6/30/26: Portnoy Threatens Zohran Challenge, CNBC Explodes Over AI Bubble, Kevin O'Leary Data Center Humiliation

21:58Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, and Ryan will be here, of course, to break down those, as you mentioned, Colorado results tomorrow. Also should mention that Angie Craig got the endorsement yesterday of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry, who has been obviously out front of the conflict between the state of Minnesota, the city of Minneapolis, between them and Donald Trump. But he went with Angie Craig in that endorsement yesterday, who was lagging, according to the polls that Crystal just showed. So a lot to watch. And I think one big takeaway, if you're somebody that is sympathetic to the political establishment, maybe you're even like a left of center Democrat who doesn't like what you see from DSA candidates.

22:36Emily Jashinsky:You're someone on the right who's horrified by what you see from some DSA candidates. I think one of the big themes, just looking at all these races is how, to your point, Crystal, there is a new coalition building happening on the ground. It is not just true that this is a totally elite movement anymore. I mean, you and I can debate about whether that was always the case, whatever, but a lot of people coming out of academia, and Chevalier is a good example. I think she's in her seventh year of a PhD. It's like people who are upwardly mobile, but spend a lot of time in academia at elite schools.

23:08Emily Jashinsky:That's Columbia in her case. So obviously there's appeal there. But what's happening right now is a broadening of the coalition or attempt to broaden the coalition. And we're seeing some successes at that. So that's I think a pretty significant development and takeaway for people who are watching this race and these races and are maybe not happy with the DSA candidates. Look, here's the thing. The establishment sold people, successfully sold people on one model of here's how we're going to defeat Trump. Yep. Right. And it was Dan Goldman. It was Dan Goldman. And it was Dan Clinton. And it was Joe Biden who was able to e-count a victory, yes, in 2020.

23:42But the idea that that was going to be the end of things and we're going to, quote unquote, go back to normal, that obviously didn't happen. So their credibility is in the toilet, even just on a basic, like, pragmatic, OK, how are we going to win? And so people are no longer cowed by this. Well, you may like this candidate, but you can't have him. You got to do this other way. You got to go with Angie Craig. You got to go with Haley Stevens. And speaking of Haley Stevens and the Michigan race, the latest polls out have Abdul Asayyad doing better in the general election against Mike Rogers, who's relatively strong for a Republican candidate, doing better and winning that general election race in a way that Haley Stevens and Mellor McMorrow are not.

24:24So all of those adages that have been sold to people about what you have, what you got to suck up and accept from your Democratic representatives, they're just not buying it anymore. So the base has always been more aligned ideologically with the Bernie wing of the party. And now that the establishment wing has destroyed their credibility on their electability argument, it has opened up a lot of possibilities. And obviously, there's been deep disappointment, too, with the way that the Democratic establishment has handled themselves in the Trump 2.0 era. And then you add Israel to that mix and it becomes quite a powerful force to be reckoned with.

24:59Emily Jashinsky:Final thought for me, we'll tie this all together with your Utah segment, Crystal, but if you are unhappy with either left populism or right populism, because a lot of right populists are very unhappy now with left populism, finding less kind of like handshakes as there was previously on antitrust and big tech, and to the extent that was real, there's clear division now. But if you're unhappy with that, But obviously, I think we can all agree on exactly what Crystal just said about the establishment, whether it's the Republican establishment or the Democratic establishment. And Trump, as somebody who's anti-establishment or wanted to tell people who's anti-establishment, is currently tabling the housing bill, the bipartisan housing bill between Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, because they won't pass the SAVE Act, which, again, is a huge priority for the conservative grassroots.

25:46Emily Jashinsky:I think it's crazy what Republican senators have done to try to block that from getting to the floor. But holy smokes, your boomer president is tabling a housing bill to get the save. Like you can maybe try to do both of these things. And he's trying to say that without the Save Act, you end up not having a country. But I'm just saying the options that you are offering young people, the more insufficient those options are, the more people are going to continue finding the better option to be an imperfect option. In many cases, they won't say this. There was a crazy poll recently. I think it was Zoron.

26:20Emily Jashinsky:I think it was exit polls from Zoran that found people were voting for him even though they don't like socialism. They're voting for democratic socialists even though they weren't supportive of socialism because the other options are so terrible. So start offering better options and stop blaming China for running an op that's making people favorable to socialism and humorism. Like just start offering better options. We'll come back to that when we get to the Utah bloc and the Chinese alleged misinformation angle here. Indeed we will. Summer is here. At Orderly Meds, we know this time is a reminder that life is full of new beginnings.

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29:27We are tracking escalating warnings that AI is a giant bubble that may collapse and take the entire economy down with it. One of the people making that argument is Jeremy Grantham. Sometimes he's characterized as like a perma bear. He is very skeptical of the idea that the line will just continue to go up forever. Has been for a while, but certainly thinks that AI is a bubble that could prove calamitous for the global economy. Here he is fighting with Joe Kernan on CNBC about exactly this topic. Let's take a listen.

29:56Emily Jashinsky:Other than the fact that some people have made a lot of money like a chain letter, what does crypto do? I don't understand the question. What is the use of crypto? It pays no dividend. It doesn't represent an asset. you can put your fingers on. There is nothing there there. It is just an idea that it will go up in price. If you trust me, it will go up in price. On an island, when shells were used to represent an hour of work, you got 100 people each one. A good comparison. This is completely faith-based. It represents proof of work. Completely faith-based. It represents proof of work. You're going to be totally wrong on Bitcoin, too.

30:38Emily Jashinsky:You're going to be wrong on everything you've covered. Proof of unnecessary work shouldn't be worth a bucket of warm spit. The point is it hasn't outlived a general bull market. We've been in a bull market since March of 2009. Right. And when we get into a bear market, which Joe may think we never will be again, a serious bear market of down 50, 60, 70. Do we think it will prosper in that environment? Anybody that listened to you from 2010, you've done a grave disservice to them. So if you feel fine with that, that's what you do for a living. That's fine. I don't have a problem. Andrew invited you on.

31:18I'm just pointing out the facts of the situation.

31:22Emily Jashinsky:Someday you might be right like a broken clock. Andrew Ross-Organ taking some strays there. Andrew wanted you on. It was really not my idea. I got to start doing that with the DSA people. Like, Crystal invited you on. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. I like that. Yeah, we should definitely go in that direction. If you want bread lines, Crystal invited you here. Crystal invited you here, but, you know, that's your business between you and her. Enjoy your bread lines. I like it. And your Central Park executions or whatever else insanity and your Nazi collaborators. Anyway. As I told you last week, all I ask is that the execution is painless.

31:54I got you, girl. Thank you. Don't worry. Okay. We've got a central bank who is giving Grantham some backup here in his analysis. We could put this up on the screen. The AI boom proping up markets could trigger the next crash. Central banks warn in its annual economic report published on Sunday, the Bank for International Settlements, known as the Central Bank for Central Banks, warned that the enormous spending on AI is accumulating financial vulnerabilities that could amplify any future shock and spread from markets into the wider economy. If memory serves, this is just the latest of there have been several central banks that have sounded similar warnings as insane amounts of money flow into this hyperscaling data center build out.

32:38and you've got companies, and we had Ed Citrone on who laid this down very clearly, you have companies that are assuming that the revenue will catch up with the spend at some point in the future if they are able to make good on their promises of effectively replacing all of human labor, and that would be a very valuable proposition to a lot of companies. That is what this is all being bet on. And at this point, you have had some displacement, but certainly you haven't had the wave of mass displacement that would be required for these numbers, these valuation numbers and the level of spend to really add up and make sense.

33:15Now, on the other side of it, you have the, I think, incontrovertible fact that these companies are effectively too big to fail at this point. They are effectively sort of de facto government entities whenever government wants to intervene and tell them what to do, as has happened in recent cases, most notably with Claude and Anthropic. We have another case now with OpenAI and ChatGPT's release also being limited. In any case, the government has a great interest in what happens here and is also going to be very interested in making sure the line does continue to go up. The size of the build-out and the sheer amount of cash that is being spent here might be too much for them to ultimately backstop.

33:51But I think we both know that they will certainly try.

33:53Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, so when you have, what, 30 % of the MAG-7, we've talked about this a ton, tied up in basically AI stocks at this point, such a sugar high. you end up in this trap where you either have to, and we talked to Raya Tropra about this, you either have to deliver on wiping out 50 % of white-collar jobs, as Daria Amadei said, that AI would, or you end up with a market crash. So you're in a trap. You either end up with mass job displacement or a crash, basically. I mean, I don't see a real way out of either of those options. In fact, I even - You may get both. You could get both. That's true. And that is kind of where I am leaning as a likely outcome of this thing.

34:31I think it is definitely a bubble. I think it is going to crash. I also think the technology is very disruptive, and I don't think they're going to replace all of human labor, but I do think it is going to cause a lot of economic dislocation.

34:43Emily Jashinsky:Well, see, this is interesting. I was going to ask you to even flesh that out, because I guess it would be the magnitude of the bubble crash and the magnitude of the job displacement, or even just the longevity of how, for what period of time there is displacement, because it is possible that there are a lot of new jobs created because of AI. Like we'll just say that that's a possibility. And maybe it takes, there's a lag in the market. It takes five years or something like that for those jobs to be replaced. So you could have this weird position where the markets are reacting to both of those things, a bubble crash.

35:14Emily Jashinsky:Like that actually, I'm curious what, when you say you think both of those could happen, you mean like simultaneously both of those could happen? Yeah, well, I mean, the classic example people are offering is the railroad boom, right? It was a genuine bubble. It crashed. It was calamitous for the economy. It also was a genuinely transformational technology. Internet, same thing. I don't really buy into the happy talk about, well, there's some unspecified jobs that we can't really tell you what they are and have no idea what they would be that will emerge from the ether as they have in the past.

35:44Because past technologies have not been meant to directly replace humans. You know, they've been meant to replace, like, horses. This is meant to replace the intellect of the human, which is like the last thing that we can really hold on to as being like, you know, having a superior position vis-a-vis the mechanical world. So, you know, I need to see some evidence of what these jobs would ultimately be. Now, let me put on the other side, put E3 up on the screen. People took a lot of notice of this. Yesterday, Ford has rehired hundreds of human engineers after the AI that they implemented failed to match the human-driven quality checks.

36:24And Ford is touting this. They also, a lot of these companies, so Ford has done like, I don't know, 5 ,300 people have lost their jobs at Ford over just the past recent period. So they're bringing back a few hundred. Now, that doesn't mean that all of those jobs were lost due to automation. But I think it's just worth keeping in mind that the workforce there is still shrinking. And then the other thing when you dig into this is they say they're bringing these people back not to permanently serve as, OK, we're just sticking with humans. They say they want the humans to better train the AI on the systems.

36:59And so which reminds me very much of what Meta is doing. They're using some of their top engineers not to necessarily do the engineer work permanently, but to train the AI that is intended to ultimately replace them. Now, maybe because of the nature of AI, and this is what plenty of people argue. I was just reading a New York Times op-ed this morning that makes this argument that because of the nature of AI, maybe it never can really replace the human quality checkers. Maybe it hallucinates too much. Maybe it sort of loses its train of thought as your conversation goes on and on or it continues to do the same work process over and over.

37:37It's possible that there are hard and fast limitations where AI development kind of peaks and peters out. I will just say that we have not found that wall for AI to hit yet. It continues to improve. It continues to achieve more and more impressive numbers on benchmarks. It continues to achieve things like being able to solve mathematical puzzles that humans were unable to solve for 80 plus years. It continues to be able to write better works of even literary fiction that is winning prizes and even discerning. People are having trouble telling the difference between the human output and the AI output.

38:16So if there is a wall, it does not appear that we have hit that wall yet.

38:20Emily Jashinsky:But the railroad comparison, I think, is really helpful, too, because it's not like when you're smeared as a doomer, which I kind of like happily will take that label. Yeah, call me a doomer. By all means, I'll take it. But when you call a doomer, it doesn't necessarily just mean that you're saying the technology isn't transformational, that it won't have some good benefits. Everyone is smeared as a doomer if they're like, well, hey, maybe we should adjust in a way that makes more sense. Maybe we shouldn't ban all states from regulating AI. You were called a doomer a year ago if you were opposing that.

38:55Emily Jashinsky:I mean, think about it. Basically, now it's a consensus position that that was insane and was an industry handout, which is why ultimately it got defeated. But at the time, that was a real claim coming from people in the industry was that you are a doomer if you don't want this. It was like a Ted Cruz provision in the big, beautiful bill. and think of just a year's time how the Overton window has shifted on that debate. It's basically a consensus position now that it would be insane to ban states from their own AI regulation for good reason. And so anyway, all that is to say is there's a process of implementing things that you can learn from history, even if we accept that this is an inevitability.

39:34Emily Jashinsky:And then the, I think, kind of ridiculous question of whether or not we're beating China, which nobody can define, literally nobody can define what it means to beat China in AI. This is kind of a meaningless thing to say. You're going to talk about this later in the show, and we actually can put E4 up on the screen. This is a piece from Axios. China's AI advances collide with U.S. safety debate. One of the biggest unknowns in AI security is also one of the most consequential, Axios writes. China's progress toward frontier AI models, a new Chinese open-source model, GLM 5.2, rocked the Internet this weekend with its ability to match the eugenic capabilities of models like Anthropics, Opus 4.8, garnering praise from Silicon Valley elites and raising questions about just how quickly China will close the gap.

40:17Emily Jashinsky:And this comes, Axios points out, as the Trump admin is still debating the best way to release Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models from Anthropic over safety and national security concerns. And again, it just gets back to Crystal. Nobody is, well, some people probably would say block all of the models, moratorium, something like that. It's not what most people are saying. most people are saying you can't destroy society for this abstract goal of beating China. Like literally whatever that means and whatever you could possibly do to even prevent it at this point. Yeah. Well, and this is the talking point that you hear from the biggest AI hyperscale boosters that everything is justified because of China.

40:56Right. And it's always left. This threat has always left very ambiguous because, you know, it's meant to be. It's meant to just be scary. Oh, oh, my God, you know, Kevin O 'Leary, who I'm going to talk about in a minute, was saying, like, they're going to be telling your kids what to eat for breakfast. And like, I don't think they actually care what my kids eat for breakfast. I see no evidence of that in any case. But I will say on the economic front, I think China poses quite a threat to anthropic and open AI and to all of the American, to Grok, to all of the American, you know, frontier AI models.

41:31And we can put, you know, in E4, they talk about the fact that you have a new Chinese release that is matching the agentic capabilities of the foremost American AI models. So this new Chinese open source model, GLM 5.2, rocked the Internet this weekend with its ability to match the agentic capabilities models like Anthropix Opus 4.8, garnering praise from Silicon Valley elites and raising questions about just how quickly China will close the gap. Yeah. We showed you before on this show a chart of companies that use AI in their businesses, startups in particular. They overwhelmingly use Chinese models, not because they're maybe the best of the best, although they are pretty darn close.

42:14And even David Sachs admits that they're probably six months behind maybe the leading models here. So that is a tiny difference at this point. But because they are way cheaper and they're open source. So they're completely accessible and they are vastly cheaper to build and then also to run. So when you have that kind of an advantage in terms of the economics, how is Anthropic, how are OpenAI going to compete with that? That seems increasingly like the most likely, in my layman's view, the most likely way the bubble is going to pop is going to be from this realization of like, oh, most companies don't need the very, very, very best of the best AI.

42:57They can settle for the one that is a few months for now behind but is way cheaper than the frontier models. And so that really changes your multi-trillion dollar valuations or whatever these companies are garnering. That really puts a major dent in those to be, I guess, kind.

43:18Emily Jashinsky:I mentioned this on the show a couple of weeks ago, but I was asking Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, about this during a pen and pad conversation recently. And about that question of whether we find ourselves in a trap. And he didn't seem to really want to give an explicit answer to that, but he was basically saying that some of these investments are like what I read into it is some of these investments are absolutely ridiculous. They're wildly overvalued. He was talking about SpaceX, for example, and he was like, look at the cash flow versus the. That's a Republican senator, a Republican senator saying that like a Trump friendly Republican senator about the administration's policy.

43:56Emily Jashinsky:I asked specifically about Trump bear hugging the AI industry. And I think that's probably why I didn't get a more direct answer. But that to me was like actually very frightening to say this is this is the administration you're friendly to bear hugging the industry. And then to have some be like, yeah, these valuations are pretty like they look really sugary. Yeah. Well, and and so that's on the economic the bubble front. Let's put E5 up on the screen. So even the Trump administration, which is very famously no holds barred, off to the race as anything goes in terms of AI development, is getting a little nervous about where these models are at this point and what the potential impact could be.

44:39So we covered before their limitation of Anthropics, latest model, Mythos, and Fable, which was like the version that was supposed to be safe and have the guardrails put on. They're now also limiting the release of OpenAI's latest model, at least for now, GPT 5.6, only in a limited preview to a small group of partners. The government themselves is personally picking and choosing who gets access to this latest model. This person opines as a de facto licensing regime. This is happening. So in terms of the capabilities, the Trump administration is getting nervous. We also have an update on the Anthropic front.

45:18We can put E6 up on the screen. They have struck a deal with Anthropic, grants the company permission to release its Mythos 5 model to a group of about 100 companies and federal agencies. So, again, similar dynamic with the government stepping in and saying, OK, we will approve who gets access to this. senior Anthropic staffers, Kobe's e-letter writes, flew to D.C. to meet with members of the Trump admin. Anthropic said earlier this month it disabled access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to comply with an export control directive. Trump admin and Anthropic have been in a two-week-long standoff over its latest model.

45:51Steel will have industry-wide implications. So, you know, look, to be fair to this administration, when they slapped this onto Anthropic, it looked very political because they've been in these fights, especially with the Department of War with Anthropic. Now that they're doing the same thing to open AI, I think you have to say like, OK, well, they are genuinely concerned about the safety considerations here of these bleeding edge models.

46:16Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, as they should be. And it did. You're right. It did the Pentagon thing, the reporting from inside of the Pentagon made it sound really political. But even if it was political at the time, I was thinking, actually, this is not that easy or clear cut of a decision on their behalf. It almost gets into the question of have we seen conservatives, and we have seen a couple of candidates, flirt with the Bernie Sanders idea of data center moratoriums and starting to really crack down and have a more concerted industrial policy on all of this, which again gets you smeared and stigmatized as a doomer in politics and in Silicon Valley.

46:53Emily Jashinsky:But it's not the easiest, like, even if you are a pro-accelerationist type person, an EAC person, when you're looking internally at the security questions from the vantage point of the Pentagon, those questions get really complicated for obvious reasons. Yeah, that's absolutely right. All right. Well, let's talk about this idea that China is behind any opposition to what's going on. And if you see an American who believes that maybe we should slow down the data center construction, maybe we should have a democratic check on this AI development, you need to ask them who is paying them, according to Kevin O 'Leary.

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49:01Emily Jashinsky:Protect your pet with insurance from PetsBest. Plans start from less than a dollar a day. Visit PetsBest.com. pet insurance products offered and administered by pets best insurance services llc are underwritten by american pet insurance company or independence american insurance company for terms and conditions visit www.petsbest.com backslash policy products are underwritten by american pet insurance company independence american insurance company or ms transverse insurance company and administered by pets best insurance services llc one dollar day premium based on 2024 average new policy holder data for accident and illness plans pets age zero to ten kevin o 'leary is eating crow after wildly accusing activists opposing his hyperscale Utah-based data center of being backed by the oh-so-scary Chinese.

49:43In a number of media appearances on Fox News and also with Tucker Carlson, Kevin O 'Leary claimed his data guys, they had dug into the social media opposition to his big Utah data center and they uncovered smoking gun, definitive proof that this opposition was being funded by the scary Chinese Communist Party. He could not possibly conceive of Americans organically opposing his energy price spiking, water sucking, noise polluting data center. Such sentiments must have been invented by China or maybe even possibly Cuba, but definitely not Republican voters in rural Utah. One of the groups that he accused, Elevate Strategies, had a lot of fun with these baseless accusations.

50:24Elevate Strategies, also a cell operating inside of Utah. Gabby Finlayson. Gabby, what are you doing? And who's paying you?

50:31Emily Jashinsky:Well, hi, hello. It's me, Gabby Finlayson. What am I doing? Apparently, we've reached the part of the Stratos Data Center journey where Kevin O 'Leary goes on National Fox News to accuse us of being sales for the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah, because at the end of the day, who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Which adversary would want that? There's only one. It's China. So what I think is happening, and I got my guys to go a deep dig into the IP addresses. And here's what we found out. This is fascinating. We found two cells inside of Utah. Elevate Strategies. Gabby Finlayson.

51:05Emily Jashinsky:Gabby, what are you doing? And who's paying you? So what I'm doing right now is after getting this data, I'm calling out Gabby operating in Utah. So hi, Kevin. We are Elevate Strategies. This is Utah. You might not know it because you're from Canada. This is where we live. Before we get into anything too serious, this is the very scary, very intimidating dating man that is threatening us. We are not taking the criticism of anyone who is wearing flip-flops and a suit on national television. You know, it's not every day you get called out by first and last name on Fox News by a Canadian billionaire trying to ruin my state.

51:37Well, Kevin has, in a sense, won the war. It looks like his data center is going in after the Box Elder County Commission voted 3-0 to clear the local regulatory hurdles. But at the very least, these ladies and the others Kevin baselessly smeared are getting a little bit of satisfaction this week as he had to fully retract his claims and Fox News had to issue multiple on-air corrections. Kevin O 'Leary appeared as a guest on this program back on May 11th and discussed the ongoing controversy surrounding his planned data center project in Utah.

52:08Emily Jashinsky:Now, he made certain claims relating to the opponents of that project. Mr. O 'Leary has now corrected the record and explained that he has no evidence that the Alliance for a Better Utah elevate strategies Josh Cantor, Taylor Knuth, or Gabrielle Finlayson are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media is likely likewise aware of no evidence that they are funded by or acting at the direction of or in coordination with Chinese interests in opposing Kevin O 'Leary's projects. Fox News Media apologizes for the error. We'll be right back. That feeling when the lawyer call hits. But this Kevin O 'Leary-backed data center is leaving its mark, not only on Fox News programming, but on the entire political landscape of Utah.

52:52In a series of shocking upsets, two of those Box Elder County commissioners who okayed the data center over the fierce objections of their constituents have now been tossed from office. The third one was not on the ballot. One of those losing incumbents told the Salt Lake Tribune, quote, do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes, I do. Would I do anything different, I would not vote differently, but I would push back against the state and make them come out publicly and tell everybody why they're forcing it down our throat. So apparently, even the guys who voted this thing through in the county commission are not feeling too enthusiastic about the project at this point.

53:29The real political earthquake for the state, though, came from the loss of the president of the state Senate. A guy by the name of Jay Stewart Adams was tossed down in favor of a political newcomer, largely over his role in pushing the so-called Stratos data center. Adams was one of the longest serving politicians in the state and also one of the most powerful. He became the focus of anti-data center ire for his role as chairman of a state commission that greenlit that installation to begin with. Now, sometimes it's easy to project your national political lens onto a local race and miss some other local dynamics that played a larger role, but that does not appear to be the case here.

54:05Adams' chief opponent, a former university lawyer that they attempted to brand as a DEI lawyer, she was very explicit that much of the energy for her campaign came from this data center opposition. Here's how local news framed the focus of one of their candidate forums.

54:20Emily Jashinsky:The Stratos data center in Boxelder County is dominating a high-profile Utah Senate race. Senate President Stuart Adams is being challenged by fellow Republicans Brayden Hess and Stephanie Hollist. All of them asked at this forum about their vision for the state's water policy. I might start by not proposing the largest data center in the country. Hollis repeatedly criticized the data center being pushed by celebrity businessman Kevin O 'Leary. Adams has helped move the project along as chair of the state's Military Installation Development Authority, ORMIDA. When the people spoke, we said we need clarity.

55:01Emily Jashinsky:So I pushed back. Adams recently softened his public support of the project, pushing the developer to reduce its size and make other changes. Tried to listen. I think we're getting we're actually better got a better project because of that. Hess told this crowd the government shouldn't treat data centers differently than any other business. As long as they are not harming society and our resources in measurable ways, I think we should allow them to go forward. But to this audience, the data center is a nonstarter. When you talk about a project that's going to sap tax dollars away from residents, that's going to take water, that's going to endanger our way of life, it's all a red flag.

55:41Emily Jashinsky:It all feels pretty dangerous for where we're at right now. It is no accident that the one candidate you heard there who was clear in her opposition to this data center won the day. And I will remind you, this is a Republican primary in Utah. This is also not an isolated political phenomenon either. NBC News recently spoke with a diehard Trump voter set to vote Tallarico over Paxton in Texas, solely over her disgust at data centers. Quarter mile away, Cheryl Shadden says the noise is as loud as ever. It's like living on the edge of Niagara Falls, or you're on a runway next to a jet that's taking off, but this jet doesn't take off.

56:19Emily Jashinsky:Morning, noon, night, she even hears it in her bedroom, and it's changed everything about how she lives her life, including her politics. Red or blue, if you vote against data centers, we vote for you. A lifelong conservative, she's so angry, she refuses to vote for Trump-backed Attorney General Ken Paxton, who clinched the GOP nomination for Senate Tuesday. Instead, she's all in for James Tallarico, a Democrat seeking to flip a seat controlled by Republicans since 1993. You're willing at this point to forego basically every conservative issue and let the Senate fall into the hands of Democrats if that's what it takes to kill data centers.

57:01Yep. My entire community is going to break rank. Everybody. All of us. We've had enough.

57:06Emily Jashinsky:Breaking rank and coming together. My entire community is going to break rank. Not just there, in Tennessee, HBCU, Fisk University, they are facing massive backlash over a plan they announced to build a data center right on the campus. Also in Tennessee, another planned data center near the Nashville Zoo has led to a political freakout among elected Democrats and Republicans, some of who have come together to oppose that build in hopes of avoiding the political fate of their Utah compatriots here, presumably. The more Americans learn about the immediate impact of data centers on communities and the more they learn about the AI that the data centers are meant to support, the more adamant they grow in their opposition.

57:47Bipartisan data center nimbyism, apparently, is our first line of defense against the AI-fueled tech oligarch global takeover. And that really is how I see it, Emily, that like the data centers are this very important locus of organizing around opposition to the broader AI project. And it truly is bipartisan. You know, I think polls show Democrats are a little bit more imposed and independents than Republicans. But you can see clearly by what's going on in Utah, there is a lot of Republican opposition as well. And this really is a coalition that is up for grabs at this point.

58:21Emily Jashinsky:It's fascinating because in the last couple of weeks, I've started to see people, a Theo Von clip, for example, went viral of him being like, you probably saw this, like, what do we need all these data centers for? And some of the accelerationist people were quote tweeting him and being like, bro, how do you think people are watching your podcast? Like we use so much data because of, I mean, first of all, a lot of that is coming from just AI, not just podcasting for the record. But secondly, very convenient thing for us to say. It is also true. It is true. But I think this is this tension is actually really important because they think this is a dunk and an own on the average person who is like, well, what do we need all of this for?

58:58Emily Jashinsky:But the tension is real because a lot of people are now looking around and being like, well, we have adopted to these lifestyles that maybe we actually don't even agree with. Right. Like there's a fundamental question happening, which is why do we need to use this much Internet? Like, do we? Do we? And now you're going to like if it's a choice between if you're going to put this choice between me living next to this plane that never takes off, which was a beautiful quote from that woman. Yeah. And cutting back on large language model usage, which if you're like 65 years old, maybe you're not even using to begin with.

59:34Emily Jashinsky:That choice is going to be actually increasingly clear. and the people like Kevin O 'Leary, who I think, I mean, if it's cynical, it was really pathetic, but I think he sincerely had people telling him this is all China. It's all China. And he really thought it because - Shows you how on a touch. Exactly. Because if you go back to his Tucker Carlson interview, he was hyping up this research that he found about all of it coming from China. And we covered here, OpenAI put out a survey that was covered by the industry as a damning proof of Chinese ops whipping up opposition to data centers. And it actually came out and said in the fine print towards the second page or something of the study, well, this didn't have much effect.

1:00:16Emily Jashinsky:The posts that the Chinese operatives were planting on social media were barely seen by many people. And it's like, they pulled the headline from that. And they were like, China is whipping up opposition. It's like, no, no, China might be trying to whip up opposition, but it's not really being effective. It reminds me so much of 2017, like Russia, Like the memes. Yeah, it's so similar to that. And it's just a way to kind of either stigmatize people into suppressing their voices or lose the argument completely because you're just making them so much angrier about what you're doing to their communities by not meeting them where they are and hearing their honest and sincere concerns with this, some of which aren't even what you think.

1:00:54Emily Jashinsky:You think, oh, this is a big slam dunk own. You don't want your data. You don't want more data. What are you talking about? We need all this data for these LLMs. And that's what they're not getting is that people are actually now reckoning with whether we do need to live like that. Well, the Utah State Senate president losing in this fashion should be. I hope politicians are paying attention because it should be a wake up call. One of the most powerful politicians in the state, he faced, you know, they thought he would pull through because he had a divided opposition. You had two candidates opposing him, right?

1:01:26But because the opposition's data center was so strong, there were some other issues with him as well. But this genuinely was the primary complaint about him at this point. It was enough to topple him. Long-time incumbent, political newcomer comes in. She's kind of lib-coded in a very conservative state. They tried to tie her. I read her website, and she had this FAQ that was like, people say that you're backed by George Soros. And she's like, I'm not backed by George Soros. People say you're a DEI lawyer. I'm not a DEI lawyer. But in any case, that was how they were trying to defeat her is like, look at this DEI lib.

1:02:00You don't want this for Utah. Obviously, it failed because the concern over the data center was greater than the fear-mongering about whatever ideological leanings are. They tried to do the many people are saying. Many people are saying, yes. That's a Trump move.

1:02:12Emily Jashinsky:Doesn't always work. Many people are saying. All right, guys, that does it for us today. Again, go sign up for the newsletter, the free version, the premium version, whatever you want to do, breakingpoints.com. Thank you for the feedback. Thank you, as always, for your support. And there will be big election results to cover tomorrow. And, of course, we have—Emily will do a great job. But we are very lucky to have Ryan who pays very close attention to all of these things. He's like the guy, yeah, for these sorts of things. So I will be watching with great interest, personally. Yeah, it's going to be fun.

1:02:38Emily Jashinsky:So we'll be here. We'll see you then. Make sure you sign up for the newsletter at breakingpoints.com. Have a great day, everyone.

1:03:16Emily Jashinsky:We'll see you next time.

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