Musk Loses OpenAI Case, Leopold’s 13F, Data Center Backlash | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Massive day today. Tons of big stories, five big stories I want to go through. Obviously, the first one is that the US jury finds OpenAI CEO Sam Altman not liable to Elon Musk for straying from charitable mission because Musk waited too long to sue. Weird like technicality, I guess, but good news for OpenAI. Judge confirms verdict and that Musk's lawsuit is dismissed.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, apparently they deliberated for about 90 minutes.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  90 minutes.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  And they didn't really make any type of statement other than the statute of limitations.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  And so Max Zaff over at Wired says, "Juror unanimously rules that Musk's claims are dismissed on the timeliness issue. He filed the lawsuit too late. Court affirms it will uphold the jury's decision. It's over. Musk loses the lawsuit against OpenAI." And Mike Isaac, the Rat King, says, "Unanimous verdict in Musk versus OpenAI is in after only 90 minutes of deliberation." So did they deliberate today? They showed up at 9:00 and went from 9:00 to 10:30 and then delivered the verdict? Is that what we think happened? Because Friday's off in the jury, right? No Fridays.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, jury showed up this morning.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Okay, talked.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  Talked for 90 minutes.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  But they got to think about it all weekend and Friday? Interesting.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Rat King says, "Huge day. Wow." And what did Tyler post? He posted a video of Drake talking about something. What's going on over here? W's in the shat. Shat. W's in the shat. Is that the OpenAI slack right now?

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  I think that's when he is gambling in front of the audience.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  It is a funny way to pronounce chat, but I enjoy it. The big news that was going on all weekend, actually, there was a lot of anticipation for Leopold Ochenbrenner Situational Awareness Hedge Fund to drop the 13F. It was supposed to go out Friday night, 5:00 PM. Everyone was saying, oh, if he, if he's not, if he's not releasing it.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, people were expecting it throughout the entire day.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. They were very excited.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  And then there was some speculation that you've been able to petition to not have to release it.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  That was one theory.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  That was one theory. The other theory is that he was just entirely in cash.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't need to report it. Just wind it down.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Said it was a good run.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He's like, I counted the ums and there's none left to count. We're done. Pack it up. No, quite the opposite. Leopold Asherbrenner, the hedge fund's chief investment officer, is known for making extremely successful investments based on his core assumption that Frontier AI will continue to improve at half an order of magnitude, 0.5 ums per year, which translates into a thesis that AI will create unprecedented demand for compute and its associated bottlenecks.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  John, they're saying it is blindingly light.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  It is brighter today, isn't it? Yeah, I think we got some new lights. We're sort of, you know, tweaking things. I do like that the wide is less dark. There's been a number of times where we've gone to watch videos and we've been very dark in the front. So we're bringing some light around. We'll see. Maybe we overdid it. Maybe we'll dial it back. I need to brush my hair. My hair's a little scruffy today. I also need a haircut, but we'll get to that some other time.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  We'll get to that later in the show. John will be getting a haircut live on the program.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  Before we go any further.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Nick, over the weekend.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:18Jordi Hays?

  Picked up a little gift for our very own Tyler.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  For Tyler, let's pull it out.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  So we wanted you to open.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  Can we go to?

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  Open it on the video. On the video, Nick.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  Hold it up.

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  Waited in line. He waited in line.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  He waited in line.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Hey. What do we got for Tyler?

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  Waited in a very long line just for you, Tyler, because what is it? Oh, I'm trying to open it.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  A little anticlimb.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Wow, it's a, what is? I don't know how to pronounce this. Am I reading upside down? It's a little, little watch. Let's go.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Another watch for Tyler.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  It is not.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you thought it might be, it might have been something else, like the Swatch AP collaboration.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  But really, like, the whole, you know, everything in the Swatch portfolio is fantastic, including this. I don't know. Describe what's on there. What is on there?

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nick, what is it? He says has a rotating bezel. Okay, but just to be clear, it's not the, it's not the Royal Pop.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Which was completely sold out and causing like stampedes all over the country, all over the world. I saw footage, I think from an international country around people really mobbing it. You, you were mentioning that you thought it was maybe an aura loss for both companies because of the craziness.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, the, the.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Your brain is now associated with chaos.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  That's not good.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Right? And AP, although it's, although it's exclusive, like you have to sort of wait in line. The waiting in line is like, here, have a, have a Diet Coke and sit in this private room while I tell you that you will not be getting an allocation in this skeletonized AP.

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  Come back soon.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Royal Oak or whatever, right? Come back soon. And it's a, and it's a, it's a very highbrow waiting in line.

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  And this was sort of a disastrous.

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they had to come out over time and say,

• 5:07John Coogan?

  Violent.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  These are not going to be limited.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  We're selling them a lot.

• 5:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  And so the, the people that wait in line just to sell on the secondary market, I think have done pretty well.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  At least in the short term.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  But I would expect that over time, prices will, will sort of retrace toward retail. I did see a funny graphic of somebody that was like, basically saying like, you know, comparing like getting a job versus waiting in the line to get it. And you actually did quite a bit better if you just got a job on Monday instead of getting in the, in the line.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  And then over time, you know, your, your earnings really ramp out.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Let's go back to Leopold Ashenbrenner and his 13F, the infamous 13F. There's a lot of discussion around it on the timeline. Really, like, we have not seen this level of attention on a hedge fund's filings in a very long time. It's, it's because it, it's breaking out of FinTwit, it's breaking into tech, Teapot and TechX and all of that. Mostly because the, a lot of the discussion centers around, the filing shows he's made some massive puts across the semiconductor sector. Two billion on SMH, the VanX Semiconductor ETF. And so there's, there's, and it feels like maybe more, more pointed thesis, less broad,

• 6:22John Coogan?

  hey, semiconductors are going to do well, more. I actually, me, Leopold in this case, understand. Where the real value is, what companies within the semiconductor industry are undervalued, which ones are actually going to be useful in the next iteration of the build out. And a lot of stuff has been priced very hotly. Some stuff is overheated. The Nvidia trade for a while became like crushingly obvious and then it grew so much that that was not one of his early positions. Now it is looking like he is going long Nvidia, which is interesting in the backdrop of his Nvidia car. Do they still have a moat? Well, there might still be something else going on there. You have to dig in through this and understand what's going on.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  But the filing is hard to interpret cleanly because a 13F is only a snapshot of holdings as of March 31st, 2026. These positions are stale. He might have rotated out of these. 13Fs do disclose put and call options. They don't disclose the strike prices, expirations, premiums, paid hedge ratio, short position swaps, or whether the options are part of broader structures. So you have to be careful out there if you're trying to read the tea leaves too precisely. You can only take away so much from these. So Fei Zhao, I don't know how to pronounce that, says unfathomably bad takes around

• 7:47John Coogan?

  this morning and a good reminder of why 13F digging is mostly a waste of time. March 31st, we were in the heat of the Iran war. Makes sense to put on hedges at the time. Options exposure on 13F gets quoted notionally as if it were 100 Delta, i.e. all 100 shares per contract. So when you see something like, oh, he owns a billion dollars of Intel, it's usually he owns the right to purchase a billion dollars of Intel and he has actually deployed far less capital into that position, although it is sometimes an important sign of things to come. We have no way of knowing whether these were five Delta convexity hedges, convexity hedges, and representative fraction of what people are saying were billions in puts or whether

• 8:31John Coogan?

  they were ITM puts in the money puts. Further, outright shorts don't get reported either. Too much noise associated with the things that happened back in March that aren't relevant now. We have no idea about his turnover in assets and trade frequency. A lot happened in the months of April and May. His positioning could be completely different. Making investment decisions for 80 vol assets based on data from months ago sounds like a good way to burn money. So don't idolize people and develop your own thesis for why you own and sell things. That is a good takeaway. Anyway, the AI backlash is continuing in a bunch of different ways. And one interesting sort of twist on this is that a lot of the AI maxis, the AI bulls, were sort of concerned at least that this would all be fossil fuel based build out

• 9:15John Coogan?

  because everything else was too slow. They might be, they may be fans of nuclear. They might be fans of, of solar, but it was seen as infeasible, seen as the timelines being far too long. So if Leopold is in fact taking a position in T1 Energy, that sort of leads me to think that there's a little bit of a shorter timeline to at least bringing some solar power to bear during the AI build out, that it's not all just sort of a hope and a dream that there will be solar power on the grid in any near amount of time. A lot of the nuclear power companies are moving on the backs of the AI build out, but it's still 2032, you know, when we talk to the folks, even, even the optimistic ones. So

• 9:59John Coogan?

  there has been big pushback on AI data centers across the board. We've talked about this a bunch and it's both a left and right wing issue now. Saagar and Jetty predicted this, I think, last year when he joined our show. And it's been interesting, left wing is worried about job displacement, theft of art, destruction of creativity. Right wing sees them as surveillance centers. That's the latest term is that they're, they're, they're used to spy on people. So that's an anti libertarian, anti right wing position. But there are a whole bunch of others, just this hollowed out coal town is voting right wing and then data center comes to town and they see it as, you know, just making their town worse off and benefiting like the coastal elites and like the SF tech bros.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  People have flagged too that both sides are using AI to create graphics to oppose data centers.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah. There's all these like deep ironies. There's, there was a whole piece on someone who's protesting data centers and using a lot of AI to research how she can push back.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says data centers need to be rebranded to Data Ranch.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Data Ranch. I like a Data Ranch. That's a good one.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  Ox, we got ox powered.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Salty says that Leopold sold Blue Energy in the latest 13F, so.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  Trimmed.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Or trimmed. So if that's, if that's the case, then there you go. The latest debate that I saw was over this huge data center in Utah that's being championed by Shark Tanks, Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O'Leary. Are you familiar with this whole thing? Yeah, someone dug into like the plan and the plan actually seems pretty reasonable, but Mr. Wonderful, he is a, he's sort of an over the top caricature of a businessman. Like he plays one on TV. He is a real businessman, but he also plays a businessman on TV. And so he's a bit of a soft target. Like he was recently seen sporting not one, but two expensive watches, not unlike Tyler Cosgrove over there. He went to the Oscars wearing a Cartier Crash skeleton and a Ruby Rolex or Daytona.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  And I believe he also had a, like a trading card around his neck. So very ostentatious, very over the top, a very soft target. If you're looking for someone to target in like a, he's doing it for the money, you know?

• 12:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  Like it, it's pretty, pretty easy. And so if you want to paint data center construction as maybe not in the best interest of average Americans, Kevin O'Leary is going to do a lot of that, a lot of the heavy lifting.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Wonderful, in the context of developing large scale infrastructure that people are afraid of, sounds like a supervillain too.

• 12:26John Coogan?

  Yes. And also like we can put this in contrast to Eric Schmidt or Tim Cook where the, the previous generation, like the major hyperscalers, like the big tech companies, they've done a pretty good job building a lot of infrastructure, making really, really bold climate pledges, saying, we're going to be net zero by this year. Our data centers are really clean. They built a lot of data centers without really any disruption. There was no backlash to Google Cloud through 15 years or 10 years of building AWS. And, and, and so now.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Neither of them were rocking dual iced out.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  So you're making the case for quiet luxury, the quiet luxury of a, of a Tim Cooker and Eric Schmidt.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Definitely.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, in this case, it seems like.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Wonderful is not. Not the guy to be the face of.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Potentially not, but apparently his, his actual data center plans are reasonable. It actually seems pretty by the book according to current plans. It's in a remote area. It uses its own power and water and it doesn't seem to disrupt any local communities. We can pull up this video from Quick Thoughts that has a little bit of a breakdown.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Million views complaining about a giant data center in Utah. And I'm kind of confused by that because I would think that an uninhabited desert valley in Utah is the perfect place to build a giant data center.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  I've been following really closely what's happening in Box Elder County, Utah, where Canadian billionaire Kevin O'Leary is trying to build the world's largest data center. A $100 billion project, okay? This would be the largest data center in the world at over 40,000 acres. And at full capacity, the data center, which is called the Stratos Project, is set to use nine gigawatts of electricity.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Gigabytes, you saw that?

• 14:10Speaker 03

  It's going to double the entire amount of electricity used by Utah as a whole.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, she said, she said it correctly.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  First, the data center is built.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but, but, but the transcripts said gigabytes, which is funny. AI fails again, we need another data center to fix that.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  Steve in the X chat says TVP in studio uses the equivalent of 23 atomic bombs of energy

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  to produce niche technology content.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  The project area is so large is because they are buying water rights of the current property owners. So the current property owners are using water for agricultural irrigation. The data center project buys that land, buys a huge amount of land.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  See, he makes this sound good, but then it's like, wait, are we gonna have less food? That doesn't seem that good. The point is, is that he's not taking it from like someone who is going to be paying water or some local community. It's like there's, there's, there's already water rights there that are staying in that valley.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  It's not drawing power from the grid. If we look at electricity consumption by state, we can see that Utah just doesn't use that much electricity compared to other states. There are plenty of states that use double or triple. Tennessee is about triple, Pennsylvania four times. Texas is like 10 times, more than 10 times what Utah uses. So if, over the course of this project, they reach their goal and they double or triple Utah's electricity usage. So why is that bad? It's not incurring more cost to the people of Utah because they're building their own power plant.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  By Utah as a whole. Robert Davies, a physics professor from Utah State University, says that he actually thinks the project will require an additional seven to eight gigawatts of waste heat energy, meaning that the project in total will be twenty-three gigawatts of total thermal load energy, which is the equivalent of dropping twenty-three atom bombs in Utah every single day.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  No. Okay, electricity generation across every state is going to have that same thermal load property. Not every generator is perfectly efficient, so they're going to generate waste heat as well. So if you say, okay, we're gonna have twenty-three atom bombs a day worth of electricity going off in Utah, well, then currently we have two-hundred-thirty atom bombs a day going off in Texas.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  You gotta put everything in the atom bomb comparison. Like, your car is like the size of like five atom bombs. Like, an atom bomb is like maybe this big, maybe a little bit bigger.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Your car weighs as much as seven atom bombs.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  It makes it sound so much more like weighty when you're like just comparing everything to atom bombs.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  This is actually pretty crazy. Twenty-eight degrees feels like a lot.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Davies wrote that daytime temperature could increase two to five degrees throughout Hansel Valley, not the state of Utah, the valley where the data center is being built. Same with nighttime temperature could increase up to twenty-eight degrees trapped in the valley. Hansel Valley is an uninhabited desert valley. So if you build a big power plant here and a big data center here, maybe it'll increase the temperature of this valley by five degrees. But, okay, nobody lives there. I think this project solves a lot of people's stated concerns with data centers. Worried about water usage? They're reallocating agricultural water to cool the data center. Worried about power cost? They're building their own power plants. That one line is not helping.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  But I like vegetables.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Uninhabited desert valley where it's already hot. And you're worried about this is such a huge project. This is a giant data center or something, world's biggest data center. Well, that's just data centers that don't have to be built in other places that are being built in this uninhabited desert valley. I think the concerns in her video are just fear mongering for reasons that I hope I've explained here. Thanks for your time.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  I guess the question is, they say that there's water for agricultural usage right now in that valley. But that valley is uninhabited and it seems like a desert. So it doesn't seem like they're growing food there. So like, where is that water actually going? Because it's just getting piped to some other farm like far away? Or was it like they were planning to farm there?

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  Way, way, way back in the day, way back in the day. You could just have a piece of land, you could drill a well and you could pull up as much water as you wanted.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  And then people realized that if you have a property here.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  And there's property here, here, here, here, here. They're oftentimes all pulling from the same aquifer. So you, all of a sudden, if you come in, you move in next to me and you start pumping, you know, billions of gallons. Yeah, you're drinking my milkshake.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  I drink your milkshake.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  I drink it up.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so it's very possible that all these parcels of land, which they collectively bought. They all have their own water rights. That doesn't mean they're being used, right? Because people will sell their water rights to like a neighboring property that is, and so.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  But my question is like, it sounds like they sold the water rights previously. Or they had some sort of deal to send the water that they were getting out of that desert, which I can't imagine produces that much water, but I guess it does. Uh, use it for like agricultural purposes, like what were they growing?

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, agricultural could mean you have some, like you have some cattle, like there's a, there's a bunch of different potential meanings for that. It doesn't mean you're growing fresh produce.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  But were they actively using it or were they just like, nah, I don't know?

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  That's the other thing too. It could have been agricultural land.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  But not.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Could have been like a failed farm. It's not farming anymore, like a former livestock. Uh, like farm, something like that, but I don't know. These points, like as you said, I think are going to be hard to break through just because AI is so deeply unpopular for a variety of reasons. Uh, and we should watch the video of Eric Schmidt, uh, getting booed onstage at University of Arizona. He says, this is incredible. Artificial intelligence getting booed out of the stadium in any commencement speech. It's mentioned in maybe telling college students AI was taking their jobs. Wasn't the best strategy. Let's watch this clip.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  The architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. We do not know. We do not know the precise contours of what this. If you, if you let me make this point, please.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  Step one, if you're giving a commencement speech, you gotta bring a soundboard. You gotta be like, AI, yeah, it's not that bad, but also I hear you.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  They're really going crazy.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  We thought that we were adding stones to a cathedral of knowledge. And humanity has been constructing for centuries.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  There's just a low level boo the whole time.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  It's so rowdy. Like normally you'd think there'd be like a little bit of boo and then they just like get quiet down. Okay, this is about to turn into a riot. This is crazy. Did he just bail on this thing? No.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  Your agency. We have only seen.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  At this point, I mean, you gotta go off script.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  You could, you could.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  You can't stay.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  It is funny that if you cut it up in the right way, you could make it seem sound like the most evil. He's like, you will surrender your agency.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. The big thing is like, I don't know that that is, like, everyone is booing for a slightly different reason, but it's like this ensemble of problems and grievances with AI generally. Like, one thing that I'm, that I've been frustrated about is everyone is vibe coding like 24/7. And leaving MacBooks open, talking about like productivity. And yet, uh, the like, the magical moments, the consumer technology has been like completely left behind. There was a time when we got the cloud, we were building a lot of data centers, but every year you'd get like a cool new thing like Yelp would come out. And it was like, it wasn't changing the world, but it was like, oh, you could find a cool new restaurant.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  And maybe like, or Groupon, like Groupon was like, not a great business ultimately, but like for the first couple of months of Groupon, you could like, go try a restaurant for like half price. And it just felt like magical or like Uber, when that came out, it was like, wait, I can go out and call a taxi cab service. Maybe it comes, maybe it doesn't stand outside in the cold, try and fly a car.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Wait, do you think they were, do you think they were, uh, like angry at usage, nanobanana usage limit?

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Probably, probably.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is this whole thing just a misunderstanding?

• 22:42John Coogan?

  They, they, they might think we're in a plateau and they might just be upset with the lack of progress outside of coding domains. Yeah, the writing is just still not that good on any of these models.

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  I can clock it.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's still clockable. Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. At first I, I thought they were mad that like at Google, Eric Schmidt was, he was doing too many, you know, stock buybacks instead of investing in technology and innovation.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, having a hundred billion on the balance sheet and cash is just unacceptable. Like, yes, you get Waymo, yes, you get DeepMind.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, cause it just shows they don't know what to do with the money.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they weren't innovating for a long time and, and that makes a lot of sense why you would boo them, sort of the Thelian.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  The Thelian boo. Just in those handful of sentences, like, is that, that felt like a speech more potentially like oriented towards maybe like the Stanford student body, which is like, how are you going to contribute to AI? That's what I was like, that's what was standing out to me. Being like, don't be afraid of this thing, like jump in and help shape it.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  And if you're maybe someone in Stanford.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  And you have the opportunity to go actually be involved and you're at the epicenter of all this progress, maybe that would land.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  But at U of A where people are hearing like, hey, all the different career paths that I'm.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  I would prefer, in terms of commencement speaker, I would prefer someone like a Sam Sulek. To give the commencement speech. People don't want other stuff built generally. Like, there's very, there are very, very few things that people are like, yeah, I'd be down for that to be built. People, people like the status quo. They're, they're happy with things as they are and they don't like change. So, um, like, any, anything new is going to be like somewhat, somewhat unpopular as nuclear power was. Uh, not building out nuclear power 50 years ago was, of course, one of the greatest mistakes humanity has made. And one that contributes directly to data center opposition today, given questions about the impact on energy bills. We have to do this another time, but the, you know, did we run out of nuclear scientists? Was that what stopped the build out? Did we not have enough geniuses? I don't know.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Maybe we'll dig into it.

• 24:46Jordi Hays?

  People are saying homes in the chat, but then again, people don't really want more homes in their area. Once they already own a home.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  They block them all the time. They block, they block home construction all the time. And, and also permitting and also, uh, expansion of existing homes. Like, these things, I'm, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that they're like as unpopular as data centers. No way. Data centers are, are, are at the bottom. But homes are something, maybe in the abstract, but like new housing in communities is like razor's edge. 50/50, 60/40. Like, it's, like, there is a lot of opposition to building, just in America, probably. Like, that's just the nature of our society. So Ben Thompson has some solutions, though. What do you got to do to build a data center properly? He says, first, this sounds obvious, but tech needs to fix its messaging problem, the issue. And if an answer seems obvious, then there surely must be some other problem at play is threefold.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  First, a good number of people in tech, particularly at one of the leading labs, genuinely believe most jobs are going away. They could lie more effectively, but beyond being dishonest, it's also betrayal of the fanatical, fanatical devotion with which they are pursuing AI despite obstacles, including the challenge of spending billions and billions of dollars on models that are obsolete in months, if not weeks. Second. It is extremely hard to describe the benefits of inventions not yet made, cures not yet discovered, economic activity not yet engaged in, et cetera. This is always the burden of those arguing in favor of progress, and the sheer potential of AI actually makes the problem even harder. Fifty years ago, everyone was like, electricity isn't that expensive. Why do we need to build nuclear power plants? They're scary. And now electricity is expensive, and we're like, oh, we should have built those. That's the way these things always go.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Third, tech is and always has been terrible at understanding and relating to the rest of society. I go back to how Silicon Valley was extremely skeptical of Facebook, a company predicated on connecting with friends and family, precisely because it's filled with people running away from their friends and family. You can optimistically say that people in tech live in the future. You can also more cynically say they live in opposition to and denial of humanity for better, and in this case, for worse. Second, tech could control the misinformation. TikTok is a major point in this. He talks about how the algorithm is still controlled by the Chinese, and maybe there's misinformation there.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Second, in a rather ironic twist, Meta has learned the lesson of trying to control misinformation, doesn't want to overtly censor, but now the company gets no credit for not censoring misinformation about data centers. And so it's like this weird thing. And then third, this was a wild card, which I didn't think of, but X is the social media platform X and Twitter, formerly Twitter, is actually incentivized to be anti-data center in a weird way, because X is owned by SpaceX, and a big part of SpaceX's upcoming public offering is the possibility of building data centers in space. This is like total tinfoil hat, I think, but it's interesting, like, okay. And he says, to be clear, he hasn't seen any evidence of thumb on the scale or not. I certainly haven't.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  But, you know, part of the problem, though, is that we would never know if there were. He goes on to propose something very, very bold, very, very bold. He says, instead, the most obvious solution is the most crass. Simply start giving people money. Not universal basic income, though. If data centers are a resource for our AI future, then start paying people for that resource. If that data center up the road weren't sold to my neighbors based on amorphous tax benefits that my local government may or may not spend appropriately. I was talking to Tyler about this earlier. But rather... Were to result in a check in the mailbox every year, I suspect you could get a lot of people on board. So he put some numbers together and he says for the data center up the road, it was expected to be 1.6 gigawatts, which could generate around $3 billion in

• 28:31John Coogan?

  annual operator revenue. DeForest, the village it was to be built in, has around 11,500 people. So you could pay every person in that village $10,000 a year and it would only equate to 3.8% of annual revenue grossed by the data center. And he says, I bet that that proposal would have been approved and I bet the operator could very easily pass on those costs to actual data center users. It also highlights how relatively pathetic the original commitment that I think the data center said, hey, we'll give you 50 million, which is like nowhere near what that math works out to. So data centers come into town, you get to vote

• 29:14John Coogan?

  for it, but the data center company says, hey, we'd like you to vote for this and we will give you a $10,000 check in the mail every year forever while we're operating this. And that seems like that could actually get people on board. So

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this goes back to even months ago at this point, we were saying, you know, AI is not a, is not like a, you know, natural resource where you benefit from having it in your backyard, right? If you're just an everyday AI user, you do not care where the data center is at all. And so if someone is coming to put it in your community, it's pretty fair to want to benefit from that in some way. And like a direct payment like that, I think I'm sure that will happen more.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  And we will see you tomorrow at 11:00 AM.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful evening.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Pacific.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  Goodbye.