success emphasizes that cost-effective and efficient AI development methods are realistic. We have already determined that in the case of a Chinese company, it is difficult to calculate the cost of development, and there may always be “surprises” in the form of multi-billion dollar government funding. But at the moment, DeepSeek-R1, with a similar level of accuracy to OpenAI o1, is much cheaper for developers. While OpenAI o1 costs $15 per million incoming tokens and $60 per million outgoing tokens, the DeepSeek Reasoner API based on the R1 model offers $0.55 per million incoming tokens and $2.19 per million outgoing tokens.
However, while DeepSeek’s innovations are groundbreaking, they have by no means given the Chinese AI lab market leadership. As DeepSeek has published its research, other AI model development companies will learn from it and adapt. Meta and Mistral, a French open-source model development company, may be a bit behind, but it will probably only take them a few months to catch up with DeepSeek. As Ian LeCun, a leading AI researcher at Meta, said: “The idea is that everyone benefits from the ideas of others. No one is “ahead” of anyone and no country is “losing” to another. No one has a monopoly on good ideas. Everyone learns from everyone.”
DeepSeek’s offerings are likely to continue to lower the cost of using AI models, which will benefit not only ordinary users but also startups and other businesses interested in AI. But if developing a DeepSeek-R1 model with fewer resources does turn out to be a reality, it could be a problem for AI companies that have invested heavily in their own infrastructure. In particular, years of operating and capital expenditures by OpenAI and others could be wasted.
The market doesn’t yet know the final answer to whether AI development will indeed require less computing power in the future, but it is already reacting nervouslywith a drop in shares of NVIDIA and other suppliers of AI data center components. This also calls into question the feasibility of the Stargate project, an initiative under which OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank promise to build next-generation AI data centers in the United States, allegedly willing to spend up to $500 billion.
But on the other hand, while American companies will still have excess capacity for the development of artificial intelligence, China’s DeepSeek, with the US export restrictions on chips still in place, may face a severe shortage. If we assume that resource constraints have indeed pushed it to innovate and allowed it to create a competitive product, the lack of computing power will simply prevent it from scaling, while competitors will catch up. Therefore, despite all the innovation of DeepSeek, it is still too early to say that Chinese companies will be able to compete with Western AI tech giants, even if we put aside the issues of censorship and data security.
URL
https://mezha.media/en/articles/where-deepseek-came-from-and-who-is-behind-the-ai-lab-that-shocked-silicon-valley
Question and Answer excerpts from 疯狂的幻方：一家隐形AI巨头的大模型之路
...
36Kr: What deductions and assumptions have we made about the business model?
Liang Wenfeng: What we want now is that we can share most of our training results publicly, so that it can be combined with commercialization. We hope that more people, even a small app, can use large models at a low cost, instead of technology only in the hands of some people and companies, forming a monopoly.
...
36Kr: In any case, it's a bit crazy for a commercial company to do a kind of research exploration with unlimited investment.
Liang Wenfeng: If you have to find a commercial reason, it may not be found, because it can't be done.
From a business point of view, basic research has a very low return on investment. When OpenAI's early investors invested money, they must not have thought about how much return I would get back, but really wanted to do it.
What we are more certain now is that since we want to do this and have the ability, we are one of the most suitable candidates at this point in time.
...
36Kr: How would you see the competitive landscape of large models?
Liang Wenfeng: Large manufacturers definitely have advantages, but if they can't be applied quickly, they may not be able to continue to adhere to them, because they need to see results.
The top startups also have solid technology, but like the old wave of AI startups, they have to face commercialization problems.
...
36Kr: Talents for large-scale model entrepreneurship are also scarce, and some investors say that many suitable talents may only be in the AI labs of giants such as OpenAI and FacebookAI Research. Do you go overseas to poach this kind of talent?
Liang Wenfeng: If you are pursuing short-term goals, it is right to find someone with existing experience. But if you look at the long term, experience is not so important, but basic ability, creativity, passion, etc. are more important. From this point of view, there are many suitable candidates in China.
36Kr: Why isn't experience so important?
Liang Wenfeng: You don't have to be able to do this by someone who has done this. High-Flyer's principle of recruiting people is to look at ability, not experience. Our core technical positions are basically mainly fresh graduates and those who have graduated for one or two years.
36Kr: Do you think experience is an obstacle when it comes to innovating business?
Liang Wenfeng: When you do something, experienced people will tell you without thinking that you should do it, but people without experience will repeatedly explore and think seriously about what should be done, and then find a solution that is in line with the current actual situation.
36Kr: High-Flyer has entered the industry from a layman with no financial genes at all, and has become the head in a few years, is this recruitment rule one of the secrets?
Liang Wenfeng: Our core team, even myself, didn't have quantitative experience at the beginning, which is very special. It can't be said to be the secret of success, but it's one of the cultures of High-Flyer. We don't deliberately shy away from experienced people, but it's more about ability.
Take the sales position as an example. Our two main sales officers are both amateurs in this industry. One was originally engaged in the foreign trade of German machinery categories, and the other was originally written in the background of the brokerage. When they enter the industry, they have no experience, no resources, no accumulation.
And now we may be the only big private equity firm that can focus on direct sales. Doing direct selling means that there is no need to divide the fees to the middlemen, and the profit margin is higher under the same scale and performance, and many companies will try to imitate us, but they do not succeed.
36Kr: Why are many families trying to imitate you, but they are not successful?
Liang Wenfeng: Because that's not enough for innovation to happen. It needs to match the culture and management of the company.
In fact, they couldn't do anything in the first year, and only in the second year did they start to make some progress. But our assessment criteria are different from those of ordinary companies. We don't have KPIs and we don't have so-called tasks.
36Kr: What are your assessment criteria?
Liang Wenfeng: We are not like ordinary companies, we value the number of orders placed by customers, and our sales sales and commissions are not good at the beginning, but will encourage sales to develop their own circles, meet more people, and have greater influence.
Because we believe that an honest salesperson who can be trusted by customers may not be able to get customers to place orders in a short period of time, but it can make you feel that he is a reliable person.
URL
https://36kr.com/p/2272896094586500
Prior entry
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11445-economiccorner010/
POST URL
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11447-economiccorner011/
PRIOR EDITION
https://aalbc.com/tc/events/event/166-economic-corner-10-online-divestiture- 01282025/
NEXT EDITION
https://aalbc.com/tc/events/event/193-economic-corner-12-02122025/
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