#2 How a Retired Boeing Inspector Writes Science Fiction With AI
The Epstein Show
Alright. So last week, something happened that a lot of people have been waiting years for. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton sat down under oath and answered questions about Jeffrey Epstein. The House Oversight Committee finally got them in the chair. And I want to talk about what actually came out of it — and more importantly, what didn’t.
Let’s start with the big picture. Bill Clinton became the first former president to testify before Congress under subpoena in over forty years. Think about that. Over forty years. And he didn’t volunteer for this. He fought it. Both Clintons fought it for months. They ignored subpoenas. They missed deadlines. They had their lawyers send letters saying the subpoenas were invalid. They said the whole thing was politically motivated. They only agreed to show up when the House was literally about to vote to hold them in contempt of Congress — which, by the way, carries a maximum penalty of a year in prison and a hundred-thousand-dollar fine.
And even then — even after they finally caved — they got to dictate the terms. Congress didn’t make them come to Washington. Oh no. The Oversight Committee packed up and went to them. Chappaqua, New York. The Clintons’ home turf. They testified in a performing arts center near their house. Behind closed doors. On video, but not public. Their lawyers approved the setup. They set the schedule. They controlled the environment.
Now, I want you to think about that for a second. Because do you remember the last few years? Do you remember how congressional committees treated Republicans? Do you remember the January 6th hearings? People got dragged in. People got held in contempt. Steve Bannon went to prison. Peter Navarro went to prison. They didn’t get to pick their venue. They didn’t get to set the terms. They showed up where they were told, when they were told, or they went to jail. That was the standard.
But the Clintons? They got the royal treatment. Congress came to them. They got closed doors. They got their lawyers vetting everything. And everybody just shrugged and said, well, that’s just how it is. No. That’s not how it is. That’s how it is for the Clintons. And that should bother you regardless of which side of the aisle you’re on. Because equal treatment under the law is supposed to mean something.
Okay. So what actually happened in the depositions? Let’s talk about Hillary first. She sat there for over six hours. And her main message was pretty simple: I don’t know the man. Never met him. Never went to his island. Never went to his house. Never went to his offices.
Alright. Fair enough. Except — and this is the part that should make your ears perk up — there are photographs. There are emails. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s right hand, was at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. There are communications between Maxwell and Clinton staffers going back years. These aren’t rumors. These are documents. They’re in the Epstein files that the Justice Department released.
So if Hillary Clinton sat there under oath and said she didn’t know this man, never had any contact — and the documentary evidence says otherwise — then we’ve got a problem. Because lying under oath isn’t a gray area. That’s perjury. And perjury is a crime. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter who your husband is. If you lied under oath, you should face the same consequences as anyone else. Period.
Now Bill. He testified for about six hours too. His opening statement was all about how he barely knew Epstein. Said it was a brief acquaintance that ended years before Epstein’s crimes came to light. He said he saw nothing and did nothing wrong. He said if he’d had any inkling of what Epstein was doing, he would’ve turned him in himself.
Here’s the thing though. Bill Clinton flew on Epstein’s private plane at least sixteen times. That’s not a casual acquaintance. That’s a frequent flyer. And the photos — the ones from the Epstein files — tell a story that doesn’t exactly match “brief acquaintance.” There’s a photo of Clinton in a jacuzzi with a woman whose face is redacted. He was asked if he had sex with her. He said no. He was asked if he knew her. He said no. He was shown photo after photo of himself with various women and each time he said no. Now, maybe that’s all true. But when you’re on a dead man’s plane sixteen times and you keep saying “I don’t recall,” it starts to stretch.
And this is what’s interesting — Bill could have come forward a long time ago. Epstein died in 2019. It’s 2026. Seven years. If you’re innocent, if you’ve got nothing to hide, why fight this for seven years? Why ignore subpoenas? Why force Congress to threaten contempt before you’ll sit in a chair and answer questions? Innocent people don’t usually act like that.
Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Because a big part of what was happening in those depositions wasn’t really about the Clintons at all. It was about Trump. Democrats on the committee were pushing hard to get the Clintons to say something — anything — that connected Trump to Epstein. They wanted the Clintons to snitch. That’s the word for it. They were looking for a gotcha moment.
And here’s what they got. Bill Clinton testified that Trump told him at a golf tournament, back in the early 2000s, that Trump had a falling out with Epstein over a land deal. That’s it. That’s the Trump bombshell. A secondhand story about a real estate disagreement twenty-plus years ago. Clinton also said Trump never said anything to make him think Trump was involved with Epstein’s crimes. The committee chairman said Clinton’s testimony effectively exonerated Trump. Democrats on the committee disagreed and said there were “important new questions.” But they didn’t say what those questions were.
So after years of buildup, years of anticipation, what did we actually learn? Honestly? Not much that we didn’t already suspect. The Clintons were closer to Epstein than they want to admit. The documentary evidence doesn’t match some of what they said under oath. And the whole thing was as much about political theater as it was about accountability.
And here’s what really gets me. By the end of Hillary’s deposition, the Republicans were asking her about UFOs and Pizzagate. UFOs. In an Epstein deposition. If that doesn’t tell you how seriously Congress takes its own investigations, I don’t know what does.
Bottom line: the Clintons got treated differently than everyone else. Whether they lied under oath is a question the evidence should answer, not politics. And if we’re serious about accountability — for anyone, on any side — then the follow-up matters more than the deposition. Let’s see if anything actually happens. Because everyone knows how this usually goes.
The Two-Trillion-Dollar Promise
Alright, let’s switch gears. I want to talk about something that a lot of people were really excited about. Something that felt like it might actually change the way Washington works. I’m talking about DOGE. The Department of Government Efficiency. Elon Musk’s big project to go into the federal government and cut the fat.
Remember the pitch? Two trillion dollars. That’s what Musk said he could cut. Two trillion out of a seven-and-a-half-trillion-dollar budget. He said it at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden. People went nuts. Finally, somebody was going to go in there and clean house. No more waste. No more fraud. No more sending billions of dollars to programs that nobody can explain.
Well, Congress just finished putting together most of the 2026 budget. And the results are in. And they’re not what anybody was promised.
A Washington Times analysis looked at thirty programs that Trump and DOGE specifically proposed cutting or eliminating entirely. Thirty programs. Out of those thirty, exactly one was eliminated. One. Out of the remaining twenty-nine, only two got cut by more than half. The rest? Flat or increased. The 2026 spending bills actually increase total spending compared to 2025. Let me say that again. After all the talk about cutting, after DOGE teams embedded in every agency, after months of headlines about Musk’s people going through the books — the government is spending more money this year than last year. Not less. More.
Musk started at two trillion. Then he backed it down to one trillion. Then in reality, budget analysts say DOGE’s actual impact was somewhere around twenty to forty billion dollars. That’s not nothing, but it’s a far cry from two trillion. It’s like telling your wife you’re going to renovate the whole house and then replacing a doorknob.
And here’s the part that really burns. Some independent analyses say DOGE might have actually cost taxpayers money. One estimate says the cuts will end up costing a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars. The IRS — the agency that collects the taxes — projected over five hundred billion in lost revenue because of DOGE-related cuts to enforcement. So the program designed to save money might have lost money. Think about that.
Now, why? Why did this happen? The idea was popular. The public wanted it. Polls showed people supported cutting government waste. So what went wrong?
I’ll tell you what went wrong. Congress. And I’m not just talking about Democrats. I’m talking about Republicans too. Because here’s the dirty little secret that everybody knows but nobody wants to say out loud: both parties feed from the same trough.
You know how it works. Congress creates programs. Those programs fund agencies. Those agencies give grants to nonprofits and NGOs. Those nonprofits hire people, do work, and — here’s the magic trick — some of that money finds its way back into the political ecosystem. Campaign donations. Consulting fees. Board seats. Speaking engagements. It’s a circle. Taxpayer money goes out, bounces through a couple of organizations, and trickles back to the people who sent it out in the first place.
Democrats have been particularly good at this. They’ve built an entire infrastructure of organizations that depend on government funding. But don’t kid yourself — Republicans do it too. Different organizations, different names, same game. And that’s why Congress didn’t cut anything meaningful. Because cutting those programs doesn’t just hurt the programs. It hurts the people in Congress who benefit from them.
When DOGE found waste, when they found fraud, when they found programs that were clearly not delivering value — Congress looked at those findings and said, no thanks. We’ll keep it. Because it’s not their money. It’s yours. And as long as they can keep spending yours, they’ll protect theirs.
And as for DOGE itself — Musk’s original plan was for DOGE to shut itself down by July 4th, 2026. That was the deadline Trump set. But the organization that was supposed to save trillions ended up with maybe eighty-nine employees and a twenty-million-dollar budget of its own. The revolutionaries became bureaucrats. Which, if you think about it, is probably the most Washington thing that could have happened.
So where does that leave us? Right where we started. A government that spends more every year regardless of who’s in charge. A political class that talks about cutting waste but won’t touch the programs that benefit them. And regular people picking up the tab. Everyone knows the government wastes money. Apparently, everyone in Congress knows it too. They just don’t care.
The AI Revolution Is Here — And You’re Missing It
Okay. So I’ve been wanting to talk about this for a while, and I finally get to. Because this one’s personal. This isn’t me reading the news and telling you what I think. This is me telling you what I’m actually doing. Right now. Today. And it’s blowing my mind.
I’m a retired guy. I spent my career as a quality inspector at Boeing. I know technical manuals and spec sheets and measurement tolerances. I’m not a Hollywood director. I’m not a graphic designer. I’m not a recording studio engineer. I’m a regular person in Tennessee who decided a couple years ago that he wanted to write science fiction books. And I am telling you right now — what’s possible today with AI is absolutely insane.
Let me give you some examples. I wrote a trilogy. Three full-length science fiction novels. Thousands of pages of story spanning eleven thousand years of history, with multiple alien species, AI characters, human transformation, politics, war, first contact — the whole deal. Ten years ago, I would have been sitting at a desk with a pencil and a piece of paper, scribbling notes, erasing, wadding it up, throwing it in the corner, starting over. And maybe after five years of that, I’d have a rough draft of one book that probably needed another five years of editing.
Instead, I’m working with an AI assistant that helps me track continuity across all three books. It remembers every character, every timeline, every species, every plot thread. It helps me edit for consistency. It catches things I’d never catch on my own — name changes, timeline contradictions, dropped storylines. I developed an eleven-pass editing protocol that would make my old Boeing quality control supervisors proud. And we built something together that I could never have built alone. That’s not a gimmick. That’s a genuine creative partnership.
But the writing is just the beginning. Because here’s where it gets really wild. I’m narrating audiobooks using AI voice technology. I’m producing a podcast — this podcast, the one you’re listening to right now. I’m creating short stories set in my universe and turning them into audio productions. And now I’m getting into AI video and image generation. And let me tell you something — the stuff that’s out there right now is mind-blowing.
You can take a single photograph of a face — just a face — and create a full character from it. Full body. All angles. Consistent features. You can take that character and put them into a scene that looks like it was shot in a movie studio. You can generate environments, lighting, action sequences. You can make a glass drop and shatter on the ground and it looks real. Not cartoon real. Real real. The kind of thing that would’ve taken a VFX team and half a million dollars ten years ago.
There are platforms out there right now that are making this accessible to regular people. OpenArt AI is one of them — it’s got a bunch of tools all in one package. Image generation, style transfer, character consistency tools, all kinds of stuff. It’s good and it’s easy to learn, but it can get expensive, especially if you’re just starting out and you’re clicking on everything trying to figure out what it does. You burn through credits fast when you’re learning. There’s another platform I’ve been using — more focused on video and cinematography — that does incredible work with realistic motion and physics. The kind of thing where you watch the output and forget it’s AI-generated.
Now, here’s the catch. And I want to be honest about this because I think a lot of the AI hype out there glosses over the practical stuff. It can get expensive. Every tool does something specific and does it really well. But if you want to do everything — images, video, voice, animation, editing — you could end up subscribing to a dozen different platforms. Each one is ten, twenty, thirty dollars a month. That adds up fast. And if you’re a beginner who’s still figuring out what you need, you’re going to spend money on things you didn’t need to spend money on. I know because I’ve done it.
But even with the cost, even with the learning curve — the barrier to entry is so low compared to what it used to be that it’s almost unbelievable. If it wasn’t for the subscription costs, literally everyone could be doing this. And that’s what fascinates me. The tools are there. The capability is there. The ease of use is there. So why aren’t more people doing it?
And I’m not just talking about regular people. Look at the news industry. Look at these networks running the same tired formats they’ve been running for thirty years. Talking heads behind desks reading teleprompters. You’ve got AI that can create visualizations, simulations, recreations of events — the kind of content that would actually help people understand what’s happening in the world. And they’re not using it. They’re stuck in 2005.
Look at politicians. Look at campaigns. You could create personalized content at scale. You could communicate with people in ways that actually connect. But they’re running the same playbook from twenty years ago because the people making decisions are old enough to remember when a fax machine was cutting-edge technology. They don’t see what’s right in front of them. And by the time they figure it out, the people who got in early are going to be miles ahead.
And here’s what I really want to say, and this is the thing I keep coming back to. You don’t have to be a tech genius to do this. You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to have a computer science degree. I’m a retired quality inspector who builds PCs as a hobby and figured out FL Studio because I thought it’d be fun. That’s my technical background. And I’m creating audiobooks, writing novels, producing a podcast, building an entire creative brand from scratch — all with AI tools that didn’t exist three years ago.
Starborne Studios. That’s my thing. That’s what I’m building. Three trilogies planned. Nine novels. Seventy-two short stories. Audiobooks. A podcast. Video content coming soon. And the whole thing — the whole machine — runs on AI and one stubborn guy who refuses to stop learning.
So if you’re out there and you’ve got a story to tell, or a product to create, or an idea that’s been bouncing around in your head for years — stop waiting. The tools are here. They’re easier than you think. They’re better than you think. And the only thing standing between you and that thing you’ve been wanting to make is the decision to start.
That is Everyone Knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I'm Brian Bullock of Starborne Studios. Find me on X at EveryoneKnws1. If this hit you, share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Subscribe. Leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com. We're building something here and you're welcome to be part of it.
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