The AI Power Backlash, the NYMag David Ellison profile, Google Personal Intelligence | Diet TBPN

0:01Microsoft who's making some waves because they jumped, they were on True social scrolling, as they do. Their comms department was probably like, what's going on? No, of course, they were talking to the Trump administration. Have you ever scrolled through social, by the way? It's like five ads for every one post. The ads are crazy. And they're crazy. They're crazy. The ads are like, are you a real patriot? Yes or no? And no matter what you click, you just immediately go on to the next phase of the funnel. And then I'll just be like, glad to hear it, patriot. How about$200 donated? And you're like, actually,$100.

0:37And they're like, 200 it is. Okay. I'm clearly clicking an entire image that just has buttons there. They're not actually buttons. They have a Truth Social ETF now. Wait, what? What's in the Truth Social ETF? Invest in the Patriot economy. Oh, okay. I wrote about Microsoft and how they are negotiating the political backlash to AI data centers, increasing power prices. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. He and the key the key line in here is really, you know, he's talking to all the American tech companies, but mostly he wants to make sure Microsoft is going first and they will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't, quote, pick up the tab for their power consumption in the form of paying higher utility bills.

1:25there's been a number of AI backlashes that have happened over 2025 you know the new technology came out everyone was there's a lot of excitement in 23 24 and 25 things got serious the numbers got really big the impacts got big and the stories about the potential risks to the rewards started cropping up and one of the challenges is the early AI generated videos were pretty bad and so people were like these are bad my power bill is going up I don't like that what's the Now this move from Trump and Microsoft almost seems a little late because the videos are getting really good Yeah, so I think people might start saying hey, it's totally worth it It's actually totally worth it.

2:05Yeah, this little you saw those those four cats on the boat that was I haven't seen that one Pull it up Tyler find the forecast. See I think most people would see this and say can we get some sound? There's no yeah, there's no amount of of uh power bills it's pretty fun okay turn it off turn off the sound but anyways yeah it's worth it worth it i think it's worth every bet clearly yeah yeah you see that in your in your life yeah i i think most people would see their power bill ticking up and realize that uh they're getting this content for free yeah they they got to pay for it somehow there's no free lunch yeah yes the power bill narrative is the one that i think stuck the most The water debate was sort of debunked pretty quickly.

2:49There were a number of just, it seemed like mathematical errors in some of the reporting that was claiming that data centers used a lot of water. And then you just talk to the data center guys, and they're like, yeah, we actually, we do use a bunch of water, but then we recycle it, and we just circle it around, and we actually don't dump it out and waste it. There were other AI backlash narratives that were cropping up. The one-shotting stories were very harrowing, and a lot of people experienced someone who sort of went off the rails, went GPT psychosis, like that one felt real. But it also seemed very preventable with aggressive guardrails.

3:22The power one was tricky because with power, you know, the data seemed real on the actual price increases. You looked at the power usage numbers and then you just see demand is increasing, supplies staying flat as it always has been for decades in America. We haven't been building a lot of power infrastructure. When demand increases and supply stays flat, We know what happens to prices. They increase. This is basic supply and demand. A 267 % wholesale electricity price increase if you're near a data center. So basically, if you're within 50 miles of a data center, this is probably affecting you in some way.

3:59Although there's a huge amount of variation. Even if you were able to pass that cost on to consumers, which is what's happening in the short term, it's starting to actually cause delays in data center build-outs. So there's$64 billion. Yeah, one thing here that I think is worth noting is consumers have very real reasons to push back, right? It's not like if they don't have a local data center, they can't use AI product. It doesn't impact them at all. Maybe there's some jobs that come. I feel like I'm missing out. I want one. I know. I want one. There's empty buildings all over the place. We did joke about moving the show to Abilene.

4:35It's not like, hey, there's a new football stadium being built, and suddenly you're going to be able to go walk. Yeah, like you could be a football fan. But even if you're an AI fan, you're like, I don't need it in my backyard. Yeah, you're just like, I already have all the products. That's the big thing. It's like, power bill goes up. What do you get in return? Nothing. Aura. Aura. $64 billion in data center projects are currently held up, and they face delays or cancellation because of opposition from local communities who say, we don't want this data center because prices are going up. Now, there's a couple other reasons.

5:06Some communities are still focused on the water issue. There's environmental impact questions, noise pollution during the construction process, and even aesthetics. There are some people who say, not in my backyard, I just don't want a big white square building. Yes, there's a Walmart there, but I know a guy who works there, and I know the cashier, and I go there, and I walk in. The data center, you'll never go in. Interestingly, the anti-AI issue is seemingly very bipartisan. Data Center Watch, which is this research group, claims in the affected districts, the opposition is 55 % Republican, 45 % Democrat.

5:45So pretty much just across the board, a bipartisan issue. And tech has obviously worked very closely with Democrats in the past, worked very closely with Republicans in the more recent history. But now they're facing... Yeah, and I think it's easy for people in tech to say, oh, these are Luddites, blah, blah, blah. But it's actually not that. What's the incentive? Why do I want this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially because it's going to get built somewhere. It might as well not be in my neighborhood. It's the easiest NIMBY argument to make. So Trump picked up the story on Monday. He says he's working with American tech companies to make major changes to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption.

6:27We're going to talk more about how that actually works out in the form of higher utility bills. Microsoft stepped up first, and I think the first mover advantage here from a messaging perspective is pretty strong, actually. I think it's a very good move. Now, to be clear, this isn't entirely new for the hyperscalers. Google actually has a program called the Clean Transition Tariff, where they overpay for electricity in certain markets, certain data centers. And Amazon pays a surplus above electricity costs already. but Microsoft is unique in the timing and in the volume of the announcement, like it's a whole story in the Wall Street Journal.

7:03Microsoft is planning to be, I think, completely net zero on the carbon emissions by 2030. And by 2050, they want to be so carbon negative that they will, as a company since the dawn of Microsoft in the 70s, they will have emitted negative carbon emissions over the entire life cycle of the company. So Microsoft's exact language is they are committed to paying high enough electricity rates to cover the electricity costs of the data centers so that they aren't passed on to consumers. Now a true free marketer is probably against this. It would be cool to see a Microsoft liquid death collab for water that was used in a data center.

7:43Used water? The die-hard free marketers would argue that the government should stay out of supply and demand issues, let prices rise and there will be more of an incentive to build more power generation capacity. Prices will stabilize naturally. But there are political realities and new capacity cannot be brought online in the blink of an eye. It takes time to build these things. Even if you're just going with natural gas, it takes time. There are backlogs. Basically, Microsoft and the big tech companies, I think, will be saying, hey, look, we want no excuses from power companies to ramp up production, ramp up capacity.

8:18And so we're willing to pay higher rates. Hopefully you can pass that revenue on into bringing up capacity. It seems like Microsoft can afford this. So some numbers. Electricity represents 40 % of data center op-ex. About seven and a half million dollars annually per major facility. Now Microsoft has over 400 data centers. And so energy is a significant line item. I think like three billion a year in electricity, something like that. That's very rough. Probably got to go to semi-analysis for the real number, but$3 billion in energy costs for$245 billion in revenue. Microsoft's going to be okay.

8:56If they pay a 50 % premium on all of their electricity across the entire portfolio, we're talking about$1 billion of extra costs. That's less than 1 % of their operating income. Satya is simply the goat. He's my goat. He does appear to be the goat. No, I think it's super smart. I think it was inevitable. Trump needs this for the midterms. He's putting pressure on everyone, right? Credit card stuff, data center stuff. We'll see more of this. And yeah, being the first mover, ultimately. Only the first mover, the one that sort of like says like, hey, yeah, we're excited about this, is the one that gets any credit, right?

9:34Tyler, what was your reaction to this news? You're in favor of data center subsidies, right? Like you want data centers to pay lower rates because it's more valuable to have... Government-backed data centers, electrical subsidies. You got to feed Claude. I mean, I just think this is kind of disappointing because it's telling me that if you imagine we have a real free market, there should be already insane incentives to build new energy supply. And that's obviously not happening because energy prices will be going down. They're going up. This is telling me that in the future, we're not going to build nearly as much energy power as we want, or at least on any kind of like short-term scale.

10:14Yeah. It does feel, I think it feels like the energy market as a whole is at least in the short term, much more zero-sum than people thought. Taiwan Semiconductor last week spent$200 million at a public auction to buy 900 acres of land adjacent to its existing Arizona property, which will reportedly be used for the planned new facility. So we're still waiting on this Taiwan trade deal, It seems like as part of that, TSMC will expand their operations in Arizona. And they are basing their design for this off of Costco warehouses, Nick, here. Tom Leonard, candidate for governor in Michigan. This isn't a joke.

10:56A friend of mine was offered$70 ,000 an acre for her farm by a data center company,$11.2 million total. This is what big tech is doing in Michigan. So anyway, somebody willing to basically overpay for farmland in Michigan. Yeah, I remember on the University of Michigan campus, there's like these stickers and posters everywhere that are like, stop the AI data center, or it was stop the data center build out. And that's when you knew you had to drop out. I was like, this place is not for me. It's not for me. Oregon rejection. I think this is shared as an example of big tech doing a bad thing, but I don't know, man.

11:2911.2 is a lot of money. The USDA says the average Michigan farm real estate value is$6 ,200 per acre. So they're paying over 10x the price. Yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean, they could easily be paying a premium because of this land-specific location or proximity to other projects that they have. I wouldn't be surprised if some land maxers are going out and just buying up, you know, why wouldn't you try to buy up the farmland in proximity to some of these other projects in hopes that somebody comes in and will never pay? I wonder how real this text message is, because I get a lot of spam. My wife got a spam text today that just said, babe, I dropped my phone and it broke.

12:09She immediately texted me and said, this isn't you, right? Oh, interesting. But it's pretty interesting kind of like loop to get somebody, and I imagine, send me$1 ,000 so I can get a new phone. Remember the text that Ben got? He was asking him if you want to get steaks. What? Oh, that's elite. That was the best spam. That was the best spam. Elite spam. It said, let's get steak tonight. Let's get steak tonight. I mean, she said yes. There's more details about that Apple card deal that Jamie Dimon worked through. We should pull this up. Behind the unraveling of Apple's credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs, after two years of negotiations, one of the biggest credit card deals of all time, we'll see Goldman replaced by JP Morgan on Apple's credit card.

12:56In early December, a long-delayed deal hung over a call between JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. Executives of the two banks had been negotiating for months on trading the massive Apple credit card program, and it's roughly$20 billion in balances. But the talks had stalled. Privately, bankers on each side were blaming the other side for needlessly slowing down the negotiations. You're moving too slow. J.P. Morgan had secured a discount on the balances, but to help cover potential losses, Goldman executives, meanwhile, didn't feel the need to bend much.

13:33Diamond and Solomon got on a call on December 8th. They discussed why the Apple deal was taking so long to close and agreed to break the logjam to see the deal through soon. Just before the new year, the banks finalized a deal that was announced last week, confirming the Wall Street Journal's earlier report. The deal brings two of the country's most influential companies together. JP Morgan is adding the flashy program to its credit card lending operation and strengthening its connections to the trillion-dollar tech giant at a time consumers are increasingly using phones and watches for payments and managing their finances.

14:08Apple gets a new partner with a sprawling consumer base that is eager to build the card. Goldman gets closure on its failed venture into consumer lending that has brought the firm billions of dollars in losses, a chapter it is hoping to forget. OpenAI is going to be running another Super Bowl ad. It's in the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI to run ad during Super Bowl. Oh, we got it. Let's go. We do have the technology. AGI is here. Okay, so there's someone throwing a spear. We create fire. Then the wheel. Then the wheel with spokes. Then the horse. The horse came out of the wheel. We created the horse and corn.

14:47We created Korn. Maybe they should use a Korn song. Freak on a Leash. That's the song they should license. A nod to Korn. I mean, the motion design is incredible. Like, it is a very well done piece. So they go inside the skeleton, build the 747, take a look at DNA, invent movies, TV news, that's us! They go to the moon. Somewhat equally important. create the internet and then you start talking to the computer and now the bird you got ai what do you want to create next and then you get the blue chat gpt dot i love this yeah it was just not necessarily i didn't need a super bowl ad for me yeah i need a super bowl ad for the clydesdale craft right the people who are are maybe on the fence about ai this year i expect it to be much more pragmatic.

15:41About what you can use to do something. Exactly how they want the average American to think about ChatGPT. Yes, yes. Where it integrates into their life. But I expect that this will be the AI Super Bowl. You think there'll be even more ads? I'm sure there will. So for context, tech companies across Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Perplexity collectively spent$333 million on linear TV ads promoting their AI offerings in the United States just last year. They also shelled out$426 million on digital ads, more than triple their 2024 outlays. Anthropic kicked off its first major push into advertising in September and has been blanketing NFL, NBA, and college sports games with ads for its clawed chatbot.

16:28It shelled out an estimated 16 and a half million dollars on linear TV ads in 2025. While OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChetGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between AI and transformative inventions, such as the light bulb, more recent ads frame the technology as a relatable tool. Which way will OpenAI go in the new Super Bowl ad? We'll see. In its ads, Anthropic has been positioning Claude as a partner for problem solvers rather than a threat to human intelligence. Super Bowl ad concept. We are not a threat to human intelligence. We are not a threat.

17:08Don't worry about us. Yeah. How about a Super Bowl ad that says - We hear you. We hear that you're concerned. 5 % chance of annihilation by end of year. Gemini introduced a more personal Gemini today designed for you. Personal intelligence, they're calling it. Personal intelligence draws insights from across your Google Apps to provide truly customized responses for Gemini. Learn all about it below. They say Gemini already remembers your past chats to prevent to provide relevant responses but today we're taking the next step forward with the introduction of personal intelligence. You can choose to let Gemini connect information from your Gmail, Google Photos, Google search, and YouTube history to receive more personalized responses.

17:51Gemini will be able to suggest hidden gems that feel right up your alley for upcoming trips or work travel because It'll know where you've stayed before, where you've been. Shopping, Gemini will get to know your taste and preferences on a deeper level, help you find items you love faster. Motivation, Gemini will have a deeper understanding of the goals you're working towards, look at your to-do list. Privacy is central to personal intelligence, how you connect other apps to Gemini. The new beta feature is off by default. You can choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect, and can turn it off at any time.

18:22You were sick of switching between, constantly switching between calendars and Chrome, having your personal calendar, your calendar, get ready to be sick of switching between LLMs. It includes Google Workspace. Google Photos is sort of interesting. I wonder if that plays into Nano Banana, you can have more suggested images. Hey, do you want to touch this photo up? Do you want to create some sort of holiday card? Like what ChatGPT ultimately wound up doing with images? Go through Google photos and turn me into a dinosaur in every photo I've ever taken. Set the GPUs on fire for sure. Anyway, let's move on to this story about David Ellison, the Sun King of Hollywood.

19:05With help from his billionaire father, Larry, David Ellison is trying to become the biggest studio mogul in history. One weekend in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie, Flyboys, had opened that weekend to reviews so bad that one of the stars had abruptly checked into the hospital. On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone. I was terrified when the phone rang, and it was Larry Ellison. Devlin made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the 1990s. Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla.

19:43Wow, what a run. But he'd struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys. a script about a band of World War I fighter pilots. Then, in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world's richest men, had a college-age son named David, who was not only trying to break into Hollywood, but was also an amateur pilot. David even had a nascent film production company with an aerial name, Skydance. Larry agreed to help fund the movie, which cost$60 million, and Skydance was listed as a producer. David, meanwhile, got a plum role alongside James Franco as a pilot named Eddie who can't shoot straight.

20:22Come on, Eddie. David says in the climactic fight scene. Can we try to find Eddie in Flyboys? Yeah, let's watch the Flyboys trailer. I'd love to see this. I actually haven't seen this movie.

20:36Franco.

20:39Maybe this is the movie to watch this weekend. Nothing in common. I can see. Enjoying this. to fly no that's a cool shot gentlemen you have bravely volunteered to preserve freedom captain tell you we gotta turn this into the clock i think that's david right oh really six weeks the guy sure knows how to make friends all these friends out there huh this is your quarters french is sure put on a nice walk that's it yeah wow got any objection let's go the man heard his good luck to rub your head i wouldn't do that if i were you sorry fellas this room's reserved for killers oh killer going to war in two days you worried about me the germans are moving to world hearts i definitely saw this as a kid because i just love i love playing yeah okay there he is we'll be back by lunch

21:39It's a pretty sweet movie for 2001. Worth the$60 million. They underpaid. They underpaid. If you're a fan of hyperscale and data center build-out and data center construction like the rest of us, you've got to be a Flyboys guy. Devlin thought he knew why Larry was calling. Flyboys had bombed at the box office and Larry stood to lose millions. As it turned out, Larry wasn't all that stressed about the money. He had spent tens of millions more just trying to win a sailing race. He was, however, concerned about his son, the actor in the hospital. Wait. Whoa. The reaction to Flyboys had so unsettled David that he was experiencing an episode of atrial fibrillation.

22:20This is bullish. Yeah. This is bullish. He was so upset about losing that he was hospitalized. That's crazy. You think he's going to lose Warner Brothers? Maybe not. I don't know. Maybe he's coming back and getting it. I think this is a guy you want. Yeah, this is good. Okay. He was thinking that whole weekend, I just lost my dad a bunch of money. Wow. He was upset about letting his father down. Larry told Devlin to make sure David knew he was still proud of him. Flyboys was the humble beginning of the Ellison family's adventures in Hollywood. After giving up on acting, David spent more than a decade building Skydance into a player in the blockbuster business, financing such hits as Top Gun, Maverick, and Mission Impossible series, along with a number of largely forgettable movies.

22:59He was, in other words, a producer, much like many others in town. Then last year, David's father put up billions to help him buy Paramount, at one of Hollywood's legendary movie studios and accompany more than 10 times the size of Skydance. This past fall, the Ellisons set their sights on an even bigger prize, Warner Brothers. At 43, David is now the first millennial, let's give it up for the millennials, to control a major Hollywood studio. While running Skydance, he'd built a reputation as someone with an earnest love for the kinds of action-packed blockbuster movies he adored as a kid and the money to actually make them.

23:31But his pursuit of Paramount and now Warner Brothers had revealed an empire-building streak in line with his father, who is currently the fifth wealthiest person in the world. It's possible to sum up the divergent fortunes of the tech and entertainment industries over the past 20 years in the simple fact that when Flyboys came out in 2006, Larry was worth$18 billion and couldn't afford Paramount, which was valued at$22 billion. By last year, the$6 billion Larry spent to help David buy the company barely made a dent. What the Ellisons want with their conglomerate, individually and together, will affect the future of what appears on all kinds of screens and the relationship between father and son has provoked no shortage of psychoanalysis larry wasn't around much when david was a kid one of the only similarities in their very different childhoods larry was born in new york city in 1944 to an unwed teenage mother who gave him up for adoption at nine months old his adopted father lewis ellison was a russian immigrant who took his last name at ellis island And a foundational part of the Larry Ellison story is that Lewis regularly told Larry he would never amount to anything.

24:33Why did you adopt this nine-month-old kid just to dunk on him? Maybe Larry should write a book called Hardcore Parenting. You know, people talk about soft parenting, right? You know, but Hardcore Parenting. It's like wake up every morning, tell your children you will never amount to anything. For a senior thesis, David wrote, directed, and starred in a thriller called When All Else Fails, in which he plays a billionaire son who has to rescue his diabetic girlfriend from kidnappers before her insulin runs out. That's an interesting frame for a plot. According to people who worked on the production, David was respectful and eager to learn, if a bit oblivious to the ways in which he wasn't making an ordinary student film.

25:12The budget was close to$100 ,000. While David inherited a love for movies from his mother, it became clear that if he wanted to stay in the business, he needed to think more like his father. David wanted to be an actor, and when that didn't work he was like if I'm not gonna be on screen I'm gonna be the biggest guy in the room so Andy Kessler was an investor who worked with David to raise money for skydance early on and they had a rule they said he swore to me no rom-coms no touchy-feely emotional Oscar bait just explosions the skydance thesis according to a person that worked closely with David was that Hollywood wasn't prepared for the overwhelming economic force of a Silicon Valley a billionaire throwing around his wealth and ambition.