Why Democrats are right to fear AI and data centers | Hour 2

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. So there was a lot of, predictions, I guess, that this was going to be the data center election. And, uh, when you look at the exit surveys, actually, no, it wasn't. Although there were a whole bunch of, uh, moratoria on the referenda around the country and virtually all of them passed. So data center construction has been effectively halted in a lot of places. Um, but when you ask people on the exit surveys about the top issues that they were voting based on data centers came in at like 3% of the responses, like it was not the thing that, uh, got people motivated to go vote. Okay. They were all, and we covered this last week, the, you got corruption, cost of living, uh, Iran, uh, tariffs, right. All of these different things. Um, Data centers was a blip, okay, but all of the moratoria except one passed. This from Politico. Local victories against data center projects are emboldening activists to take their fight to state lawmakers and launch a broader fight over data center expansion. ConserveOhio. a political action committee that helped pass 10 ballot initiatives to ban large-scale data centers in local Ohio communities, is aiming to use these successes to push the state legislature to pass a 12-month moratorium on all data center-related activity. I have been covering this issue for a while now because it came out of nowhere. This was not controversial at These projects were not controversial for the last 30 years. And then all of a sudden, it was like, oh, my gosh, they're taking all the water. Like, wait, what? They're taking all the water? They're causing heat sinks. Or what was the other one? Noise pollution. It makes a hum. I can hear the hum from 20 miles away. It's giving me brain damage or something. which I think may actually pre-exist the data center being located near some of these people, but I digress. Well, actually here, let me read. This is, um, yeah. Some, um, what, yeah. Author, blogger, content creator, pronouns in her bio. She, her, shrew. That's what, that's what she says. And then she's got the, uh, the LGBTQ plus two I a double ampersands, whatever has that flag in her bio. And she's responding to somebody who's pointing out like a comparison, like one data center uses about as much water in a year as a single Krispy Kreme store, not the whole chain, one store, a single store. Okay. And so she responds to this by saying, let me try and explain this. Okay, so this is one of the actually types of comments. A Krispy Kreme uses water to make donuts, which can be eaten, and coffee, which can be drunken. This is what we're dealing with. The workers wash their hands so the food is sanitary and the customers use the bathroom. In a data center, all that water is wasted with no treats. So, that's the thing about water. I'm not sure that Mary Pizzulo, I'm not sure she has a degree or any kind of experience with science of any kind. But water can take on a couple different forms. Have you heard of this? It's true. Like depending on temperature, water can be three different things. It can be in three different states. So when it's really, really cold, it's ice. And you could even use the ice for things like drinks. You can put it in a soda. And then at room temperature and not above freezing, right, then it's just water. That would be a liquid state. So the ice would be the solid state and the water is a liquid state. And then if you heat it up to a point where we call that boiling, now the water, right, now it's not a liquid anymore. Now it is evaporating out. I think that is called maybe, is that a gas? It's an evaporator or something. Maybe something like that. And here's the thing. That water, then after it's no longer hot anymore because it turns into this steam and it goes up and then it's not hot anymore. You know what happens to it? It turns back into a liquid. Yes, very good. Very good. Turns back into a liquid. How does that happen? Isn't that amazing? Science is amazing. This is what we're dealing with. She literally thinks here that, first off, drunken is the correct word for coffee can be drunken. Like, that's no. I mean, unless you're talking about coffee somehow becoming inebriated, coffee cannot be drunken. Okay? So not only does she think that, but she apparently thinks that when you use water in a data center, that that data center or the water in that facility is somehow, like, destroyed. Like, it doesn't turn into any other form. It's not recaptured. It's not reused, even though the closed-loop cooling systems do, in fact, recycle the water. But apparently, in her mind, the water is literally destroyed, I guess, at, like, the atomic level or the molecular level, right? Like, at the core H2O, at that level, like, it is destroyed, which I... I feel like if you did that, it would be an explosion. Isn't that what kind of the... Isn't that like a hydrogen bomb or something like that? Okay, I've exhausted my scientific expertise here with the solid liquid gas states of water. All I can say is that the water is not destroyed. Okay, Mary? The water is not destroyed. But this is the kind of ignorance that we are dealing with on this topic. Remember, she started off by saying... Let me try to explain it to you. Like she's the knowledgeable person here about the state of water in a data center. And she's responding to a guy, Adam Sullivan, who is the CEO of Core Scientific, who builds data centers. Like this guy is pointing out like the facilities that we build use less water than one Krispy Kreme store in a year. And she's like, let me explain it to you, CEO of data center corp. You don't know what you're talking about. Coffee can be drunken and water can be destroyed at the molecular level if it goes through a data center. So this is the kind of Ignorance. That we are dealing with. But she is so confident. She's just so confident. In her dumbassery. It really is impressive. You know. They have a quote at this Politico article. Doug. Kalidas, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at Americans for Responsible Innovation, a nonprofit that advocates for state and federal AI rules. Okay, so this is a de-growther. Because they won in such overwhelming ways and really ran the table, I think that only emboldens the people who are behind this and puts the data center industry on their back feet. We got them on the ropes, people. The grassroots resistance, this is not grassroots. This is AstroTurf. I have gone over the funding sources for this. It is coming out of China. They would very much like us to not build any more data centers and to not have any more advancements in technology anymore. because they would very much like to be able to be the world leader so they can write all of the rules and they could be ahead of everybody else, particularly the countries and civilizations that they don't like. Not a grassroots resistance. Now, there are people that are like Mary that don't know what the hell they're talking about, who have been fed a bunch of lies and propaganda, obviously, and she believes it, and so she gives voice to this stupidity, but it's not grassroots. 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Go to createavideo.com or visit them in Mint Hill just off I-485. Your photos and videos are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you. And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit createavideo.com. From the text line, Virginia number says, how do these people think their social media accounts work? They need data centers to work. They don't magically appear. The Nice Marie says, thank goodness our good friend Ray told us his views on data centers before the election. Actually, if you go back to when he was governor, remember we talked with AP Dillon last week, and she finally got a batch of former governor Roy Cooper, now Senator-elect Cooper's emails from when he was governor. And one of them was thanking a data center company. Oh no, Google. I think it was, it was like welcoming them to the state and thanking them for the, the, the, the project and all this, you know, but I'm sure now that's going to be bad. But yeah, nobody asked him about any of these things before the election. Paul says, China is laughing at the fact that our people are resisting data centers. The American people should wake up and realize this is an arms race. We need to win data. John says data, bad donuts, good. Hmm. Well, if you've looked at her profile picture, nevermind. Um, unnamed redneck says water is only recycled dinosaur pee anyway. So I don't see what the big deal is. Okay. And Kim says, I actually visited a data center for business recently. They recirculated the water for the cooling systems. The contact said they use more water flushing toilets in one year than pulling from the municipality. Maybe this lady should get a tour before she spouts. Pardon the pun. Well, no, you don't. You do not want to be disabused of your opinions, false as they may be. by, you know, receiving facts and information about the topic. Seth says, speaking of elections, what do you think, what do you think would cause down ballot elections to get more total votes than up ballot? Texas had circuit court judges that got more votes than the Senate or governor's races. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm watching some of these stories coming out as people are crunching these numbers. So not sure what to make of that yet. Um, Alan in Gastonia says, drunken? How pathetically ignorant. Everyone knows it's dranken. That's fair. Yes. Let's see here. Next up is 704 number says, at least she is consistent. Didn't use AI to write that or it would have corrected the past perfect tense of drink. Yeah, you could tell she didn't use AI to write that tweet. Yeah. This dumbassery regarding the water issue with data centers is a byproduct of public education, says Stanley. There are two main laws of physics you'd have learned if you actually studied the real world around you like you think you do, knowing a mind is a terrible thing to waste. They are conservation of energy and mass. Neither one can be created or destroyed by humans. We can only change their forms. When we do, nature itself puts them back into the proper balance unless we continually practice dumbassery on it. So it can't. Kevin says, Pete, this anti-data center activist is a great example of why a traditional husband and wife family is so important. Sometimes on tech, I have to mansplain things to my wife. And then on emotional ideology, I need my wife to sometimes woman-splain things to me. Yes, it is about striking the balance. 704 number says, there is no new water. All the water that is here has been here since the formation of the planet. It just cleans itself and recycles over time. Fun fact, every drop of water on Earth was at one point associated with dinosaur pee. They were around for 160 million years, so there's that. I don't make this up. Have a great day. Russ says, if I were in charge of this data center stuff, I'd warn about the potential of throttling data if more centers are not built. Maybe throw some pop-ups on people's screens. Announce future demand pricing like toll roads. You want to see what this influencer's favorite socks are? Well, that'll be $ 5. You want the nurse's station to keep an eye on grandma's heart rate? That'll be $ 500. Um, they had a meeting about a data center in Lumberton and posted about it on Facebook. And someone asked if they were live streaming it. Someone replied, you're going to need a new data center for that. I, like I said, I've, I have now begun incorporating any time. Like if you're, you know, you're hanging out with people, friends, whatever, and like something comes up and you're like, Oh, what is that thing? I don't know. Let's Google it. Right. Or whatever. And I will make a point. I am now like, I'm not saying let me Google that, or I'm trying not to. I'm trying to say, let me consult my local data center. I'm dropping that in every time. Whenever we're talking to anything tech-related, whatever, if you have to use the internet for something, I always try to work it in. Oh, let's consult our local data center for these directions. Oh, you want to call the Uber? Let me contact my local data center. Get that Uber. Like, all of it. So... Back to the Politico story. The grassroots resistance is growing across red and blue states, putting pressure on lawmakers to respond and force the data center industry to defend its expansion plans. On Tuesday, voters overwhelmingly voted to ban, pause, or limit data center construction in their communities across the board in states like Ohio, Kansas, Maine, and Florida, adding to the over 400 existing moratoria and bans already in place. And the anti-data center crowd, they say this is just the starting point. They want a complete ban. This is what they want. All right, real quick. Every government number gets revised, right? Every projection gets walked back. Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. Revelation Gold Group helps families hold physical gold and silver, including in a tax-advantaged gold IRA. It's real. It's in your name. And 10 minutes tells you if your retirement account qualifies. If you want to learn more, go to Calendarmetals.com. That's Calendarmetals.com. There is a link in the podcast description. Or if you want to talk to somebody, you can call 888-465-3049. I have read various pieces on the show here from Breville Lepran. I think I'm pronouncing that right. He's a French tech entrepreneur, founder of Argile AI. And He has a piece called Why Democrats Fear AI and Why They Are Right To. And I found this to be very insightful. He talks about the three pillars of bureaucratic power. Scarcity, narrative, and money. the three pillars of bureaucratic power, scarcity, narrative, money. Pete, what does this have to do with data centers? Glad you asked. AI is the first technology in history that's hitting all three of those pillars at the same time. That's why it's viewed as an existential threat to the, quote, deep state, to the state, to the bureaucracy, because it is. That's what's generating a lot of this opposition. Across 10 states, he says, data centers were on the ballot 41 times and the industry won once. So they went one in 40. Within hours, Democrats were demanding that AI executives be called in front of Congress to testify under oath. Bernie Sanders pitching a national moratorium on all data center construction. So why did the left turn on AI? And the official answer is make stuff cost less, right, Roy Cooper? It's power bills or jobs or it's safety, the precautionary principle, right? We don't know what this is going to do, so let's just stop everything. No innovation. Those worries, to some degree, and others not so much, are real, but they don't explain why the institutional left, the people who actually run things, has decided that AI is the enemy. And so he offers his answer. Consciously or not, they've understood that AI is an existential threat, not to humanity, but to their model of power. And to see why, you got to go back about a century. Which, if you went to K-12 government schools, none of this will have been taught to you, okay? In the late 1920s, from a cell in Mussolini's prison, Mussolini, by the way, was the fascist leader of Italy. Again, to all of you government school grads, there was a guy in the prison. He was Italian and he was a Marxist and his name was Antonio Gramsci. Now, if you've listened to my show, You've heard me talk about Antonio Gramsci. These are the prison papers, okay? And he worked out in the prison papers, in his notebooks and stuff, he worked out why revolution had failed in Western societies. You don't take power by seizing the factories. He said you take it by seizing the culture. What is the culture? That's the schools, universities, newspapers, every institution that decides what's normal and what is unthinkable, right? He called it cultural hegemony. In 1967, a German student leader named Rudi Dutschke gave the strategy its slogan, which is the long march through the institutions. Half a century later, the march is pretty much over. It reached the universities, the newsrooms, the NGOs, the foundations, the international agencies, and the senior civil service. In fact, just four years ago, there was a survey of American journalists, and only 3% of them identified as Republicans. So that there is the march being a success. He says this is not a conspiracy. It's an ecosystem. Nobody needs to give orders when everybody went to the same schools, reads the same newspapers, attends the same conferences, and lives off the same money. This is a block. It's not, so when he says, it's not just like the Democratic Party, it's, yes, the party, but it's also Brussels and Davos, the supranational agencies, the philanthropic money that flows between them. Different flags, one vision. The world has something to be administered. In 2016, the World Economic Forum published a video of predictions for 2030. Remember the famous line? You'll own nothing and you'll be happy. That's what the World Economic Forum promised. A class that writes the rules eventually stops believing that the rules apply to that class. To stay in power, this system needs three things. It needs scarcity, it needs narrative, and it needs money. He says most of the scarcity that we live with now is not natural. It's manufactured. He then walks through all of these different industries. I've talked about this as well, right? He compares TVs with childcare. Why is it that the price of a television is 98% cheaper than it was 20 years ago, but the cost of childcare is, and housing are running higher than inflation. How does that happen? How do college tuition rates go up 275% in that same time period? The sectors where prices exploded, that's where the state is present. It subsidizes, it regulates, it licenses, it pays the bills. What are the sectors where the prices come down? What do those sectors have in common? Competition. higher education, housing, healthcare, right? Scarcity is the fuel of this power. Whatever is scarce then has to be allocated. And whatever has to be allocated needs an allocator, right? You need the people, the Politburo, central planners, right? You need some organization, somebody, right? to allocate the scarce resources, which we, oh, by the way, kind of made scarce. What about the narrative? For people to accept manufactured scarcity, you need a story that justifies it, hence the capture of culture, media, academia, right? Control the narrative. And then there's the money, the least visible, but the most powerful pillar, the control of money. When a state spends more than it takes in, it has three options. It can tax, but that's unpopular. It can borrow, but that just kicks the can down the road. Or it can print, which nobody really understands. So guess which one the bureaucracy prefers? Yeah, print more money. Underneath all three, and that's inflation. That's how you get the inflation, the most perverse tax ever invented. Underneath all three pillars sits one idea, which is centralization. Smart people at the center. with enough data and enough power, and they can allocate resources better than millions of people deciding for themselves. Ludwig von Mises demolished this idea, by the way, a century ago, 1920. Without private property, there are no real prices, and without real prices, the central planner is blind. Friedrich Hayek came along, finished the job in The Road to Serfdom, 1944. He showed Economic planning slides into political control because a plan cannot tolerate people who refuse to follow it. A year later, he wrote in The Use of Knowledge in Society, explaining why planning fails, the knowledge needed to run an economy does not exist in any one place. It is scattered across millions of minds and only prices can pull it all together, the free market. Also, The bureaucrat has no skin in the game. When he's wrong, you pay. If I'm wrong, I pay. That's the difference. Every time the same pattern. People with no skin in the game make centralized decisions. When it blows up, the taxpayer pays and the market takes the blame. That's why you're hearing all of these Democrats criticizing capitalism as if it's responsible for the prices that have not come down but have gone up because of the state intervention in those exact industries. And when that's not enough, when blaming the market is not enough, the system does what Rene Girard described, it finds a scapegoat. In the worst cases, it finds a war. Right now, the scapegoat is AI. That's what we are seeing in real time. All right, so the scapegoat now is AI. The scapegoat is, you know, the scapegoating is being done by, essentially, the bureaucracy, right? These same types of, like, central planners. And he points out, again, this is the French tech entrepreneur Breville Le Pogon. And he says... He says, here's their problem. AI has a property almost nobody anticipated. It accelerates everything, including the collapse of systems that do not work. A healthy system absorbs acceleration. A dysfunctional system explodes. Anybody can get a tutor that may be better than professors. You get a tutor for $ 100 a month or $ 200 a month or whatever. Why do you need a $ 200, 000 diploma? When robots can put up a house in days, construction costs collapse. Only one thing will stay expensive, which is the stamp, the permit, the license. In other words, the authorization. Everyone will see that the scarcity was never physical, it was administrative. And for an elite, quote-unquote, whose power consists of allocating scarcity... Abundance is not good news. It's a layoff notice to them. A state that lives on debt needs inflation to quietly shrink what it owes. AI is the most deflationary technology ever built. So if you're concerned about cost of living and affordability and all of that, you should want more AI. Everything it touches gets cheaper. Writing, code, design, translation, diagnosis, and soon physical production. So the price curve is about to split in two. Everything AI touches will trend downward towards free. Everything the state protects will keep climbing in cost. A system that needs inflation to service its debt cannot survive a technology that manufactures deflation. This is the problem for the expert class. It's lost its monopoly. Now, Some will say that AI can be captured as well, and that's true. That's why the fight over AI is the fight of the era. One AI can be censored. A thousand competing models, many of them open, running on millions of machines, that can't. That's why they want to regulate it upstream. To do what? Manufacture scarcity. Licenses, authorizations, committees, moratoriums. They can't stop the technology, so they want to become its tollbooth. The order that's coming rests on two pillars that are the exact inverse of the elites. Private property and individual decisions. A robot you own. An AI that works for you. A house that you could actually build. Facts you can check yourself. And money that nobody can counterfeit. Milton Friedman said for years that he would be in favor of replacing the Federal Reserve with a computer. And what he meant by that was a fixed public rule for growing the money supply instead of the moods of a committee. A computer. He was describing, without maybe knowing it, but he was describing the end of the central banker. Which brings us to the last domino, which is the bureaucrat. Not the teacher, not the nurse, the allocator. The person whose job is to stand between you and what you need, deciding who gets the permit, the contract, the subsidy, everything. That role reliably produces one thing, what he calls friction, and friction is where corruption lives. Do you remember this story? I talked about it last year, that Albania had appointed an AI minister. Do you remember this? Whatever happened to that? The AI minister was called Bern, B-I-R-N, And it was supposed to run public procurement. So in other words, like government purchases, right? And it had one mission, which was to end corruption in the public tenders, he says. So what happened to it? What became of Byrne? A year later, an investigation found that the rollout had barely begun. The bureaucracy slowed down, is slowing down its own replacement. They don't want this. This is what they're doing. This is a threat to them and their jobs and the corruption and the greased wheels and palms and such. Every profession in America, he says, is asking whether AI will replace it, but only one profession gets to write the rules about it. That's what we're seeing. More AI means more prosperity. More prosperity means less scarcity. Less scarcity means fewer people that you need to ask for permission. And a system whose power rests on permission does not survive abundance. They're not fighting AI because it's dangerous to you. They're fighting it because it's dangerous to them. He says, AI is not a threat to humanity. It's an audit. And no system built on artificial scarcity has ever survived an audit. I just thought that was an insight that was worth sharing because it does actually clarify some stuff, doesn't it? All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to ThePeteCalenderShow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.