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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Massive day to day, tons of big stories, five big stories I wanna go through. Obviously, the first one is that the US jury finds OpenAI CEO Sam Alman not liable to Elon Musk for straying from charitable mission because Musk waited too long to sue. Weird, like, technicality, I guess, but good news for OpenAI. Judge confirms verdict and that Musk's lawsuit is dismissed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Apparently, they deliberated for about ninety minutes.
Speaker 1:Ninety minutes.
Speaker 2:And they didn't really make any type of statement other than the statute of limitations.
Speaker 1:And so Max Zaff over at Wired says, jury unanimously rules that Musk's claims are dismissed on the timeliness issue. He filed the lawsuit too late. Court affirms it will uphold the jury's decision. It's over. Musk loses the lawsuit against OpenAI.
Speaker 1:And Mike Isaac, the rat king, says unanimous verdict in mosque versus OpenAI is in after only ninety minutes of deliberation. So did they deliberate today? They showed up at nine and went from nine to 10:30 and then delivered the verdict? Is that what we think happened? Because Friday's off in the jury.
Speaker 1:Right? No Fridays.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jury showed up this morning.
Speaker 1:Okay. Talked.
Speaker 2:For ninety minutes.
Speaker 1:But they get to think about it all weekend and Friday? Interesting.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:Rat King says huge day. Wow. And what did Tyler post? He posted a video of Drake talking about something. What's going on over here?
Speaker 1:W's in the shot. Shot. W's in the shot. Is that the song? OpenAI's Slack right
Speaker 2:now? Think that's when he is gambling in front of
Speaker 1:It is a funny way to pronounce chat, but I enjoy it. The big news that was going on all weekend actually, there was a lot of anticipation for Leopold Aschenbrenner's situational awareness hedge fund to drop the 13 f. It was supposed to go out Friday night, 5PM. Everyone was saying, oh, if he if he's not releasing
Speaker 2:throughout the entire day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They were very excited.
Speaker 2:There was some speculation that he'd been able to petition to not have to release it.
Speaker 1:That was one theory?
Speaker 2:That was one theory. The other theory is that he was just entirely in cash.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Don't need to report Just wind it down.
Speaker 2:Said it was a good run. Yeah. It's over.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. He's like, counted the oooms, and there's none left to count. We're done. Pack it up.
Speaker 1:No. Quite the opposite. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the hedge fund's Chief Investment Officer, is known for making extremely successful investments based on his core assumption that frontier AI will continue to improve at half an order of magnitude, 0.5 ooms per year, which translates into a thesis that AI will create unprecedented demand for compute and its associated bottlenecks.
Speaker 2:John, they're saying it is blindingly light. Is brightly, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think we got some new lights. We're we're sort of, you know, tweaking things. I do like that the wide is less dark. There's been a a number of times where we've gone and watched videos and we've been very dark in the front.
Speaker 1:So we're bringing some light around. We'll see. Maybe maybe we overdid it. Maybe we'll dial it back. I need to brush my hair.
Speaker 1:My hair's a little a little scruffy today. I also need a haircut, but we'll get to that
Speaker 2:somewhat later. Get to that later in the show. John will be getting a haircut live Live. On the program.
Speaker 1:Potentially.
Speaker 2:But But before we go any further Yeah. I Nick over the weekend Oh, yeah. Picked up a little gift for our very own Tyler. Tyler, let's Open pull it Can
Speaker 1:we go to
Speaker 2:open it on on the video on the video, Nick. Hold up. We waited in line.
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 2:We waited in line.
Speaker 1:Hey. What do we got for Tyler?
Speaker 2:We have very long line just for you, Tyler, because what is
Speaker 3:I'm trying to open it.
Speaker 1:Little anti clock.
Speaker 3:Wow. It's a what is I don't know how to pronounce this. Am I reading upside down? It's a little little watch.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 3:Watch It for entirely
Speaker 1:is not
Speaker 2:I don't know if you thought it might be might have been something else, like the Swatch AP collaboration.
Speaker 1:But really like the whole, you know, everything in the Swatch portfolio is fantastic including this. I don't know. Describe what's on there. What is on there?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Nick, what is it?
Speaker 3:It it has a rotating bezel.
Speaker 2:That's not
Speaker 3:Oh, It says it has a rotating bezel.
Speaker 2:Okay. But just to be clear, it's not the
Speaker 1:It's not
Speaker 2:the it's not the pop.
Speaker 1:Was completely sold out and causing like stampedes all over the country, all over the world. I saw footage, I think from an international country, around people really mobbing it. You you were mentioning that you thought it was maybe an aura loss for both companies because of the Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just Like the the Your
Speaker 1:brain is now associated with chaos. Yeah. That's not good.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? And AP It's a series. It's although it's exclusive, like you have to sort of wait in line. The waiting in line is like, here, have a have a Diet Coke and sit in this private room while I tell you that you will not be getting an allocation in the skeletonized AEP
Speaker 2:Come back soon.
Speaker 1:Royal Oak or whatever. Right? Come back soon. And it's a and it's a it's a very high brow waiting in line. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And this was
Speaker 2:Yeah. They had to come out over time This is and say violent. These are not gonna be limited. We're Yeah. Selling them a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so the the people that wait in line just to sell on the secondary market, think, have done pretty well.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:At least in the
Speaker 1:short term. Okay.
Speaker 2:But I would expect that over time
Speaker 1:Bring in
Speaker 2:the list. Prices will will sort of retrace toward retail. I did see a funny graphic of somebody that was like Uh-huh. Basically saying like, you know, comparing like getting a job versus waiting in the line to get it. And you actually did quite a bit better if you just got a job on Monday instead of getting in the the line.
Speaker 2:And then over time, you know, your your earnings really ramp out.
Speaker 1:Let's go back to Leopold Ashenbrenner and his 13 f, the infamous 13 f. There's a lot of discussion around it on the timeline. Really, like, we have not seen this level of attention on a hedge fund's filings in a very long time. It's it's because it's breaking out of FINTwit. It's breaking into tech, teapot and techx and all of that, mostly because the a lot of the discussion centers around.
Speaker 1:The filing shows he's made some massive puts across the semiconductor sector, 2,000,000,000 on SMH, the Van X Semiconductor ETF. And so there's it feels like maybe more of a pointed thesis, less broad, hey, semiconductors are gonna do well, more. I actually, me, Leopold in this case, understand where the real value is, what companies within the semiconductor industry are undervalued, which ones are actually going to be useful in the next iteration of the build out. And a lot of stuff has been priced very hotly. Some stuff is overheated.
Speaker 1:The NVIDIA trade for a while became like crushingly obvious, and then it grew so much that that was not one of his early positions. Now it is looking like he is going long in video, which is interesting in the backdrop of is NVIDIA a car? Do they still have a moat? Well, there might still be something else going on there. You have to dig in through this and understand what's going on.
Speaker 1:But the filing is hard to interpret cleanly because a 13F is only a snapshot of holdings as of 03/31/2026. These positions are stale. He might have rotated out of these. 13Fs do disclose put and call options. They don't disclose the strike prices, expirations, premiums paid, hedge ratios, short position swaps, or whether the options are part of broader structures.
Speaker 1:So you have to be careful out there if you're trying to read the tea leaves too precisely. You're you're you know, you can only take away so much from these. So Fei Zhao, I don't know how to pronounce that, says unfathomably bad takes around this morning and a good reminder of why 13 digging is mostly a waste of time. March 31, we were in the heat of the Iran war. Makes sense to put on hedges at the time.
Speaker 1:Options exposure on 13 gets quoted notionally as if it were 100 delta, I. E, all 100 shares per contract. So when you see something like, oh, he owns $1,000,000,000 of Intel, it's usually he owns the right to purchase $1,000,000,000 of Intel, and he has actually deployed far less capital into that position, although it is sometimes an important sign of things to come. We have no way of knowing whether these were five delta convexity hedges and represented a fraction of what people are saying were billions in puts or whether they were ITM puts, in the money puts. Further, outright shorts don't get reported either.
Speaker 1:Too much noise associated with the things that happened back in March that aren't relevant now. We have no idea about his turnover in assets and trade frequency. A lot happened in the months of April and May. His positioning could be completely different. Making investment decisions for 80 vol assets based on data from months ago sounds like a good way to burn money.
Speaker 1:So don't idolize people and develop your own thesis for why you own and sell things. That is a good takeaway. Anyway, the AI backlash is continuing in a bunch of different ways and one interesting sort of twist on this is that a lot of the AI Maxis, the AI Bulls were sort of concerned at least that this would all be fossil fuel based build out because everything else was too slow. They might be they may be fans of nuclear. They might be fans of of solar, but it was, seen as infeasible, seen as the the timelines being far too long.
Speaker 1:So, if Leopold is in fact taking a position in T1 Energy, that sort of leads me to think that there's a little bit of a shorter timeline to at least bringing some solar power to bear, during the AI build out, that it's not, all just sort of a hope and a dream that there will be solar power on the grid in any near amount of time. A lot of the nuclear power companies are moving on the backs of the AI build out, but it's still 2032, you know, when we talk to these folks, even even the optimistic ones. So there has been big pushback on AI data centers across the board. We've talked about this a bunch. And it's both a left and right wing issue now.
Speaker 1:Sagar and Jedi predicted predicted this, I think, last year when he joined our show. And it's been interesting. Left wing is worried about job displacement, theft of art, destruction of creativity. Right wing sees them as surveillance centers. That's the latest term is that they're they're they're used to spy on people.
Speaker 1:So that's an anti libertarian, anti right wing position. But there are a whole bunch of others just this hollowed out Coal town is voting right wing and then data center comes to town and they see it as just making their town worse off and benefiting like the coastal elites and like the
Speaker 2:People have flagged too that both sides are using AI to create graphics to oppose data centers.
Speaker 1:That's true. Yeah. There's all these like deep ironies. There's there's a whole piece on someone who's protesting data centers and using a lot of AI to research how she can push back.
Speaker 2:Gabe says data centers need to be rebranded to Data Ranch.
Speaker 1:Data Ranch. I like a Data Ranch. That's a good one.
Speaker 2:Ox. We got Ox powered.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Salty says that Leopold sold Blue Energy in the latest 13 f. So Trimmed. Or trimmed. So if that's if that's the case, then there you go.
Speaker 1:The latest debate that I saw was over this huge data center in Utah that's being championed by Shark Tank's mister Wonderful, Kevin O'Leary. Are you familiar with this whole thing? Yeah. Someone dug into like the plan and the plan actually seems pretty reasonable. But mister Wonderful, he is a he's sort of an over the top caricature of a businessman.
Speaker 1:Like, he plays one on TV. He is a real businessman, but he also plays a businessman on TV. And so he's a bit of a soft target. Like, he was recently seen sporting not one, but two expensive watches, not unlike Tyler Cosgrove over there. He went to the Oscars wearing a Cartier crash skeleton and a ruby Rolex or Daytona.
Speaker 1:And I believe he also had a, like a trading card around his neck. So very ostentatious, very over the top, a very soft target if you're looking for someone to target in like a, he's doing it for the money, you know? Yeah. Like it's pretty easy. And so if you want to paint data center construction as maybe not in the best interest of average Americans, Kevin O'Leary is going do a lot of that, a lot of the heavy
Speaker 2:Mr. Wonderful in the context of developing large scale infrastructure that people are afraid of Yeah. Sounds like a super villain, too.
Speaker 1:Yes. And also, like, you can put this in contrast to Eric Schmidt or Tim Cook, where the the previous generation, like the major hyperscalers, like the big tech companies, they've done a pretty good job building a lot of infrastructure, making really, really bold climate pledges saying, we're going to be net zero by this year. Our data centers are really clean. They built a lot of data centers without really any disruption. There was no backlash to Google Cloud through fifteen years or ten years of building AWS.
Speaker 1:And and and so now But
Speaker 2:neither of them were rocking dual iced out
Speaker 1:So you made the case for quiet luxury. The quiet luxury of a of a Tim Cooker and Eric Schmidt.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, in this case,
Speaker 2:it's No. I think like mister mister wonderful is not not the guy to be the face of.
Speaker 1:Potentially not. But apparently, his his actual data center plans are reasonable. It actually seems pretty by the book according to current plans. It's in a remote area. It uses its own power and water, and it doesn't seem to disrupt any local communities.
Speaker 1:We can pull up this video from Quick Thoughts that has a little bit of a breakdown.
Speaker 4:Million views complaining about a giant data center in Utah. And I'm kind of confused by that because I would think that an uninhabited desert valley in Utah is the perfect place to build a giant data center.
Speaker 5:I've been following really closely what's happening in Box Elder County, Utah where Canadian billionaire Kevin O'Leary Canadian. That's a big largest center. A $100,000,000,000 project. Okay? This would be the largest data center in the world at over 40,000 acres.
Speaker 5:And at full capacity, the data center, which is called the Stratos Project, is set to use nine gigawatts of electricity.
Speaker 1:Gigabytes. You saw that?
Speaker 5:Double the entire amount of electricity used by
Speaker 2:Well, she said she said it correctly.
Speaker 4:First, the data center is
Speaker 1:built She's Yeah. Yeah. But but but the transcript said gigabytes, which is funny.
Speaker 4:It's not a
Speaker 1:AI fails again. We need another data center to fix that.
Speaker 2:Steve in the X Chat says, TBPN Studio uses the equivalent of 23 atomic bombs of energy acres. That's To produce niche technology content.
Speaker 4:Is so large is because they are buying water rights of the current property owners. So the current property owners are using water for agricultural irrigation. The data center project buys that land, buys a huge
Speaker 1:So he makes this sound good, but then it's like, wait, are we gonna have less food? That doesn't seem that good. The point is is that it's not taking it from, like, someone who is going to be paying water or some local community. It's like there's there's there's already water rights there that are staying in that valley.
Speaker 4:It's not drawing power from the grid. If we look at electricity consumption by state we can see that Utah just doesn't use that much electricity compared to other states. There are plenty of states that use double or triple. Tennessee is about triple, Pennsylvania four times, Texas is like 10 times more than 10 times what Utah uses. So if over the course of this project they reach their goal and they double or triple Utah's electricity usage, So why is that bad?
Speaker 4:It's not incurring more cost to the people of Utah because they're building their own power plant.
Speaker 5:By Utah as a whole. Robert Davies, a physics professor from Utah State University, says that he actually thinks the project will require an additional seven to eight gigawatts of waste heat energy, meaning that the project in total will be 23 gigawatts of total thermal
Speaker 1:energy, which is the equivalent
Speaker 5:of dropping 23 atom bombs in Utah every single day. No. Also, let's Okay.
Speaker 4:Electricity generation across every state is going to have that same thermal load property. Not every generator is perfectly efficient so they're going to generate waste heat as well. So if you say okay we're gonna have 23 atom bombs a day worth of electricity going off in Utah well then currently we have two thirty atom bombs day going off in Texas.
Speaker 1:You gotta put everything in there. More atom bomb comparison. Like, your car is, like, the size of, like, five atom bombs. Estimated that Utah's an atom bomb is, like, maybe this big, maybe a little bit bigger.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Your car weighs as much as seven atom bombs. That's It makes it sound so much more, like, weighty when you're, like, just comparing everything to atom bombs.
Speaker 5:Night temperature by 28 degrees.
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 1:actually pretty crazy. 28 degrees feels like a lot.
Speaker 4:Daytime temperature could increase two to five degrees throughout Hansel Valley, not the state of Utah, the valley where the data center is being built. Same with nighttime temperature, could increase up to 28 degrees trapped in the valley. Hansel Valley is an uninhabited desert valley. So if you build a big power plant here and a big data center here, maybe it'll increase the temperature of this valley by five degrees. But okay, nobody lives there.
Speaker 4:I think this project solves a lot of people's stated concerns with data centers. You're worried about water usage? They're reallocating agricultural water to cool the data center. Worried about power cost?
Speaker 2:They're building That's on Worrying
Speaker 4:about waste
Speaker 2:heat? Helping you.
Speaker 1:But I like vegetables. In the middle
Speaker 4:of an uninhabited desert valley where it's already hot. And you're worried about this is such a huge project. This is a giant data center or something, world's biggest data center. Well, that's just data centers that don't have to be built in other places that are being built in this uninhabited desert valley. I think the concerns in her video are just fear mongering for reasons that I hope I've explained here.
Speaker 4:Thanks for your time.
Speaker 1:I guess the question is, they say that there's water for agricultural usage right now in that valley, but the valley is uninhabited and seems like a desert. So it doesn't seem like they're growing food there. So like, where is that water actually going? Because is it just getting piped to some other farm like far away? Or was it like that they they were
Speaker 2:way way way back in the day. Way back in the day. Yeah. You could just have a piece of land Yep. You could drill a well and you could pull up as much water as you wanted.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then people realized that if you have a property here Yeah. And there's property here here here here, they're oftentimes all pulling from the same aquifer. Yep. So you, all of a sudden, if you come in, you move in next to me, and you start pumping Yeah.
Speaker 2:Billions of gallons. Milkshake. Yeah. You're drinking my milkshake.
Speaker 1:I drink your milkshake. I drink it up.
Speaker 2:And so it's very possible that all these parcels of land which they collectively bought, they all have their own water rights. That doesn't mean they're being used. Right? So because people will sell their water rights to, like, a neighboring property that is. And
Speaker 1:so But my question is, like, sounds like they sold the water rights previously, or they had some sort of deal to send the water that they were getting out of the desert, which I can't imagine produces that much water, but I guess it does, use it for like agricultural purposes. Like, what were they growing?
Speaker 2:Well, agricultural could mean you have some like, you have some cattle. Like, there's a there's a bunch of different Yeah. Potential meanings for that. It doesn't mean you're Yeah. Growing fresh produce.
Speaker 1:But were they actively using it or
Speaker 2:were they just like No. Not That's the other thing. Don't know. That's the other thing too. Could have been agricultural land Yeah.
Speaker 2:But not
Speaker 1:Could have been like a failed farm. It's not farming anymore. Like a former livestock farm, something like that. But I don't know. These points, like as you said, I think, are going to be hard to break through just because AI is so deeply unpopular for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 1:And we should watch the video of Eric Schmidt getting booed on stage at University of Arizona. He says, this is incredible. Artificial intelligence getting booed out of the stadium in any commencement speech. It's mentioned in maybe telling college students AI was taking their jobs wasn't the best strategy. Let's watch this clip.
Speaker 6:The architects of artificial intelligence. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. We do not know. We do not know the precise contours of what this if you'd if you'd let me make this point, please.
Speaker 1:Step one. Get if you're giving a commencement speech, you
Speaker 2:gotta bring a soundboard. Yeah. It'd be like, AI yeah. It's not that bad, but also, I hear you.
Speaker 6:Including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country.
Speaker 1:They're really going crazy.
Speaker 6:We thought that we were adding stones to a cathedral of knowledge. And nothing humanity had been constructing for centuries.
Speaker 2:There's just a low level boo
Speaker 1:the whole time. It's so rowdy. Like, normally, you think there'd be, like, a little bit of boo, and then
Speaker 2:they just, like, get quiet down. Okay?
Speaker 1:This is about to turn into a riot. This is crazy. Did he just bail on this thing?
Speaker 6:Surrendering your agency. We have only seen
Speaker 1:At this point, I mean, you gotta go off script. You could you you just can't stay in
Speaker 2:a script. Funny that if you cut it up in the right way Yeah. You could make it seem sound like the most Also
Speaker 1:could be
Speaker 2:you will surrender your agency.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The big thing is, like, I don't know that that is it it like, everyone is booing for a slightly different reason, but it's like this ensemble of problems and and grievances with AI generally. Like, one thing that I'm that I've been, like, frustrated about is everyone is vibe coding, like, twenty four seven leaving MacBooks open, talking about, like, productivity. And yet, the, like, the magical moments, the consumer technology has been, like, completely left behind. There was a time when we got the cloud, we were building a lot of data centers, but every year you'd get like a cool new thing, like Yelp would come out.
Speaker 1:And it was like, it wasn't changing the world, but it was like, oh, you could find a cool new restaurant. Maybe like, or Groupon. Like Groupon was like not a great business ultimately. But like for the first couple months of Groupon, you could like go try a restaurant for like half price and it just felt like magical. Like Uber, when that came out, it was like, wait, I can go out and call a taxi cab service.
Speaker 1:Maybe it comes, maybe it doesn't. Stand outside in the cold, try and flag a car.
Speaker 6:There were all these you think they
Speaker 2:were like angry at usage nano banana usage limit?
Speaker 1:Probably. Probably.
Speaker 2:Is that Yeah. Is this whole thing just a misunderstanding? They
Speaker 1:might think we're in a plateau and they might just be upset with the lack of progress outside of coding domains. Yeah. The writing is just still not that good. I need these
Speaker 2:I can clock it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's still clockable.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. At first, I I thought they were mad that, like, at Google, Eric Schmidt was he he was doing too too many, you know, stock buybacks instead of investing
Speaker 1:Too much cash
Speaker 2:in balance sheet. Innovation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Having a 100,000,000,000 on the balance sheet in cash is just unacceptable. Like, yes, you get Waymo. Yes, you get DeepMind.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because it just
Speaker 3:says they don't know
Speaker 1:what to
Speaker 3:do with the money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. They weren't innovating for a long time and and then that makes a lot sense why you would boo them. Sort of the tealian.
Speaker 2:The tealian boo. Boo. In those handful of sentences, like, is that that felt like a speech more potentially like oriented towards maybe like the Stanford student body, which is like how are you going to Mhmm. Contribute
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:To AI. That's what I was like that's what was standing out to me. Yeah. Being like, don't be afraid of this thing, like jump in Yeah. And help shape it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And if you're maybe someone at in Stanford
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you have the opportunity to go actually be involved and you're at the epicenter of all this progress, maybe that would land. Yeah. But at U of A where people are hearing like Yeah. Hey, all the different career paths that I'm
Speaker 1:I would prefer thinking about. Terms of commencement speaker, I would prefer someone like a Sam Soulek to give the commencement speech. People don't want other stuff built generally. Like there's very there are very, very few things that people are like, yeah, I'd be down for that to be built. People people like the status quo.
Speaker 1:They're they're happy with things as they are and they don't like change. Like any anything new is going to be like somewhat somewhat unpopular as nuclear power was. Not building out nuclear power fifty years ago was, of course, one of the greatest mistakes humanity has made and one that contributes directly to data center opposition today, given questions about the impact on energy bills. We have to do this another time. But did we run out of nuclear scientists?
Speaker 1:Was that what stopped the build out? Did we not have enough geniuses? I don't know. Maybe. We'll dig into it.
Speaker 2:Is People are saying homes in the chat. But then again, people don't really want more homes in their area once they already own
Speaker 1:a home. They block them all the time. They block they block home construction all the time. And and also permitting and also expansion of existing homes. Like, these things I'm I'm not saying I'm not saying that they're like as unpopular as data centers.
Speaker 1:No way. Data centers are are are at the bottom. But homes are something maybe in the abstract, but, like, new housing in communities is, like, razor's edge, fifty fifty, sixty forty. Like, it's like, there is a lot of opposition to building just in America, probably. Like, that's just the nature of our society.
Speaker 1:So Ben Thompson has some solutions, though. What do you got to do to build a data center properly? He says, first, this sounds obvious, but tech needs to fix its messaging problem, the issue. And if an answer seems obvious, then there surely must be some other problem at play. It's threefold.
Speaker 1:First, a good number of people in tech, particularly at one of the leading labs, genuinely believe most jobs are going away. They could lie more effectively, but beyond being dishonest, it's also a betrayal of the fanatical devotion with which they are pursuing AI despite obstacles, including the challenge of spending billions and billions of dollars on models that are obsolete in months, if not weeks. Second, it is extremely hard to describe the benefits of inventions not yet made, cures not yet discovered, economic activity not yet engaged in, etcetera. This is always the burden of those arguing in favor of progress, and the sheer potential of AI actually makes the problem even harder. Fifty years ago, everyone was like, electricity isn't that expensive.
Speaker 1:Why do we need to build nuclear power plants? They're scary. And now electricity is expensive, we're like, Oh, we should have built those. That's the way these things always go. Third, tech is and always has been terrible at understanding and relating to the rest of society.
Speaker 1:I go back to how Silicon Valley was extremely skeptical of Facebook, a company predicated on connecting with friends and family precisely because it's filled with people running away from their friends and family. You can optimistically say that people in tech live in the future. You can also more cynically say they live in opposition to and denial of humanity for better and, in this case, for worse. Second, tech could control the misinformation. TikTok is a major point in this.
Speaker 1:He talks about how the algorithm is still controlled by the Chinese, and maybe there's misinformation there. Second, in a rather ironic twist, Meta has learned the lesson of trying to control misinformation, doesn't want to overtly censor, but now the company gets no credit for not censoring misinformation about data centers. And so it's like this weird thing. And then third, this was a wildcard, which I didn't think of, but X is the the the social media platform X and Twitter, formerly Twitter, is actually incentivized to be anti data center in a weird way because X is owned by SpaceX, and a big part of SpaceX's upcoming public offering is the possibility of building data centers in space. This is like total tinfoil hat, I think, but, but it's an interesting, like okay.
Speaker 1:And and he says, to be clear, he hasn't seen any evidence of thumb on the scale or not. I certainly haven't. But, you know, part of the problem, is that we would never know if there were. He goes on to to propose something very, very bold, very, very bold. He says, instead, the most obvious solution is the most crass.
Speaker 1:Simply start giving people money. Not universal basic income, though. If data centers are a resource for our future, then start paying people for that resource. If that data center up the road weren't sold to my neighbors based on amorphous tax benefits that my local government may or may not spend appropriately and I was talking to Tyler about this earlier but rather were to result in a check-in the mailbox every year, I suspect you could get a lot of people on board. So he put some numbers together, and he says, for the data center up the road, it was expected to be 1.6 gigawatts, which could generate around $3,000,000,000 in annual operator revenue.
Speaker 1:Deforest, the village it was to be built in, has around 11,500 people. So you could pay every person in that village $10,000 a year and it would only equate to 3.8 of annual revenue grossed by the data center. And he says, I bet that that proposal would have been approved and I bet the operator could very easily pass on those costs to actual data center users. It also highlights how relatively pathetic the original commitment that I think the data center said, Hey, we'll give you $50,000,000 which is like nowhere near what that math works out to. So data center's coming to town.
Speaker 1:You get to vote for it. But the data center company says, hey, we'd like you to vote for this, and we will give you a $10,000 check-in the mail every year forever while we're operating this. And that seems like that could actually get people on board.
Speaker 2:So Yes. And this goes back to even months ago at this point. We were saying, you know, AI is not a is not like a, you know, natural resource where you benefit from having it in your backyard. Right? If you're just an everyday AI user, you do not care where the data center is at all.
Speaker 2:And so if someone is coming to put it in your community, it's pretty fair to want to benefit from that in some And like a direct payment like that, I think, I'm sure that will happen more.
Speaker 1:And we will see you tomorrow. It'll be wonderful evening. Pacific. We love you. Goodbye.