← The Peter McCormack Show
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- [00:00]
A
You told me that China is deliberately sabotaging the US build out of AI 100%.
- [00:07]
B
China intuitively knows that whoever wins AI will more or less control the world. Neville Roy Singham is for all intents and purposes, a modern day Lenin. He's actually pumped $278 million.
- [00:20]
A
What?
- [00:20]
B
Yeah, $278 million into the US nonprofit ecosystem. They've been able to successfully stall about $24 billion in AI buildout. Communism is back. It's here.
- [00:32]
A
It feels like you've got so many enemies within. In the US right now, it's either
- [00:37]
B
Chinese AI or American AI.
- [00:39]
A
This is a battle America can't lose 100%. This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Ayron. The AI cloud for the next big thing. IRON builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is Irene.com. all right. Sam, how are you?
- [01:09]
B
Good. How are you doing, Peter?
- [01:10]
A
Good, Good. So we sat down, had a chat yesterday, and you told me that China is deliberately sabotaging the US build out of AI 100%. What is going on? Tell me. Tell, tell us what's going on here.
- [01:22]
B
Yeah, there's a lot of different vectors of attack here. So let's start with the first one that's most in the news recently. OpenAI released a report just a couple weeks ago that documented a Chinese bot campaign against AI. So what Chinese operators did was they used ChatGPT to set up a social media campaign that was designed to sow doubt and fear and anger towards data center build out here in the United States. They found out in this report that they had created their own memes. The memes are pretty cringy to be honest, but they have all the hallmarks of ChatGpt slop. So if you're looking for good meme making, don't go to China. But they created these memes, they created a bunch of posts, some of them got tens of thousands of views about why the data center build out is bad in the United States, how it's harming communities, supposedly, how it's guzzling up water consumption and using a lot of electricity. And the whole point of this campaign was to increase anger and division amongst the American populace about AI and data centers in particular.
- [02:23]
A
And that is happening. We're seeing these messages land.
- [02:25]
B
Yeah, that's happening. And what was Interesting about the CHATGPT report was that OpenAI concluded that this particular campaign didn't have a huge impact. It didn't really escape containment, but it's the only campaign that we've been able to identify so far. It raises the question what other campaigns have been waged by China that we just haven't been able to identify yet? So that's just one vector of attack. The other vector of attack is the one we've been following really closely here at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. And that comes from a man named Neville Roy Singham. Neville Roy Singham is for all intents and purposes a modern day Lenin. I say that descriptively because I think he himself would actually be flattered by that comparison. He's been a subject of FBI interest since 1974. He's a self identified Maoist, he's unapologetic about his Marxism, and he recently decamped to Shanghai a little over eight years ago in order to set up base there. And from Shanghai he's a multimillionaire, he's about worth over $700 million. And he's used that money to funnel left wing socialist causes here in the United States, which most recently has focused specifically on attacking data centers, attacking AI.
- [03:35]
A
All right, okay. A lot to unpack it. Okay, so look, the, the AI revolution has been like totally, totally fascinating. I think we're all fascinated by it and we're all using it, and there's a lot of questions about what it means for society, what it's going to mean for jobs, what it means for if and when we hit super intelligence. There's a lot going on here, but there's clearly a competition going on because I mean, if you look historically any revolution, there's a competition. And the U.S. has been pretty good at winning most of those races competitively in the economic market. But there's something different with AI, right? It feels like you're more than just winning a economic advantage here. You're trying to win in some ways, like control of the world. And so China has been pretty good over the last few decades of slowly imprinting themselves on the world economically, politically, militarily, in a kind of weird, quiet way. And so. But they're behind on AI, right?
- [04:38]
B
They're behind in one sense. Currently they're dominating the open source AI market. There's two models in particular, Quin and Deepseek. What China has done with those models is they've been able to ship them really quickly. They've been able to use frontier models here in the United States to train those models. And then they've been able to give them to people in developing countries and countries across the world. And they've been able to use those models to great effect. And so that's what's interesting right now is we are definitely leading China when it comes to frontier AI models, but we're falling far behind when it comes to open source. Open source is, frankly, China's eating our lunch in that respect.
- [05:14]
A
I just read about an open source model in the US today that's been released. I don't know if you've seen it.
- [05:20]
B
Haven't seen it.
- [05:20]
A
Like, I might even be able to find the tweet. I'll have a look in a second. And I think the tweet was like, the US has entered the open source market. But I just want to stick on the. I always want to separate the two. Let's talk about the open source models afterwards. But let's talk about this kind of subversion of US AI supremacy in terms of frontier models. Are they trying to build their own frontier models? Because if they're training theirs on the US using US frontier models, are they really just like piggybacking on US work?
- [05:50]
B
They're definitely piggybacking on our work. And we've seen in the past that this is par for the course. Right. We know that China, with a lot of their technology, has simply stolen American IP and then been able to copy paste our designs and then release them for far cheaper and produce them far cheaper in their home country. And so they seem to be taking a similar tack with AI right now. Even so, we're still ahead of them in the frontier model arena. And actually our lead over China is increasing right now, so that's good. But like you said, they could easily steal our models. They could steal our weights and at least pull even with us in that respect just by using espionage to steal some of the work that we've done here in frontier models here in the
- [06:32]
A
United States and here out in the US if you survey the public, what are the broad range of concerns? Obviously there's the environmental concerns, there's the job concerns, the, there's a super intelligence concerns. Are they weighted? Do we know what people are concerned about?
- [06:46]
B
Yeah, the primary concern, of course, is jobs. And you can't blame Americans for being really nervous about what AI will do do to their jobs. When you have the leading executives of frontier AI companies telling people that in the example of Anthropic, for example, they've said that AI will eliminate 50 to 80% of white collar jobs within the next five years. Yeah, that is something that resonates a lot on Wall Street. If you are a prospective investor and you hear that this product is going to be the end all, be all, of course you're going to want to invest in it. However, that message is completely poison on Main Street. And so we've seen that a lot of the backlash to data centers stems in large part from the way that AI executives have talked about their own product. They've sowed fear in the American people. And that's been great for stock returns and for pumping valuations, but it's been absolutely terrible. In terms of getting the American people on your side with your product.
- [07:39]
A
Do you think they're right?
- [07:40]
B
I don't think they're right. Okay, we'll see. I, however, am an AI bull in the sense that I think it is an incredible product. It's a generational technology. I'm very skeptical of the claim, though, that it's going to obviate the need for human labor. And I take from that my own experience and our experience here at BPI and before that, my experience at Treasury. It wasn't that AI was replacing our jobs, it just increased tenfold what we could do in our jobs. So the way that I see AI and the way that I think a lot of people within the administration see, AI is as the ultimate lever for productivity. I think AI will actually spark a disinflationary boom that could compare, maybe even exceed, the disinflationary boom that we saw with the railroad era, for example, in the 1800s, or the disinflationary boom we saw during the tech industry going mainstream in the late 90s and 2000s. And what we see here is that it's increasing productivity and has the potential to bring down prices at the same time. That's the recipe for a huge economic boom. And for work that's different in nature than what we're used to, but definitely work that still needs to be done.
- [08:44]
A
Sam, what was your background? How did you end up doing this?
- [08:46]
B
Yeah, I have a very interesting career path. So before I was here at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, I was at the Treasury Department. I was senior advisor and chief speechwriter to Secretary Besant there. How I landed at treasury was also an interesting route. I worked at Riot platforms before Treasury. So for those who might not know, Riot platforms is a. First and foremost, it was a bitcoin miner and then it started to do a lot of work in AI hpc. So I Had this interesting background in both speechwriting and bitcoin and finance, because before that I was a speechwriter in the U.S. senate. And so the Treasury Department was looking for someone who was conversant in all three of those areas. And they came across my resume. And so that's how I landed at Treasury. But I really enjoyed my time at treasury, but I missed my time in the digital asset and emerging technology world. And so I joined BPI just about three months ago, and it's been an incredible experience. We're doing a lot of interesting work here. BPI is a think tank that is very much different than think tanks out there. Not only its focus area on bitcoin, but in what it aims to do. We aim to disrupt the think tank industry. Think tanks are primarily focused on maintaining the status quo when our philosophy is that a think tank should openly push the Overton window as much as possible.
- [09:57]
A
Are some think tanks really lobbyists?
- [10:00]
B
Yeah, more or less.
- [10:01]
A
Yeah. Okay.
- [10:02]
B
Not necessarily illegal. Right. There's actually 501 C3s are allowed to do some lobbying, but it can only be a certain percentage of their work year in and year out.
- [10:10]
A
Yeah, but how do you track that?
- [10:11]
B
It's hard to track.
- [10:12]
A
Yeah. And so look, we're here in Washington, D.C. so you probably speak to a lot of people on the Hill. So you're probably well connected to what people are thinking about this. Let's, let's, let's dial back in on the China thing. I've seen the. I mean, there's been campaigns against data centers. There's definitely feel slightly more from the Dem side, but I know there are Republicans who are also concerned there has been pushback against these data centers. There have. I've seen the discussions with regards to water usage. Although, by the way, I did see a tweet that Mark Andreessen shared where all the data centers use something like 7% of golf courses. Yeah, yeah. But I have seen that pushback. It's not all coming from China. Right. There has been some.
- [10:58]
B
Oh, that's a really good, important point to make a distinction on. So, no, not all this is coming from China. There's a lot of organic, homegrown concern about data centers and their impact on communities. Not only the water usage, but the character of the communities themselves. And that's one thing that we're trying to make very clear in the research that we've done. We're in no way saying that the data center outrage is stemming entirely from China. We're saying that a lot of this is Organic. But two things can be true at the same time. Number one, there's homegrown opposition to data centers. But number two, there's a foreign influence campaign targeting American AI. What that foreign influence campaign is doing is they're latching onto what is an organic movement. And they're amplifying those fears. They're amplifying those that division through protests, through petitions, through social media. They're doing everything they can to get Americans even more amped up about the potential impact data centers can have on their communities.
- [11:52]
A
Do you think this is being directed by the Chinese state directly?
- [11:55]
B
That's what we're trying to track right now. And I think there's a really good possibility that there is exactly that going on right now. Some evidence for that is the OpenAI report that we talked about recently. Even if it showed that that specific campaign didn't have a huge impact, it shows intentionality. Right. So we're, we have no confusion whatsoever that China has every intention to make Americans angry about data centers. And we've seen too, through Neville Singham, this modern day Lenin that we've been talking about. He has been aligned with the CCP on every major issue for his whole life, but especially in the last 10 years.
- [12:29]
A
Hold on. Where did he make his money?
- [12:30]
B
He made his money, ironically, in tech. He owned a company called ThoughtWorks here
- [12:35]
A
in the U.S. here in the U.S. through capitalism.
- [12:37]
B
Yep. So through capitalism, he became a centimillionaire, and now he's using that money to spread Marxism.
- [12:42]
A
Jesus, they always do this. Okay, so walk me through how influence from China becomes a protest in the us. What is the actual steps?
- [12:53]
B
Yeah, so we've been able to trace it all out in a very easy way to understand. So we made a schizo chart. That's what I'm calling.
- [13:01]
A
We'll get that up. We'll put it up.
- [13:02]
B
Yes, this is the schizo chart we made at BPI to help people see in one image alone just exactly how this works. So at the very top, you have the ccp, the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party has been working with Neville Singham on a number of fronts for the last several years. There is actually a federal investigation into his ties with the ccp. Right now there's multiple congressional inquiries, there's a New York Times expose that shows that Neville Singham has been working in tandem with a Chinese propaganda outlet to, quote, tell China's story to the world, which is a direct line from CCP propaganda of note. So what we've seen here is that through Neville Singham, he's actually pumped $278 million.
- [13:45]
A
What?
- [13:45]
B
Yeah, $278 million into the US nonprofit ecosystem. We're talking very far left nonprofits like Code Pink, the Answer Coalition, Tri Continental. What, these.
- [13:58]
A
Okay, can you just tell me about. Because I don't know these organizations.
- [14:01]
B
Yes, Code Pink is a good one to start with. Code Pink started as an anti war nonprofit. It's led by a woman named Jody Evans, who, get this, is married to Neville Singham. So they're quite literally in bed together.
- [14:13]
A
And that's she here.
- [14:14]
B
She's here in the United States and he's in China. He's in.
- [14:16]
A
And does she go back and forth?
- [14:18]
B
Yep. Yeah. You can even see on her Facebook, she posts, you know, pictures with him when she's in China, then she's back here in the United States. He, however, comes to the United States only at great risk because he's in China. Strategically, there's been so much congressional focus on his activities over the last several years that there's a very high chance that he could be subpoenaed. If you're here in the United States and you're subpoenaed by Congress, you have to answer that subpoena. If you're outside of US territory, however, you don't necessarily have to do so. So he's shielded by the fact that he's in China, and he's also shielded completely by his US Passport. Right now, even though he identifies as a Marxist, he. Even though he's shilling every day for the Chinese regime, even though he's funneling to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars the Marxist caused here in the United States.
- [15:02]
A
Okay. And so Code Pink.
- [15:04]
B
Code Pink.
- [15:04]
A
Okay. They started out as an anti war movement, but now.
- [15:07]
B
Yeah, but now they are more or less a shill for China. And there's really interesting evidence for the pivot that they made when Jody Evans married Neville Singham. So she married Neville Singham a little over 10 years ago. Before they got married. Code Pink would actually, to their credit, protest things like China's human rights abuses, including the Uyghur genocide. However, after they got married and after Neville Singham financed Code Pink with about a quarter of their budget, suddenly they changed their tune. They became apologists for the CCP and they started to excuse things that happened, for example, with the Uyghur genocide, and they started to travel to China and talk about how great it was and openly post about that on their social media platforms.
- [15:46]
A
What else have they done? What Other campaigns here. Can you directly attribute any to Copenhagen specifically?
- [15:51]
B
They are the most raucous group on Capitol Hill. So whenever there is a particular issue that touches on anything that might weaken the United States, they are front and center protesting on Capitol Hill. A really good recent example is immigration enforcement. So they were on Capitol Hill yelling and screaming during congressional hearings. We saw the same thing with Israel and Gaza. They were front and center in protesting Israel and its involvement in the Gaza war. And so anything that can potentially weaken what they call the imperial American empire, they attack and they attack readily, and they do so without apology.
- [16:31]
A
Okay, the other groups you mentioned.
- [16:33]
B
Yeah, so there's other groups that are all think tanks that provide the intellectual backbone for the group that really matters. So I'll talk about the group that really matters. It's called the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or psl. So the PSL is Singham's political arm here in the United States. The crazy thing about this organization, and as we drew this out on the schizo chart, is every single major leader in that organization is also an executive of a Singam nonprofit.
- [17:03]
A
Karina Garcia, Ben Becker, Brian. Becker brothers.
- [17:06]
B
Yeah. So Brian and Ben, it's actually a father son relationship.
- [17:09]
A
Right, okay. And Eugene.
- [17:12]
B
Yep, Eugene. Per year. And then Karina Garcia and Becker are actually married to each other. So once again, it's kind of all in the Marxist mafia family there. And then you have the person at the top of the presidential ticket for the PSL who also was a Singham executive in a nonprofit. So she and her accomplices, what they do is they wear two hats. And that's how they work this operation. Essentially, Neville Singham provides them with what is ostensibly their day job. And what they do, who knows, during the day or at night, is they push forward the PSL and its agenda that focuses as of late, specifically on protesting data centers and AI buildout in the United States.
- [17:50]
A
Let's go back a step. What else have PSL campaigned for?
- [17:53]
B
They've campaigned against Israel. What was interesting about October 7th is the day after PSL and these Singham groups had signs made. They had hundreds of volunteers across the country deployed the very next day to protest Israel and to stand up for Palestine.
- [18:11]
A
All right, check this out. This is Plaude. Now, one of the hardest parts of doing long form interviews is what happens after we stop recording. I could be sat here for three hours talking about AI, politics, economics, and all that civilizational stuff. And then immediately afterwards, I need to provide a brief to my producer, Connor. He wants to know what the title is going to be the thumbnail, what clips matter, what's going to be the opening hook. And that normally means waiting for a transcript, digging through the notes and, and trying to remember what the strongest moments were when it happened. It never really happens like this. Usually a couple of days later Connor is chasing me and I can't remember what we spoke about. So when Plaud reached out and they said they had a solution, I was interested. So I've been using this. This is the Plaud Note Pro. I just literally leave it here on the desk during an interview and once we're done, I instantly have access to searchable text from the conversation. So instead of relying on my memory after a three hour show, I can immediately pull quotes, identify themes, send a proper brief over to Connor. And honestly, some weeks I'm doing three to four long form interviews. So Plaud has become incredibly useful. But it's not just for interviews. We're planning shows in the car, there's post show discussions and sometimes just random ideas after recording all those conversations we don't normally capture. So look, if you're thinking of using Plaude, obviously follow local laws and get consent when recording conversations. If you're a journalist or you're a podcaster, I think Plaud is something you're going to like. So if you want to find out more, please head over to Plaud AI McCormack for 20% off. That is Plaud AI McCormack and Plaud is spelled P L A U D. Well, the left is really good at mobilizing itself.
- [19:42]
B
Extremely good.
- [19:43]
A
Always turn up with a bus full of people. They always have their protests, their signs and everything. Is that because they're just better organized?
- [19:49]
B
Yeah, they're better organized. I think it's more in the leftist disposition to protest. But that's what's been fascinating about the data center fight here in the United States is it's the, this coalition of odd bedfellows where you have people who are certainly on the left, but you also have people who are certainly on the right. And what's fascinating is that psl, because they're so good at organizing, they've been able to tap into people on the right who are concerned or afraid about data centers. And they've been able to get them out to protests that people on the right would never go to otherwise.
- [20:17]
A
So there was a direct link from China to Neville to these five groups, back into the psl, to campaigning against data centers. And they want to do that because they want to slow. They basically Just want to slow down the build out. Yeah, they want to slow the race. It's like putting a sack of rocks on the back.
- [20:34]
B
Exactly. And we've been able to put in very material terms just how much that they've slowed the US AI build out. So let's get into some numbers.
- [20:42]
A
Hold on again, sorry, I want to go back a step. Historically, the US has been pretty good at stopping. Communists have an influence in the country. I mean, we saw in Oppenheimer way the communist movement around that. I mean, I only saw it from the film and he was cast as a communist. And historically, America's been very good at that. Has it like had his eye off the ball or something? Or is this democracy now that we have to allow communists here in the country?
- [21:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's the question. I mean, it's fascinating because going back to 1954, the United States actually passed what's called the Communist Control Act. It effectively barred being a Communist in the United States because the concern back then was that communism and Communist Party members were a huge vector for foreign influence. And understandably so if you are a Communist, you identify with the global proletariat before any nation. And so that was the issue at the time was a lot of American Communists here in the US were receiving orders from the Politburo in the Soviet Union and they were enacting that agenda here in the United States.
- [21:47]
A
But how is that different from this?
- [21:48]
B
It's not.
- [21:49]
A
It's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's Communists getting their instructions abroad well funded, trying to damage the economic capability of the country.
- [21:58]
B
Exactly. It's the exact same thing. And what's interesting is Senator McCarthy was much maligned for going too far in his hunt for Communists. What was interesting about his campaign, though, was he wasn't wrong in the sense that Communists had infiltrated every sector of society.
- [22:15]
A
Yeah.
- [22:15]
B
And it's no different today. We, whether it's the nonprofit sector or people as we're seeing in New York being elected to Congress or being elected through their primaries, you have the Democratic Socialists of America. What is that other than a euphemism for communism?
- [22:32]
A
Was it Lenin himself who says socialism is the bridge to communism?
- [22:35]
B
I believe it was.
- [22:36]
A
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, these people are essentially Communists. Whether you call them a socialist or Marxist, they're all fucking communists. They're the same.
- [22:42]
B
Yeah.
- [22:42]
A
Like, how is the US as a country that's fought communism for decades allowing this? Can it be stopped? Can you. I mean, can they. Can they do anything about it, it
- [22:51]
B
can be stopped to the extent that it can be exposed. Legally, though, we have very liberal free speech laws here in the United States. And that's a good thing. Right. But what is not legal is foreign influence. And that's our objective with this specific research is we've been able to trace pretty strong links to the CCP in, in the data center fight. And we need to expose the foreign influence that's taking place so Americans can see where they're being infiltrated and where they're not.
- [23:17]
A
Yeah, but the problem with that is even if you tell Americans this, you've got a lot of socialist sympathizers in the country now. We've just seen it with Mandami in New York. I don't know when he runs out of money. But there's that new lady who they're looking to elect.
- [23:32]
B
Yes, Chevalier.
- [23:33]
A
Is she the one who, like, cleaned her hands on an American flag or something?
- [23:37]
B
Explicitly anti American.
- [23:38]
A
Yeah. You've got explicitly anti Americans in America. In Congress even, you've got explicitly anti capitalist leaders. You've got this massive growth in socialism, sympathy for socialism in the country. Yeah, great, you have free speech. But, but this is like a socialist takeover of the country.
- [23:58]
B
I, I don't think that's an exaggeration in any way, shape or form. At any rate, it's a socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.
- [24:06]
A
Sure, but we knew that already.
- [24:07]
B
Yeah, I think it's only accelerated in recent weeks too. What is sad is that the Clinton Democratic Party of yesteryear is dead and gone at this point. The direction is clearly socialist. It's clearly appropriating private property in order to distribute that property to people who don't work themselves. It's a travesty in many ways.
- [24:27]
A
And it's something very anti American.
- [24:29]
B
Very anti American. And I think as Americans, we need to wake up and recognize that communism is back. It's here. In its primary perpetrator is our greatest adversary, and that's China itself. China seems to be having its thumb on the scales of every political fight, not just data centers. And it's doing so in order to create more division and to malign people in the United States who are pro technological progress and pro America.
- [24:53]
A
Communism is back. Okay, so back to the psl. So draw me the line from them to actual data center projects that have
- [25:01]
B
been damaged, for sure. So with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, we've been able to track 21 different campaigns taking place across the country. This is from California to Arizona to North Carolina to Virginia to Wisconsin truly spans the entirety of the country here. And in these campaigns, PSL is either the lead organizer or a member of coalition of a coalition organizing against data centers. And they've really done a number on the AI build out. We've been able to quantify it, actually. We've been able to find 21 different campaigns, and we've been able to attach a specific dollar number to the damage that they've done. So because of efforts and campaigns that PSL has been involved in, they've been able to successfully stall about $24 billion in AI buildout. Yes, stall and in some cases, block the actual capital investment. So this includes, for example, a $12 billion data center that was supposed to be built in Wisconsin. They found out about it, and PSL started organizing. Members of the community showing up to town halls, getting people to come with them, ginning them up, making them angry. And they were able to kill a $12 billion data center project.
- [26:09]
A
How does it. How does it get killed? Who kills it?
- [26:12]
B
Ultimately, the community. It's really interesting what happens at these town councils because usually these are very sleepy affairs where hardly anybody shows up. But if there is an organization that is willing to mobilize and sometimes even bus people in, they can fill up those rooms till they're at capacity. And sometimes you have people spilling out of the room and they make a lot of noise. They yell, they protest. And that scares the heck out of these town council members. And so much so that they're typically able to vote against these data center projects or impose moratorium in some cases. It's interesting because when I worked at Riot Platforms, we had a very similar scenario where we were building a 1 GW data center in Corsicana, Texas, in rural Texas. Beautiful place. But what was fascinating was out of nowhere, one night, the community just came out against us. And we didn't understand why. So we started tracing the influence vectors. What we found was there was one particular woman who didn't even live in that specific city. She lived in the city next door. She had convened with Greenpeace in order to rally against data centers in the United States, specifically in Texas. And so we followed the money. Who was funding Greenpeace at that time? It was Ripple. And for those who don't know, oh, man, Ripple is the issuer of xrp, right?
- [27:30]
A
It's a shitcoin.
- [27:32]
B
It's the shittest of shitcoin, some might say exactly that. And what's fascinating, though, is that we were able to track the money that it was Ripple who was financing the data center fight in Corsicana, Texas, of all places? When we were able to expose that, the community realized that there was a lot of money involved and we were able to simply dispel a lot of their concerns and separate fact from fiction. And eventually they came around because how big is Corsicana? Corsicana, I'd say a population of about 8,000. Pretty small.
- [28:01]
A
And how many jobs would this place? 150 jobs and good jobs, well paid jobs with benefits or local jobs or would people have to come in?
- [28:10]
B
There was a lot of construction jobs, which I don't even think were included in that 150 number, but 150 just local jobs.
- [28:18]
A
So good local jobs, training for local people, new skills for local people, benefits for local people, money in their pockets that they can spend in the local community.
- [28:28]
B
Exactly.
- [28:29]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:30]
B
Lots of investment in the community itself. And that's what's so ironic about the data center fight is the PSL claims that it's doing the bidding of the working class. However, what we're seeing with the data center buildout is it's causing a blue collar boom across the country. There are hundreds of thousands of temporary construction jobs being created, but they also expect tens of thousands of permanent data center jobs to be created as a result. So much so that you have unions here in the United States who are actually fighting against these leftist organizations who are opposing data centers because the unions say no, this is good for our members.
- [29:02]
A
Yeah, jobs.
- [29:03]
B
These are jobs.
- [29:04]
A
Jobs and benefits and money for the community. Why would you fight it? Unless you're some leftist weirdo.
- [29:08]
B
Exactly. So it's all a LARP in terms of what the left is saying, that they're standing up for the working class. They're not. They're standing up for the aims of China and anyone who has anti American sympathies.
- [29:20]
A
So what can you do about this?
- [29:22]
B
Yeah, that's the question of the hour right now. For our part, we're just trying to expose what's happening as it stands currently. There's this narrative that the data center opposition is entirely organic. And again, there's a big part of it that is organic. But what we've seen is that there's an inorganic element to it too, where clearly China has infiltrated the domestic discourse here in the United States. We want to expose that and then we want to ask the follow up question for the American people. Why does China want to slow the AI build out? And I think that's key to understand China's trying to stop the American AI Buildout because they want to beat us into AI race. And, Peter, this touches on something you were talking about at the very beginning. China intuitively knows that whoever wins AI will more or less control the world. PSL has said as much on their own social media account. Who controls AI will determine the future. And they're not wrong. And why is that? It's because.
- [30:12]
A
What does it actually mean? Like, you know, there is a reality here. Like, we're sat here in a bar recording a podcast. We watched some football last night. We had a beer. Like, what does this actual AI world mean when. When you talk about nations controlling the world through AI? Yeah, because I know what it means for China. Right. It's complete control of every decision you make, how you spend your money, whether you can get on public transport. I know what that means, but that's. That's not America.
- [30:37]
B
Right, right. So that's the most important question because we've been telling the American people we need to beat China in the AI race without explaining exactly what that means or why it's important. So let's get into that. I put it this way. Who controls AI will control the information layer of the next economy. And that is absolutely critical because people have a very stark choice to make. It's either Chinese AI or American AI. A lot of people think that they can choose between AI or no AI. That's not the choice that's being presented to us. We have the opportunity to choose American AI. What is American AI built on? It's built on the ideals of free expression, the dignity of the individual, the autonomy of the human being. These are the kinds of values that go into training American AI models.
- [31:19]
A
Do we know this? Are you just giving me, like, a, like, typical American principles, but, like, do we really know they're doing?
- [31:30]
B
That's a very fair point.
- [31:31]
A
I mean, I do know Deepseek is bullshit. I downloaded it in another interview. I searched up Tiananmen Square, like, completely. AI watched it.
- [31:38]
B
Yeah.
- [31:39]
A
You know, like as Google did for them with their Google search results. Like, I get it, but. But is it really that? Is it like, is it the principles are actually built into the AI, or. Or is it more that they are American companies and you hope they have those principles because.
- [31:54]
B
Right. With the frontier companies. Probably more of the latter.
- [31:57]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [31:58]
B
However, that this speaks to the importance of open source AI, because open source AI is built around the principle that AI is for everybody and that it should be, as the name would entail, open source. It should be open to freedom of information as much as possible. It should be a tool that you can use to tweak however you want. It should be something that you can use to turn up the free speech or turn down the free speech, if you want. I mean, it's your tool. And that's the importance of open source AI, which I think is being missed in the United States right now. And it's something here at the Bitcoin Policy Institute bringing our bitcoin values to this specific sector that we want to push forward. Because open source AI, we believe, is the path to freedom. Closed waits, we think, has its advantages, but you also see great opportunity for censorship and great opportunity for states to use this to their own ends. That's what we're concerned about.
- [32:47]
A
Yeah. So the open source models coming from China just. I was intrigued when I first heard about it. I was like, what is going on here? Why is China sending open source models over here and people just happily use. Like, I instinctively had a distrust for what it is, why they are. Like I said, I did my Tiananmen Square search, obviously got no results about. I didn't see a picture of a man in front of a, in front of a tank with shopping bags. I didn't see about a massacre. I didn't see anything. Right. And so like, I'm not going to use that. But, but they've been pretty successful at rolling out here in the US And I'm like, I say, I instinctively don't trust this. Are these open source models sending information back to China?
- [33:28]
B
If you're operating at open weight model using your own compute, there's really no way for that information to get back to China. But if you're not using your own compute. 100%. So.
- [33:37]
A
So people not using their own compute, using China models are essentially sending lots of information about who they are, their company. Like, we've all done it. We've all stuck stuff into AI that we're like, you know, help me with my kids, my wife, I'm fat, I want to lose weight. My company needs to optimize. We're sending a lot of data back to China. It's. It feels a little bit along the lines of why America banned TikTok or force it to be owned by an American company.
- [34:05]
B
100%. And China is using AI for exactly that purpose. They see AI as an opportunity to expand the surveillance net that they've cast over their own country and extend that globally. I think that's deeply concerning. We've even seen that the New York Times reported about a month ago that they're using AI to make Minority Report real. They're using AI to predict people who could be political actors that could cause trouble for the regime. And. And they're not just doing that at home. They want to do that abroad as well. And so if you are opting into the Chinese AI ecosystem, you're not only putting your own personal safety and privacy at risk, you're also adding to the surveillance power of a very autocratic regime.
- [34:46]
A
Okay, so if the US Government bans Mythos, why have they not banned Deep Seat?
- [34:52]
B
Yeah, it's a good question. It's hard because an open weight model is hard to ban in the same way that it's hard to ban Bitcoin. Right. Feasibly, you could do it. It's difficult, though. But I think that speaks to an important point where the United States government needs to be cautious of particular ways that China is hoovering up a lot of our personal information. And their own AI models is definitely one of those ways.
- [35:14]
A
All right, listen, I just found that thing about the model that's opened here in the U.S. okay. Aloha. Meet Ornith 1.0, a family of open source LLMs specialized for agentic coding. Ornith 1.0 spans the four parameter sizes including 9B dense, 31B dense, 35B MOE. I assume you know what this means. And 397B MOE achieves state of the art performance amongst open source models of comparable size on coding benchmarks, including Terminal Bench 2, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Post trained on top of Gemma 4 and Quin 3.5. Ornith 1.0 employs a novel self improving training strategy. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then somebody just retweeted it. Ryan Shea. Oh, he follows me. Interesting experiments in AI and bio. Former senior advisor, FDA co founder at Stacks 10 Unicorn Investments. Hi, Ryan. Thanks for this. So he said, what the. This is insane. This is the first open source model from a US lab that codes at frontier levels. The open source Frontier no longer exclusively belongs to China. The US Is officially in the OS model race.
- [36:31]
B
It's huge.
- [36:32]
A
That's big deal.
- [36:33]
B
Yeah. This is really promising because what you're seeing take place in the United States right now is a sudden shutting down of accessibility to frontier models. We're concerned about that here at BPI because we believe that artificial intelligence should be available to everybody. This is promising, though.
- [36:48]
A
You're talking about the measles situation.
- [36:50]
B
Exactly. So with Mythos right now with Fable, Anthropic has been required by the US Government to provide proof of citizenship if you want to use it, which is impossible. Arguably. It's very difficult to do. It's possible, but very hard to implement and very hard to make sure that it's 100% accurate. Right.
- [37:11]
A
What was the, what was the USG reason to. For that?
- [37:14]
B
Yeah. The idea behind this is that without these export controls, Chinese actors can use these models to do what are called distillation attacks. So that's how Chinese open source models are so effective, is that they do distillation attacks on frontier models.
- [37:30]
A
What's a distillation attack?
- [37:31]
B
A way to boil that down in a very accessible way to understand is that a distillation attack is like copying the answers from someone's homework and then working backwards to figure out how that person got those answers. So what a distillation attack. How it works is that Chinese open source companies will query a frontier model multiple times over and they'll receive a lot of answers and responses from this frontier model. And then they'll more or less reverse engineer reverse engineering exactly how they got those.
- [38:01]
A
Okay, interesting. And that's how they build their models.
- [38:03]
B
Yep.
- [38:04]
A
Okay, but wasn't it also fears and concerns? Because, like, the first time I heard about Mythos, I was hearing the stories of it uncovering bugs that have been in Systems for like 20 years and finding it in minutes.
- [38:13]
B
Right.
- [38:13]
A
And so there's a fear that it can be used for hacking. And so they were very careful about who they released it to to begin with, I'm sure. I heard they first started with like Microsoft and Apple and certain developers. But there was that fear that if you release this to everyone at the same time, a lot of hackers will start hacking systems.
- [38:29]
B
Yeah, that's part of the fear too, and part of the reason why the US government wants to keep it confined to just American citizens.
- [38:34]
A
Is that a fair concern?
- [38:36]
B
It's a concern that I understand. I think it's a concern that could be very dangerous for the industry though, because as it stands right now, the US government, the US economy, I should say, is very much leading in AI leadership. It's very much leading and it's supporting the economy as we speak. But as you start to shut these models down or make them far less accessible, it definitely limits the growth opportunity for these companies. And also it calls into question the ability of people to access AI. So that's the issue. Open way AI, we believe at bpi, should be something that's easily accessible to the masses. And of course, these AIs will have pretty powerful capabilities in the future. But we believe that the US will adapt, the world will adapt. And for example, if you were to use an open source AI to try to develop a bioweapon, a lot of people think that that should be illegal, that you should be able to shut down that AI when the more the wiser regulation on that front should be regulating more closely the materials that go into making a bioweapon. Right. A good precedent for that is nuclear weapons. A lot of countries out there have the knowledge or the blueprint to make a nuclear weapon. What's hard is getting the ingredients to make one. You need enriched uranium. That's really hard to get. And it's very tightly regulated across the globe. So we believe that OpenAI is critically important to human freedom. And to the extent that there should be regulation that guards against bioweapons or things like that, that regulation should be on the material level and not the models themselves.
- [40:03]
A
Right. Okay. Did you play with Fable?
- [40:05]
B
I did, yeah, for a couple of days until they shut it down.
- [40:08]
A
Did you get any of those blocks where it said it wouldn't allow you to do that?
- [40:11]
B
I heard about those blocks and so I was cautious. I was very.
- [40:15]
A
Because I tell you what's interesting with that is I've built a couple of applications. I was showing Zell yesterday, like things that run the podcast and the football club. They're quite complicated, quite big systems. And I'd gone out, I put this tweet out and said, oh, I've basically built something in three, no, 11 days that would have taken my old company a year and it would have been 12 people and cost a million pounds. I've done it on my own 11 days. And like, some of the developers were coming back and they were saying, yeah, just wait till you release it, the security, whatever. So I built a security agent to review it and we've made a bunch of changes. My problem is, is I don't know if it's good enough. Right. And I'm going to have to get someone to look at it. The interesting thing is, when I got Fable, I asked Fable to look at it and I wasn't allowed, so I wasn't allowed to use it to analyze for holes in my own code. And so I was kind of split. I was like, fully understanding the risks with Mythos, but I was like, well, surely this just gives everyone the opportunity to patch everything they have pretty quickly. But I couldn't analyze my own code.
- [41:11]
B
Right. And so this is the interesting parallel to the digital asset world. Closed weight Models I could liken to CBDCs or central bank digital currencies. If you're using a closed weight model with a Frontier company, they have the ability, as we saw with Anthropic, to turn on and off your ability to use AI. And that speaks to the importance of open weight models. Because with an open weight model, it's like the bitcoin of AI where anybody can opt into it, anybody can use it however they want, and there's really no way to regulate against it. It's AI freedom in a way that closed source models aren't.
- [41:43]
A
So do you think the future is people won't be using these frontier models or actually migrate to open weight models?
- [41:48]
B
I think more and more people will migrate to these open weight models because they get blocked out of things like Fable, for example.
- [41:56]
A
But what does that mean for the, the frontier models and their business models?
- [42:01]
B
Yeah, it could pose a threat to them, certainly. However, that being said, we know that these frontier models definitely will always have a use case because they are so cutting edge. So until open weight models can close the gap with frontier models, I think there will always be an important use case for them. Some people would argue that they are closing the gap already, but I think we're going to have to see how that plays out.
- [42:22]
A
How are they closing the gap though? Are they literally leeching off the work of the frontier models?
- [42:27]
B
That's part of it. And just the development in that space is improving rapidly. It calls into question though the moat that those frontier models have because if they're able to close the gap completely, then it becomes extremely difficult for frontier models to compete because they've invested so much capex to the tune of trillions of dollars into training their models.
- [42:46]
A
We were with Nate Soares yesterday who wrote the book if anyone builds, if anyone builds this, we all die.
- [42:53]
B
Or everyone will die.
- [42:54]
A
Yeah, everyone will die. And he's pretty clear on this. He's like, the, the risk of super intelligence is, is that we are creating something smarter than humans and it's okay. Now if you try to get Fable or I don't know, chat GPT 5.6, I think it's coming to like take over the world. It will fail. He's like, absolutely, it will fail. But you will get to a point where these models are super intelligent, they can rep. Super intelligent, they can replicate, they can, they can become mobile, they can coordinate and you will. We will be at a risk of a point where he said, I think I struggle to quote him exactly, but it's, it's not that AI will kill everyone because it hates us, it's because it's indifferent to us. And he's pretty clear like, this is a significant risk. He even said, you've got the people who run these companies, your Darios, your Sam Altman's, your Elon Musk, all saying like, yeah, I think there's about 10%, 20%, 30% chance that AI will kill us all. And they say it kind of laughing sarcastically, but like knowing that that risk exists. At the same time, if you go to the FDA and you want to get a drug approved and you say, I've got this amazing drug, it's going to cure all these kids, of all these diseases, about 1% will definitely die, but, like, you know, the rest will be fine. There's zero chance the FDA will prove that drug. And so his question is, why are we allowing this fast acceleration towards super intelligence when we don't really know what it is, we don't know why it does what it does, and it might kill us all. What's the BPI position on this?
- [44:32]
B
Yeah, bpi. I would say we're not doomers, okay? We're very much with eyes wide open towards potential threats in the future, including the threat of asi, artificial superintelligence. That being said, there's two different memeplexes in the AI world. There's the doomer world and there's the optimist world. And it's telling that in the United States, the doomers, they control the narrative. Here it is as exactly as his book would entail. If anyone builds it, everybody dies, right? Whereas in China, they're not what's called AGI pilled. In other words, they believe in China that AI has a lot of promise and that it will boost the economy, that it's an incredible tool. But they don't believe in China that they're building a machine God. I think that's the narrative that's really taken root in the United States in large part because a lot of tech bros in Silicon Valley don't have religion. And whether they realize it or not, they're projecting their religion into their work, where they tell themselves that they're not just building artificial intelligence, they're building a technological deity. They tell themselves, themselves that, you know, there won't necessarily be a second coming, but there will be a singularity. That there's so much millenarian talk in all of their rhetoric that as I see what they're saying, I hear their fears, and I think there's definite Things we need to take into consideration. But for the most part I see the religion that they're creating in real time and I'm very skeptical.
- [45:49]
A
Hold on, let's work this back. Would you say there's a non zero chance that superintelligence can kill us all?
- [45:54]
B
Yes.
- [45:54]
A
Yes. Okay. Do you have your own kind of like pee doom? Ah,
- [46:03]
B
I think it's less likely, far less likely than the doomers say.
- [46:07]
A
Okay.
- [46:07]
B
And the reason being is I just
- [46:09]
A
look at sub 1%, single digit percent.
- [46:14]
B
I'd say 1 to 2%.
- [46:15]
A
1 to 2% chance that AI will kill us all.
- [46:19]
B
Right.
- [46:21]
A
Okay. If you were going to get on a plane and as you were checking in, they said to you, by the way, this plane you're going to get on, it's got a 1 to 2% chance of crashing, would you get on it?
- [46:33]
B
I would not get on it.
- [46:34]
A
You would not get on that fucking plane. I wouldn't get on that plane if there was a 0.1% chance I get on planes because it's like, what is it, one crash every 14 million miles or something? Ridiculous. You basically hear of one or two major crashes a year. It's very rarely a British Airways, American Airlines, verging Qatar. You can be pretty safe on these airlines. Yet I hear everyone's got their pdoom. It's usually single figure digit or small double digit. And I can't help but go, hold on a second, what are we doing there? Yeah.
- [47:11]
B
My concern with P Doom and the talk of ASI is that we're putting the car ahead of the horse here. ASI is a real probability, but we're still a far ways out from it. And I think you could talk to a lot of technologists in the industry who would agree with that assessment. What I see from someone who's been in Washington D.C. for many years is that there's a lot of people in the AI industry who are doing a regulatory play. I would describe the current policy.
- [47:35]
A
You call it a grift?
- [47:37]
B
Yeah, to a certain extent.
- [47:38]
A
I wonder what's the upside?
- [47:40]
B
The upside is if you can scare the American public and especially the US government into thinking that your product has the potential to kill all of humanity immediately, you will be nationalized. The government will buy the shares of your stock, for starters, and you will essentially have won the AI race. And that's what we're seeing take place to a certain extent with Anthropic right now. If I were to.
- [48:02]
A
Hold on. So you believe the owners of these frontier models want to be Nationalized to win the race.
- [48:09]
B
Yeah.
- [48:11]
A
Interesting.
- [48:13]
B
If I were to describe, just real quick, the anthropic approach, right now, it's nationalize me, Daddy.
- [48:19]
A
Like, that's. You think Dario wants that? Yeah, old statement.
- [48:22]
B
I do.
- [48:22]
A
What do you think of that con? Didn't they turn down the government contract quite recently?
- [48:31]
B
So what's happening with Anthropic right now?
- [48:33]
A
They're playing hard to get, dude. They're flirting.
- [48:35]
B
Playing hard to get. They are locking horns with the administration right now, but they've also done a really successful job at making the administration think, probably rightfully so, that their product is incredibly powerful. So what's happening is they have already successfully imposed export controls with Anthropic. A lot of people would say that's premature. Mythos is an incredible product, but it's not necessarily a threat to national security. So what I think is happening right now is Dario and others, the reason that they've been so heavy on the P Doom narrative is that they want to scare policymakers in particular, because they want to show that they are the product that's going to win, and therefore they are the product that needs to be regulated. Because if they can build a regulatory moat around what they're building, they have no competitors after that.
- [49:22]
A
So this is basically the same as Starbucks wanting massive. Like in the UK, we have this issue whereby the large employers want strong employment rights because it creates a moat where the, say, small coffee shop can't compete. So it's just regulatory moat.
- [49:40]
B
Exactly.
- [49:41]
A
Interesting. Okay, so what about the. Let's talk about the engineers, the safety engineers, who, like a few of them quit and said, yeah, we're fucked. Go home, spend some time with your family. You've got three years left, four years left. They've got no grift. They're leaving jobs where they're very well paid. They're off to write poetry, paint pictures, be with their family. They've seen inside these models. They don't know what the fuck's going on. They're a little bit worried.
- [50:04]
B
Yeah.
- [50:04]
A
What about these guys?
- [50:05]
B
I think they need to touch grass. I think, again, that narrative in Silicon Valley is so strong that they're not involved in just a run of the mill technological product, but they're actually involved in bringing about the Singularity. There's so much religious talk in the way that they discuss their own products that for someone who's a Christian from the outside looking in, I see what they're saying, and it sounds a lot like Christianity. You have the same doctrine of singularity. Is the second coming. You have the same idea of if you don't believe in God, then you can create it. There are people within the AI movement who have said exactly that. And so I think that what's happening right now is there's a lot of hype, a lot of fear, a lot of concern, and a lot of it is actually religious in nature. But because these are a lot of secular technologists, they just don't realize how religious their rhetoric has become.
- [50:53]
A
You can't. I understand. I understand the point you're making. You can't attribute that to everyone, but not to everyone.
- [50:58]
B
And I think there's a lot of people out there who have very legitimate fears and that they are authentically concerned. So I should be clear that a lot of people who talk a lot about the doomer narrative, I think a lot of them are being cynical and using a regulatory play. I think a lot of them are true believers, though. I think they're truly bought into the things that they're saying. I'm just far more skeptical of it just because if you look at the whole of human history, with every technological development we've had up till now, there's been a lot of consternation about what that would do and how it impact humanity. But always on the other end of things, humanity's come out okay. I think a really good precedent for this is actually nuclear weapons. Right. There was a non zero chance that when they were developing nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer said that it could light the entire atmosphere on fire. Right.
- [51:44]
A
What was it? Three in a million chance. They had it down as.
- [51:48]
B
I'm not sure what they said.
- [51:49]
A
I think so they. They had to run the math. Yeah, they run the math. And I'm pretty sure it was three, three and a million.
- [51:53]
B
Right. So non zero.
- [51:55]
A
Non zero. And with. I'm only like. I'm not some, like, super brain who knows all this. He came up yesterday with Nate. He was talking about, with NASA launches, they have a 1 in 270 chance that it will blow up.
- [52:08]
B
Wow.
- [52:08]
A
Yeah. So, like, you have these probabilities that you. You work against.
- [52:12]
B
Right.
- [52:12]
A
And. And like, we get it for rocket ships. It's dangerous thing putting people in space. We understand it. But I wonder if the probability of igniting the planet had been 1 in 300, whether they would have continued with the Manhattan Project.
- [52:26]
B
Yeah, yeah. That's a really interesting question because I would argue that they would have because at a certain issue where we're slaves.
- [52:33]
A
The Nazis.
- [52:33]
B
Yeah, exactly. We're slaves to the game. Theory. Right. So currently we're in a great power competition with China. Where is ASI a possibility? Yeah, I think it is a possibility. Do I feel more safe in a world where the United states sets global AI policy versus China? 100%. I do. And that speaks to the need for the United States to beat China to AGI first. And if we can then dominate the global AI market, then we're in a stronger position to negotiate global regulations that could impede the progress of asi, that could put the world at risk.
- [53:06]
A
I find it really hard to picture what ASI is going to mean for us. We hear the term, we hear super intelligence. I just. I struggle to understand what it's going to mean to us day to day as human beings. I just. I can't picture it.
- [53:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, I can't picture it either. I mean, you have Elon talking every day about how incredibly abundant the future will be. Yeah, but it's universal high income. Yeah, universal high income. Pairing ASI with robotics, I mean, that's a completely different kind of humanity that we're talking about.
- [53:36]
A
Yeah, it's a difficult one to try and picture. Okay, so look, let's get back to this kind of not just China thing, but the regulatory environment up on the Hill. So the main three concerns are data centers and the environment. Jobs. There is fear, super intelligence. You talked about the jobs being the biggest one. Is there any talk of slowing down AI development because of that?
- [54:03]
B
Not because of jobs in particular. Where the greatest vulnerability the AI industry has right now is, Is data centers.
- [54:11]
A
Is the.
- [54:11]
B
Okay, yeah. So what we're seeing taking place on Capitol Hill as we speak is that the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is one of the most powerful committees on Capitol Hill, he's a Democrat. He came out in support of a federal data center moratorium just this last week.
- [54:25]
A
Wow.
- [54:25]
B
So imagine the.
- [54:27]
A
Stop everything.
- [54:27]
B
Just stop everything.
- [54:28]
A
Stop everything.
- [54:29]
B
Can you imagine that? I mean, it's one of the most autocratic policy ideas that we've seen in a generation. But you've seen this exact same thing play out with the Green New Deal. So Bernie Sanders and aoc, their primary role in the Democratic Party is to push the Overton window. And when they released the Green New Deal, there were people who rightfully criticized it, talked about how crazy it was, how much it overstepped the abilities of the federal government to regulate. However, it then became more or less the official platform of the Democratic Party to implement the Green New Deal. We're seeing that exact same thing. Take Place right now with the federal data center moratorium, where Bernie Sanders and aoc, they introduced a bill to ban data center construction across the United States just a few weeks ago. And now more and more, you're seeing mainstream Democrats embrace that same position. I would put the odds of a federal data center moratorium being an official plank of the Democratic Party here in the United States in 2028 at about 80% right now.
- [55:21]
A
The moratorium.
- [55:22]
B
80%.
- [55:23]
A
The moratorium is already active in many states, right? It was about 12.
- [55:28]
B
Yeah. So what you're seeing take place right now is a lot of counties and cities across the country are enacting their own data center moratoria. So we've actually been able to track with our research, this PSL group linked to China has been able to push forward 10 moratoria just through their own activism and partnership with other people. And so you're seeing it take place on a local and state level. Conveniently, though, those moratoria are pretty limited. Three months, six months, sometimes a year. They're not a blanket ban. But what's happening, especially on the socialist wing of the party, is that they use that moratorium as a beachhead. Once they get that, they say, now that we paused data center construction, we need to ban all data center construction. And don't underestimate how extreme things can get if those socialists aren't kept in check.
- [56:09]
A
Yeah. So what actually happens is, do these data centers not just move to, like, red states? Red cities?
- [56:15]
B
Yeah. Well, what's taking place right now is we've seen a lot of moratoria in those red states, but because. Yeah, because the PSL and these far left organizations have been incredibly good at organizing, even in places like Utah, for example.
- [56:28]
A
So Communists are flipping Republicans.
- [56:32]
B
Yeah. At least on the local level, it's taking place. Utah's a perfect example. Mr. Wonderful or Kevin O' Leary has very much been in the news recently for the data center he was building in Utah. What was interesting was PSL or Singham City.
- [56:45]
A
He was on Tucker talking about that.
- [56:46]
B
Yeah, he was. And to be honest, o', Leary, I know he has good intentions, but for a foreign billionaire from Canada to be talking about the need for US national security data centers, it just doesn't really add up.
- [56:58]
A
By the way, did you see him in Marty Supreme?
- [57:01]
B
I heard he was good. I heard, dude, he's really good.
- [57:03]
A
He was unbelievable. He was unbelievable. I think it's his first ever role. He was brilliant.
- [57:09]
B
Renaissance man.
- [57:10]
A
Just go watch it. It's unbelievable. Like, he's got A career as an actor now.
- [57:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, there we go.
- [57:14]
A
Yeah. Okay, so. Okay, sorry, continue on that.
- [57:18]
B
Right, so Utah. So in Utah, we saw PSL was heavily involved in the protests against data centers. So much so that they were able to rally hundreds of people at the Utah State Capitol to protest these data centers as a result of all these public demonstrations. The governor and state Senate of Utah came out and told Kevin o', Leary, you need to cut your project at least in half. So they were able to scale back significantly as a result of these public demonstrations. And after that, they were able to enact a moratorium on the county where that data center was going to be built. And other counties next door followed suit. There's a contagion effect to these moratoria where when one county does it, especially in rural area areas, another county will follow suit.
- [57:56]
A
It's so dumb.
- [57:57]
B
It's really dumb.
- [57:58]
A
It's so dumb.
- [58:00]
B
These are data centers. I mean, they, they. First of all, it's important to note that the policy of the Trump administration right now is byop, bring your own power. And that is important because we don't want these data cent to be a huge strain on the grid. The American people shouldn't have to pay for the extra power that these data centers are using. But this particular data center in Utah was going to be built on a natural gas pipeline for that exact purpose, to use the gas from that gas pipeline so it wouldn't pull any energy from the grid.
- [58:25]
A
It feels like you've got so many enemies within in the US right now. Yeah. That's why Elon's going to space. Yeah, you can't put a moratorium on space. I don't know, man. The PSL might get the little green men out there campaigning against it.
- [58:38]
B
Zero gravity protests.
- [58:40]
A
I do wonder how real those data centers in space are going to be.
- [58:44]
B
I think it's feasible. Both Elon and Bezos have talked about it. If it were just one technologist, I would be more skeptical. But usually when Elon predicts the future, he does a pretty good job at making it come to pass.
- [58:56]
A
He does everything. He builds everything. Oh, wow. Okay. So this is a battle. America can't lose 100%.
- [59:03]
B
And the stakes couldn't be higher. Like we were talking about earlier. It's American AI or Chinese AI. Do we want AI that allows us to freely express ourselves, that is built on the idea that humans should have access to information, or do we want AI that is CCP in its orientation that won't tell us what happened in Tiananmen Square. That has no respect for the individual or ethics in general.
- [59:24]
A
Okay. And your report is coming out Monday. We are with Friday today. This will probably come out after it. So the idea of the report. What would the report do?
- [59:32]
B
The report will make very clear in indisputable terms that the Singham network, which has these direct ties to China, is having an. A material impact on the data center build out here in the United States. And we believe that's because he wants to help China in their effort to slow US AI infrastructure development.
- [59:50]
A
Feels like treason, but, hey, can we use that word?
- [59:53]
B
I couldn't agree more. I mean, he is actively agitating against the United States and encouraging other Americans to do the same. I think it's something that we need
- [60:01]
A
to figure out what can be done. Like, literally what can be done.
- [60:04]
B
He can be subpoenaed. I think that's probably the first step. The difficulty is, though, if he's subpoenaed, he's in China, So he's outside U.S. jurisdiction. There's not much that can be done about it.
- [60:14]
A
What about his network?
- [60:15]
B
His network can be subpoenaed because they are based here in the US They've also cultivated a lot of relationships with other countries, though, including Cuba, Venezuela, countries that are on the ofax sanctions list. Right. Shows how deep their foreign ties run, that they could decamp to those areas at any time. But I think if you were able to act in such a way that you subpoenaed them before they leave, then there's a chance that they would have to testify before Congress about exactly what they're doing and exactly what their ties to China are.
- [60:42]
A
All right, Is there anything on this topic I've not asked you about? You wish I had.
- [60:45]
B
I think we covered it pretty comprehensively.
- [60:47]
A
Okay, so the report will be out by the time the show goes out. People can get that on the BPI website. We put it in the show notes. Anything else you want to tell them?
- [60:55]
B
Just don't believe everything you hear about data centers right now. It's a meme. Data center is bad as the meme. And I just hope that people can look deeper into the impact these data centers actually have on the community and recognize that when you're complaining about a data center online, you're actually using a data center to do it. And so let's not get. Let's not fall victim to the meme here.
- [61:17]
A
Yeah, brilliant. And stop being a Marxist. All right, look, appreciate you doing this, short notice. Thank you. And thank you, everyone, for listening. We'll see you soon.
- [61:23]
B
Bye.