Ep. 902: The Pros, Cons, and Complications of Data Centers

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with journalist Ann Vaughan about the costs of datacenters on water, energy, and the land. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 3:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay, folks, here by popular demand is our show where we dive into data centers from a natural resources perspective. People are always writing in asking about why don't we cover this more? We should do it. Part of the problem is I was trying to find the perfect person to do it. So I just want someone that can look at this, at the data center debate, from an informed perspective, from an even perspective, someone that's not trying to drive a particular narrative or that's in the pocket of a certain set of interests, like someone to take a journalistic look at what is going on with data centers, and she's here, Ann Davis Vaughn. Ann was a longtime Wall Street Journal Energy and Finance Reporter.

• 3:54Steven Rinella?

  Then she became an investment analyst, which is basically where you like do investigative reporting on companies?

• 4:00Speaker 04

  That's right. I was like an investigative reporter for portfolio managers.

• 4:04Steven Rinella?

  Got it. So if they wanted to make an investment, you'd go dig up the dirt?

• 4:08Speaker 04

  You'd dig up the best version of the truth you can find.

• 4:10Steven Rinella?

  Best version of the truth you can find. And now Ann has re-entered journalism and is writing a book, which likely will be called Gigawatt. And it is about the AI industrial boom. How it is reshaping the energy industry, the industrial landscape and the American heartland. She currently writes, this is, this is where I found Anne. She currently writes a column for the information. So it's information.com, theinformation.com.

• 4:44Speaker 04

  Theinformation.com.

• 4:46Steven Rinella?

  Friends send me art, friends would send me your columns and she writes a column on AI infrastructure for theinformation.com. That's a publication based out of Silicon Valley. What I liked about it, about your writing, when I would read it is it was like, it was very refreshing to hear someone looking at the issue that, that I, I felt hadn't already arrived at all the answers, but was just asking questions and also taking, as we're going to get into, taking a lot of measurements, measurements of water, measurements of energy, measurements of footprint and putting those measurements sort of into context and comparing them to things that, that people might understand. So rather than hearing about some kind of

• 5:31Steven Rinella?

  wattage, comparing that to other industrial applications, other things that we're all familiar with. So you, you start to form a relative picture. So thank you for coming on and thank you for sharing a bunch of your reporting, especially because you're doing this before your book comes out, which is, which is good of you.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited about your, your podcast and having come from the Blue Ridge Mountains and love the outdoors. It's a big part of sorting through what's happening today.

• 6:03Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Great. Can you start out by, this is kind of a dumb question, but I want, I want to do it. Can you start out by like telling people in 2026, when they see data center in a headline in the newspaper. Okay.

• 6:22Steven Rinella?

  What exactly are they talking about? But it's a dumb question to say like, what is

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 6:28Steven Rinella?

  a data center today?

• 6:29Speaker 04

  Well, I'll tell you what it is not. It is not clouds in the sky. The data center is referred to as a cloud. It's like the, I think it's one of the best marketing decisions tech has ever made for itself is to call data centers a cloud.

• 6:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  These are

• 6:46Steven Rinella?

  Like it's in the cloud.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  It's in the cloud. And this cloud is really an industrial complex. And so it's an industrial scale facility

• 7:00Speaker 04

  back kind of pre-AI when we just thought of it as the cloud that holds our entire digital lives. And that means

• 7:09Speaker 04

  everything that, you know, we waste our time on and everything that is vital to our society. So, you know, how you save your pictures, how you stream your movies, how you listen to your podcasts, how you get money out of the ATM, you know, how your payroll gets paid, how, you know, life-saving machines stay on and scan your body and track data. It's all of that. And the, you know, cloud data centers

• 7:39Speaker 04

  have been a pretty big part of the digital landscape since, you know, kind of the mid 2000s. A lot of companies used to have basically their own data rooms, computer rooms, and they'd have servers that were in a closet. And eventually some of those got bigger. And of course, since, you know, for decades, we've had government supercomputers that were far bigger than that. But this idea of a data center that started to grow commercially came with the rise of the internet. These, these buildings, you know, would serve a variety of different customers.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  And the notion of these big tech software companies becoming cloud giants really meant that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they began to build buildings with rows, hallways of, of chips and servers and all the equipment that keeps them at this Goldilocks, you know, environment and temperature.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  And fiber would go in and out and and data would, you know, uh, it was very important to have data have what is called low latency. So they tended to be in, um, urban centers. And the

• 9:01Steven Rinella?

  What does low, low latency mean?

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Low latency means quick, like, you know, you know, when you, when you remember the days when you would try to watch a video and it would say buffering, buffering.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's low latency. And so, um, you need instantaneous data for something lifesaving, like, you know, an emergency response system. Traders want instantaneous data. We get upset if, if we can't, you know, if a text doesn't come through right away. Um, there are certain businesses that really are mission critical and that need to be near a city. So a lot of data centers got built, um, in smaller fashion before the AI age and, um, especially Northern Virginia, near Washington DC.

• 9:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  And then some big cities like Dallas, Chicago, Phoenix, um, out on, you know, the West Coast and, and both the Silicon Valley area and then up in the Pacific Northwest near, uh, Seattle. And

• 9:59Steven Rinella?

  Was it, was it really that proximity in, in those days, which is just like yesterday?

• 10:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:06Steven Rinella?

  The proximity to you, to, to user groups was important, like physical proximity to big populations of people?

• 10:15Speaker 04

  Yes, because the, there's a limit to how quickly data, you know, will travel on fiber. And we're talking, you know, just nanoseconds. We're not talking, you know, we're, we're really unwilling to wait for a few seconds for, for something to come through. So they were built under that, you know, premise that, uh, giant amounts of fiber got built in the dot com era. There was a whole bunch of it left, um, you know, didn't get used. And then we kind of built into that in the 2000s and in the 2010s.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  And when COVID happened, people started using online digital resources like crazy and even more continued to be built. And so then when, um, chat GPT and, and AI as a new paradigm kind of really came on the scene around 2022, there Began to be the conception of a whole nother kind of scale of data center. So AI data centers are bigger, more power hungry, more resource hungry, really because AI models operate on a scaling phenomenon.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  And so the the idea is that it's not just a building with with a whole bunch of different companies siloed, computing taking place, but instead it is one big campus where all the chips are connected to all the other chips. And they're all talking to each other and it's like one big brain. And the the more powerful models that have been trained

• 11:59Speaker 04

  have operated on this concept. And so we're building even bigger ones now. And that they operate altogether big. That means bigger footprint for these data centers, more industrial equipment to bring them the electricity and to cool them. And that's why they are basically factories.

• 12:19Steven Rinella?

  And all the time that we've been like, well, let me reapproach that. Maybe you can correct me on the timeline, but but at what point was it a year ago? Was it 18 months ago? At what point was it that all of a sudden this debate about data centers? And the environmental impact of data centers exploded?

• 12:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:40Steven Rinella?

  You probably have a different view of it because you follow this and report on it. But try to like in your mind, think of, think of just a normal concerned citizen who reads a few newspapers in the morning. Like, like, help me remember, when was it at all sudden it was just like the issue?

• 12:56Speaker 04

  It was the issue around the end of 2025 and early 2026.

• 13:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so it was it was recent.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:03Steven Rinella?

  Because what struck me is where was the argument about data centers prior to that?

• 13:11Steven Rinella?

  Was there one?

• 13:12Speaker 04

  Uh, yes, there was. And if you go back, you will find uh some pushback from a few years ago.

• 13:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  I think that the scale just had not hit people. And so this AI boom has gone through several stages. And, and you know, at first it was just like, what is this AI thing? What, what is ChatGPT? It's going to change everything. And then there was this stage when I was actually still working as an investment analyst where everyone was saying, how much power are we going to need? And where is it going to go? And, you know, the financial and, and energy and tech types were mobilizing. And everyone was saying, can, can we really use this much power?

• 13:59Speaker 04

  Then there was like, maybe in the fall of last year, an, an absolute panic over whether AI was a bubble. And um whether we're spending too much, because at that stage, everyone was really focused on how much the tech guys were going to be spending and, and, you know, every quarter and, and how they had gone from just being so cash rich to spending, you know, a, a great deal of their cash flow. And so all during that time, the, the, the, you know, wildcatters that were trying to put AI together and find places to put it, were going to communities and starting to make plans for

• 14:38Speaker 04

  data centers. And individual communities were having meetings and saying, what do we think about this? Um, but the populace in general is not super engaged on, you know, their local community level. There's um, we, we've kind of turned polarized and less local news to consume anyway in the digital age, sadly. And, and, you know, people have, you know, whatever they're concerned about on the national level. And all of a sudden, um, these Campuses started to get constructed and people started to say, wait a minute.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Like I, I didn't know this was happening. Um, and well, you know, some of, some of this may have been done, just like any kind of industrial real estate project might've been in the past, where people go to the local zoning authorities. They say, hey, we're with this company. We want to buy this land. Can we put this application in? Um, you know, normally the public is not watching every move on, on that front.

• 15:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  But all of a sudden, there was this collective realization that there had been a kind of rush out into the middle of the country. Um, because these data centers were on a totally different scale than the cloud data centers and we're going to need to go places where there was enough land or where there was enough power, where there was some headroom and, you know, whether it was water, um, the grid. And, um, that is, it kind of started to reach a fever pitch. I would say I noticed it, um, on a trip to Wisconsin in early February,

• 16:24Speaker 04

  um, the, where the backlash had grown just exponentially.

• 16:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. I want to do a thing where you give me, you can pick or you can do neither or we can play a game to figure out who does it. Like, I want to do the positives, just before we get into some of the details, I want to do the positives and negatives. You can take both of them. I can take one. You can do both. You can sell me on the hysterical view. I don't want to load it too much. You can sell me on like, why this is upsetting the people. And you can sell me on why it's exciting to some, right? Or we can split the job up. It's up to you.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Uh, well, okay. So the worries are that data centers are going to destroy our environment. They're going to, you know, destroy our health, um, that they'll drain Lake Michigan. They'll, um, you know, raise the temperature above the buildings and, and into our, our neighborhoods. They'll poison the water supply. They'll spike our power bills. Um,

• 17:23Speaker 04

  They'll only take subsidies and not give anything back to, you know, local communities. And, um, and that it's all happening in secret. So I think that's part of the

• 17:35Steven Rinella?

  That's the vibe I get. That's the vibe I get of the panic. Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And, and not to even mention that it's existential to humanity and it could destroy humanity.

• 17:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I think

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Not, not a small concern either.

• 17:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cuz that, that's a certain thing is, um, it'd be in looking at water consumption, energy consumption footprint. There's also just, it, it's fueled by a general apprehension and it'd be like, so that it can take my job.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:02Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 18:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:03Steven Rinella?

  I gotta give up all that. I gotta give up clean water. I gotta give up all this stuff. I gotta accept this I soar into my community. So that then this can take my friends' jobs.

• 18:13Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 18:14Steven Rinella?

  And I think that

• 18:15Speaker 04

  And my future, my children's future jobs.

• 18:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Um, and I don't think that the tech industry has done itself any favors by, you know, carrying out a narrative that is, you know, potentially quite exaggerated in that view, but, you know, candidly, we all have a lot to learn as time unfolds. So, um, so, yeah, I mean, I, I, you ask like, how do you separate or figure out what is truth and what is, what is crazy? And, um, what, what is rational to worry about?

• 18:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  And, um, I guess I, uh, I would start with, what, what is rational to worry about? It is very rational to worry about, um, uh, you know, to fear change and uncertainty. And we, um, are facing an incredible, uh, turning point. We're in the early days of the AI revolution and there's incredible fear and uncertainty. And that's rational. And I think it's rational to love your community and to love the character of your community. And, you know, especially if you've, you know, uh, even if there's been some economic decline, you've kind of made peace with that.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Or you, you kind of love where you're from and you kind of enjoy a little bit of the peace that has come with, um, some of the economic decline in your region and, and, um, the natural beauty instead making, you know, like coming to grips with it, looking completely different is I think that's very rational, like some of the the scale of what I'm talking about in rural communities, we are talking about in the end, a campus that I sometimes think of it as like, you know, five pentagons, like landing in the field across from your house.

• 20:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  These are huge campuses, some of them.

• 20:09Steven Rinella?

  Give it to me in Walmarts.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, uh, well, I'll get, uh, it's many more than Walmart super campuses, like a meta campus in Louisiana is, um, five miles, uh, long and one mile wide.

• 20:23Steven Rinella?

  Are you kidding?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  And so I've driven the perimeters of these.

• 20:26Steven Rinella?

  That'd be a concrete slab, five miles?

• 20:29Speaker 04

  No, not a concrete, it's many buildings. So it's many buildings with with land in between. And when they're finished, they will have some grass and they will have some parking lots and they will have.

• 20:41Steven Rinella?

  But the footprint of that thing is five miles by a mile.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, that particular campus.

• 20:45Steven Rinella?

  It's it's the footprint, it's it's the footprint of a large municipal airport.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  Yes, it's not dissimilar from an airport. And so it is rational to say, wait, this scale, um, is is truly, it feels nuts to me. And, um, and, and, you know, the, the, the truth is that the landscape has changed through many years of other industrial revolutions. Railroads have, you know, crisscrossed and, and, you know, may, maybe some thought at the time scarred the landscape and we got used to those. We have airports.

• 21:22Steven Rinella?

  Someone like today was proposing the railroad infrastructure as a new concept. You'd never get it done.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  You'd never get it done today.

• 21:31Steven Rinella?

  They're like, hey, I got an idea. I'm gonna run, you know, we're gonna run these continuous lines all across the country and eminent domain, everything. Yeah, you'd never get it through.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  I'm gonna put poles up with wires all over every single street in America.

• 21:43Steven Rinella?

  Every street will have a pole with wires and people will be like, no way, you're not doing that.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I mean, I think it's it's it's rational to, you know, uh, And it's understandable, too, that people see technology and they see data centers as the embodiment of how tech has changed our lives.

• 22:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  And, you know, for the worse, perhaps. And they sort of see it for the worse. And of course, tech has also changed our lives for the better. And so I guess I would say what is not rational is to not look at and do this with some common sense and put context around it. So, you know, one piece of context, right? Like, well, look, we now have airports that are these giant pieces of land that we all depend on. The truth is, we do all depend on data centers every single day. Our lives are, you know, as dependent on energy as they are on digital. And now AI and energy are completely intertwined and they pull in all kinds of other resources

• 22:46Speaker 04

  and we're grappling with that and in real time, in a hurry. The tech industry is in a big hurry and that's another part of people's unease is how fast this is unfolding.

• 22:59Steven Rinella?

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• 25:56Steven Rinella?

  Let's talk about some of the specifics, some of the specific impacts. Is, we start with water? Yeah. Okay.

• 26:06Steven Rinella?

  What amount of water, what amount of water are we talking about? I mean, let's look at it, you know, there's another question I got prior to that, because it just kind of sets this whole thing up.

• 26:18Steven Rinella?

  When we talk about what's gonna happen, what is a comfortable timeline? 10 years, we have no idea, right? So there's sort of like what's proposed right now? What's in process right now? So if I say to you, how much water are data centers gonna use? What, at what, what date are we looking at? Like, what date is it fair to look at? Is it like right now? Is it two years from now?

• 26:46Speaker 04

  People use 2030 as the sort of guidepost.

• 26:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So when we're talking about, it's just for people to remind, reminder here, we're, we're in 2026. When we're talking about how much water, how much footprint? We're sort of looking at reasonable projections about four years from now. Is that cool? Okay. So when I read articles talking about data centers and resistance to data centers and things, one of the big issues that comes up is where is all this water coming from? And that winds up being like relevant. It's relevant to all Americans because we all rely on abundant, clean water. It's relevant to agriculture, obviously, because food.

• 27:33Steven Rinella?

  And then in a sort of niche way, it's very relevant to like me as a fisherman and an outdoorsman, you know, like, like the fact that our country is wealthy as it is and as populous as it is, still has this like abundance of clean water, full of fish, relative to other places around the world. That's like of tremendous value. So when I hear of something that might threaten that, I get anxious, you know? How do we look at the water issue here?

• 28:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think, so I just a couple of caveats that I am, I'm not a water scientist. And, and I'm also in the process, as I work on this book, of interrogating this topic from every angle that I can. And, you know, striving to figure out the best version of the truth so that, you know, we can all talk apples to apples. And so I've attempted, recently did a column on water for the information and have attempted to do that for the book as well, sort of saying,

• 28:41Speaker 04

  What, how much water, you know, does this industry really consume and has that changed? So it has changed, actually. The data centers are getting bigger, but they're getting more water efficient. So let's put kind of water, broadly speaking, in perspective so that this is, this is kind of a rough exercise. And again, like, you know, there are many resources that folks who have like, helped me think through this are drawing from.

• 29:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Okay, but, um, so we don't get alarmed by contextless numbers. You hear something like billions of gallons of water being used a year, and that sounds astonishingly large.

• 29:27Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  But in fact, big industries, including agriculture, are using trillions of gallons a year.

• 29:35Steven Rinella?

  The other thing you hear, and it's kind of glib, is you'll do, you'll do a search, right? You do like a thing on ChatGPT, and then people will be like, well, there goes a gallon of water.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:47Steven Rinella?

  But you hear it, but you don't really, no one knows what, I shouldn't say no one. Most people don't really know what they're saying.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay, so let's start big, and we'll kind of telescope, you know, out and then go, go in a little bit. So there's like, you know, if you, maybe you can keep a number in your head of like freshwater consumption in, in the US in the like 30 trillion gallons a year range. And

• 30:11Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's what, that's what we're using.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, and, you know, and, and, um,

• 30:18Steven Rinella?

  30 trillion gallons.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  30 trillion gallons a year. And, um, single crops in the United States use as much as 3 trillion gallons a year. Okay, so corn or alfalfa, like for, for livestock.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  And a third of the corn, you know, harvest is going to ethanol. So, so this, these are just single crops. And so agriculture, irrigation for agriculture does consume something like, um, you know, the, like 70% of our fresh water.

• 30:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  So we're already using a lot of our fresh water for irrigated crops.

• 31:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  And so corn, like three trillion gallons a year. California almonds, 1.2 to 1.8 trillion gallons.

• 31:10Steven Rinella?

  Seriously?

• 31:11Speaker 04

  Seriously.

• 31:12Steven Rinella?

  See, corn and alfalfa, I get it because like, yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  You're not an almond lover?

• 31:17Steven Rinella?

  Well, no, no, I eat almond now and then, but you know, the country's not going to, without alfalfa and be able to feed cattle, right? It's not going to happen.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. We might get along with that almond.

• 31:28Steven Rinella?

  For ethanol and livestock feed and other things, it's not going to happen. I'm just like, I don't mean to hack on the almond people. Like I like almond joy as much as the next guy. I'm just saying like, the almond thing seems, uh, I don't know. I don't want to hack on almond farmers. Yeah, it just seems like a wow.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  We don't need to pick on them because there's, there's plenty of examples of dairy farming. Dairy farming is, is enormously water consumptive and about, um, an estimated like 93% of the water footprint of dairy farming is actually just to feed cows. Um, or, you know, basically to raise crops.

• 32:01Steven Rinella?

  But dairy's got to blow, dairy's got to blow almonds out of the water. As like a, not quite a pun, but.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, you know, I think it's, it's, it's way up there. I guess it, like the statistic that I came to arm with is that a gallon of milk, and this is from the US dairy industry's like sustainability reports. A gallon of milk takes 144 gallons of water to produce.

• 32:26Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 32:26Speaker 04

  And a pound of cheese takes 164 gallons of water to produce.

• 32:29Steven Rinella?

  So how come when you take a sip, like when I put a little half and half in my coffee, no one goes like, well, there goes three gallons of water.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  I think that we have normalized, we love our farms, we love our food.

• 32:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh yeah, I love farms, man.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  We, you know, we love

• 32:43Steven Rinella?

  Do you like farms?

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Corn fields blowing in the breeze and, and we need it.

• 32:49Steven Rinella?

  Having a farm field across the road.

• 32:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:51Steven Rinella?

  That's a selling point.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  You know, and a lot of people will say, and I had a farmer say this to me who sold a very large chunk of land to Meta, you know, I hear over and over, nobody can eat a data center. He's like, well, these are, you know, his words, not mine, but he's like, don't tell that to me when, you know, we have seven million acres of, um, sorry, when we're using, you know, yeah, seven million acres in just in Illinois or 30, 30 million acres of corn, of corn that is harvested is going to ethanol. So we're not eating ethanol. We shouldn't be eating ethanol.

• 33:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's what missed, like on the land use front, I think that that's a little bit of a, I don't know how widespread it is, but I would say with people not adjacent to agriculture, I would say when you're driving, when you're in the, in the upper Midwest and you're driving through corn monocultures, I think that, I think that most people, most urban people feel that they're in a food production landscape.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:56Steven Rinella?

  And they don't view it that they're, they are in a

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Fuel production landscape.

• 34:01Steven Rinella?

  They are in a fuel and energy production landscape. And it'd be like, it's like, I don't even want to equate it to an oil field because it's, it's soil, it could be repurposed for other things, right? It's not developed, it's not under concrete.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:15Steven Rinella?

  It could be used, you could grow different crops there next year if you wanted to, but it's, it's energy.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:20Steven Rinella?

  You're, you're looking at energy production.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  So that's some of the ag, let's take like lawn irrigation and golf courses.

• 34:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  All lawn irrigation in the United States also equates to about three trillion a year. And golf courses use about a half a trillion gallons of water a year. Um, you get into like individual.

• 34:41Steven Rinella?

  Like the, the golf course, you take all the water used by Americans to water their grass or gardens and that, and that that's three trillion?

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 34:52Steven Rinella?

  And that golf courses are sucking up a half trillion?

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, so like golf courses, there's a difference between consumptive water use and water that is used.

• 35:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  But it's returned to its sources.

• 35:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  We can talk about that.

• 35:05Steven Rinella?

  Just, just, I want to tell listeners.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:07Steven Rinella?

  We'll get into this because of course, the amount of water on earth is a constant. So we need, we need to talk about, when you say that you're using water, what does it mean?

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:22Steven Rinella?

  Like, just to give one example, at our fish shack, we pull water out of a creek. It runs through our fish shack, but goes back into the creek.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 35:34Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? So it's like, we're just detaining it for a minute and putting it right back where it came from at the same temperature and like, measured in quartz. But I'm saying it's like, so you'd be like, are we using water? Like when I turn the hose on, am I using water? Because that water's flowing right back into where I got it from. So we'll get into that a little bit, like, when the data center is using water, how are they using it?

• 35:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:59Steven Rinella?

  And why can't they put it back where they found it? We'll talk about this a little bit.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  Well, your fish shack, let's now zoom into a much higher industrial scale, which would be a power plant, is doing something similar to your fish shack. It is withdrawing a pretty large amount of water from water sources like lakes and rivers. But approximately 90 to 90%, 5% of the water gets returned to its source. Now, not always.

• 36:26Steven Rinella?

  But that still gets counted as usage, though.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  It's counted as usage, but not, but if you really think of consumption, it's not all like, you know, maybe, water is considered consumed, and this is where you want to go to an expert, but like, generally speaking, when it evaporates and it doesn't, it's not directly replenished.

• 36:46Steven Rinella?

  That, okay, yeah. That's the number I'm interested in, where you've moved it. I don't want to get too in the weeds on this, but like, once you evaporate it and put it into cloud cover, you're moving it to different drainages. You're moving it to different basins and you're like, you're redistributing water rather than you're keeping it in a closed circuit system.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 37:03Steven Rinella?

  But anyways, but keep, keep hitting me with how much the relative on water.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Let's look at the electric sector though, but it's still, it uses around 45 trillion gallons annually, the power.

• 37:14Steven Rinella?

  Generating electricity.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  To cool thermal power. So thermal power would be like coal plants, natural gas plants and nuclear plants. So as opposed to like solar or, you know, hydroelectric and the, but you know, only about 5% of that is fully consumed and it's returned to its source. And there are regulations around this, but you know, I, none of us like to think of warm water going into a pristine ecosystem. So there's regulation around this and there's ways that it is dealt with.

• 37:52Steven Rinella?

  From, from a fishing perspective?

• 37:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:54Steven Rinella?

  Which is how I look at many things in life. Um, a hot water discharge is a blessing and a curse. You know, cause like a hot water discharge could be the best fishing place in the world. It could also be what destroys a body of water.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:09Steven Rinella?

  By changing the water temperature. So it's like, it's a, it's a funny, you know, like many anglers, especially in the Great Lakes area have like a complicated relationship with hot water discharges, you know?

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I can imagine.

• 38:21Steven Rinella?

  The fish are like, the fish are just there, right? And you're like, it's kind of like you're cheating. They're there for the hot water discharge. And then at the other times of the year, it makes the water too damn warm, you know?

• 38:31Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah. And it changes the fishing conditions and you can't fish at all.

• 38:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So people have a, there's like, in my world, there's a, there's like a complicated relationship with those things.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:40Steven Rinella?

  But yeah, you're, they're putting it back. They're putting it back where they got it from, but it's just a lot hotter.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. So the electric sector, this is where you really want to focus when you're thinking about data centers. So members of the data center industry have made significant strides in changing how they do water. Out of necessity. So AI runs hotter than traditional computing. Okay. It's it takes a lot more electricity and it puts it into much denser racks of like, you know, tightly, tightly networked chips and servers and and memory and all this stuff. And so they're they've now learned to do what's called closed loop cooling.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  Literally, they'll run a a cooling liquid, which, you know, can include water and glycol in, you know, over chips and and in these tiny tubes that get into bigger tubes and, you know, eventually also need to go up to a or or out to a big set of equipment that cools that water and then it sends it all back to do it all over again. Got it. When today's really advanced AI data centers get built, they get filled up with a pretty small amount of water. Like, for example, a Microsoft facility in Wisconsin was filled. I think it's a handful of swimming pools worth of water. It's about what a car wash would use in a year. Oh.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Not not too much. When you what people have forgotten how much water other industrial things, you know, factories, steel mill, you know, like any any industrial plant uses water, right? So chip foundries use a giant amount of water. So on a relative basis, the data center guys will sometimes say, we're we're hardly using any water. But there is a trade off that they, you know, I think would be smart to just upfront acknowledge because the the closed loop cooling is using a lot of new advanced equipment and existing technologies that we've known about that basically are very energy intensive. And so that means they draw more power to do that.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that means that if they are using the output of a thermal power plant that is up the road. That thermal power plant is using a lot of water to, you know, cool its facilities and make the power. And so it, we're kind of trading one problem for another.

• 41:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, they're dropping off on water used to pick, but then they need energy to cool the water.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, then they, yeah, then they need energy and that needs to be cooled at the power plant. So the much bigger offenders in the water for the digital economy are electric power plants and actually chip foundries are extremely water intensive and they use ultra pure water and it takes, you know, a large, you know, kind of extra amount of water to get it fully pure and to do that. And, and, and some of it is consumptive. And so there are some water treatment and, you know, technology companies that have done some really interesting studies. You know, Xylem's done one that I wrote about

• 41:57Speaker 04

  in my last column, just showing it's if, if you kind of, if you can visualize like these two layers of giant mountains of water use and, and they, they are semiconductor plants and power plants. And then there's kind of a ribbon on the top, which is data centers.

• 42:12Steven Rinella?

  Huh. So with all those, hit, hit a couple of those again, like hit me with, with the water use of agriculture.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:20Steven Rinella?

  Or like the total water use, hit me with a couple, then tell me in 2030, what are we looking at for AI?

• 42:24Speaker 04

  Crops, single crops, big, big crops in the US might be three trillion gallons a year of water. Direct water use of data centers has been estimated at roughly 18 billion gallons. So remember a billion is a thousand less, order of magnitude a thousand less than a trillion. So three trillion of, for a single crop, US data center use 18 billion. We're talking way, way smaller.

• 42:50Steven Rinella?

  And that's project, that's 2030's projection.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Like a quarter of a percent.

• 42:54Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 42:55Speaker 04

  And so it's just important to kind of keep some of that in perspective because if even the data center footprint of onsite plus the amount consumed in the electric sector, you, you take how much power they're using, you have to haircut it because not all power is thermal power. And you also have to haircut it because it's not, just as we said, all consumed.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  And it's still like, we're talking 1% of freshwater. Even maybe by 2030, the data centers might be using in a, you know, a more consumptive fashion.

• 43:35Steven Rinella?

  Is it safe to say that it's um,

• 43:40Steven Rinella?

  that a part of the concern is it's like it's it's it's added mortality on water? Meaning, we're we're used to, we're comfortable with how much water we're using for energy, how much water we're using for agriculture. And we've just become numb to it. We we just look at it like it's just like how it is. And so when someone comes and says, I'm gonna draw.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:06Steven Rinella?

  Blank billion gallons.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  It is an added stressor, for sure.

• 44:11Steven Rinella?

  But but in the context of the, and I know you're not, you know, and you know, I know you're not looking at this from from an apologist perspective, but it's just very interesting to hear from a relative sense of other industries, what we're talking about. Because the impression one would get,

• 44:30Steven Rinella?

  the impression one would get is that we're talking about a level of wat- like an unprecedented level of water use.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, then we should also talk about why people are alarmed. And well, first I'll tell you something that's really depressing, which is about, it depends on the estimate, but 18 to 30% of municipal water system, water is getting wasted completely because of leaks. Leaky pipes, old infrastructure. Water utilities are typically like owned by municipalities. They they are underfunded and they didn't have great technology. Today it exists to to kind of monitor and figure out where leaks are. And so even as we use more water for industrial purposes for data centers,

• 45:19Speaker 04

  we're we're leaving so much of it, you know. Like where we can't access it, like it's just falling out of our water system.

• 45:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  So that's tough. The other problem is that a lot of digital infrastructure is going to water stressed places. And so in individual places, it's a bigger incremental stress on the system. It's a very big incremental stress.

• 45:42Steven Rinella?

  What is the rationale? Well, maybe we should do that one next is the, the, the physical footprint.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:47Steven Rinella?

  But go on on water. We'll, we'll talk about physical footprint next.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um, well, you know, the, um, you've seen a lot of chip plants locate in the, you know, Southwest, uh, in the Phoenix area. A lot of data centers are there too. And, um, when, when I have been traveling the country, looking at the AI boom and where the next generation of digital infrastructure is getting built.

• 46:13Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  It's getting built in the middle of the country effectively. So, and some of them are in water stressed areas. So we kind of think of the American West and that sort of more desert landscape as water stress. So the Colorado River Basin.

• 46:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 04

  Um, for sure is a, is a area of significant water stress. Um, the Ogallala Water Aquifer, which goes from South Dakota down to Texas.

• 46:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, basically lies beneath the American Great Plains.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, um, you know, in both cases, there have been alarms sounded about water before the AI boom and, and these regions, but they're, they're, um, for a variety of different reasons, good places to build AI data center campuses.

• 46:59Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're going to be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com. Okay, so buying a new car or a new home starts by building credit, right?

• 47:43Steven Rinella?

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• 48:05Speaker 05

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• 48:20Steven Rinella?

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• 49:00Steven Rinella?

  That's O-K-E-E-F-F-E-S, company.com for guaranteed relief. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It works good. At this point, like, if I carry in my mind, from just being a concerned citizen, if I carry in my mind an idea that water consumption is a major implication of AI infrastructure, and then someone tells me that, that data centers, that people are building data centers and they're, they're tending toward the Colorado Basin, the Guadalajara Aquifer, so like, the American Great Plains, the Southwest, and I have the water thing in my mind, I'm like, that seems ridiculous.

• 49:44Steven Rinella?

  But is it, are they going, are data centers now going where it makes sense to put a data center, or are they going where they're welcome? Like, like, when they look at, when they look at like, where should we try? Right? Um, is it, they won't put up a fuss, let's go there, water be damned?

• 50:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:06Steven Rinella?

  Or are they like, no, for, for all these reasons of infrastructure, this is the place to be?

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, so water is a factor in where they go. Um, and there are data centers being placed in areas with plentiful water, too. Um, I just got, uh,

• 50:22Steven Rinella?

  They don't want it either.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  Well, you know, water is less, uh, is, it's less of an, of a footprint than the energy that these facilities are going to be drained. Um, but they, they're going to different spots. So for example, you know, they're going to the Mississippi River Delta.

• 50:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  And, um, Alab, sorry, really in Mississippi and Louisiana.

• 50:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so why? Like, let's take that one for instance.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Okay, so water availability is a draw to go there, right? Um, and I literally was driving a week and a half ago through Louisiana, past, you know, uh, bayous, where the tree trunks are basically swimming in water, right? There, there's water everywhere.

• 51:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  And, um, and it's, um, you know, if a farmer said to me that, you know, this water, this aquifer will not, you know, did, does not have a drain, drain the, the, you know, the water supply risk. Now, um, I, that does not mean that water is not precious everywhere, right? And so, um, Texas is getting an enormous number of these new data centers and water scarcity is a big issue in Texas. And, um, you know, in, like, there's a, a new study out of the University of Texas that, um, looks at both the direct water use, which as I've said, is getting better data centers, and the indirect

• 51:55Speaker 04

  water use from power, which is getting worse, um, in some ways. It, it depends on what, what we end up putting in as the power source, right? If we don't build coal plants, that's a whole lot better for the water supply.

• 52:10Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  But the Texas could end up having, you know, right now, it's only data centers are only 0.4% of water use, but growing water needs for AI could bump up just in Texas, the water used directly and indirectly from from AI to as much as 5%.

• 52:33Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  And that would be, you know, that would exceed that of livestock and mining. It would still be well short of irrigated farming, but there are places that are water stressed where, you know, it is not trivial, the buildup of what we're trying to, what the tech industry is intending.

• 52:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And then the other thing in Texas is you have you have an exploding human population.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:57Steven Rinella?

  So when when urban planners are thinking about water consumption into the future and you're talking about an industry going from 0.4 to 5%, that's like meaningful water. But like, but to that question of when when these entities that build data centers survey the country, why are they picking where they pick?

• 53:19Speaker 04

  Why are they picking it? The very biggest factor is is power. So we have an aging power grid and while we have lost some power users because we have deindustrialized, we have a grid that has not kept up with with, you know, progress of the economy and and now needs both because of extreme weather and just general, you know, age, needs a lot of investment and the, you know, power grid just cannot handle gigawatt scale power just anywhere.

• 54:04Speaker 04

  So what is a gigawatt? A gigawatt is as much power as the whole city of San Francisco or Denver consumes.

• 54:11Steven Rinella?

  In how much time?

• 54:13Speaker 04

  It's a it's a capacity figure. You can also look at at energy as a per hour.

• 54:17Steven Rinella?

  I understand what you're saying.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  You need plants capable of producing this much, a gigawatt.

• 54:23Steven Rinella?

  So so a plant. Would you you're saying like an AI data center and AI campus, data center campus would feasibly use the same amount of power that is being used in Denver?

• 54:40Speaker 04

  Correct, or more. There are multi gigawatt campuses.

• 54:43Steven Rinella?

  And that's like the the residents, the businesses, the manufacturing.

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, the whole community. And and as going to this concentrated place, yeah, it's a big landmass, but we're talking a few thousand acres where that much power could be going into a single place.

• 55:00Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  So it's it's the sale of it is quite.

• 55:03Steven Rinella?

  Selecting areas where there's where there's the possibility of getting and moving that amount of power.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. And and that has it. It's not like, you know, just because there are power lines going through a property or just because there's a power plant, a nuclear power plant in the vicinity that is available. So then you get to things like power congestion and the ability to pull a large amount of power to a single location. And so it becomes this really complicated matrix of of factors that are bringing people places. So it's, you know, can the power, are there are there pockets of power that are accessible?

• 55:49Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 55:49Speaker 04

  Does the the community or the state make it easy to build? Is there water? This is not the very first concern, though. Is there fiber? Fiber is easier to lay, but, you know, we also had a glut of fiber that was laid in the, you know, in the dot com days. So, you know, there, these are some of the concerns, you know, others are are land value. And so you will now see data center developments going up. It it's at in. You know, virtually everywhere.

• 56:29Steven Rinella?

  Are they actually looking for land? Like, when you factor all this in, are they actually looking for land deals? Like, the cost of the land matters to them?

• 56:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, the cost of the land matters. Places where data centers are quite saturated, like Northern Virginia, the, you know, the land values have approached, you know, the millions of per acre. And you can't really even get a campus that's that big. And so, you know, AI starts with these big training campuses that are big. But eventually, and not too long from now, we're going to hear a lot more about how do you fill in the smaller, but, you know, state of the art data centers to do what is called inference, which is basically the thing that makes money,

• 57:19Speaker 04

  which is finding the answers to your questions, you know, querying the model and getting back the answer, like, which could be, you know, driving your autonomous car through a town. A data center is going to do that for you. It could be, you know, figuring out the cure for, you know, a rare disease. The data center will do that for you.

• 57:42Steven Rinella?

  Do you have little kids?

• 57:43Speaker 04

  I have three older kids. They're teenagers and one's in her twenties.

• 57:47Steven Rinella?

  Isn't it weird that you run around yelling at them about leaving the lights on?

• 57:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:51Steven Rinella?

  Well, you should do, you should yell at them about not looking stuff up on the Internet.

• 57:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:57Steven Rinella?

  You should be like, don't look pancake recipes up on the Internet. You can look it up in a cookbook.

• 58:00Speaker 04

  Well, I did also.

• 58:01Steven Rinella?

  Leaving the lights on in your room, it's inconsequential. It's just, it's insane.

• 58:07Speaker 04

  There are calculators that show, you asked about like, just to go back to the water thing for a minute. Does a ChatGPT query really use a bottle of water?

• 58:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I don't even know. I hear all the numbers, but I don't know what.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  There was a study that said so. There are also data points that indicate a far smaller amount, like a.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  A teaspoon, two teaspoons. And I'm, I'm not the expert to, to fully, you know, parse that out. But the one thing that I could, I could say with some confidence is that computing is getting more efficient. Even AI computing every day. It's this, you know, it's this quandary that, that the industry has. They can't find enough power, water, land. They can't, you know, get enough of their computing into these places. So everybody in the whole value chain is like innovating, trying to do it with less. And so I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, there, there are big advances. And, um, and, and perhaps these newer estimates of what a chat GPT search does use in water

• 59:12Speaker 04

  are taking into account some of that efficiency. But you're going to have, the, the problem right now is that there are wildly different estimates and plenty of them are scary numbers that have no context around them. They, they haven't been compared to anything else.

• 59:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that, that's, that's the, that's the problem you run into.

• 59:33Steven Rinella?

  Before we started to record, we, we were having, we, we were, we were talking. And you had mentioned, um, you'd mentioned that there's become like a sort of red state, blue state divide on data center placement.

• 59:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, except this now become bipartisan against.

• 59:54Steven Rinella?

  It's become bipartisan against.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like, like, let's talk a little about, cause just on, on this, on this idea of physical placement. Right. There's a, there's a big, I think that there's generally like a NIMBY, a not in my backyard component to this, where most of the fights you see about data centers.

• 1:00:17Steven Rinella?

  From my perspective, you may have a different perspective. Most of the fights you see about data centers are localized, meaning one's going in near you. One's going near you in Wisconsin. One's going in near you in Michigan. One's going in near you in Montana. And all of a sudden it gets real, right? And, and then you want to talk about what does this mean? Water uses here, what does this mean? Energy use here, what does it mean for just the, the, the visual quality of the landscape here? I'm sure there are crusaders on a national sense, but I'm more familiar with the localized fights. Right? As you've looked at this, what have you found about the mentalities or like the the communities that are wanted, the communities that don't, like what sort of differentiates

• 1:01:01Steven Rinella?

  them? Is it is it ideology, like political ideology? What is it? You know, a friendly town versus an antagonistic town?

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  Well, I I it's a combination of how they feel they were treated from the beginning and how, you know, their their ability to imagine what the future could be hold for them, possibly economically. So the Northern Virginia has a very heavy concentration of data centers today and it takes 25% of power use in Virginia now goes to data centers. And it's mostly concentrated.

• 1:01:42Steven Rinella?

  The whole damn state.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  In the whole state. And people in Northern Virginia have have benefited economically from the the tax revenue. Okay, so data centers don't employ as many people, especially the older data centers. They therefore don't bring a big burden on hospitals, schools, roads, ambulance, all that stuff.

• 1:02:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they're like ghost town. Once they're built, they're like ghost towns, right?

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  The cloud data centers employed, you know, it could be like 20 people, although the bigger AI data centers are going to employ hundreds of people. Some of them even say in the four figures, but but the so some of these places have have had a huge influx of tax revenue. They've improved their schools. Northern Virginia fits that. Even so, it gets to a certain point where people, you know, are living with with these developments right up in their backyard, in some cases, nice homes and a big data center right behind. And and they're starting to say, no more. They're starting to worry about backup power

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  doesn't run all the time, but it has to test. And then if there's a power outage, that's going to burn diesel. Diesel is one of the worst things that you can burn for air pollution and health. And and so Northern Virginia is an example of a community that welcomed data centers. You know, kind of prospered with them and is starting to hit a breaking point.

• 1:03:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, the mood's starting to sour?

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  The mood has started to get much tougher and

• 1:03:27Speaker 04

  there's gonna have to be a conversation. Even so, even in Northern Virginia, the actual land use of data centers

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  by just square footage is the campuses themselves are still less than 3% of the land. And Loudoun County, the most data center populated county. And if you, and if you just looked at the buildings, it was less than, you know, 1% of the land. And that is data center capital of the world.

• 1:03:58Steven Rinella?

  But that's like, but that's.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  It's not nothing, because when you think about grass.

• 1:04:03Steven Rinella?

  But that's a weird way to think about landscape. That you're saying a percent of a county.

• 1:04:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Steven Rinella?

  Is under a data center. I think I would want to know what percent of the county is under a house.

• 1:04:18Steven Rinella?

  Cause I mean, like, I don't even know what to make of that. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like the point you made about that you hear these numbers, but without context, it's hard to understand. It's like, I don't think that, I don't hear that a percent of a county sits underneath a data center. I don't hear that and think that's not much.

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:34Steven Rinella?

  But, but I don't know. But again, I don't know what percent's under

• 1:04:38Steven Rinella?

  schools. I don't know what percent is under homes, you know?

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:04:41Steven Rinella?

  But it feels to me like a ton.

• 1:04:43Speaker 04

  There are, you know, certainly denser urban environments. This becomes a real concern with, with, you know, so many resources and water flow and everything. So the, the communities that,

• 1:04:56Speaker 04

  you know, some communities that have welcome data centers are, are still experiencing backlash. And I think it's because it's just such a profound change. But there are parts of the country that also have economic.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  Synergies, I guess you could say, with with this type of an industry. They have factories that can and are producing the equipment that goes inside. They've got a workforce of electrical and mechanical and trades craft workers who have been underemployed for a long time. And and that starts to kind of work together. Like, there are there are some several areas in the Rust Belt that the Economic Development Authorities have, you know,

• 1:05:49Speaker 04

  either recruited data centers or were open to data centers coming. The workforce, especially like organized unions, are very in favor of it.

• 1:06:00Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:00Speaker 04

  And then other residents who live in the midst of farmland are not in favor of it.

• 1:06:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  And don't want it. And so it it there are some really hard trade offs, you know, because we all need jobs and economic activity in our community. And that is actually what ends up funding all of the infrastructure that makes the city livable.

• 1:06:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I want to hit you with two ideas. One is, you had mentioned that it used to be that, like, blue states or left-leaning states were antagonistic to data centers. Just speaking very generally.

• 1:06:39Steven Rinella?

  Right-leaning states were more welcoming to data centers. But you had said that it is it is becoming that you're finding resistance in right-leaning states. We always talk about this thing. You familiar with this, like, horseshoe deal?

• 1:06:51Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:52Steven Rinella?

  Where, like, the right and left kind of come together.

• 1:06:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Steven Rinella?

  The radical right and the radical left come together at the bottom of the horseshoe.

• 1:06:59Speaker 04

  That's who's against them.

• 1:07:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  It's these two or two different sides.

• 1:07:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but they like they almost meet.

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  They almost meet.

• 1:07:06Steven Rinella?

  Is that what is the sort of?

• 1:07:10Steven Rinella?

  What is the right leaning, what is the emerging right leaning argument against data centers? Is it like antagonism to big tech?

• 1:07:21Speaker 04

  It's partially antagonism to big tech. You know, they're spying on my life. They, you know, are driving our young people, you know, the wrong direction.

• 1:07:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  It's partially property rights. I will not have my property, you know, seized for a transmission line that, you know, sends power to, you know, Elon Musk's, you know, or Sam Altman's data center. And

• 1:07:48Steven Rinella?

  So they can get rich off my land or whatever.

• 1:07:50Speaker 04

  That's right. And it's their way of life. I will tell you that when you go to some of those communities, though, people will acknowledge a mixed feeling because some of them have sold their, you don't even have to have sold a big piece of property inside the data center to possibly have your property value, you know, a potential, potential gain, like maybe they want to lay down equipment in a, in a yard and you've got a few acres where you could do that, that's nearby. Or you decided that you want to run a food truck and, you know, go sell to the workers or, you know, there's, there are a variety of, of, maybe your, your land was used to

• 1:08:35Speaker 04

  build worker housing, like a man camp.

• 1:08:38Steven Rinella?

  So is it generally, are data centers generally raising property levels?

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  I

• 1:08:45Steven Rinella?

  Or is the inverse happening?

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  There's such a land rush right now and, and once, and these are such big construction projects that I think in many cases, the properties near these projects do experience, you know, rising property value.

• 1:09:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because picture we're talking about they're, they're putting in a municipal wastewater treatment plant.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  Compare that to like a landfill coming to town.

• 1:09:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's going to be like, um, good for some.

• 1:09:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:13Steven Rinella?

  But the people around that are going to be like, that's going to tank my home value.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:09:20Steven Rinella?

  So with, with, in, in the data center landscape, when it comes to land ownership and land use, in the data center landscape, I could see if they're coming in, they're going to, they need this, you know, whatever, many, you know, they need five square miles, 10 square miles of land. That the impact, that the people that own those properties are going to see perhaps a little gold rush.

• 1:09:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Steven Rinella?

  But what is the conversation about people that are outside of the footprint?

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's tough. I mean,

• 1:09:49Steven Rinella?

  What are they seeing?

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  They hate the tra- well, everybody hates traffic.

• 1:09:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

  Bipartisan rage against the traffic and that lasts for several years in these big, big projects. Like, people bring that up way before global warming. They bring it up way before.

• 1:10:03Steven Rinella?

  Traffic.

• 1:10:04Speaker 04

  You know, traffic, traffic, dust, traffic. You know, so, you know, they were giving free car washes out in Wisconsin near the Port Washington data center.

• 1:10:15Steven Rinella?

  No, really?

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  Maybe people appreciated it. It's a, it's a pretty small, you know, it's a small token of something, but you know.

• 1:10:23Steven Rinella?

  Seriously, they're-

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because it was, it's going to be dusty and dirty for a really long time.

• 1:10:30Steven Rinella?

  There had been a lot of people that just did not want to accept that free car.

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Steven Rinella?

  My god, man.

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  But you do go to places where this has been underway for at least a year and there are hotels being redone. There are new restaurants that have come in. There are, and you know, like, that's the case in Louisiana and that's 30 minutes away from the data center site. So.

• 1:10:58Steven Rinella?

  Hmm, like some revitalization, some investment that's not totally tied to the data center.

• 1:11:03Speaker 04

  That's right. And the, you know, like, these are, they're criticized as temporary jobs, but often these projects last for a few years, longer than many people hold jobs. And, and then they're, they, they tend to cluster, like, you know, a good, you know, environment where people think they can get business done, they can build more come. So then it turns out that there are a lot of projects and a lot of people kind of moving from one to the other and, and their supervisors and their, you know, will- Rent apartments in

• 1:11:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, I understand.

• 1:11:42Speaker 04

  A lot of this is like a revitalized little town.

• 1:11:44Steven Rinella?

  It's not just like ephemeral activity. It generates general economic activity.

• 1:11:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you know, there's, but I've also knocked on the door of houses that like, the guy wasn't home, but he was, he was sitting across from a new RV camp that was gonna, and he just had a little ranch house and flat as far as the eye could see in Texas, near Abilene, and across the street was being placed a 3,000 RV camp, you know, with telephone, not telephone,

• 1:12:18Steven Rinella?

  Of contractors.

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  Power poles. They were, they were basically putting in water and power poles on an expansive land that was extremely uh, flat, broad, huge. Imagine 3,000 recreational vehicles. So this is where the workers would come. And so all of a sudden, what was an empty field in front of him was, almost looked like, you know, a future airport or something.

• 1:12:43Steven Rinella?

  Was he pissed?

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  Well, he wasn't there that day when I knocked on his door, but I'm telling you,

• 1:12:48Steven Rinella?

  You'd have gotten an earful, probably.

• 1:12:49Speaker 04

  He might have had a really different view. And so like, there are some growing pains and, and some real, real concerns about growth.

• 1:12:59Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com.

• 1:13:40Steven Rinella?

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• 1:14:37Steven Rinella?

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• 1:15:21Steven Rinella?

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• 1:15:31Steven Rinella?

  Can you tell me again in Northern Virginia, the, the, the power increase for, for data centers again?

• 1:15:37Speaker 04

  Well, it's 25% of power in the state.

• 1:15:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  Goes to data centers.

• 1:15:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:15:42Speaker 04

  And probably growing.

• 1:15:43Steven Rinella?

  So however they're generating electricity, however they're generating power, it's not like, I mean, to a point, you probably go and just turn the dial up, right? And make more.

• 1:15:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Steven Rinella?

  But I imagine when you're talking about a 25% increase in power,

• 1:16:00Steven Rinella?

  you need to start looking at make like, it, it's more than just cranking up what you got going on. Meaning if you're running hydroelectric, you know, you got turbines one through 13 running, and you just kick 14 and 15 and 16 on to make up for the, the heavy use. There's a point at which that doesn't work anymore and you need new ways.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:16:23Steven Rinella?

  Like net, net new power production.

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  But I mean, one thing that is, you know, a very hot topic of conversation that would be good for everybody is something called grid utilization, which we all as a, as a society contribute to shared resources. And the power grid is one of those. And we are not utilizing the, the grid that we've already paid for to the extent that we could be. But technology is only now helping us understand how far up that, you know, level of headroom, you could really go safely.

• 1:17:02Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  And so there's all these new technologies and, and utilities, utilities are starting to be open to it to say, hey, yes, we do need to build more power, but turns out the grid is only, you know, actually we're only using 30 to 50% of the power that we've already built on a given day because we overbuilt it for those days of peak power demand.

• 1:17:26Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  And. Our ability as a human mind to do the simulations to figure out how far you could push it just didn't go that far. So we just built a lot. We bought a lot of extra.

• 1:17:38Steven Rinella?

  No, I understand. Like, let's say you're in a, let's say you're in a town, you live in a coastal community that's a very popular summer destination.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Steven Rinella?

  And when it's awful, you know, I was recently on the isle.

• 1:17:48Speaker 04

  Or if it gets really hot.

• 1:17:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I was recently on the island and there's this little community on this island and someone told me, you know how many people live here year round? There's 10 residents year round.

• 1:17:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Steven Rinella?

  In the summer, there are 400 residents.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so picture a town like that and then picture the hottest day in the summer, when everyone's like, like, turning on AC. I see your point where it's capable of that.

• 1:18:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:18:12Steven Rinella?

  But then come here in February when there's, you know, nobody here. So yeah, presumably there's infrastructure that's not

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:20Steven Rinella?

  completely utilized. I hadn't really, I never thought of that before.

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like the, the utility industry really needed somebody to wake it, so wake it up, you know, or to push it because they are not incentivized to, utilities have this perverse way of getting paid. It's just, it's an incentive that got put in when we created monopoly utilities in the dawn of the electric age. And they make more money by spending more money. Basically, they go to a utility commission and say, we need power for reliability purposes. I want to build a new thing, a new power plant, a new line, a new, and they get a guaranteed rate of return if it is approved, to compensate them for, you know, the capital that is needed for that. And so we all pay that. We all pay the cost of what

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  it was to build, plus an added rate of return. And sometimes, you could argue that they didn't need to build that brand new thing. They, they should learn how to use what we've got. And so the tech industry is looking, they're in such a hurry and, and they've, they've realized. There are certain inefficiencies in the way the system is built and they have the money and the motivation to shake up the system and say, well, hang on. Yes, I, you know, I will, if I don't offer to pay my full share on all this new infrastructure, I know I will not have the social license to build and I will be vilified. But at the same time, this, let me

• 1:19:52Speaker 04

  fund, you know, these pilot projects or let me add these sensors to lines because we could, we could be determining how far we could push this. And I'm also willing to spend my own money to put batteries behind the meter and other systems. So when everybody is at that 400 person seaside resort and, and that state is, you know, hurting for electricity, I'd disappear from the grid. So, so much of this is happening.

• 1:20:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  People don't see it.

• 1:20:24Steven Rinella?

  But why are you, why are you seeing art, like, not you, like, why do you see articles where it's that they're going to be building like, you know, nuclear plants to power data centers?

• 1:20:36Speaker 04

  Because the scale of what we're doing requires all of it. It literally requires all of it.

• 1:20:40Steven Rinella?

  So you do expect, like, even though you could find, there's efficiencies to be found in energy production and that when we're generating electricity and running it through the grid and it's not being tapped and it just, you know, isn't being stored in batteries, whatever, there is going to be in our 2030 outlook, there will need to be like net new.

• 1:21:01Speaker 04

  There will.

• 1:21:02Steven Rinella?

  Generation.

• 1:21:03Speaker 04

  And you can ask, like, can, can we stop this from happening? And I, I, I'm not sure that we can. I think money finds a way when it's trying to, you know, get to a goal. So I think we will build quite a bit of additional generation. Utilizing the grid we have right now is just a faster way to do it because it's already built. So we are, we are revitalizing old nuclear plants that have, you know, were built 50 years ago. We are.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  Putting in newer, more efficient forms of power generation, both, you know, solar and batteries, as well as, you know, newer generations of gas plants, which is

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  not necessarily a popular thing, but is going to happen. And there's all kinds of other really interesting things happening in the energy industry. We are applying a set of pioneers that came from the oil and gas industry in fracking are using those techniques to reimagine geothermal power so that you can you don't have to go where there are pockets of steam already in the earth. You can go to a location and inject water, create steam, create the steam that spins the turbine, send that water back down in a closed loop. And again, like more water efficient.

• 1:22:39Speaker 04

  And, and the better you get at it, the more you do it, the lower your costs are. There's a company called Furvo that is kind of the darling of new geothermal.

• 1:22:48Steven Rinella?

  God, that's incredible. It's like, it's like that. I'm not familiar with that concept, but it's basically you're making a steam engine, but you're using instead of burning coal to heat the water, you're, you're using the earth's thermal.

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 1:23:00Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:23:00Speaker 04

  And you're using techniques and workers who came from an industry that, you know, either, you know, needs the work or needs to be transitioned into a cleaner form, but have the skills. And so that's been a popular thing. And that's, you know, here we are in Montana. Some of the interesting projects on that are near you. There's work being done in Utah and in Nevada. And I, and there's work on this, you know, enhanced geothermal in Texas. There's, there's a lot going on in that. You have to get the cost down, but they're actually making great progress getting the cost down.

• 1:23:37Steven Rinella?

  Wouldn't it be interesting if, um, it'd be interesting if unexpected upside amid all the downsides, an unexpected upside is just like this, this sort of like American ideal that, um,

• 1:23:54Steven Rinella?

  You know, need driving innovation.

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's a big theme in the book that I'm working on.

• 1:23:59Steven Rinella?

  That you're gonna get these certain, like, you're gonna, like, for a while, you had this certain, these certain types of brains chasing renewables, right? But now you have like a whole different class and category of humans, right?

• 1:24:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15Steven Rinella?

  That are like, looking at energy, right? It'd be just like, it'd be kind of, it'd be like a weird irony if, if that sector, if that sector figured out maximizing renewables.

• 1:24:31Speaker 04

  That's right, and I think we'll end up, so, not to scare you or your, you know, viewers here, but I think we're, like I said earlier, we're at the beginning of this more of an industrial revolution that is, is catalyzed by AI. We think today of energy demand for things like chatbot prompts, but we're going into an era of physical AI, where all of this high-performance computing is going to be used to guide cars, guide robots in factories, make, you know, whether you like it or not,

• 1:25:15Speaker 04

  weaponry autonomous, you know, change the way industrial automation makes things so that we possibly can make factories viable again. A lot of that demand and a lot of that, you know, just activity to make that happen is just barely beginning. And so, we may end up just creating more energy generation to feed more.

• 1:25:51Speaker 04

  Applications of AI than we can imagine today. And so that's where it gets a little scary. You think about the ramp up and how, you know, this could change everything. It can bring positives and it can bring negatives. And I think, you know, one of the things that I'm trying to do is, is look at what each side wishes the other would acknowledge about both the promise and the peril of what is facing us.

• 1:26:19Steven Rinella?

  How would you put that? Like, like, how would you put those two questions? If you had to answer them? You know, if, if you imagine the brightest minds, like the brightest, most rational minds in the, in the anti-data center movement and you say that I, and they're saying to the, and they're saying to the industry, I wish you would acknowledge, right? And on, and on the flip side, what is the, what is the thing you found?

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I, I would say, um, what, uh, the energy industry would say, I wish we would all acknowledge is that the modern world runs on energy. And you can draw a, an upward line of, uh, you know, prosperity and energy that it's pretty much aligned. The more energy a society consumes, the higher its quality of, of life.

• 1:27:16Speaker 04

  And replacing what we, modern life has become really convenient. So you don't even really see the power plant. You just plug your phone in. Modern life has become so convenient, you don't really understand how we get water. You just turn the faucet on. You just, um, order, you know, stuff from Amazon. You just assume that, you know, steel is coming from somewhere to build your buildings.

• 1:27:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Speaker 04

  You know, it's all industrial. It's, it's, um, and.

• 1:27:48Speaker 04

  We assume these days that solar is just really cheap and batteries are just getting better. They are. They and they're improving, but they too have an environmental and industrial footprint. I mean, you've got to, you know, you've got to convert raw materials to make the products. They need to be recycled eventually, too. Modern life is, is industrial. And so I think that that is what, you know, in some ways, the, you know, guys who have been in industry building physical things want everyone to understand. And they want people to understand that what we've done so far has made a dent and, you know, to make a greener world and

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  planet has improved. You know, we've, we've improved emissions by introducing green energy. And we need to do a lot more of it, but we also, you know, we have a long way to go to decarbonize the world. And it's going to take a lot of new technology, new, new thinking, some adaptation. And so I would say that, you know, on the, on the energy side, they're saying like, the world needs more energy because we prosper with more energy, more

• 1:29:13Speaker 04

  energy, you know, is part of just progress of civilization. But we need, we need lower emissions. We need cleaner water. We need all those things.

• 1:29:24Steven Rinella?

  You feel that the industry is asking for lower emissions and cleaner water? I mean, I feel like the industry is largely, I mean, you know, I mean, let's be frank, man. I mean, the industry is largely given up on the, the green energy conversation. I mean, like the, the dry, like the main driving factors, like the adminis, the, the administration.

• 1:29:44Steven Rinella?

  Big tech, I mean, this isn't a concern of theirs anymore. It's so 2023.

• 1:29:51Speaker 04

  It is so 2023. I think that it's, it could come full circle again with some of the innovation that we're seeing. The, the tech companies are still, still standing by goals that now look increasingly impossible to meet in terms of net zero by 2030. And look at the direction that they're going.

• 1:30:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Whenever you see like a, like a 2050 or whatever, I was like, come on.

• 1:30:20Speaker 04

  And so then, you know, on the other side, that's where the, you know, advocates for climate action, for the environment, for health are saying, you know,

• 1:30:34Speaker 04

  you need to acknowledge your, your full lifecycle footprint and communities need to hear everything transparently that you are, are coming into a community and, and going to do. And there's a lot that, um, there's a lot of dialogue that, you know, it's kind of hard to have when the two sides are, are at odds. But I would say, you know, the environmental groups are saying, look, uh, you, like, don't, um, don't de-emphasize, like, you know, the

• 1:31:15Speaker 04

  truth is, you know, if you're backing up your data center with diesel, you know, that creates air pollution for the community. If we're all using shared water and you are adding incremental water demand, um, this is an issue for the community. If you are removing virgin land and, and wild places, you know, um, we ought to have a say on it. And so it is a natural kind of back and forth that is happening right now. And it is concerning that, you know, there's, there's a lot of money on the, the pro-development side and,

• 1:31:56Speaker 04

  So, you know, that's where I'm trying to kind of watch and see,

• 1:32:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:01Speaker 04

  You know, how is this happening? There's a, you know, maybe it's a, it's a, the voice is not as loud, but there are voices within tech companies,

• 1:32:14Speaker 04

  within, even guys who have been in the field developing data centers who say, "Look, we need to get to a place, communities have a lot of leverage now to ask for more." They've now realized like, "Hey, we're, you know, we're kind of a unicorn here. We've got a big pot of, you know, available power or water or what have you. And maybe our community is open to doing business with you. But, you know, we, we don't want to give, you know, tax incentives that like we used to."

• 1:32:54Steven Rinella?

  They realize they might have more leverage than they thought.

• 1:32:55Speaker 04

  More leverage, yeah. You know, we used to give these certain breaks to low-margin industrial users that, you know, were trying to afford to build a big car plant. It's such a really different community, you know, of potential users of the land that are coming in now. And not only that, they, they do have technologies that can actually improve the community. So not only can they give money for a new firehouse or fix the, you know, give money for schools, they could use high-performance computing and help the community figure out, you know, and they are doing this.

• 1:33:40Speaker 04

  They're, you know, there are good partnerships happening with, with water, where they're saying, "If we come in, let us spend tens of millions of dollars in your community to, to help shore up your leaky water system."

• 1:33:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:53Speaker 04

  And in exchange, you know, that will help us replenish more water than we're actually using at our data center. So there, there are things like that. There's a...

• 1:34:04Speaker 04

  There's a guy who was kind of known as the sort of conscience of the data center industry, Christian Bellotti.

• 1:34:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:10Speaker 04

  And I've gotten to know him. He was at Microsoft. He's basically coined some metrics about how efficient a data center could be.

• 1:34:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  And then the latter part of his career at Microsoft, he did a lot of R and D into community positive data centers. And he's now independent and working, you know, as an advisor in a lot of ways. And, you know, he says that his industry needs to think about what would make a community want the data center.

• 1:34:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:42Speaker 04

  He said, and tells his peers, until you're willing to live next to that data center, then you haven't finished doing your job.

• 1:34:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:52Speaker 04

  And you want it to be like, please in my backyard. And there are some really interesting ways that he's seen infrastructure get developed. Like, he often will cite a, like, a plant, a water desalination plant, the difference between one that was done in Australia and one was done in Singapore, and the one that was done, you know, more community positive way, you know, was got like a roof of grass and has, you know, all these different ways that it recycles the water that flows in the community. He's gone to places that, you know, are farming communities and small, simple things, like

• 1:35:33Speaker 04

  we will plant trees that improve the pollination in your community for your agriculture.

• 1:35:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:35:41Speaker 04

  Like, this industry is willing to do some of those things if you ask for them. But, you know, there's a big difference between a large company that's coming in, trying to get permission, social license to operate, and then there's a lot of other, you know, just private developers that are looking for, you know, something to develop fast and flip quick. And so-

• 1:36:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. That way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com.

• 1:36:47Steven Rinella?

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• 1:37:34Steven Rinella?

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• 1:38:14Steven Rinella?

  That's O-K-E-E-F-F-E-S company.com for guaranteed relief. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It works good. I feel like they've done...

• 1:38:28Steven Rinella?

  A poor job like, well, I mean, it's kind of university accepted. They've done a very poor job of uh their their social management of the issue for sure. And I think it's because on one hand of like pushing the radical amount of change and then also thinking that they were going to do the data center move in a lot of communities quietly.

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:54Steven Rinella?

  You know, and I understand the approach you're making because I think that a lot of times people, there's an expectation that towns, villages, communities, whatever, are going to sort of like bait the hook to bring them in. And if the tide turns enough, it's going to flip that.

• 1:39:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:39:12Steven Rinella?

  And rather than saying, oh, we'll give you these tax breaks. We'll give you this land. We'll give you all these incentives that you that you'd play that political game enough to the point where it's like, well, why don't you tell me what you're going to do for me?

• 1:39:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:39:27Steven Rinella?

  And maybe and maybe that switch will, you know, maybe that switch will happen. And there's so much, there's so much need that it'll, it'll push, it'll push that negotiating process in a totally different direction.

• 1:39:39Speaker 04

  I think that that's happening now. I think that there's, you know, communities are understanding that the ones like ironically that, you know, got started first and are probably going to be the most economically viable because they got started first. You know, they, they kind of came into being in a little earlier place where there is real competition between states for big economic projects. And so I've been traveling all over the country, a lot of places like literally for a decade, they were looking for a car manufacturing plant and, and had assembled a big mega project site and couldn't, they were like

• 1:40:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:40:22Speaker 04

  second and third and

• 1:40:24Steven Rinella?

  They're trying to lure in a plant.

• 1:40:25Speaker 04

  and they lost it again and again and again. And when data centers came along.

• 1:40:33Speaker 04

  You know, they there's a rival and they know who their rivals are and they know, you know, maybe it's Wisconsin versus Indiana, maybe it's Louisiana versus, you know, Mississippi. And so they didn't want to lose it and they they offered incentives. Um, which in retrospect, um, maybe they needed them at the time or they certainly, you know, were intending to bring business economic prosperity to their state. But there's a lot of things when we look with hindsight later at this era.

• 1:41:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they maybe made some bad deals.

• 1:41:09Speaker 04

  Hey, well, maybe we should have done it this way instead.

• 1:41:11Steven Rinella?

  Are you seeing that when you talk to people?

• 1:41:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I I've I've talked with with mayors who say, boy, I would have asked for even more had I realized how much leverage I have.

• 1:41:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:22Speaker 04

  And, um,

• 1:41:25Speaker 04

  the, you know, and some things are getting retraded, um, you know. Uh, Microsoft came to a community in Indiana and said, we'd actually like to give you a better financial deal and it has to do with the way that they've structured taxes. And it gave a lot more money to the school system right away.

• 1:41:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:41:45Speaker 04

  And they just came back and said, this is more in keeping with what we're doing now. Um, so, uh, it's it's it's kind of a give and and take. But what we're going up to is, uh, data center backlash has gotten worse. I think part of it is, you know, people have facts about their town and fears that, um, it's just really hard to separate the truth from the noise. And, um, and sometimes the truth is not good either. And so we're going to have an election cycle where is I I just wrote a column about this where, um, you know, I was talking with a political consultant who said, you know, if you are running a governor's race,

• 1:42:27Speaker 04

  uh, he was speaking of a specific state, but I think it's broader than that. And you're Republican or a Democrat, you have to be, you can't really be for AI data centers or you have to be demanding, you know, a new, uh, a a new policy on how how the power gets done or how, you know, it works.

• 1:42:46Steven Rinella?

  Man, that that's funny you mention that for me.

• 1:42:52Steven Rinella?

  For me to get behind a politician, state level politician,

• 1:42:59Steven Rinella?

  if their, if their deal was, if their sort of, if their take on it was, I'm gonna do everything in my power to bring data centers to our state.

• 1:43:12Steven Rinella?

  In my mind, they're out.

• 1:43:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Steven Rinella?

  It doesn't need to be that they're gonna do everything in their power to prevent it, but they would have to like articulate a level of skepticism and a level of negotiating prowess about how this was gonna go down. And then if it happens, it's gonna be good for us. Like I would, I would have to hear it. So it doesn't surprise me to hear that just across the country, you have to be like, um, I don't know what the best word for it. You have to be like, maybe at least a data center skeptic, you know? Because really,

• 1:43:50Steven Rinella?

  the thing that like, the thing that makes me pay attention is, is, and it sounds trite. Like, I don't wanna look at it.

• 1:43:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:57Steven Rinella?

  I don't wanna look at it.

• 1:43:59Steven Rinella?

  You know, when I look out, I like to see things,

• 1:44:05Steven Rinella?

  like, like green.

• 1:44:06Speaker 04

  How God made it.

• 1:44:07Steven Rinella?

  Wildlife habitat, you know what I mean? Like, I, I, like, I don't like to, I don't wanna look out and see it. And so it would take a lot. And there's a sense that like,

• 1:44:17Steven Rinella?

  there's a sense that even if there's tons of resistance,

• 1:44:22Steven Rinella?

  I'm not, I'm not gonna see it in my laptop.

• 1:44:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:26Steven Rinella?

  Do you follow me? Like, there could be like, it's never gonna be like, I'm gonna, I'm never gonna try to use Google, you know, drive, right? And, and realize, ah, there's no, I just know it'll resolve itself.

• 1:44:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:44:39Steven Rinella?

  And so the, the resistance part of it, like the resistance to data center part of it, never feels real to me, like it's gonna cost me.

• 1:44:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:46Steven Rinella?

  And so maybe that's a paradigm shift that will need to happen, where people start seeing like some way that like, if we resist this all the time, we're gonna lose out on a global scale. We're gonna lose out on some geopolitical scale. But I think that people would have to see it first. Cause there's plenty of people that hate data centers that are probably organizing their anti-data center activities with cloud computing.

• 1:45:07Speaker 04

  And using social media algorithms to elevate.

• 1:45:10Steven Rinella?

  I mean, not probably.

• 1:45:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:12Steven Rinella?

  They definitionally are. The anti-data center movement is driven by.

• 1:45:18Steven Rinella?

  Data centers. So but Americans are comfortable with that kind of Americans are comfortable with that kind of hypocrisy.

• 1:45:26Speaker 04

  They are, and we we do face, you know, some some risks, you know, in the as we think about where the world could go. You know, we're it has become very difficult to build infrastructure in this country. And we're in desperate need of a better power grid. We're depending on which side of the, you know, political aisle you walk down, we're in desperate need of more transmission, and we're in desperate need of more natural gas pipelines, both of which are considered, quote, linear infrastructure. You know, they go through people's land. One is buried. So maybe neither one are easy to get through. Okay. And and so we're at

• 1:46:11Speaker 04

  a moment where there's maybe some bipartisan discussion about whether we make that easier. From what I've seen of some polls, like, people do find like the threat of China and AI-enabled warfare to still be abstract. And, you know, if they're like in a community where it was pastoral, maybe it was pastoral because the factories closed and they, you know, just became cornfields again. But the if it but they see their community first

• 1:46:48Speaker 04

  and don't want it to change with so much else changing. And so the truth is that China has built a grid that's, you know, triple our size. Now, they've been powering manufacturing all this time that we've been doing less manufacturing, right? So their grid is super modern. It is capable of ramping up.

• 1:47:13Speaker 04

  For whatever it may be, economic wartime, they've got a grid that is quite capable. And they've got a burgeoning advanced manufacturing sector.

• 1:47:25Speaker 04

  You know, we're not talking cheap toys and furniture. We're talking, you know, batteries, automated factories. We're talking, you know, all the different elements of green energy that, you know, require solar panels, but robotics.

• 1:47:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:46Speaker 04

  All of this advanced manufacturing. Now, there's an effort to bring it back here. Guess what? That uses more energy and that, you know, will have an additional industrial footprint besides data centers. And they will use data centers to run them.

• 1:48:01Steven Rinella?

  That's man, that's the thing I always think about is I used to work on this theory and I never got it worked out good. It was kind of like an environmental nationalism and it's, it's full of holes. But this environmental nationalism I envisioned would be that, um, it's as immature as it might sound. It would be this idea that our play, our play would be to harness resources, like environmental degradation that other nations are comfortable doing.

• 1:48:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:30Steven Rinella?

  And that we would reap the benefits of that, but leave our stuff clean and pristine. I never got all the details worked out, but I was, I was trying to envision.

• 1:48:40Speaker 04

  Haven't we done that?

• 1:48:42Steven Rinella?

  We, we do do that. We do that and it would, we do, we do that to quite a degree. And it would be the thing that was brought up all the time when people were, I was talking about your heartburn on your kids.

• 1:48:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:52Steven Rinella?

  To turn the lights off and be like, all these things in the U.S. around being efficient with energy and, and clean coal and all this, and you'd look, but you're like, but there's still India.

• 1:49:03Speaker 04

  No, we've out.

• 1:49:04Steven Rinella?

  There's still China. It'd be like, you can do all this stuff. It doesn't matter because there's these things you can't control that are out there. And so in some way we benefit from it. But I think that if you looked and said like, sure, man, maybe in China, they don't have a movement of people that has the freedom and liberty and autonomy to resist the government.

• 1:49:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:49:25Steven Rinella?

  To resist industry. Industry is king. The government is king. Human, like citizens have no voice. They get steamrolled. Their stuff all gets turned in to data centers, right? Up until the point when we're like, up until the point where we're fighting a war with China. And if we're fighting a war with China, even if it's a proxy war through Taiwan or whatever, we're fighting a war with China. And then we say to ourselves, man,

• 1:49:53Steven Rinella?

  we shouldn't have just let it be that they were doing it all and we weren't doing it. Because now we're at odds, you know? And it's, it's a like, I don't know, it's a tricky one. It's a tricky one when I imagine a,

• 1:50:08Steven Rinella?

  you know, a natural, beautiful landscape with clean air, clean water, and like healthy wildlife populations and like, you know, just a place you love to be and love to look out versus this distant threat

• 1:50:25Steven Rinella?

  that we're, that we're going to get bested by another country in a way that is going to ultimately impede our freedom. And I think that you have to, you know, and, and looking at all this, it's like a, it's a really complicated gamble everybody has to make.

• 1:50:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you, you ask, well, can, you know, is there a way to do that? And have fewer regrets? And so, you know, I just wrote about this event I attended where a bunch of Silicon Valley founders had, had rushed to Detroit for, you know, the sole purpose of discussing and, and showing how we can re-industrialize America, using their technology, right? Making factories, you know, and, and industrial bases work differently. Using technology to make critical medical processing cleaner. And bringing it here, because if, if we're a society that no longer makes things

• 1:51:21Speaker 04

  and just a service economy and we're dependent on the powers that do make things, that doesn't leave us in a very good position. And, but what you love and what we all love, Wild America and the, the, you know, scenery just outside of this podcast studio is, you know, it is what our country

• 1:51:45Speaker 04

  makes, is what makes our country so majestic. And so,

• 1:51:51Speaker 04

  what are some attempts to have industry and, and progress? And think more about the natural landscape? And there, there are models that are starting to emerge

• 1:52:03Speaker 04

  that, you know, Make better choices. There are AI data centers that are being built in, you know, desert prairie in Texas that will primarily be run off the grid on solar and batteries with some natural gas power to kind of firm it when it's not sunny or windy if there's wind. And some of, you know, it's using some kind of flexible gas power that uses less water. Does that mean that that's, you know, the way you can do it everywhere?

• 1:52:41Speaker 04

  No, like you need certain, certain regions allow you to reimagine an industrial factory, like a data center, which really is an industrial factory. Other places, you know, you might have water, but you, you know, don't have the power and maybe people, and to build it, you know, you, you can't put a burden on people. What, what I found so interesting is like, we've got the richest industry in the world trying to take from the power system. And it's also the case that there are people living in dire conditions who can't run their dialysis machine or their asthma machine and the power, they can't afford their power bill.

• 1:53:25Speaker 04

  Like we're sharing that same, you know,

• 1:53:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Speaker 04

  Mark Zuckerberg is sharing that system with that human being who, who needs, you know, very, whose very subsistence depends on being able to afford their power bill. So are there some, some ways that we can all fit ourselves onto the planet together? Like you, you would like to hope so and you know that there will be mistakes along the way, but back to your point about the way the country allows us to be messy and free and, you know, do what we want with our property rights. It is a different way to arrive at the answer than to have it be centrally planned from the Chinese Communist Party.

• 1:54:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:12Speaker 04

  And so, and it's the way our country is, this is how it's unfolding. It's, it's where we have opposition. We have proponents. They're both trying to make each other more honest. Hopefully they will. That's America, I guess.

• 1:54:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:33Steven Rinella?

  If you had to crystal ball it, when you look at, this kind of closing question for you, if you have to crystal ball it, when we first started talking, we talked about that 2030 projection.

• 1:54:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:46Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:54:49Steven Rinella?

  Will opposition, if you crystal ball it, will opposition

• 1:54:55Steven Rinella?

  to data centers block that projection? Or do you think that it's like, it's like where there's a will, there's a way, like it'll happen, it'll happen in, it might move, but, but that's going to happen?

• 1:55:10Speaker 04

  I think it's going to happen more in certain regions of the country than others.

• 1:55:14Steven Rinella?

  So we'll shift where it happens, but it will happen.

• 1:55:17Speaker 04

  We'll shift where it's allowed to happen.

• 1:55:20Speaker 04

  There will be some of these projects built where people weren't, aren't happy with it. And I think that could make it a less happy outcome. But, so I think, you know, for example, you'll end up seeing more of it come to Texas. You're, you're already seeing that now. Not because Texas is rolling over, actually. Texas is an interesting case because they are, they have their own grid, their own grid sheriffs. You know, they've been very strict, saying, here's how we want it to happen. And, but they've always been more of a pro-development state.

• 1:55:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:57Speaker 04

  But I think it's going to take a few years for the mess and the dust of building to clear. And

• 1:56:09Speaker 04

  some, some places may seem like white elephants and others, we may just get used to them and then start to take them for granted, like we have other aspects of our industrial and digital life already, or our energy supply already. And it's, it's up to, you know, all the innovators to try to do it with a better footprint so that we.

• 1:56:36Steven Rinella?

  I oftentimes try to explain to my kids, the Y2K phenomenon.

• 1:56:42Speaker 04

  The panic that wasn't?

• 1:56:44Steven Rinella?

  Meaning, there's things that, like, history's full of this. American history's full of this. There, there's things like this that come. And it's like, so shocking.

• 1:56:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:56Steven Rinella?

  And then later, people look and.

• 1:57:02Steven Rinella?

  Later generations and the previous generations had to explain like, no, you don't understand, man. This was like when this happened, this was a big deal. It was a big deal. And they're just like, huh, right? Like all the like, picture, picture what we were going through in the 40s and 50s with, with, with nuclear energy.

• 1:57:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:23Steven Rinella?

  And nuclear armament.

• 1:57:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And building the plants in the 70s.

• 1:57:27Steven Rinella?

  My kids will like, they will never understand the amount of soul searching and the amount of public debate, right? The careers that were won and lost, the books that were written about this is the, is this the right move? Should we go down this path? They would, it'll just be that that's what it, that's how the world is.

• 1:57:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. There were debates like that about, you know, coal mining and, you know, the early oil boom, a lot of it was up in Pennsylvania and it definitely changed the landscape. And to some degree benefited the cities closer to the coast, but it also, you know, created communities that of laborers and points of pride that led to the steel age.

• 1:58:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And I mentioned that it's a NIMBY fight. It almost like accentuates, it almost, it almost makes it why it needs to be a NIMBY fight would be that a citizen says, I accept that it's coming. This is all inevitable. The only thing I can really do here is I can make it that it's not right there. Like that's the only, you know, if I can do that, if I can make it not across the road from my house, I accept the rest and that'll be my fight.

• 1:58:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:53Steven Rinella?

  You know, and that'll probably be how this continues to play out. They're like, I get it. You're all gonna do it. Don't do it right there.

• 1:59:00Speaker 04

  And who will be happier? It's an interesting question. The ones that don't get any of it, the ones that get way too much of it. Um, you know, it's a, it comes with trade offs.

• 1:59:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that was a thing I was gonna ask you about, but then I thought it'd just be such wild speculation is, I was gonna ask you about, do you think that some of these cities, states, whatever, that make it prohibitive to build data centers, that in 10 years, 20 years, they're gonna look at it like how Portland, when Portland made hard drugs legal, and then a while later, they were like, my God, can you believe, that was the dumbest thing we've ever done? Right? That, that down the road, states, cities will be like, dude, we shouldn't have driven those people away. Now, look at all the prosperity that these other,

• 1:59:54Steven Rinella?

  these other cities are having, and we like screwed ourselves. And now, you know, I don't know.

• 2:00:00Speaker 04

  I think it could be a big contrast between the communities that did and the communities that didn't.

• 2:00:08Speaker 04

  And I think you're gonna have different people either feeling regret or satisfaction. Like, anyone whose job it is to figure out how you're gonna, you know, fund a municipal budget is, is gonna say, wow, I really could use that tax revenue.

• 2:00:24Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:25Speaker 04

  You know, it kicks in, you know, there have been tax breaks, don't get me wrong, but you know, some of those start to, um, uh, you know, expire, and then the property value of these data centers could be enormous.

• 2:00:41Speaker 04

  If you listen to tech and what they think they can make off of them, then you realize that, the tax base of some of these communities could go up hundreds of percent, you know, by multiples. And, um, and that Pace for a lot, including helping communities that are struggling.

• 2:01:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the human mind doesn't really work that way, though. If down the road, you're like, you're closing a school, no one's gonna say like, damn it, we should have let the data center come.

• 2:01:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, they probably won't say that.

• 2:01:10Steven Rinella?

  People's heads don't work that way.

• 2:01:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Steven Rinella?

  Well, Anne Davis Vaughn, thanks for coming on the show. People that want to follow this as it plays out, and it's happening so fast. There's so much going on all the time. Anne does a column at theinformation.com. Every two weeks, you have a column?

• 2:01:27Speaker 04

  Every two weeks. It's behind a paywall, but it's worth it.

• 2:01:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I have really enjoyed your reporting on it. Appreciate you coming down.

• 2:01:37Speaker 04

  And I post it on LinkedIn, so you can always get the gist of what I'm writing.

• 2:01:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh, perfect. Okay. So Anne Davis Vaughn, last name V A U G H N. Look forward to?

• 2:01:48Speaker 04

  V A U G H A N.

• 2:01:49Steven Rinella?

  What did I just say?

• 2:01:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:01:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I spelled it wrong. I'm sorry. Spell it again?

• 2:01:53Speaker 04

  It's V A U G H A N.

• 2:01:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 2:01:56Speaker 04

  No, it's.

• 2:01:57Steven Rinella?

  V A U G H A N. Is this pronounced Vaughn, though?

• 2:02:01Speaker 04

  Vaughn.

• 2:02:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I didn't screw that up. Great. And looked for the, uh, looked for the book, which will hopefully probably be titled Gigawatt. And again, it's a book about the AI industrial boom and how it is reshaping the energy industry, the industrial landscape in the American heartland. Thanks for coming on.

• 2:02:18Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me, Stephen.

• 2:02:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, Nate Mason's back there flagging me. The TRCP deal. Just hang tight a minute. This has nothing to do with AI. Every year, we do, we do our TRCP, our TRCP Turkey Hunt Giveaway, where we raise money for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Yanis, we've been doing this many years now. Yanis and I take a, it's a raffle. We take the winner and a guest, and we take them on a turkey hunt. We cover airfare, lodging. Last year, we brought in a buddy of mine who's a professional chef to cook. We cover all expenses, turkey tag, everything. We take you turkey hunting, two days, three nights. We have a great time. We got a super good spot lined up. For next spring, we took our guys there this spring. Everybody got their turkeys the

• 2:03:04Steven Rinella?

  first day. It's a great time. If you want to do it, go to trcp.org, look for the summer fundraiser. And again, all the expenses are covered. So when you buy raffle tickets, every dime of that raffle ticket goes to TRCP. And TRCP's slogan is guaranteeing Americans quality places to hunt and fish. So, uh, support TRCP, enter the raffle for the turkey hunt giveaway hosted by me and Janus Puteles, uh, the Latin eagle. Thanks, everyone.

• 2:04:05Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got weather tech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in weather tech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put weather tech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com. Hey, let me tell you, when the hunt is over, the work isn't over. You've still got all

• 2:04:49Steven Rinella?

  the grinding, stuffing, slicing and sealing. Turning your harvest into meals takes the right tools. L E M products offers grinders, stuffers, slicers, dehydrators, vacuum sealers, and more for hunters and home meat processors. For more than 30 years, L E M has been helping people bring their harvest from field to table. Visit L E M products.com and use promo code Steve 15 to receive 15% off plus free shipping. That's Steve 15 at L E M products.com.

• 2:05:28Steven Rinella?

  Timeout in the field is not free. Okay, every time you go out in the woods, there's a trade off happening. Like you leave work early, you miss your kid's game, whatever. You forego some family gathering. If that applies to you, what you gotta do is you gotta learn how to spend the right time out in the woods, the right time in the tree. And OnX Hunt's Deer Movement Forecast tells you when deer are most likely to be on their feet based on real conditions. So you're not missing the kid's game or burning paid time off on a day that's not going to produce. The Deer Movement Forecast means missing fewer of the moments that matter, whether in the stand or back at home. Try it today in OnX Hunt.

• 2:06:07Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.