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Give everyone some news about this. Wisconsin city passes nation's first anti data center referendum. The vote suggests ballot measures could become a powerful new tool for grassroots activists. The chat thinks it's a foreign adversary, doesn't want data center problem on the mic right now. Let's hear if it sounds any better now. Is it a little better? Oh yeah, I think that's great. There we go. Thank you. There we go. Okay, so is, so is this local Wisconsin city referendum like the new playbook that will spread all over America? Are there other jurisdictions that are already looking to copy and paste this? How do you think this, where do you think this goes? I definitely do think it will serve as a model, especially as other. Remember this is really a bottom up phenomenon. So it's really at the community level. Here in the state of Virginia where I live, 40% of our power is actually consumed by data centers. And so you've seen organic pushb became a major issue in the gubernatorial campaign. Both the Republican and the Democratic candidates were against status centers. And a lot of the candidates are seeing all of the energy I'm sure around this. I'm saying at the community level. I'm sure you guys also have seen all of these viral videos. I referenced the one more recently of this trailer park which is being basically told they have to go out because they're going to build a new one. There's the famous one recently, I think it was in Kentucky of a woman being, I think she was offered like $20 million for land. She's like, I'm born on this, going to die on this land. So I really think that this is one of those bubbling political issues which no major politician, maybe Bernie Sanders, the only one that I've seen which has been willing to like jump on top of it. But I think it's going to be a major issue in 28. 28. I think in 28 both candidates are going to have a data center platform. Maybe the Republican one, depending on who it is, is going to try and square the circle around gdp. But I don't think that voters want to hear anything about it. That's just my personal opinion is the sense in Virginia that Virginia would would be better off if the state had never had a data center. Well, it's complicated. Remember, you know, we're full of a military industrial complex. But don't forget this. We had Amazon, remember when they were going to leave New York and they were going to come here, they're actually going to come near where I live. It really didn't work and there's a lot of local op eds they're like hey we didn't get all the jobs that we were promised. Virginia threw all these tax credits. And so people do feel really taken advant of I think especially by Amazon here in northern Virginia. But look the backbone of our economy is always going to be the military industrial complex and all of these like ridiculous server farms that serve the CIA and the Pentagon. But I mean Oregon I think it was 30% of power in the state of Oregon is being used by data centers. There's like 20% in a few different states. Virginia is definitely we were the highest in the nation but I can tell you at the organic level Fredericksburg more the rural communities where they're the new projects that were being looked at all of those city councils people were lining up for hours to campaign against the same thing. In New Jersey people lined up for you know in the middle of the night and I've talked about this before guys do you know what it takes for a voter to actually care? You can barely get people to come out for election day for the president now for to come up for a local meeting against zoning. Usually that's just really old people this time people are bringing their children, they're sleeping in the room they're waiting all night just to be. What is your whatever. What is your advice for the data center developers out there? Because certain certainly I like you feel Let me. You don't think that we should just not build any data centers. It depends you know I don't know I mean I'm becoming more radical as times go on and so maybe we do just need a butlerian jihad. I'm testing the limits of your editorial independence by the way. Shout out to you Sam but I mean look I'm not giving any advice to the enemy. I think really what I would say to the tech community more generally and John, you and I have talked about this is just prove to me that this is going to make my life better and stop talking about all these scary things because I'm starting to believe you. In fact I do believe you. What is this new Claude news That their new model is so scary they have to pre release it to the cybersecurity companies so that they can develop so no no so that the new model can develop defenses against itself. We're very much with you that the fear based marketing like needs to stop because it's not, it's not helping anyone like part of the whole back But I don't know guys. I mean Jordan, you have always made the case, and maybe you're right, is that that's a great way to fundraise. Every time the company that bought you wants more money, they have to go and be like, look, we're changing the world. We're going to destroy all these jobs. Like, I don't know. I mean, let's say, like, with Anthropic, I feel so. So my point. My point was that it was very effective when there was no revenue in the industry. Right? Yeah. And. And. And it was kind of this kind of far out idea. Nobody had had, like a magical experience with AI. They hadn't had, like, a question, didn't have anyone to ask it to, and then asked AI the question. They got a good answer. Like, when, When. When the average American had not had a very cool experience with AI they hadn't generated an image that was, you know, photo real or gotten help with their homework or help with, you know, writing any of these things that, like, now everybody has had the experience of. It clearly was necessary to kind of marshal enough capital for a bunch of upstarts to be able to compete with the biggest companies in the world on this, like, the Googles of the world. And I just think at this point, I made the case, like, you know, at the end of last year, where it was like, we need to stop. We need. I think we need to stop this as an industry, because why would average American be excited about this if you're just trying to give them, you know, Terminator nightmares? But clearly the entire, you know, some people in the industry still feel like they need to, because I think they really believe it. Yeah, yeah, no, I think they believe it. That's the. I'm with John. Like, I feel like Dario believes it, and he just goes on every podcast in the world and says it, like, over and over again. And at a certain point, especially like with the new Claude news, I'm like, dude, maybe I should just believe you. And, you know, people. What is it? People are taking leaves of absences because they're afraid. And I mean, you know, you can only call yourself the new digital God so many times before. Look again, I'm a Luddite. I don't know a ton about the technology. I listen to smart people like you guys and many others to try and figure out what's going on. But if anything, I just want to be able to convey to the people who watch this show, you're not very popular right now. And especially in the midst of a global energy crunch, I would just be real careful about strolling around town and talking about how it's going to bring jobs in because a nobody believes you. They all think that their bills are going to go higher. There needs to be. I think what this really needs, guys, is I don't think it can be solved at the federal level or, sorry, at the company level. I think the government is going to have to step in and genuinely like codify, let's say the executive order that Trump wanted to put in place where every data center project is going to have to supply the initial, the amount of energy that it's going to use it, have to prove it to the local city council, to the state, to the feds. Like there needs to be genuine democratic buy in if we're all going to decide like this is cool for us. And I'm not sure that, I'm not sure really that the tech companies are ready for that. Although maybe Sam is. You guys saw his new social contract. I was, I was going to do a segment about it on my show, but I didn't have, I didn't have a chance because of this entire Iran war thing. But I mean, look, I mean, clearly he's, he can foresee what the problem is. I don't really agree with some of the stuff he laid out, but. Yeah, anyways, yeah, it was notable. So Demis had an interview with, with Harry.

The spreadsheet will become irrelevant, says Buco Capital bloke. No, the spreadsheet is eternal. The spreadsheet paradigm is capitalism. The two are irrevocably intertwined. We were using spreadsheets 3,000 years ago to trade oxen. We will still be using them in 3,000 years. Long live the spreadsheet. And he shares a stone tablet that appears to be a spreadsheet. This is in reaction to signals post that Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have maybe four to five years of relevance left simply because the document spreadsheet paradigm itself will become mostly irrelevant. It already makes zero sense to draft, review or analyze anything without a native AI environment around it. That gap only widens over time. Most communication, including email, chat, status updates, is heading towards agent mediated flows where humans set intent and AI handles execution. I don't know, I mean it is like both can be true here because you could be in a world where if you need a spreadsheet, the code is written on the fly and instantiated. We saw ramp launch Ramp sheets very, very quickly and it was a very full featured product that was clearly only possible to build that so fast. Like cloning. Google Sheets used to be insane. We had some luck cloning Slack recently. Yeah, our intern built like a very, very convincing clone. It's sort of crazy in about like an hour. Y I think it was on the. Was it on the $200 plan? Wow, that's incredible. So yeah, I think there's still the question of actually getting that to feature complete, maintaining it, really serving it, hosting it. All of that seems like a hassle compared to just signing up on a consumption basis or a seat based basis for a lot of SaaS. I'm still sort of not a firm believer in Those near term SaaS apocalypse broadly, but it does. I think the more likely scenario is that you will see software instantiated in real time. So if you're building something and it requires a spreadsheet to visualize, and you're already seeing that with a lot of the chat apps, if you ask for a deep research report or something that that requires sort of building a timeline or a chart, it can write Python, it can write HTML that will. The other thing is just giving customers a lot more flexibility around the product and thinking that like okay, if you're buying a piece of software, like buying a home, you get the home and then you can make changes to it to fit your own needs over time. And so we'll see what ultimately changes. But you can imagine a world where it stops being. I forget who was on the show, but they were talking about how it was console.console.com talking about how instead of having a request, a feature button, you just let people build it themselves. Yes, well,

Meek Mill pulled out a slide from Bill Ackman. The slide says a small percentage of songs are listened to. The overwhelming majority of music tracks receive zero or minimal engagement. AI is poised to exacerbate this reality. And so it shows that 0.2% of songs are culturally and commercially relevant. Commercially relevant is 10% of songs streamed 1,000 to 100,000 times. And then Meek is dropping that into what looks like Claude saying, you're not in that 88%. You already skipped the whole bottom of the pyramid. You're already in that top.02%. People know your name. They search for you specifically. They stream on purpose. That changes everything. You already have the hardest thing. Attention. You don't need the algorithm to find you. Your fans already look for you. So while AI is flooding the market with millions of trash songs that don't even. This is A.I. throwing A.I. this is crazy. Your catalog just sits there collecting streams because people want Meek, not just a rap song. And Dimes Square holding says, first in my bloodline to see a rapper with AI psychosis commenting on a deck from. I think it's a. I think it's a reasonable. It's a reasonable analysis. Reasonable analysis. I just think it's. I. I just think it's a little bit unfair for the AI to be dunking on the other AI. Yeah, this is kind of like a crab. There's a whole story about this in the Journal the other day about a local group that's lobbying against data center development using AI tools, ChatGPT very heavily to understand the legal code, how they can organize who they should be calling. It sort of feels like a good use of AI in the sense that they're exercising their democratic rights properly through the correct channels. Like, it could be so much worse. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, well, hopefully by using the models enough, they'll be like, oh, wait, this is actually good. Yeah. Or there are some parts that I like narrowly, but do we need this data center in my neighborhood? Maybe not. And they can also. Specifically on this. I think it's interesting, among celebrities, it seems like rappers specifically are really leaning in a lot more than other types of celebrities. Little Baby. Little Baby. Not Little Baby. There's a post yesterday about someone who got paid to, like, set up openclaw Forum. Yeah, you've seen this a bunch. Yeah. It's just funny. Like, you don't see actors. Baby Keem. Lil Baby was second after Baby Keem. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, Matthew McConaughey had some words about AI saying, oh yeah, when he was gonna log in, he needs to log in. Well, no, that was separate, like, wasn't it? Like months. It was like months, months, months and months later he was like, this is coming. Like, you need to be prepared for this. You need to work alongside of it. Yeah, but he's not talking about his specifically. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. I guess Ben Affleck had that company already. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, Ben Affleck already got the nine figure exit. He's good. Yeah. But you would imagine that AI actually might be a useful tool for understanding the impact of building a data center in a particular community. Because everyone is debating the economic impact, how many jobs will be created, what's the environmental impact, and being able to crunch through all those trade offs so that the community gets to a net positive impact that the population can basically vote on and be happy about and say, yeah, we made this trade off properly and we feel like we're getting the benefit. Because maybe it's generating a lot of tax revenue. Maybe the tax revenue is very durable. Maybe the tax revenue is going to the right place. Is it going to a tax refund because. Or is it going towards a project that people don't actually support? And so there's a whole other question of, for the local community, is that tax revenue meaningful? Like what dollar value do they put on new tax revenues for the city? Depends on what the city's building or doing with that revenue. Anyway, what is this post by Eigen, Jennifer.

Well in other Amazon news, Amazon Pharmacy to offer Eli Lilly and company's new GLP1 pill Foundeo via same day delivery shield. Monad says this thing is gonna fly. Amazon is up 3%. I don't know if it's on this new it's hard to say. Amazon's actually almost up 5% today and I would expect that to be because of the letter but, but people tend to buy a lot of GLP1 drugs too. But it does seem like a good I mean we were talking about this with some of the fast ramp of that one company in direct to consumer GLP1 and peptides and there's so much skepticism about fly by night peptide operations. Where are they being compounded? Are they safe? Do they contain even what you think they contain? And giving consumers an option that's something as established as Amazon with all of the guardrails that they have in place feels like a very positive move for consumers. Before we jump into the next story.

Fueled the theory that potentially Satoshi passed away or something. Yeah. So the question. So here's a question that I have. So one of the stronger arguments or one of the pieces of evidence that the article in the New York Times points out is that Adam Bag is well known. He has a long history with the cypherpunks. He'd been interested in privacy and digital money for a long time, going back to at least, like, the mid-90s, etc. He had invented Hash Cash, which was, you know, basically laid the foundation for proof of work, which of course is elemental to mining. So he was, like, right there. Now, one of the arguments that the piece makes is Adam Back, like, disappeared, didn't have much of a digital trace of those first couple of years when bitcoin was taking off. So maybe that was when he had slipped into satoshi mode. On the other hand, there was no way that anyone in 2008 or 2009 or 2007 could have known really what a gigantic phenomenon bitcoin was going to be. Why? You know, like, Adam Back clearly was very comfortable talking about many of his projects under his own name. He talked about hash, cash. All of these people had been talking about their work and applied cryptography for years under their own name. So not having been able to know how big of a deal bitcoin was going to be, why would this particular project, suddenly he would, like, have the foresight to, like, oh, I have to be pseudonymous for this particular project. I don't totally understand why someone who had, like, talked about digital money, digital money for years under his real name would have had reason to think, okay, with this project, I'm going to have to talk pseudonymously or anonymously. That is not entirely obvious to me. Yeah, yeah. Like, again, in retrospect, like, sure. Like in 2026, we can look back. Yes, it makes a lot of sense that this person would have liked the pseudonym aspect. But when it's just a bunch of people, part of the community, trying to solve the problem of P2P payments who have been using their names, why suddenly, like, when these pieces come together this way, would the creator feel impelled to be private in a way that they didn't feel impelled to be private with all the other bcash, hash cash, digital gold, et cetera. That's not totally obvious to me. Well, the way that, I mean, the differentiation you're talking about, it is. I'm becoming more suspect that it was, in fact. You hear. So this is. Yeah, Wait, John, it sounds like you. You don't find this component? No, I. Yeah, I just. I feel like after watching a number of projects sort of sputter where they did have a specific founder that could be just not even attacked, but just the motivations of that individual.

Pledge into law. A good move. It would be a good move, but I don't think it's enough at this point. There's so much distrust, guys, like at the local level and on the political level. I recommend you follow Ryan Graduski. He's done some more recent work on the data center question. He's been talking about this. He's like, guys, this is just laying out there for any politician to pick up. And I'm talking about it from an anti data center position. He's much more of an expert on polling than I am. Go and check out his feed. And some of the work that he's done, especially not just on feelings against AI, but data centers, because he. I think he crunched the numbers. I know it was within the last couple of weeks that he looked at the question and he was. He just said there's an overwhelming animus and that people are angry. So it's not just, again, let's be very clear. It's about a feeling of lack of control over, you know, you're coming to take my job, you're increasing my electricity, you're changing my nation, and I have to have a say as a citizen. So that's not just no longer about electricity. That's about the whole picture of like technology and oligarchy and the economy. So you're fighting against a very, very big force right now in the country. Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. Thank you for coming on and breaking it down. I'm sure.

You know, adversaries can see clearly that this is a potential pain spot for the U.S. economy here in the U.S. the administration is really aware of this. But there's also just this rising kind of populist tide against the data center movement and against I think really like abundance style assurances from politicians and from companies that after 40 years now, I mean before data centers it was Walmart and before that it was something else. There's always going to be like a small guy versus big guy feeling, especially in rural parts of the country. And you know, I'm from Texas, Jordy, with the oil industry, so I get exactly what you're talking about. Right. Like there's a symbiosis of we actually get rich off this stuff, so we're okay with drilling for oil. But you know, there has been enough stories also even there where people go bust as a result and there's a lot of animosity towards the oil industry, especially pre shale oil revolution after things petered out. And you know, I don't know, I, I've just seen this go politically in a lot of interesting directions. Enough to see that A, something is happening, B, is that the tide is not only just turned, but I think coming very explicitly. And if what I would really advocate for is a genuine democratic process because that's what it's all about. Like people just feel like this is out of their control about AI especially. They're like, I want impact, I want a say. And I don't think they're wrong to say that. Yeah, I really don't slow for, for getting some sort of resolution on the.

Release it to the cyber security companies so that they can develop. So. No, no. So that the new model can develop defenses against itself. The fear based marketing like needs to stop because it's not, it's not helping anyone like part of the whole back. But I don't know guys. I mean Jordy, you have always made the case and maybe you're right. Is that that's a great way to fundraise. Every time the company that bought you wants more money, they have to go and be like, look, we're changing the world. We're going to destroy all these shots. Like, I don't know. I mean for, for let' with anthropic. I feel. So my point, my point was that it was very effective when there was no revenue in the industry. Right? Yeah. And, and, and it was kind of this kind of far out idea. Nobody had had like a magical experience with AI. They hadn't had like a question, didn't have anyone to ask it to, and then asked AI the question. They got a good answer. Like when, when, when the average American had not had a very cool experience with AI they hadn't generated an image that was, you know, photo real or gotten help with their homework or help with, you know, writing any of these things that like now everybody has had the experience of it clearly like was necessary to kind of marshal enough capital for upstarts to be able to compete with the biggest companies in the world on this, like the Googles of the world. And I just think at this point I made the case like, you know, at the end of last year where it was like, we need to stop, we need, I think we need to stop this as an industry. Because why would, why would average American be excited about this if you're just trying to give them Terminator nightmares? But clearly some people in the industry still feel like they need to because I think they really believe it. Yeah, no, I think they believe it. That's the. I'm with John. I feel like Dario believes it and he just goes on everybody.

Against zoning usually that's just really old people this time people are bringing their children they're sleeping in the room they're waiting all night just to be what is your what is your what is your advice for the data center developers out there because certain certainly I like you feel let me you don't think that we should just not build any data centers it depends you know I don't know I mean I'm becoming more radical as times go on and so maybe we do just need a butlerian jihad I'm testing the limits of your editorial dependence by the shout out to you Sam but I mean look I. I'm not giving any advice to the enemy I I think really what I would say it to the tech community more generally and John you and I have talked about this is just prove to me that this is going to make my life better and stop talking about all these scary things because I'm starting to believe you in fact I do believe you what is this new Claude news that their new model is so scary?

I think that's great. There we go. Thank you. There we go. Okay, so is. So is this local Wisconsin city referendum like the new playbook that will spread all over America? Are there other jurisdictions that are already looking to copy and paste this? How do you think this, where do you think this goes? I definitely do think it will serve as a model, especially as other. Remember, this is really a bottom up phenomenon. So it's really at the community level. Here in the state of Virgin Virginia, where I live, 40% of our power is actually consumed by data centers. And so you've seen organic pushback. It became a major issue in the gubernatorial campaign. Both the Republican and the Democratic candidates were against data centers. And both. A lot of the candidates are seeing all of the energy, I'm sure, around this. I'm saying at the community level. I'm sure you guys also have seen all of these viral videos. I referenced the one more recently of this trailer park which is being basically told they have to go out because they're going to build a new one. There's the famous one recently, I think it was in Kentucky of a woman being, I think she was offered like $20 million for her land. She's like, I'm born on this land, I'm gonna die on this land. So I, I really think that this is one of those bubbling political issues which no major politician, maybe Bernie Sanders, the only one that I've seen which has been willing to like jump on top of it. But I think it's gonna be a major issue in 28. 28. I think in 28 both candidates are going to have a data center platform. Maybe the Republican one, depending on who it is, is going to try and square the circle around gdp. But I don't think that voters want to hear anything about it. That's just my personal opinion, dude.