The Ezra Klein Show: The A.I. Revolt Is Here

The A. I. giants weren’t prepared for this.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Ripple has been powering modern finance for a decade. It's not our first trip around the blockchain, and it won't be our last. We're leading the charge to bridge the gap between existing financial systems and the future of finance. You can have it all: legacy, stability, and digital innovation. Systems that work with your other systems. Because with the right partner, the question isn't crypto or traditional finance. The question is simply, why choose? A new standard of modern finance. It's happening with Ripple. For informational purposes only. Availability of products can vary and may be provided by different Ripple entities.

• 0:55Kevin Roose?

  So we are taking this week off, along with our producers, to get ready for our finale extravaganza, our last ever episode of Hard Fork, which will be next week.

• 1:04Casey Newton?

  And when you see the choreography, you'll understand why we needed a week to prepare.

• 1:08Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. There's pyro, there's choreo, it's going to be a big production.

• 1:12Casey Newton?

  There's Oreos.

• 1:15Kevin Roose?

  But until then, we have a very special treat to share with you. You may remember past Hard Fork guest Jasmine Sun. She recently appeared on the Ezra Klein Show to talk about her reporting on data centers.

• 1:27Casey Newton?

  Yeah, she took this really fascinating reporting trip through the Midwest this summer, interviewing people on all sides of the debate throughout Wisconsin and Michigan. She wrote a piece called "No Data Centers in My Backyard: Money, Power, and Populism in the AI Buildout" on her Substack. Really great, really worth a read. And after you read it, you should listen to this conversation with Ezra.

• 1:50Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:51Casey Newton?

  And then, we'll be back next week, one more time. And among other things, we'll tell you what we're doing next.

• 1:58Kevin Roose?

  We'll be back in a week to say goodbye and bring you our very special finale episode. But in the meantime, enjoy Jasmine and Ezra talking about data centers.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  What is big, ugly, and has united Republicans and Democrats at a time when it has felt like nothing else could? AI data centers. Last August, a Heat Map News poll found that about 4 in 10 voters would oppose a data center being built where they live. By May of this year, opposition grew to 7 in 10. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, of course, has proposed a new Citizens Bill of Rights for AI.

• 2:59Kevin Roose?

  The incentives of big tech are not the same as what's in the interest of the people and the public.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Senator Bernie Sanders called for a national data center moratorium.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  This moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing and make sure that the benefits of these technologies work for all of us, not just the wealthiest people on earth.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  There are over 100 local or statewide moratorium proposals across the country. And here in New York, Governor Kathy Hochul, not usually thought of as a hardcore populist, just imposed a one-year moratorium on data center construction.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  These hyperscale AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, truly threatening to outpace our grid's capacity, and they drive up costs for local ratepayers. And I refuse to let those costs be passed on to New Yorkers, who already pay too much for their utility bills.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  So I wanted to get into the fight over data centers. How much of this is really about water, or electricity, or aesthetics? And how much is about AI itself and the companies that are behind it? My guest today is Jasmine Sun. Jasmine has been doing excellent coverage of both the culture inside the AI companies -- unusual culture -- and the anger that is building against them in the rest of the country. I highly recommend following her Substack, but right now, she just finished a reporting trip in the Midwest, talking to the people organizing against these data centers. And I wanted to hear what she'd learned.

• 4:45Speaker 06

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• 5:19Speaker 07

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• 5:52Speaker 00

  Ripple has been powering modern finance for a decade. It's not our first trip around the blockchain, and it won't be our last. We're leading the charge to bridge the gap between existing financial systems and the future of finance. You can have it all: legacy, stability, and digital innovation. Systems that work with your other systems. Because with the right partner, the question isn't crypto or traditional finance. The question is simply, why choose? A new standard of modern finance. It's happening with Ripple. For informational purposes only. Availability of products can vary and may be provided by different Ripple entities.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Jasmine Sun, welcome to the show.

• 6:28Speaker 08

  I'm so excited to be here.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  So you just got back from a reporting trip in Wisconsin and Michigan, covering the fight over data centers. Let's just start with what you see when you're near a data center. What does it look like?

• 6:42Speaker 08

  I think one of the most important things about rural Wisconsin and rural Michigan is how beautiful it is. I felt like I was in Eden. I felt like I was in paradise. It's incredibly lush, incredibly green. And as you get closer to a data center, you start to see more power lines, you start to see more towers, and eventually, you just see what looks like an extremely large, flat warehouse. But you just see this sort of, like, verdant landscape give way to what is a windowless industrial park. Data centers are very ugly. I think I didn't appreciate this until I started standing in front of them, getting near them, listening to them.

• 7:23Speaker 08

  People will time how long it takes to drive past a data center on the highway going 70 miles per hour in Port Washington. I think it's like a minute and 42 seconds. The size of these things--

• 7:34Speaker 03

  That's a long on a highway.

• 7:35Speaker 08

  It is a long, long ride. Like, these hyperscale data centers are huge. They are massive. And so, I think that the aesthetic questions, right, around, is this what I want my estate, my community, to look like? These are really salient to people.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  You mentioned hearing them.

• 7:52Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  What do they sound like?

• 7:54Speaker 08

  Oh my gosh. I mean, they sound like humming, buzzing, whirring. Every once in a while, you'll hear a rattling.

• 8:01Speaker 09

  Residents who live next door, to some of them say, they're producing noise that's not only annoying, but debilitating, like this right here.

• 8:14Speaker 08

  But again, they're windowless. There are not that many workers inside. So they're very mechanical sounds. They are inhuman, as a lot of folks would say.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  So you spent a lot of time with people organizing against data centers. Who were they?

• 8:28Speaker 08

  You had stay-at-home moms. You had retired executives. You had farmers who didn't like the impacts on their land. You had activists, professional activists, with environmental groups in the state. It was an interesting mix of people, but a lot of women, relatively more left-leaning, there are definitely some right-leaning folks as well.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  So one question I've heard people ask is, how much is this different than other kinds of industrial installations? I mean, there are a lot of things that are built all over the country that you wouldn't necessarily want to be right next to. Are data centers unusual in this? Or are they, you know, from fracking to industrial agriculture, just like the latest version of it?

• 9:16Speaker 08

  It's a good question. It's one I had and thought a lot about before I went. And I've talked to city officials who are confused by this question of, we had a chip fab here, we had an auto plant here, we had a fulfillment center here, and nobody cared as much. Why are data centers so much more unpopular than, say, solar farms, which also faced local opposition in places like Michigan? And so, I think while the quality of life concerns around this thing is loud and annoying and ugly and consumes resources are very similar to other industrial projects, there must be some reason that opposition is so much more severe and widespread, even beyond the communities where the data centers are literally being built.

• 9:57Speaker 08

  And I think that question has a lot to do with the AI, with the AI industry, and sort of the way that people feel about these companies and these projects.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  When I read your reporting on this, when I've talked to people involved in this, it always feels to me there's sort of three layers of concerns that are converging into what we call the data center backlash. There's process.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Then there's direct impacts, you know, the environment, water, electricity. And then there's AI itself. And maybe let's go through them sort of one by one. One thing that I have been hearing a lot of, and I've seen in your reporting as well, is the anger over how these processes are going, and in particular, the use of NDAs.

• 10:40Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Which is not that common, right? I've covered a lot of, what does it take to build a housing development? And you don't tend to hear a lot of the city councilmen got put under an NDA.

• 10:50Speaker 08

  Right.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  So what is happening with these NDAs?

• 10:53Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, this is also something that really surprised me. And I think the NDAs that-

• 10:58Speaker 03

  I should say, non-disclosure agreements.

• 10:59Speaker 08

  Right, the non-disclosure agreements. This has really inflamed the amount of local opposition that you see. And so basically, what would happen oftentimes is there would be some sense, starting in city council, that maybe a big development project was gonna show up. But because of the NDAs, the council members would not be able to disclose that necessarily it was a data center, necessarily who the customers were gonna be, a company like OpenAI, or a company like Anthropic, or whoever. Or even the size of the project, like how much electricity is this actually going to consume? But whispers would start to get around. I was talking to a VP of a construction union, and he was saying, you know, there's an old Irish saying, that the only way to keep a secret between three people is to kill two of them, which I thought was hilarious.

• 11:42Speaker 08

  And so he's saying, when these developers show up, they talk to the general contractor. The general contractor talks to all their subcontractors. The subcontractors talk to all their workers. Yes, maybe everyone is signing NDAs at every part of that process, but whispers get around. And as soon as whispers get around, you start to get social media posts, you start to get rumors. And the city council, because they are beholden to these NDAs, they lose the ability to get ahead of the social media narrative. That was something I repeatedly heard from these local government officials, was we could not get ahead of social media because we had signed an NDA and rumors started getting around.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  But why do the companies want these NDAs signed?

• 12:17Speaker 08

  I mean, I think they didn't think about it. They didn't realize there would be a backlash. They just thought it would be easier in case they changed their mind. These companies sign lots of NDAs with their own workers, with anyone who works with them. I don't think there's a good reason. Microsoft has actually decided to stop using NDAs because of the level of backlash. I've heard from people managing compute at some of the other AI labs that they are thinking of making the same decision. One thing that surprised me is all of the pro data center, pro build people who I spoke to, whether workers or AI developers, they all regret the NDAs. They all think that they made the situation much worse.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  What is the impact of a new data center on water usage, water availability in a town?

• 13:00Speaker 08

  They do require some of it, obviously, primarily for cooling the data centers, because these chips and servers run really hot and they need AC. The thing that's gone a bit wrong in the water debate, I think, is that today's new data centers are almost all closed-loop systems. Closed-loop in the same way that air conditioning is closed-loop, which means they're recycling the water within the system. And they use a fraction of the water that, you know, golf courses use. And in fact, in places like Janesville, Wisconsin, we would often see a literal golf course right next to the data center site. But they do use some, and it has sort of become a very sticky icon of like, these things, resource consumption. A lot of folks I talked to in Wisconsin and Michigan, they would say things like, you know, they're building right by the Great Lakes.

• 13:44Speaker 08

  Why would they do that if they weren't trying to drain the lakes? Why would they do that if they didn't need all this fresh water?

• 13:49Speaker 03

  And so your view is, at this point, the technology has changed, such that water is not as big of a deal as maybe it actually was a couple of years ago. I think the next thing people have heard a lot about is energy usage.

• 14:00Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  So walk me through that.

• 14:03Speaker 08

  The electricity consumption issue is real. So data centers do in fact use an incredible amount of electricity. These, these chips and these servers that are processing gigantic mathematical calculations to make AI work require tons of energy. All these chips and clusters are talking to each other. You need the interconnections to be really fast. In order to get like a chat GPT answer really quickly with low latency, you need these super fast connections, all of that's powered by electricity. So we are talking about a really, really significant amount of new electricity that is gonna require new generators, new power plants. It's probably gonna be natural gas in the near future. Once a data center is fully operational, there is not a ton of air and water pollution, assuming that everything's working correctly.

• 14:47Speaker 08

  They are relatively clean facilities. But, you know, like, a lot of folks are concerned about the electricity use. They're saying, yeah, maybe the data center doesn't use that much water. Maybe the data center doesn't pollute that much. But what about all of these, you know, new power plants that they're going to build in order to power it?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  When the tech companies come into these towns and begin talking to the city council members, when they begin talking to the community, what are they sort of promising on the one hand, right? This is why this will be good for you. And what are they asking for on the other?

• 15:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, so these things do provide an incredible amount of tax revenue, right? And so in Mount Pleasant, the, on the old Foxconn site, which ended up being bought out by Microsoft, they saw, oh, there's all this infrastructure already here. Why don't we build a hyperscale data center on this unused industrially zoned land? Microsoft is on track to pay $19.6 million in property taxes in 2026. This is expected to continue for many years. Again, this is a small village of 28,000 people. And so there are really meaningful property tax benefits. And I do think, I find it frustrating personally, when anti-data center organizers say that the job creation is a myth, because I think that 500, you know, maybe six-figure jobs for folks who go through apprenticeships and maybe don't need college degrees

• 16:03Speaker 08

  that last two to six years, that's enough time to build a family, that's enough time to buy a home. I think it's super meaningful. And when I talk to technicians, when I talk to workers, clearly, it was extremely meaningful work. I think one of the things that was the most surprising to me when I talked to data center activists was that they responded to so many of the pro arguments with, I don't believe them. So like, this company says that they are going to treat the water with chemicals in it so that it doesn't flow into the lakes. People would say, I don't believe them. I don't think they can do it. People would say, the companies would say, we are going to cover the cost of our own electricity grid built out. We are gonna ensure that rates do not go up for all Michiganders.

• 16:49Speaker 08

  A lot of folks would say, I don't believe them. DTE has raised our electricity rates basically every year since 2022. Why would this be the year that they decide not to do it? I do not believe them. They are going, we are going to create 500 jobs, and some of these will stick around after the data center is built. People just said, I don't believe them. It was really clear to me that data centers are showing up in an environment of extremely low trust in both governments and in corporations, to the extent where the pro arguments almost do not land because people just aren't interested in anything an outside tech company is going to tell them. They say, they have big PR teams, they can say whatever they want. One thing that became really obvious to me when I talked about people at the AI companies and local officials, is that two years ago, no one thought that data center backlash was going to be like this.

• 17:35Speaker 08

  And so these companies were in fact looking for things like, does this state have a sales tax exemption, as Wisconsin does, to ensure that they don't have to pay sales taxes on their very expensive chips, on their very expensive GPUs? They were often looking to build in places that might even offer local subsidies to the companies for building in that area. I think that a lot of the balance of power has shifted as local opposition has ramped up. Now it's the case that I'm hearing from some local officials, if we did this again today, we wouldn't have to offer any subsidies. Because in fact, now there is so much local opposition that the developers are really looking, where is there going to be a local community and a government that is friendly to our project?

• 18:20Speaker 08

  How can we, you know, have a Christmas tree ornaments worth of community benefits agreements? And so just the nature of these deals and how much they are skewed towards communities versus the AI developers has really changed.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  One of the things that came up a lot in your reporting, and that I thought was interesting, was the fear that this is a bubble.

• 18:39Speaker 08

  For sure.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  And what's gonna happen is your community will agree to something. And then in the middle, the bubble's gonna pop. And you're gonna end up with a half-finished data center, or one that is not being kept up correctly, or something where the, you know, promised benefits don't emerge. I mean, you were in Wisconsin, which had a very, very bad experience with Foxconn.

• 19:01Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Which seems to be structuring the way people are thinking about at least some of this. So talk to me a bit about that set of concerns.

• 19:09Speaker 08

  Absolutely. Yeah, I think in terms of what people in these communities with these data centers feel when they see the projects come in with their gigantic, like $2 billion of investment, like these gigantic numbers that are being dangled, it feels like a bubble to them. One, they're seeing news articles saying maybe AI is a bubble. We don't know it's a bubble, but it could be. Two, you do have experiences like Foxconn where you have a big tech company show up in a very small community. In this case, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, a city of like 28,000 people. It's not very big. Get, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure investment and tax subsidy from the, from the town. Promise 13,000 high-paying manufacturing jobs and then pull out because the contract wasn't set up correctly.

• 19:53Speaker 08

  They decided they didn't actually want to build a bunch of flat-screen TVs in Wisconsin. And the, you know, the town is left on the hook, having invested all of this money in the grid and in roads. They got, I think, 1,000 jobs in the end. Foxconn is still paying back all of this debt that has been accumulated. And so experiences like that have really, really soured people on the question of when an outside big tech company comes in and, you know, promises these gigantic numbers and all of these jobs and all of this tax revenue. And it's for this technology that like you can't, a lot of people, they don't see, they don't feel, they don't find personally extremely, extremely useful, not at the levels of these valuations. They have a lot of questions about if the bubble pops, are we going to be the ones left with a stranded asset in our community?

• 20:33Speaker 08

  I mean, in Janesville, Wisconsin, it was famously the site of this 100-year-old GM plant that was the centerpiece of the community that employed a ton of people. When they left during the financial crash in 2008 and the plant closed down, not only did it sort of devastate the community from a work perspective, but they also left $30 million of contamination and hazardous waste in the middle of the city that has never been cleaned up. There's forever chemicals in there. This is why developers have not been able to sell this brownfield is because there's so much waste that GM never cleaned up. And so I think that people worry about what happens if the AI bubble pops, if maybe it doesn't pop and the data center developers just decide,

• 21:15Speaker 08

  never mind, we want to build elsewhere. Never mind, this data center isn't good enough. We have newer, better technology. And who's going to be left holding the bag? That was the question I heard over and over again.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  But this is something that I do think is in people's minds.

• 21:26Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  You, you bring this in and right now you're at this time of very, very high valuations.

• 21:30Speaker 08

  Right.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  And if AI demand isn't quite what you think, or even just the company that was behind this particular data center is not part of the winner's circle, that in a couple of years, what you got is this like giant box.

• 21:45Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  That's not going to continue being valuable. And so whatever the promised benefits are from it, you know, tax revenue, et cetera, but yeah, maybe they show up for a while.

• 21:54Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  But then what if in five years they're gone, but you are left with this infrastructure? It's like, they can leave Janesville.

• 22:01Speaker 08

  Right.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  With no real concern. They're not there. Their people don't live there, right? But if you're in Janesville, you do live there.

• 22:06Speaker 08

  Yes. Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  And this is a real concern.

• 22:09Speaker 08

  You see, you see things like this with Elon's giant Colossus data centers, right, that he built out in Memphis.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  And what makes people feel better about a new construction project in their town than calling it Colossus?

• 22:19Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, these things.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Unerring touch for those people.

• 22:25Speaker 08

  I mean, so usually the thing that happens is they give them very cutesy names like Project Cannoli and The Barn, and they try to make them sound as friendly as possible. But yeah, I mean, with Colossus, XAI never really took off. People were not in fact using Grok as much as Elon thought he, they were going to be using it. And in that case, he was able to get a really good deal selling the compute capacity to Anthropic, which was growing like crazy and had not built enough data centers on their side. But you could totally imagine a world, as you say, where in fact, you know, XAI decides we are going to focus on space. We don't care about AI anymore. Maybe there's not an Anthropic to pick up the bill because Anthropic has maybe built enough of their own compute capacity. There is an open question about what happens in that world.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  So I heard Abundance last year with Derek Thompson, who published it. And one thing I've heard been asked by a lot of people, like, what does the abundance take on a data center? And the, like, the beginning of that book has this line that, you know, the question is, what do we need more of and how do we get it? And I think the question here that has been so hard for the AI companies, for the people trying to build data centers, is actually getting people to believe they need more of them, right? When you're talking about building affordable housing, when you're talking about, you know, building an array of solar panels or wind turbines, there's a pretty legible argument.

• 23:51Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  For why you need that, right? People still may not like it, but we need homes because we need places for people to live. We need solar panels because we need clean renewable energy.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  How much is this like a normal kind of, I don't even exactly want to call it nimbyism, but, uh, but a normal kind of, I don't want the industrial infrastructure built in my backyard because like, you know, what am I going to get out of that? And how much of it is actually something that is more related to people's feelings about AI? Which is, I don't want this built here because why would I want to pay the cost for a thing that I don't want there to even be more of in the first place?

• 24:34Speaker 08

  This, I think, was one of my big motivating questions going into this trip is, is it quote unquote, normal nimbyism? Is it about AI? Is it about something else? And so I spent time both looking at polls and trying to talk to people about, would you be excited if this was a chip factory, which would use a lot more water and pollute a lot more? Would you be excited if it was a solar farm? Also, maybe acquiring agricultural land and turning it into industrial use? Would you be excited if it was a million other things? And I talked to Nick Bagley, who you've had on your show about, is this just proceduralism? And we talked about the solar farms example where solar farms, uh, the opposition used very similar tactics to the data center opposition.

• 25:15Speaker 08

  They were organizing in Facebook groups. They were packing town halls. They were talking about the local impacts and the importance of farmland and the visions for their communities. There were zoning fights, of course. But like you say, with the solar farms, you do have a very clear pro case. You have a faction. You have a group of people, a constituency, people who care about the environment, who want renewable energy, who understand that that's a thing that, yeah, maybe it sucks to have in your backyard, but you can take one for the team because this is important for our planet. You don't really have a pro faction with AI. Same with like the auto plant, right? You have one, you have maybe 7,000 workers in the old GM plant in Janesville who all have families who really care about them, who see that as a constituency.

• 25:57Speaker 08

  Everyone drives a car. They see their car as essential. I think the fact that it's creating these tangible outputs really, really matter. I don't think that data centers have a compelling pro constituency besides the utility companies and the AI companies, which are already incredibly, incredibly unpopular. And I went in and asked these organizers, do you guys use AI? I do find it useful. This was one of the top questions that my friends in San Francisco wanted me to ask is, are these people like using ChatGPT? And they don't even realize that the data centers are how they can use it? And what I found there was a lot of these folks did say, yeah, I've used it to draft an email or make a meme. They're not denying that AI might have any possible utility at all.

• 26:41Speaker 08

  But they clearly didn't see it as essential in the way that cars, energy and housing are essential. They clearly saw it as kind of like a widget, a toy. And maybe there are these risks, maybe there's the job stuff, but fundamentally they were like, this thing is not that useful. I don't really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations. And so I was talking to, for example, Charles Franklin, who runs Marquette Law Polls in Wisconsin. And he was explaining that usually you see 50/50 polling on issues where you have a strong anti-case and a strong pro case. And the only reason you're kind of seeing this 70/30 bipartisan opposition to data centers, no matter whether you live near a data center or you don't, which means it's not just nimbyism, it's you don't want a data center in anyone's backyard, is because he was like, there is no strong pro argument for it.

• 27:25Speaker 08

  There is not even a fight that's really going on. Nobody wants it, was the phrase I heard over and over.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  You have a very influential definition of AI populism where you call it a worldview in which AI is viewed not only as a normal technology, but as an elite political project to be resisted. Unpack that for me.

• 27:45Speaker 08

  The phrase that you hear a lot from AI critics is, why is this being shoved down our throats? Or with, you know, ChatGPT, it's not that people are saying there is literally no use for ChatGPT. It's people are saying, why are you forcing me at my job to use AI to do something worse when I could do it better? And so I think that a lot of the public backlash to AI that has risen over the past six months is not explained by people thinking that the technology has no use at all. It's not explained by them being worried about specific technical properties of LLMs that might lead to rogue AI or misalignment or whatever, which are the sort of safest arguments.

• 28:26Speaker 08

  It's AI as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires' ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent. And I think that's also what I hear echoed in these data center debates. It's not just, uh, it's going to use this much water or that much water. I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use, people would be just as angry about the data centers.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I consider the water, I don't want to say the water issue is fake. What I will say is like, there was a debate.

• 28:57Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Uh, online a while back about how much water, like a ChatGPT query.

• 29:03Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Consumed. And somebody was like, if you really care about water, are you, are you eating beef?

• 29:08Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  As someone who doesn't eat meat, I thought this was a quite good, like, you could really save a lot of water by going vegetarian.

• 29:15Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Um, and relatively much, much more than not using ChatGPT. And relatively few people in that conversation were giving up meat.

• 29:23Speaker 08

  Or giving up YouTube videos. YouTube videos like use more water than a ChatGPT query.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Which is to say that I think sometimes people don't like a thing and they're looking for reasons to justify that dislike.

• 29:34Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  But what's actually happening at the base is they don't like the thing.

• 29:38Speaker 08

  Right.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  And the data centers, like as you're saying, I think, speak to this AI populism question like even more precisely. Because the issue with AI itself is that.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  I think people's relationship to it is very complicated.

• 29:52Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  I have myself a very complicated relationship to AI. Like, I use it a fair amount. I'm not sure I think it's a good thing for society, the way it is going. I don't want my kids using it. I know they'll be using it. Like, maybe it'll make things better, but I really don't know. Like, I think that the costs are going to be very, very high for us relationally and economically. And, you know, and so I just, I'm very conflicted. But do I want to live next to a data center? Yeah, no.

• 30:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's totally different.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Like, that's easier.

• 30:22Speaker 08

  I mean, one of the most interesting things-

• 30:23Speaker 03

  Somebody is just making you do that.

• 30:24Speaker 08

  Yes, of like going to this, um, I, back to back, I went to this Abdul Bernie AOC rally in Lansing, Michigan, and then I went and saw the Celine activists the next day. And I was researching how the Celine Stargate project happened. And it was really interesting to see these echoes of the populist message sort of manifest in this specific project. Like, when I'm at this rally, people are talking about the oligarchy. They're talking about, uh, corporate billionaires, whether it's big tech or big pharma or DT, the utility companies, um, paying off politicians in order to, you know, screw the people over. And that's why you need the people to come together and to get money out of politics, to prevent DT from donating to these super PACs and paying off Gretchen Whitmer or whatever.

• 31:07Speaker 08

  And, um, then when I learned how the Celine data center saga played out, what happened was the Celine Township City Council, unlike a lot of city councils, actually voted for one against rezoning their land for the data center. So this was a case where local government said, this is not our vision for our community. It's not worth it to us. And what happened? The data center developers sued Celine Township, a town of like, again, a few thousand people, um, into saying, wait, no, this is exclusionary zoning. You can't have no industrial use in your entire township. And when a town of that size is getting sued by a giant AI data center developer, they just settled. They were just like, fine, give us a few million for the fire department and for some schools. And this fight is not worth it to us.

• 31:49Speaker 08

  But that to people felt like a profound, a profound violation of little D democracy. It felt like the dark money in politics story, which is, you know, you have some very rich companies show up with a bag of money to your politician. They don't tell anybody else what's happening. The politicians aren't allowed to tell their citizens and involve them in the decision-making process. And they themselves work out a deal, a deal that is fundamentally asymmetric because of the amount of money on one side, that will then transform the image of your community, your lived reality into the world that these tech companies have decided for you. And so I think that the data centers in that sense are a very visceral, uh, microcosm of the way that a lot of people feel the AI is showing up in their lives.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  I would also maybe even take that a little bit further. I think that the way that not all of the AI companies, and I think Anthropic has largely been a, a good actor here, but many of them have acted, has opened up such a chasm between what they say and then how they act under pressure, that one should be incredibly, incredibly skeptical of them. And what I mean by this is that, you know, Sam Altman and all these different people, you know, in front of congressional testimony and in interviews will say, you know, it should not just be us making these decisions. There should be a real deep, small D democratic role here in how AI rolls out, in, um, you

• 33:12Speaker 03

  know, what effects it has on communities and how it is governed. And then when a community or a politician, you know, who's representing a community, tries to say, well, we don't want this data center here, or we want to impose these regulations. We have watched repeatedly, these companies turn tremendous amounts of financial artillery-

• 33:38Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  -against whoever is standing in their way, right? And to, to use this, the expertise and the money and the power they are amassing to kind of short circuit that democratic voice.

• 33:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. One is like, I think one big gap I noticed between Silicon Valley and the folks in these communities I was talking to is Silicon Valley does tend to think that money solves all problems, that if you just make the check bigger, everything's going to be okay. And I think people have a sense for, I'm being bribed. This corporation is not offering me a free lunch or whatever. There is going to be something that I'm losing here. And in fact, sometimes the fact that the data center deals were bigger or the amount of political spending was bigger, actually it just makes people more suspicious. Like, in the Abdul race, like, his number one, like, hit on Haley Stevens is how much money she is getting from AIPAC, from DTE, from Pharma or whatever. And so one is just that I think we're in a political environment where making the numbers bigger and the amounts of money bigger makes people more suspicious, not less.

• 34:33Speaker 08

  Another one I'll just quickly mention is, I don't even think Anthropic should be left off the hook for things like labor market impacts, right? They are the ones simultaneously warning that we might see a, you know, 50% of white collar jobs lost by 2030. This is really important to us. We're freaking out about it. Uh, Dario has written in his essays, uh, we might see an underclass of people of lower intellectual ability. And they are building the agents, they are building the coding agents, the banking agents, the design agents, that they know are going to displace jobs, or they believe at least are going to displace jobs. And I think that people feel that hypocrisy as well, which is, if you are so worried about the inequality, why are you building the agents to do it? And when I ask executives and researchers and whoever at Anthropic this question,

• 35:17Speaker 08

  they don't really have a good answer because it is true that their business model is fundamentally premised on the disruption that they say they are causing.

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• 37:22Speaker 03

  You did a big piece for The Times on the very widespread belief in Silicon Valley that they will create this underclass.

• 37:29Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  What does the underclass mean to them?

• 37:32Speaker 08

  The idea of a permanent underclass caused by AI is basically a world where any job a person can do, either AI or a robot can do for them, which means that workers lose all the economic leverage they have and capital owners, people with money, can simply pay machine labor to do all the work instead of paying workers. What that means is anyone who earned their living by working is no longer able to do that. You end up with a world of runaway inequality where the rich get richer and the working class gets poor. Maybe they get some welfare checks, but fundamentally, it's a loss of economic mobility in a society. And when I ask folks in Silicon Valley, do you think by default AI is going to increase or decrease inequality?

• 38:14Speaker 08

  I have not yet heard anyone say it will decrease inequality or keep it the same. They might say the floor will get really high. They might say AI will bring the cost of consumer goods down, and so people's lives are going to get cheaper and, you know, everyone will be super healthy, so it's okay. But I have not heard a single person in the tech industry tell me that they believe that AI is going to decrease inequality. And in fact, many people are very worried that instead, most workers will lose their leverage and be on a kind of permanent welfare in the far off future.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  I, I'm pretty skeptical of this vision, although I don't rule it out, right? It might happen, although I just don't think AI is going to be quite as revolutionary as a lot of these people think, and will not diffuse into the real world as easily. But, you know, the thing you're going to need to adjust to any major technological change is time. And then also, it's like, the AI industry is in, like, an all-out war to make sure we have as little time for adjustment as possible.

• 39:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, look at their job postings-

• 39:09Speaker 03

  And I just find it hard to, like, unnot that.

• 39:11Speaker 08

  How many enterprise salespeople are open AI and Anthropic hiring in order to convince companies that they can replace their workforce, or maybe not replace, but expand their workforce with agents instead of humans, right? They are having these sales conversations, trying to persuade people of these questions. I don't think that a permanent underclass is the likeliest outcome economically that we're going to get. I think that AI is actually just really jagged and human jobs are super complex and super hard to automate. And most of the folks who are predicting economic apocalypse haven't actually worked enough real jobs to know how complicated and how multifaceted most jobs really are. But I definitely agree on the speed point. I think that, like Alex Yamas, economist, has made this point very well.

• 39:56Speaker 08

  Uh, one thing I think a lot about are people say, well, humans can adjust, humans can reskill, they can retrain, they can just do the new jobs that we're going to develop instead. But you look at things like software engineering, where people will often say now, um, senior software engineers are doing great, they love Claude code, um, junior software engineers have been mostly replaced and you see hiring and job postings are down in that sector. Well, do we think that a human software engineer is going to rescale or upskill themselves faster than the next model is going to get better at software engineering? That's the question that I really wonder about is, if AI progress outpaces humans' ability to rescale, retrain, upscale, adapt, then I'm not really sure what there is going to be left.

• 40:38Speaker 08

  There, there'll be some jobs left, but it's going to be a really, really painful adjustment.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  I have had so many people at the top of these companies, right? The very tippy top, tell me they wish all this would slow down.

• 40:52Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  I'm sure you have had them say this to you, right? But in this world where, in their unguarded moments, they will say they wish all this was going slower, well, one way to slow AI down is to constrict the number of data centers you can build.

• 41:10Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Just like you've done, you know, as good reporting as anybody on just how conflicted people even working for these companies seem to be about what they are building. And yet they're in this competitive race to build it as quickly as possible. And so it makes them a pretty unconvincing pro faction.

• 41:29Speaker 08

  Oh, absolutely.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  It's like, we're building the thing we're telling you to be afraid of, and we need to build it as fast as possible, even though we sort of admit that it would be better if the whole thing was slowed down.

• 41:39Speaker 08

  It's very confusing.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  It's a weird argument.

• 41:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's so confusing. I remember when I sat down with Abdul, also the Michigan Senate candidate, he cited Dario's 50% white collar job loss stat probably like five times in the 30 minute conversation. It's like, he was like, they're saying that there's going to be recursive self improvement and it might kill us all. Like, yeah, I get why you would not want to make this thing go faster. This is true for data centers, but it's true for any other way that you might slow AI down, which is that everyone only wants to be slowed down if they can guarantee that the other companies, that the Chinese labs are going to slow down with them. So long as that's not true, they're going to keep racing. And I think for that reason, yeah, I mean, the thing that I hear when I talk to people

• 42:22Speaker 08

  at the companies, data center executives about the build out is how much money do we need to give these cities to let us build a data center? Tell us how to bribe them better. Tell us what we can do. And so when I talk to them about the build out, I'm not hearing any sort of personal moral reckoning with slowing AI down. I'm hearing, how do I make the bribes bigger? How big do they need to be?

• 42:41Speaker 03

  So then how do you reconcile what many of these executives, many of these AI company workers are telling you about their fears of creating an underclass, about their fears of losing control? I mean, we just saw the situation where OpenAI's model was breaking out of a sandbox in order to sort of cheat on its evaluation, right? So the AI safety people are very worried, right? The safety teams in here clearly don't have full control or even understanding of what they're building. How do you reconcile, if you reconcile, the way the AI companies talk when they are giving voice to their fears, or the people at them talk when they're giving voice to their fears?

• 43:22Speaker 03

  And their pretty profound hostility to anything that would slow down how fast we are building this thing, whose consequences they freely admit they cannot predict?

• 43:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's fascinating because just on a very personal level, when I talk to people at these companies, I just think like, man, if I thought this thing might have a 10% chance of killing us all or taking everybody's job, I wouldn't work on it.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  I would not build that.

• 43:49Speaker 08

  I personally could not morally justify taking that chance. And when I talk to people who are not in the San Francisco AI world, they feel like I do. They're just like, why would you do it? And I think there are basically three rough buckets of rationales that I hear from people or that I hear between the lines from people. One is this sort of sense of techno determinism. It's, superintelligence is going to be built inevitably. There is no way it's not going to happen. If it happens, I want to be part of it. I want to make my money from it. I want to maybe make it happen in the least bad way. I think that's a super common answer.

• 44:27Speaker 08

  Another is, um, this technology might kill us all, but it also might be really amazing. It might produce super abundance for everybody. We might be immortal. It might double everyone's lifespans, cure all diseases, bring the cost of every consumer good, housing, energy, whatever, to near zero. And that would be utopia. And so I think all the time to that anecdote that I think SBF said on a podcast where it's

• 44:56Speaker 03

  Sam Bankman Fried.

• 44:57Speaker 08

  Yes, Sam Bankman Fried said on a podcast where it was like, if you could flip a coin and it was 51% odds, you would double the total amount of like human welfare and 49% chance everyone dies, would he flip the coin? He says yes.

• 45:08Speaker 11

  And again, I feel compelled to say like, caveat here of like, you know, how do you really know that's what's happening? Blah, blah, blah, whatever. Put that aside, take the hypothetical, the pure hypothetical. Yeah, yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 08

  I think this is a hyperbolic example, but I think it's not actually that far off from what a lot of the people building superintelligence believe too, that they are basically willing to flip the coin. Maybe we all die, but maybe we're all immortal and that expected value wise cancels things out. And then the final category is just, I think, folks who are so fascinated by the technical endeavor of whether we can build this thing and how to do it, that they just aren't super worried about the consequences or what else might happen. So people have all sorts of self justifying narratives as to why it's worth it. Some I think are better than others.

• 45:57Speaker 08

  But it makes sense to me why the public is not particularly sympathetic to any of these.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  I mean, that middle narrative, I heard Sam Bankman Fried say that, I think it was on Tyler Cowen's podcast. And it's like, oh, that's like, that's a psychopath, right? To actually believe that you would have to be a psychopath, you would have to have a very, very, very low value on, I think, human life.

• 46:19Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Right? Imagine being the person who flips that coin and it comes up wrong.

• 46:22Speaker 08

  Oh, Jesus, yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Like, I'm a parent. That like, the idea that you would do something that's like 5149 on like, your kid is doubly happy or your kid is gone, like, you would never, you don't even want to say that out loud.

• 46:38Speaker 08

  Of course. I think that's how almost everybody thinks about it. And again, I think 5149 is obviously the most egregious example you could think of. And so SBF is very unsympathetic. But when I think about the superintelligence bet, a lot of people will characterize it as a 9010 bet, as an 8020 bet. And this question of how much is an acceptable amount of either extinction risk or total disempowerment risk? You know, I think people have very different risk appetites and Silicon Valley is a place that has always prized their high risk appetite. I think that makes a lot more sense when you're talking about maybe yourself or your company full of people who have opted into taking a very high risk endeavor. I think that's extremely different, obviously, when you're talking about the rest of the world. And one thing with the data center debates that I'd always hear is like, you know, I

• 47:22Speaker 08

  get that these people are making this crazy bet on this technology they think is going to change the world, but why do they have to do it in our backyard? Why is Mark Zuckerberg not building a data center in his backyard? And so this question of, yeah, you guys are going to create like these very tangible impacts and to their real harms on specific communities that are not the communities benefiting from this technology. At least they don't see the benefits yet. They don't see the cancer cures. They don't see themselves getting these million dollar, $10 million salaries that the AI researchers are getting. It feels like, I think it feels to a lot of these folks, like they are pawns in some tech billionaires' game and they do not like to feel that way.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Why aren't they building it in their own backyard? That's why don't you see a bunch of data centers in, you know,

• 48:05Speaker 08

  I mean, I don't

• 48:06Speaker 03

  Northern California?

• 48:07Speaker 08

  I don't think I need to tell you why it's so hard to build in Northern California.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  But I both, I both think that's true, that it's hard to build in Northern California. But I also think there's like a truth to the other thing being said, they don't want them there.

• 48:19Speaker 08

  No.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Right? I mean, the land is expensive. It would be very hard, like inexpensive to build a data center and like the places where we're talking about. But it also gets at a core truth, which is people don't actually want data centers around them. It is a cost. It is a concentrated cost for a diffuse benefit. Like, if you believe in the benefit.

• 48:37Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  So I think that's part of it. I want to go back to the first bucket you were talking about, which is like the race dynamics.

• 48:42Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  So at the most generous, the thing that I've heard repeatedly is sort of what you're describing, which is it would be better if this were going slower. But I can't control that because I, whether I'm at, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI or Google or Meta, you know, if we slow down, it just is our less ethical competitors over there who speed up. And even if you put down legislation slowing down all of America, then it's China.

• 49:16Speaker 08

  Right.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  You know, the CCP, which is going to win the race.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  I guess one question is, do you buy this central metaphor of a race that has a, like a ticker tape line where at some point somebody passes it and then they have the recursive superintelligence and like the race is over? Or do you see this more as, like most technologies, like a kind of like a linear set of gains? I mean, can be fast, can be slow, but that doesn't have that somebody is going to win dynamic?

• 49:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, I find this really confusing. One of the first things that I did when I started reporting more deeply on AI was try to figure out what AGI meant, because a lot of the way that this race has been characterized is who will build AGI first?

• 50:06Speaker 03

  Artificial general intelligence.

• 50:07Speaker 08

  Artificial general intelligence first. Thing, first thing I found, no one agrees on what that means. AGI means everything from AI that can build itself to AI that can do all human jobs to AI that produces whatever number of economic value. And so everyone has these different milestones for what constitutes AGI to them. What that also means is that the race has different finish lines and moving finish lines. And I think that like, you see the way that these models perform differently on benchmarks. They are extremely jagged. They can be super good at math and they can be super bad at poker at the same time. They can be, yeah, amazing at cracking cybersecurity problems, but not able to build anything in the physical world.

• 50:49Speaker 08

  And because of that, I don't think the technology is A, as general as people suggest it is. I also think that means that it is much harder to define a finish line to the race. And my sense is that the race, because you cannot adjudicate it, everyone will always feel that they are falling behind on some dimension. I mean, to then make the case for that these AI companies are making is they do believe in this recursive self improvement. They think that, you know, OpenAI, Google, DeepMind and Anthropic are all extremely focused specifically on the question of, can we build AI that built itself? Can we build an AI that can train the next generation model completely from scratch on its own?

• 51:30Speaker 08

  And in that sense, you get an exponential pace of improvement for whoever can hit that recursive self improvement curve first. And they think that this might lead to that company pulling ahead. Right now, folks think that it's Anthropic, which has the best coding models, meaning they can code faster, meaning that their next models are even better. I can see where that argument is, but I'm not sure when we look at, you know, the latest anthropic models versus the latest OpenAI models versus the latest, you know, Chinese open weights models that we see a company pulling ahead that decisively in that way, especially when every single company in lab is using the same recursive

• 52:13Speaker 08

  self-improvement strategy. And so basically, I don't know that the race has a finish line, and that's what worries me about it continuing.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  The reason I want to focus in on this race metaphor for a minute is I've come to think it is really one of the central dividing lines in how you think about different kinds of AI policy. Whether you think that we are in a race with China to get to the point where one side of the other is going to pull like endlessly and decisively ahead because they hit that, you know, recursive self-improving level. Well, then that means what you do in the next one to three years is incredibly, incredibly definitionally important. But if you don't believe that, if you believe something more like, yes, this is a powerful technology, it's a powerful technology that might have a lot of downsides, might come with a lot

• 53:03Speaker 03

  of social instability, its effect on a society may not be good, then let's run faster to the bad place is not nearly as compelling an argument. And all of a sudden, the idea that we should have policy in place that slows things down for more voice, for more consideration, it's not crazy. And I guess one place this goes is that I have begun to notice like a really interesting convergence between the SFAI safety people, in a way, and like the AI populace, like a Bernie Sanders or in a different way, and Abdul

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Al-Sayed, who are getting to not that different places, but through very, very different mechanisms, right? They're like the AI safety people who actually believe we are in a race, but they believe that winning that race might bring the end of humanity. And so like, they don't, they don't want to move that fast, right? If we begin to slow down, we'd have more credibility for negotiating with China and like trying to come up with like international treaties and all the rest of it. You know, and then you have like the kind of more AI populist side, who just like, doesn't want to give all these tech billionaires all this power, who doesn't believe this technology will be good for people. And they're starting to come up with like, maybe not the policies AI safety people would, but you know, data

• 54:22Speaker 03

  center moratoriums and things like that. And so you have this sort of slightly strange, like you would not have considered this coalition.

• 54:30Speaker 08

  It's super interesting. I mean, you literally have Ron DeSantis doing AI roundtables with Max Tegmark, who's been one of the leading advocates of pausing and slowing down AI, an MIT professor. And you have Bernie Sanders doing viral videos with Eliezer Yudkowsky, the guy who's telling us that AI is probably going to kill us all if we build it. I was talking-

• 54:52Speaker 03

  Which is both the lines it doesn't and does kind of makes it, you know what I mean?

• 54:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, totally. I've been spending some time in DC this year to talk to some of these AI populist, some from the social conservative right, others from, say, the labor left. And this Bannon guy I was talking to told me, he's like, you know, like, I wouldn't send my kids over to a play day at the polycule, but I can do coalitions. And so I think it's been one of the most interesting political stories going on right now. It's a sort of strange bedfellows that have emerged. I mean, even with the data center stuff, I was talking to an activist and they were saying, these were liberal women who had gotten into politics after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. They said that data centers were the first thing that got them to talk productively with their Trump voting neighbors about politics the first thing in like 10 years, almost, which is fascinating to me. And in this sense, they felt a really strong sense almost of a political agency that almost came out of

• 55:39Speaker 08

  this fight. So I, yeah, I think one of the big questions that folks in AI safety, for example, are thinking about is, do we want to build these alliances with the rising left and right populist waves in American culture in order to slow AI down? Maybe it's okay that we have different reasons and different theories for why AI is so dangerous. For one person is big model bad, for another person, it's big billionaires bad, big tech bad. And those folks are sort of linking arms in a lot of ways against the AI accelerationists and sort of the folks pushing the race faster.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  So I think listening to this, we've been sort of living in the data center moratorium side of the politics. But what's the other side of it? What are the problems with just saying, okay, fine, like, let's not build any more data centers?

• 56:32Speaker 08

  One, like, this is not actually the way that you would successfully slow down AI if that's what you really wanted. One, if you, if one locality or one state imposes a moratorium, AI companies are very, very happy to go to other states or other countries. They are already flooding into Texas, for example, because it's had such a pro data center environment. People are looking at Louisiana, the Dakotas, Australia. Space, of course, is a current big interest of Elon Musk's because people think that, maybe not now, but in five years, we can just put all the data centers in space and solve the political problems that way. So one is, I'm not really sure that this would stop AI progress that much. It would just shift the data centers to other places that do welcome them. The

• 57:15Speaker 08

  second thing is, I actually do think that there are ways for these deals to be good. Not every community should want a data center. I think that many of them may discuss it and say, this isn't what we want. We don't need the tax revenue that bad. But in a lot of the cases with these sites that I visited, like, you know, in the old GM site in Janesville, the Veridian Partners, the data center developer, was going to clean that brownfield up. They were the only ones willing to do so. I talked to a real estate broker who had tried to sell that site for five years, and he couldn't do it because not a single other commercial buyer wanted to clean up all of this hazardous waste. Only the data centers were willing to do that. Or with Mount Pleasanton, the Foxconn site, right? They had already cleared

• 57:58Speaker 08

  all this land. They had built all this infrastructure. Putting a data center there was a net improvement for the community, most, in my opinion, personally, from an economic perspective, from the perspective of, there is nothing going on there anyway. So I think that there are ways to do these deals right. There is enough money in this industry that a lot of communities will decide it is economically beneficial for them to bring in these jobs and bring in this investment. But I think that the way that the data center deals have been done nearly guarantee the amount of public backlash that there's been. And the thing that will probably fix it, I suspect, is probably either like a state level streamlining, where someone does the research, probably at the state level, maybe at the federal level, to figure out, what is the fair way to do these deals? How do we ensure the communities get the most transparency,

• 58:43Speaker 08

  the most benefit out of data center deals when they happen? So it's not case by case, and it's not so asymmetric with a town of 12,000 negotiating with an OpenAI or whatever.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  I would add two other things to that. That'd be curious to hear your take on. So one, you mentioned data centers moving towards other localities, and those localities are not randomly selected. They're localities that are going to impose fewer conditions. So maybe that is fewer environmental conditions. But, you know, in the case of maybe a UAE or some of the Gulf states that are interested here, you know, you're looking at more authoritarian countries, right? So I've heard a lot of people worry about that, or, you know, Elon Musk and space. So in a sense, if you make it so the data centers cannot go into places where there is more democratic control, they might, you might end up with less overall democratic control. The other thing, and I do think this is significant, is that

• 59:33Speaker 03

  there is right now more demand for compute than there is compute.

• 59:38Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  You know, people talk a lot about a bubble, but we do not look to have excess AI supply at the moment. And if demand keeps rising because, you know, the coding agents get better and all the rest of the things we know that are happening, but you are constricting the supply of compute, then you end up with more inequality and who can afford it. So, you know, a Goldman Sachs, a JP Morgan, right? You know, a company with a lot of money to buy compute is going to have a lot of it. And then, you know, ordinary users, small businesses, et cetera. If you believe AI is important and powerful, and I believe it is important and powerful, then you have a problem where you have created much more stratification and who can afford it. How do you think about those dimensions of it?

• 1:00:23Speaker 08

  I think with where you build the data centers, a lot of folks are starting to look at building AI infrastructure as a form of geopolitical leverage, right? And so some countries, like, places like Australia, Canada, countries in Europe are thinking, actually, maybe the way for us to get a slice of frontier AI, for us to negotiate with the countries where the best AI is being developed, like the US, for, in cases like cybersecurity access, is to say, you know, we'll build your data centers here, we'll actually welcome you in, and in return, maybe you guarantee us access to the frontier models. So I think that one is that we should look at AI infrastructure as a point of leverage that both states and

• 1:01:06Speaker 08

  countries have. And as you mentioned, if local moratoriums in the US, if domestic moratoriums or something like that, lead to giving that leverage and negotiating power to authoritarian states, that's probably something the US should be really worried about. On the other hand, there are folks like Anton Lightd at Carnegie has done work on this, where it's, can we give our allies, can we give our democratic allies negotiating leverage through them building out compute? The second thing that you mentioned about pricing is interesting because I do think one of the big macro trends in AI right now is the closing of the frontier. It's the fact that the very best models, like Mythos from Anthropic, are not being

• 1:01:50Speaker 08

  open to everybody. That is both a safety decision, as in, we don't want to give really powerful cyber weapons and bioweapons to a bunch of bad actors or just unknown actors. It is also a pricing question of, the best models are really, really expensive to run. They don't have enough compute to run them. And so we're going to have to charge a lot of money or only give it to the biggest corporations. And I think that's a reason that startups are worried, that countries outside of the US are worried, that normal people are worried. Maybe we get superintelligence and it can achieve all of these amazing things, but I'm not going to get it. Maybe my boss is going to get the superintelligence and they're going to automate my job as a worker, as a consumer. I'm not going to be able to

• 1:02:33Speaker 08

  do the same thing. So I think it's also a really good point that if we don't continue the compute build out, we do see a world where it is the folks with existing capital and access, probably big corporations in the US and the US government, that are going to have access to frontier AI and all the benefits that it confers.

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• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  You were in China for a trip reporting on AI. Was there much political AI backlash and ferment there from what you could see?

• 1:04:57Speaker 08

  I was super interested in this question on this trip because I was finishing my Times piece on the permanent underclass while in China. And so I was basically asking everyone I met there, whether it was engineers at the labs or just my family members or sort of normal, middle-class people in Shanghai. Are people worried about AI and jobs? Are people worried about AI and social instability? I think the answer is not as much. I caveat this, of course, with the fact that the information environment in China is obviously suppressed. You can't dissent in public on social media nearly as much as you can in the US. You don't have good polling. So it's kind of hard to understand the actual level of social discontent there is in China. But I would say that, for the most part, people were not as terrified of AI as they are in the US. There's a few explanations for this.

• 1:05:40Speaker 08

  Some people say that China is more techno-optimistic than the US is. I don't love this explanation, mostly because the thing that I heard was not exactly optimism. It was not exactly, yeah, we're going to get the cancer cures and the superabundance. It was something a lot closer to "technology is a force that cannot be stopped." Actually, in some ways, reminded me more of some of these Silicon Valley beliefs, that the future is predetermined, that when the state decides that something like AI is a national priority, that is going to march forward. And as an individual, there's not much you can do to resist, especially in a one-party state, in an authoritarian society. There is no culture of resistance, really. And so rather than thinking about, how do I prevent AI in my workplace or in the world? That's not really a thing that a lot of people in China think about.

• 1:06:23Speaker 08

  It's how can I use AI to make sure I don't fall behind? In an environment that already has crazy levels of white-collar competition and white-collar unemployment, if you're not upskilling yourself with, you know, open claw or whatever, there's a million people in line behind you who are going to get on the bus. At the same time, I think that the Chinese state takes a pretty different approach to the US when it comes to AI regulation and also to technology regulation in general. And so China has passed laws sort of banning a lot of kinds of companion chatbots because they're worried about relationships, they're worried about fertility rates, they're worried about addiction. China has passed made court rulings that say that AI replaced this worker's job, AI can do this worker's job is not a good enough reason to lay off a worker.

• 1:07:09Speaker 08

  You have regulations that require all AI-generated images to be labeled, and you'll see the "made with AI" sort of language on all of the AI-made ads in China. And so there's also a sense that some people, some Chinese have, that their government is more likely to look out for sort of the social downsides and the labor downsides relative to the US government, which has thus far been pretty laissez-faire, especially at the national level, right? And that gives some people a bit of solace as well.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  There's been some reporting that China and Russia are pushing sort of anti-data-center memes and, you know, social media bots. It's hard for me to tell what scale that is, but it has been very much picked up on by like, people like Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank guy, whose, you know, big data center project has faced a lot of backlash.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  Do you buy the sort of growing view among like, at least some tech elite, that the data center backlash is like a Chinese psy-op?

• 1:08:07Speaker 08

  I think this is ridiculous, to be honest. I mean, so I read the OpenAI report that was saying like, this is all a CCP plot. And like, it pastes in the accounts and the tweets that are doing the psy-op. These tweets have like, no likes on them. They have two views per tweet. So I'm not doubting that, like, I'm sure some clever CCP propaganda person has attempted to inflame the anti-data-center sentiment. I have not seen evidence that any of this is working. I think it feels very organic. I think I also tend to be personally a little suspicious when you just cast all your political opponents as being misinformed. I think there's a way in which people use foreign influence to avoid thinking about the fact that there are people that they live with in society who do not agree with their vision of the world.

• 1:08:50Speaker 08

  And when I talk to these data center activists, for example, they're actually much less TikTok-addled and misinformed than I think people like to caricature. A lot of them understand sort of the basic facts of what's the difference between an AI data center and the old kind of data center? How much, what's the difference between a closed-loop system and an open-loop system? Most of these people are not just misinformed. They have just personally decided, I'm not that interested in having a data center in my community, even if it pays some property taxes.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  So you talk to people in the AI companies and sort of talk to them about this backlash. I know they're very worried about this, right? I've talked to them about this. What are they learning from it?

• 1:09:29Speaker 08

  I do think that this year, in 2026, AI executives, AI researchers have started to take the public backlash a lot more seriously than they have in the past. I've heard executives ask, can we do better marketing? I don't understand why it is that Waymos are so unpopular. I've heard executives ask, what do you think are the deals that we should be making? Do you think we should just be mailing checks to every house that lives near a data center project? Will that fix things? Like, tell us how to make a better deal. Do we need to cut people's electricity prices in half? Would that work? Unfortunately, the word bribe gets used a lot more than I am personally comfortable with. I think that when you are framing the thing you're doing,

• 1:10:15Speaker 08

  even jokingly, as bribing communities into putting a data center there, I don't think you're starting off on the right foot. I think that people can feel when they are being bribed. I've heard these people say, these companies are bribing us.

• 1:10:27Speaker 08

  So there's a little bit of examination. The thing that I don't think is being examined as much as I want it to be, though, is, are we building a technology? Are we building a product that is helping people?

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, the version of this I have heard is, we have a marketing problem. Maybe we should stop saying aloud so often that our technology might take everybody's job and has a 10% chance of upending or destroying humanity altogether?

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  What has not been clear to me, even as they begin to like, maybe move away from that messaging a little bit, is whether or not they no longer believe that. Again, I am, my personal view is like, I don't think it's going to take everybody's job. But to the extent they do, or at least they take that very, very seriously, it's like, I keep hearing them say that we have a marketing problem. And I keep saying, when I talk to them about this, that if you believe the things you have been saying and in fact, the things you have told me personally, you don't have a marketing problem. You have a problematic technology. Like, you have a product problem. Because people are not going to want that future.

• 1:11:37Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, I think I would make some distinctions between, of course, different companies, different executives, right? Like, one thing that's like, very interesting to me, thinking about the comms in Silicon Valley, is that for a very long time, these companies were only marketing to potential recruits and potential investors, basically. They were trying to win the vibes on AI Twitter in San Francisco. And I kind of feel like they never realized everyone else could hear them, right? And so now they're trying to take it back. But like, my sense is that Sam Altman, for a long time, part of the reason he was talking about like, oh, shifting the balance of power from labor to capital and like, rogue AI and whatever, was also because he was winning points among people who he wanted to work at OpenAI. And he had to communicate that he was as AGI-pilled as them. He was as worried about the same safety things as them.

• 1:12:21Speaker 08

  And now that his interest is more in political goodwill and IPO-ing and things like that, he sort of changed his tune. I think that, yeah, I'm not sure to what extent every AI industry actor has always believed the things that they've warned about.

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  I think people can believe things that they don't feel, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of people in the AI industry are in a culture and inside arguments where...

• 1:12:52Speaker 03

  This set of outcomes feels very real, right? Or looks very real. And so I think they believe it. I think when they make these arguments, I don't think they're just doing it for, you know, publicity points. In fact, I think it's the opposite. I think when they're now trying to move away from some of these arguments, I think it's actually much more of like a cynical marketing ploy.

• 1:13:09Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  But I think they often believe these things without actually like in their bones feeling it, um, which is sort of why they act relatively heedlessly.

• 1:13:21Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21Speaker 03

  Or at least like on the set of things they believe, like this speculative notional set of beliefs about what might happen is way less close to their core.

• 1:13:30Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Than their belief that if they don't build this data center or get this next model out, like their competitors or China or somebody.

• 1:13:37Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Is like going to get in front of them and they're much more motivated by, by, by the push forward.

• 1:13:42Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, I think the technological determinism is just such a big part of it. I think that if I'm trying to think about how my friends in the AI industry would react to this conversation, that's the thing that they would say that we are not focusing on enough is they are so sure that there is no way that AGI or superintelligence or whatever it is, does not get built. And it is only a question of who builds it. I think that fundamental sort of underlying belief is what justifies everything else is we have to be the ones to do it. Us pulling back, us stopping is not going to prevent any of the bad stuff, right?

• 1:14:10Speaker 03

  I, I agree with that. And I think that's why the China card in this has been such like a destructive part of the argument. I'm not even sure it's totally untrue. Like I, I am completely willing to believe that China and America are in a race for a economically and geopolitically important technology, even if you don't buy like recursive superintelligence.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  But the way that has then been used to not say, well, we should enter into international negotiations or something, but instead just like, we cannot slow down whatsoever, no matter what else we worry about or, or believe, I think has been, it is, it is acted as a kind of blackmail. And the thing is that it's not bought by enough people.

• 1:14:51Speaker 08

  No.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  Outside of the industry. But I think the phase of the politics we're now in is out of their control. And it is just not going to be the case that they have control over the AI narrative like next year that they had two years ago. And yeah, I don't really think they know what to, what to do in that space. And so now it's like, either going to have to start benefiting.

• 1:15:16Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  People, right? Some of these, like if people began seeing like drug cures come out, right? All these things we've actually been promised.

• 1:15:23Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  And you could say like, we're beginning to see the beginning of like mathematical conjectures, like that's been pretty cool. But we're not really seeing the gains. And if you start getting the losses before the gains.

• 1:15:33Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  Right? You start getting the job loss, for instance, before the promised, you know, superabundance. Politically, that's not going to be an equilibrium you can protect.

• 1:15:42Speaker 08

  That's one of the things I'm worried about is I do think that we are pretty likely to see, we are seeing a lot of the social instability before we get the cancer cures, right? And so, or even with the math stuff, it's like, I think that one thing I notice more and more now is this deep cultural and values gap between Silicon Valley and the rest of America, the rest of the world. I'm not saying that Silicon Valley is wrong, that it's cool to like disprove the Jacobian conjecture, right? Like, um, it is cool, but like when you ask a lot of people in the tech industry, what their utopia looks like, they'll say things like, we have UBI, so no one has to work anymore. We're all immortal and we've discovered all of math and physics. And if you do the polling on UBI and mortality, neither are especially popular with the American public. I think that most people.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  We pulled the mortality, it's funny.

• 1:16:29Speaker 08

  I mean, it's been polled, you can look it up. If you ask people what like they want AI to do for them, it's not necessarily having, you know, Karen's Tao in your pocket. It's not disproving math, right? Like they want things to be cheaper. They want to be healthier. They want to not do crappy work so they have more time for the stuff they like. But I think it is genuinely true that the stuff that is really cool and also that is oftentimes technically easier to solve, like math, um, is not what most people want from this technology. Um, and I think it's also true that it's just literally technically harder to cure cancer than it is, it turns out to prove math theorems. And the other thing that I hear from the public, when I talk about the cancer cures

• 1:17:13Speaker 08

  is, yeah, but are they going to just use it for themselves? Is Peter Thiel or whoever just gonna buy himself immortality? Am I going to be able to afford immortality?

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  My view for a very long time has been that a lot of people in these companies overrate how much of the bottleneck in scientific and human progress is raw intelligence.

• 1:17:33Speaker 08

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  And just, I mean, this is a point of abundance, it's just, but the point of covering anything, anywhere, the world is full of friction.

• 1:17:42Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  And, you know, you want to do drug discovery and I think we should actually do a lot to make drug discovery easier, make drug testing easier, right? Like I've said this many times before, I would like to see us prepare like drug development for a world where AI is spitting out way more promising molecular candidates. But that's still a world where you need enough monkeys to test things on.

• 1:18:05Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  Humans to test things on, rats to test things on, right? And you still need to do all the safety data. And just the amount of the world that is slowed down by, we don't have any good ideas. Like we are out of ideas versus it is hard to organize things amidst humans, you know, amidst, you know, with raw materials, like in bureaucracies, in organizations, you get that like, intelligence is important. But it is not everything. And I think anybody who's like been in organizations like knows it's actually less than you think it is.

• 1:18:39Speaker 08

  Yeah. Again, I think of a, you know, a lot of these people have been AI researchers for their entire careers, maybe before that they were physics PhDs or they were, uh, doing quant trading, which are all these kinds of jobs that are fairly, they're IC jobs, they're individual contributors, where you're not necessarily working in big teams. There's not a lot of politicking and relational work, where all of the relevant context lives inside a single code base. And so for AI to sort of understand what's going on and kind of explore all this context that's already been written down. I'm not saying there's no tacit knowledge, but a lot more of the context is made explicit. And these are also places where simply applying more thinking and more intelligence, just as an individual, like as a person, a remote worker in a closet or whatever, might actually find the more efficient algorithm, right?

• 1:19:23Speaker 08

  Like you don't actually need to politic your way to a better algorithm. You don't need to do stuff in the physical world to get that. And so I think a lot of people at these companies don't really realize how hard that is. I mean, it's funny because people will say things like, um, yeah, there's like electricity costs and energy costs to AI, but like AI will maybe solve the climate. And I ask how, and to be clear, I think there are a lot of ways that AI can improve, you know, climate science research, help.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. Building efficiency.

• 1:19:51Speaker 08

  Absolutely. But like, at the same time, you ask people and it's just like, oh, I don't know. It's just going to do it, right? Or it's like, oh, how, how is AI going to improve robotics? Like, I don't know, AI will figure it out. You kind of do have this, I, I find it lazy, actually. Like I, one of the things that annoys me about this particular approach is it's not that I don't think that AI can contribute to all of these problems. I think it definitely can. But what I often hear is a kind of laziness about how it's going to do that. And it feels like a Deus ex machina of it's super smart, ilf, just figure it out.

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  I used to say that this was back when, you know, Silicon Valley was a more optimistic place than it has been in recent years. But that the difference between the culture of DC, where I lived for a long time and of Silicon Valley, was that in Silicon Valley, people's worldview is formed by seeing impossible problems prove possible to solve. And in DC, people's worldview is formed by seeing possible problems prove impossible to solve. And I think that is now going to collapse for the AI industry into one worldview because, you know, these are people who like, give them their due, they've invented artificial intelligence, like they actually did it.

• 1:20:59Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  You know, this is amazing. Like I cannot believe how good some of these systems are. I'm like shocked to be living through this. They were able to do that. That seemed impossible, proved possible. And now they're gonna, now they're finding it's like impossible to build a data center.

• 1:21:14Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  And like, that's what doing other kinds of things in the world teaches you.

• 1:21:20Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  That there are a lot of problems that are not possible to solve, not because like you cannot come up with the idea for them, but because you are dealing with like the messy realities of societies, of politics, of values, of, you know, um, logistics. And, um, it'll demand a kind of, it'll impose a kind of realism, I think, on the issues that it has not always had.

• 1:21:46Speaker 08

  Yeah. I was trying to think about what the difference was between how I would describe Silicon Valley and San Francisco culture a year ago, um, let's say early 2025 versus now. And I think the number one thing is that Silicon Valley has really woken up to politics. Um, you know, in January, 2025, Silicon Valley was feeling very triumphant about, about Doge, about Elon Musk, about David Sacks and Shroom and the White House. It kind of felt like they were all in control. And actually, if you just build the, these genius technologies and you get super rich and you have good ideas, you'll just, you know, get the political power to enact your vision. And a year and a half later, a lot of those folks are out of the White House. They failed at reducing the national debt and achieving all these other goals that they thought they could just AI their way into solving.

• 1:22:30Speaker 08

  Anthropic, for example, um, is, has had a lot of problems in its dealings with the Trump administration, fundamentally very political and very relational problems. Dario's problem in dealing with the White House was not, I think that he didn't have good arguments or that he's not very smart or not saying logical things. I think that anyone from Anthropic will admit that these are largely relational problems. And so there's a way where I think democracy and politics is a lot more powerful than these very rich and very smart tech people realize. And there's some optimism to that, I think, and in, in looking at it and saying, it's actually really hard to buy an election. It's actually really hard to buy out the whole White House at once.

• 1:23:11Speaker 08

  But it's an interesting moment, I think, for, uh, the tech industry to be realizing how important politics really is and how difficult it is.

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  I think that's a good place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:23:24Speaker 08

  Ooh. So I think the first one is really relevant to this conversation, which is, uh, Benjamin Labutus, The Maniac, um, which includes a sort of lightly fictionalized biography of John von Neumann, The Story of AlphaGo. I think it's very much a sort of halfway novel, halfway nonfiction book about how intelligence is incredibly awe inspiring and something worth respecting and at the same time can lead people to some very dark realities.

• 1:23:54Speaker 08

  My second book is The Technology Trap from Carl Benedict Frey, which I think is very much about how people's attitudes towards technology and automation depend on to what extent the benefits, the economic growth is shared, to what extent they feel like they're getting a piece of the pie. It goes through a lot of history, much more than just the Industrial Revolution. And so that's shaped a lot of my thinking on some of the economic questions and the populist questions. Um, and then finally, uh, Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering, because I do think that the relational stuff is going to become a lot more important. It always was. And I do think that book has helped me become a better host.

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  She would be so happy to hear that. People should go check out our conversation with Priya Parker. Jasmine Sun, thank you so much.

• 1:24:39Speaker 08

  Thank you so much for having me. This is fun.