Datacenter Protests, Paramount WB Bid Clears Key Hurdle, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

0:02Charlie Croteville says, we won no data center and they have to build a park. Yes. This got 3 million views, 222 ,000. That ratio is crazy, right? Yeah. Crazy, crazy ratio. Gary Tan responds and says a fully built one gigawatt data center complex generates around $31 million per year in state taxes and 61 million per year in local taxes from data center operations alone. Also, it creates roughly 430 direct jobs at the facility itself, plus many more indirect and construction phase jobs. So nearly$100 million a year in local taxes based on this analysis by the Consumer Energy Alliance. So maybe these data centers need to be leading with that more.

0:48Think about how many parks you can build. Think about how many roads you can repair, new buildings, schools that you'll be able to build locally if you have one of these. We've talked about this at length, but it's understandable that citizens will be like, I don't need the data center in my backyard to use ChatGPT, so why would I want it? But if you're going to have nearly nine figures in local and state taxes that you can direct. There is another solution here. You could build a jungle gym that has GPUs embedded in the slides and in the swings. And so you get a little bit of... You know those rolly slide things?

1:21Yes, yes, yes. So if those were generating... That generates electricity. Oh, yeah. I know. I'm thinking what you're thinking. Of course. Put the kids to work. If they're swinging, I want to capture that electricity and turn it into tokens. And Reggie James, creative director of General Catalyst and friend of the show, says, you mean to tell me the meme of creating a permanent underclass hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of the public? Shocking. Yeah. Very good point. Let's pull up this video because it's a pretty wild reaction. Let's get sound and start it back. They canceled it! Wow. They canceled it!

2:00It's like the little Yachty. Yeah, it is the little Yachty walkout.

2:08The people united will never be defeated. The people united will never be defeated. The people united will never be defeated. The people united will never be defeated. They got a soundboard? It does seem like a deal. Keep chanting. your Netflix recommendations just got 0.1 % less accurate. Against data centers everywhere in New Jersey. New Jersey. They actually have a live band? Or instruments. Yeah, it's interesting because the pushback against data centers, it really is this meme of creating a permanent underclass, that type of thing because I would be so much more expecting of this pushback if it was like, oh, well, we know that living next to a data center is dangerous for your health.

2:58That is not the meme. The meme is like, maybe your power rates will go up, but it's sort of unclear and they might offset that. They're sort of ugly, but they're not the biggest, craziest thing that you could put there. It really is just about like, I don't like what it produces abstractly. And so I don't want the concrete. I don't like what it stands for. Yeah, exactly. I don't like what it stands for. It's a little bit different than, I think a lot of people do. It says, for real though, data centers filling up Northern Virginia is super annoying and ugly. They're like 600 now. They got to make them look better.

3:28Yeah. Okay. So you were joking about the jungle gym, but there is that, you've probably seen it. There's in Denmark, there's the ski hill that's on top of the power plant. Wait, really? Have you seen that? No, I haven't seen that. I thought you were going to mention the, have you seen the stealthy cell phone towers? So there are cell phone towers all over Los Angeles that are dressed up like trees. Yeah. They always get me. They always get you. I can never tell. I'm kidding. Of course you can tell. From very far away. They do sort of like fade into the background and you don't notice them as much as like a full-on crazy cell tower in your face.

3:57AI folks have about four months to pull a cure for cancer out of the latent space before we drift into Butlerian Jihad attractor basin. Yeah. Jihad. Butlerian Jihad is from Dune. They don't want computers, so they use Spice and they travel around that way. Yeah, it's really popular. I mean, we talked to Sagar and Jetty about this. It's bipartisan. medicine it's it's very very broad support against data center build out and there doesn't seem to be anything that's that's pushing back against it and i was thinking more about the uh the cure for cancer thing because you know microsoft excel has been useful in medicine you use microsoft excel to catalog how patients are doing track a bunch of blood work create a correlation okay these people got placebos these people got the real cancer treatment now we know for sure and it just sped it up a little bit you could have done it on paper but doing it in excel probably move things forward just a notch you got the cancer cure like a couple months earlier a little bit cheaper a little bit faster and that sort of like diffusion story is ridiculously unsexy like it's not attractive at all.

5:07No one wants to talk about it. I had this riff for a while. People want one simple trick. I had this riff for a while that the debt markets were critical in the space race. Like you actually do need to finance rocketry with debt. You need efficient capital markets to build rockets. But everyone likes to look at rockets. No one wants to look at debt covenants. And so rocket engineers get all the credit when, in fact, some of the credit does, in fact, belong to the financiers that make large-scale industrial projects possible. People love the bridge, but they don't think about the financiers that make it possible.

5:45But as silly as that sounds, it really is an important step in the chain. And AI, it might be that more than the magical cure for cancer that you pull out of latent space. It's gonna be tricky. I think even if we do see a boom in cancer drugs and we hear testimonies from scientists that, Oh, yeah, like AI definitely like sped me up. Like the ticker tape parade is going to happen for the scientists. Like we know Jennifer Duden is named for discovering mRNA and CRISPR. Like we don't know the software stack that she used when she was analyzing genes. We got to find out. We do because that's the real hero.

6:24It's not the real hero, but it's an important hero in the story that we just don't tell because it's abstract and diffuse. Let's pull up this video from Architectural Digest of this beautiful, sustainable power plant with a ski slope on its roof. So you can actually ski on this? Wait, you ski on the grass? You can ski on grass? It works. I had no idea. Presumably in winter, there would be some snow on it. The building industry accounts for one third of all CO2 emissions, and we need to bring that down. This thing looks so cool. This is cool. This is cool. Sustainability go hand in hand. Trey in the chat would be totally cool with more data centers in Virginia.

7:07I imagine if you had extreme sports on the roof. Yes. Do a deal with Red Bull. Get the FPV drones out there. Red Bull sponsored data centers. The next X Games on data centers. Yeah. I mean, the Olympics are coming. If you want to build a data center in L.A., why not build an Olympic village as well? On Cities, we want to design the future of the buildings that we would like to live in.

7:38My name is Jakob Lange. I'm a partner and architect at the architecture firm BIK or Bjarke Ingels Group. We're standing here at Copenhagen, the tallest mountain in Copenhagen. Wait, what? well he's calling the building a mountain that's insane a little more than 10 years ago now we started a competition to design the facade of this building we were struggling for quite a while but in one of the design meetings we were talking about the fact sure magazine needs to get on this deal flow completely agree are you a thrasher magazine guy i love thrasher i haven't been a subscriber in probably 10 years but yeah so the only thing that comes out of the yeah how did we not know about this this is amazing yeah i knew about it buried in you did you did buried in the european stagnation thesis is the most white beautiful white pills structure i mean this goes viral every like few months i've seen this a bunch on we gotta do it you should post it say why is no one talking about yes yes yes you got no i'm saying people are talking about this no no No one's talking about this.

8:50We're the first people to talk about this. Yeah. It feels like Apple would be one to do this. It's in line with the Google branding. There's so many companies that are ready to sort of pick up what this is all about and do a promo video. Put plants on the roof of the data center. It takes a building that looks dystopian and cold and industrial. Build them underground, right? And then put the park on top of it. I don't know. It just seems like there's so many easy ways. Matt over on X says, there's an abandoned Brooks Brothers office in my town would make a lovely data center. So he's taking the other side.

9:27I think if you left the sign and it was just Brooks Brothers, you kind of revitalized the sign, redid the kind of landscaping, but then put a data center in it. I love it. Let's head over to Time Magazine. So Leo, he came in pretty hot on the reaction. He said, Team Cope made the cover of Time. Yeah. the people versus AI, a lot of... Behind the growing backlash. I mean, the growing backlash is really, it actually makes a lot of sense to do a portrait and a profile on all the different voices that are here because some of them are lawmakers, some of them are pundits, some of them are analysts, some of them are environmentalists, some of them are lawyers, all sorts of different folks.

10:06Did you read it yet, Tyler? Why are you laughing? In protest, you won't. Team Cope is funny. Team Cope is funny. Yeah, people took this all over the place. The people versus the wheel, All grunts from the silent majority dragging rocks and rolling is a drag. People are having a lot of fun about the horses versus the car. The horses versus the car. At the same time, like this, the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, well, obviously, AI is going to happen. So this is, you know, it's inevitable. It's like, no, these, these, like, we live in a democracy.

10:39Like, if they vote, no more data centers. Look at what happened to nuclear people. Like you keep comparing AI to splitting the atom. I was just watching some video and the guy was saying like, AI is the most incredible human invention. It's up there right with when we split the atom. And I'm like, well, I know how that ended. We got a bunch of nuclear weapons that we didn't even fire at each other. It just became a cold war. So really zero economic value from that. Just a lot of people building and then putting them in silos. And then a couple nuclear power plants that eventually got regulated out of existence.

11:09We never got a nuclear future of energy. And so it is possible that society can just freak out and be like, actually, we're doing non-proliferation. That's a possible outcome here. Hill says this is why we need data centers in space. Elon looking pretty smart. For sure, for sure. Even if the timelines that have been thrown out are aggressive on a longer time horizon. Oh, you're not going to have to push back there. And Trey really coming in with the most obvious solution, blimp data centers. Just put them over the Pacific. I love it. Float them over there. Rob over on X has found some information on the Twitter deal trial.

11:46I believe this is the case around the Twitter employees that did not actually get their severance. It says the class action brought by former Twitter investors against Elon Musk. I actually don't know that much about this particular case, but there was a pool of 92. They think Twitter was worth more than$44 billion? Well, maybe they had stock options that were canceled. Maybe they are employees, but they're counted as investors in this case because it's a SEC violation instead of an employment contract. Apparently, Elon Musk's popularity, unpopularity is throwing a wrench in the trial because, quote, hate for Musk quickly narrows the jury pool in Twitter deal trial.

12:27A California judge quickly narrowed a pool of 92 prospective jurors Thursday, excusing 38 potential jurors who said they couldn't be fair and impartial, as Musk's attorney lamented. There are so many people who hate him so much. Yeah. The trial involves claims from Twitter investors who say Musk violated securities law by publicly waffling over his decision to purchase the company and driving down its stock price. Yeah, and there's probably a lot of people who don't like Elon because of the benchmarking. Does that mean, though, so he said, okay, I'm going to buy this company, and then he was trying to back out because he was like, the price is insane, and then the stock declined and people sold, and then it ended up getting bought up here, and now they're like, well, you kind of misled, I don't know.

13:16I wonder actually how this will net out because he didn't make anyone sell the company if you're a Twitter shareholder and you believe that? Basically, I mean, every time you make a public statement, unless it's disclosed through the traditional SEC workflow, one person or five people can sell, and then they can hold you to account on that, on the impacts of that. And so every possible move in the price of the company can come back to bite you based on what you were saying and whether or not it was above board. Yeah. Pub is saying they're calling it the most Canadian caption of all time. Team Canada hit the timeline after their loss to the United States saying silver shines just as bright.

13:59It's very Canadian. Absolutely brutal. We have a Canadian on our team is sitting over there shaking his head. He's hard to see from this angle. We're all friends on this continent. We like a good competition. There's a war in the community notes right now. People are saying silver actually shines brighter than gold, but gold is better. It actually doesn't. It also tarnishes much easier and becomes dull. Gold is greater than silver. Blake Robbins is reacting to the news that Meta's VR metaverse is ditching VR. This is from The Verge. We'll have to talk to Alex Heath, former Verge reporter later today.

14:38This feels pretty clear. The metaverse was actually just Roblox this whole time. Not Fortnite, not VR. This is extremely hard for me as a VR bull. I threw on the headset yesterday, watched about 10 minutes of Blade Runner 2049 before you called me and I had to take it off. But I was having a great experience watching a 3D movie. You threw that on right when you got home. Right when I got home. I was like, I'm gonna chill for a little bit, throw on Blade Runner 2049. Reggie recommended it, so hip city Reg. I was like, okay, I gotta do it. But interrupted, there was other stuff going on. So didn't get through the whole movie, but still delightful experience.

15:13and VR is not dead. It's about to reanimate and come back from the grave. In the next 400 years, I guarantee you, VR will be like kind of popular, like sort of popular. Matthew Ball dropped his state of video games in 2026. Boom. One of the standout lines was Roblox had 150 million daily users in Q3 of 2025. Its quarterly engagement is now equal to Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. It's huge. which is just absolutely wild. This is the report that I was sort of inspired by yesterday when I was talking about this interesting fact that Matt Ball shared on his Stratechery interview that when you look at video games, the video game market is not doing particularly well.

16:02You have to always segment out non-China and then there's also mobile versus console. Are people paying or is it ad-based? There's a whole bunch of different sub-segments, But just looking at non-China growth in video games, like all of the growth went to Roblox. And basically everything else was either flat or down. And people are starting to just spend more time on endless feeds. They're on Instagram, they're on TikTok, or they're doing sports betting or watching TV or watching Netflix. There's a million different things that have fought for attention. And it used to be the greatest bargain in history.

16:38and Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two, maker of GTA and 2K games, got in a lot of trouble at one point because he said like, we should be charging per minute. And people were like, this is a nightmare. Are these gonna charge per minute? He was like, no, no, no. I just mean in terms of the value that we're delivering, we will take$60 from you, which is a lot of money, but we will give you GTA V, which you can play for 100 hours and have a great time. And some people will play for more than that. And so on a per hour basis, you're paying like 50 cents. Now comp that, he would say, comp that to go into the movies.

17:15You know, you pay 20 bucks and you're there for two hours, that's$10 an hour for entertainment. Whereas with a video game, 50 bucks for 50 hours, you're paying a dollar an hour. He was just driving home that this is a great value. That is no longer the case in the world where there's so much incredible entertainment that's basically free because it's ad supported. and the experience of scrolling an endless vertical social feed is now rivaling the level of entertainment that you get from video games. It used to be like, yeah, I'll go on Facebook and check some posts about see who posted what they did this weekend, check in with that, but I got to go and play Counter-Strike or I got to go play the actual game that's really fun.

17:55Now it's a lot more competitive. I'll kind of tap through. So global video game content sales had a strong 2025, growing 5 % year over year and hitting a new all-time high of about 195 billion, 10 billion more than the prior high in 2021. The industry high was achieved through new highs in each of mobile PC and console too. So everything's up and to the right. And fortunately 2025 as with years prior, boasted several new hit franchises and studios while many older franchises and studios also achieved new highs. But despite three straight years of industry growth, Both a new record high for revenues and a smattering of new hits each year.

18:33Private funding for game makers fell another 55 % in 2025. There's so much going on in the video game industry. And it's often overlooked because it's just like sort of off in its own little world. Do you want to talk about chill remote jobs or do you want to stay on video games? Yeah, let's talk. Do you want a chill remote job? No, I said that, but I lied. I don't want a chill remote job. I actually love a high pressure job. I love office politics. I love being thrown into the fire. Last-minute slide changes fuel me. I get high off an ad hoc ask. Corporate jargon is my love language. When I'm in office, I'm a lethal corporate machine.

19:13I'm in a God-tier flow state right now. This is my favorite game. This is so good. I love this new genre of the day in the life at work. Whoever said that office jobs are adult daycares was on to something. There's nothing like an ad hoc ask, right, Tyler? Yeah. I feel like Tyler, Tyler. Tyler lives for an ad hoc ask. He's like, yes, and. You're like, yes, but let me throw on my white suit first. Yes. Yeah, market's up. Let's go. I think at least it was. Yeah. More news in Paramount's$108 billion bid for Warner Brothers. It cleared an antitrust hurdle. What hurdle was that? The media group whose bid is bankrolled by Oracle billionaire Donald Trump donor Larry Ellison.

20:00Freudian slip. No, Oracle's doing fine. Said on Friday that its deal had complied with the U.S. Department of Justice's second request review process, removing a critical impediment to U.S. regulatory approval. I have no idea why there would be any antitrust worries here. The antitrust question is always that there's no antitrust with Paramount here and Warner Brothers. The question has always been Netflix, but I thought that was going to get through, but we'll see where it lands. So Paramount's deal could still be blocked, but allowing but by allowing the 10 day statutory waiting period to elapse under HSR or Hart Scott Rodino acts.

20:41Second request process. The DOJ is clearing the path for Paramount's deal on antitrust grounds. The government's saying they can go forward as long as they can agree to terms. Yeah. Yeah. And zooming out, when you look back at the news from a month ago, it seemed obvious that the next step was to spend a lot of time in Washington for the Ellisons. Yeah. And try that angle. It seems to be going well. Matthew McConaughey, we talked a little bit about this, but it hits way harder when he says it himself. So let's play the clip. It's coming. It's already here. It's already here. Don't deny it. It's not enough.

21:17It may be for you, but it's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea. The moral plea that, no, this is wrong. It's not going to last. There's too much money to be made, and it's too productive. It's here. All right? So I say get your own yourself. Voice, likeness, et cetera. Trade market, whatever you got to do. That's how you did that. Yeah. Own yourself. So when it comes, not if it comes, no one can steal you. But they're going to have to come to you to go, can I? Or they're going to be in breach, and you'll have the chance to be your own agency and go, yeah, for this amount or no.

21:59Okay? It's coming. Is it going to be another category or is it going to infiltrate our category? It's damn sure it's going to infiltrate our category. I think it will end up, does it become another category? Will we be in five years having films, the best AI film, the best AI actor? Maybe. I think that might be the thing, is that becomes another category. I'm not sure. It's going to be in front of us in ways that we don't even see. I'm not watching movies if it's AI or not. No AI is going to get me to start watching movies. That's the question of reality. I don't watch them. It's more hazy than ever.

22:38In a very exciting way, I think. but also a scary way. This is great industry leadership. I love it. Very politically delivered. Yeah, so I can see there being an incremental category. Yeah. That said, I still think AI will be used in every category. That's what he says. Yeah. Yeah, he says he doesn't know the timeline and he's not sure exactly how this will come out but he says there might be a new category just like there's best animated film at the Oscars but then CGI and animation works its way into the Avengers which is not an animated film but Thanos was animated with CGI. It just wasn't hand-drawn.

23:14And so the categories blur together. Clearly AI is coming for all sorts of different levels of the stack. And he's just saying you shouldn't just sit by and hope that it doesn't happen. You should embrace and figure out how you fit in. There is a$36.5 million waterfront compound for sale in the Florida Keys. And take a look at this picture. It has 1 ,700 feet of shoreline and two 5 ,000 square foot homes. You thinking what I'm thinking? Next door neighbors? That's right. That's right. That's right. We can do it. So you remember, I think it, not Asana, the Atlassian. They did. They had this crazy feud.

23:57So the founders of Atlassian, they were besties. They built this massive company together, wildly successful, multi-gen, you know, basically two decade run. Yeah. Incredible run. and they decide, you know, we've had an incredible run. Let's keep the run going. Let's buy houses right next to each other. They end up getting a massive feud over it. And I think it destroys the friendship. Hopefully it's recovered by now. But we could do it. Oh, you think we could do it? I think we could do it. You don't think you'd be bothered by my industrial-grade Wi-Fi penetrating while you're trying to sleep? You don't think that would bother you?

24:29I think that would be. That would be the straw that broke the camel's back. I'd be like, John, you have to turn off the Wi-Fi after 10 p.m. when we're sleeping. It disrupts the sleep. Stop listening to movies all night long at full blast volume. I don't care. I don't want to see the second and third Matrix or hear them through the walls. You'd be in the backyard with your VR headset on, but playing the audio fully. And so you can still hear it. And then you'd be falling asleep with it on. So it'd just be blaring. Exactly. That would be the end of TVPN. That would be the end. So we won't be doing this.

24:59But what a funny situation. So it's a 10-acre waterfront property in the Florida Keys. The rent says just move in together. No, you need two properties that are as close as possible next to each other. Eddie Garcia bought the Isla Morada property for about 15 years ago. Waterman specializes in developing master plan communities throughout Florida. Garcia said he originally intended to create a small development on the land, but he wound up falling in love with the site and instead turned it into a family compound. My kids grew up there fishing, lobstering, crabbing, you name it. He was on open claw before it even existed.

25:35Did you hear the drama about there was a reporter, was it at Reuters or something? But he was accused of using AI to write all of his Olympics coverage. And it had all the telltale signs of AI-generated sort of slop. And the editor-in-chief backed the journalist and said, no, he always writes like that. That's what he sounds like. They trained on him. They trained on him. and then Pangram came in and said, well, we pulled the receipts and he didn't use to write like that before AI. And so you can look at the chart. Maybe he's really bullish on AI. And so he only will read outputs now. He doesn't read any organic.