AI Power Struggles: Data Centers, Agent Errors and Shared Meaning

Hello, everybody. Happy Monday and welcome to the Techstrong gang. And unless you've been living under a rock, you might have noticed that this data center stuff and AI stuff, well, it's wrapped up in almost every political campaign out there these days.

I think there's not a state somewhere where somebody's not putting together some sort of ad touting the fact that the other one is soft on data centers. Here in New York, even the Republican congressional candidate for Westchester County is accusing the Democrat of being soft on it. So both parties are kind of tossing stuff around back and forth at each other.

President Trump is out campaigning on this particular issue, saying that data centers, I guess, are strategic, and there's been reports that some of these projects have been delayed. But Goldman Sachs is saying that as far as they can tell, there's been no real impact because the 2027 projections are the same. John, I just gave a couple of highlights.

Meanwhile, there's at least six or seven other things going on a daily basis around this thing. So walk us through the latest and greatest. Yeah.

By the way, say hello to Jack and Chris, who you both know really well. So if you missed the gang, we have four of our regulars. Hey, Jack and Chris.

Hi. Yes, hi, Mike. So yeah, you mentioned this.

There are so many moving parts. I almost feel like I'm swatting flies because I can't keep track of this. So in addition to what you talked about, and I guess the big moment over the weekend, and it crystallizes what's going on, is that Trump was speaking in Ohio, and he was defending data centers, and he wants to double down on them because this is a big manufacturing push.

He says there's so much money to be made from them. You can't turn them off. They'll go to China if you do.

And he's kind of frameworking this as a national security imperative. Meanwhile, there's a Wall Street Journal poll, widespread sentiment to slow down AI development because of the anti-data center movement, among other things. There's also indications that the anti-data center backlash is picking up steam in Europe and Asia, where energy costs are much higher and the public population centers are much more dense.

You mentioned the Goldman Sachs. I think it's relatively steady expansion through next year. They kind of fudged a little bit beyond that.

In a sense, there's just a large degree of skepticism about data centers or about AI development in general, given all the security breaches and incidents that have been happening the last several weeks, and also because of what the companies have told us about how they want to dial back. In fact, when you look into this, it's like looking at a kaleidoscope. There are so many different angles.

There's the advantage that companies are using for this. Meta's using R&D tax credits and classifying data centers as experimental to dock some taxes. You've got Sam Altman out there mentioning that data center development should slow down.

They're all trying to take advantage. And if it's confusing, maybe it's by design, but I also think there are so many voices saying so many disparate things that the takeaway is that companies are trying to present themselves as kind of measured and responsible. On the flip side, we've got a lot of politicalization, a lot of folks telling us that this is just this reckless expansion of data centers which are going to impact our affordability issues, our environment, et cetera.

And I think it's going to only accelerate. This is just the tip of the spear, so to speak. I think we're going to see more and more of this.

And you didn't mention Amazon, which conveniently is talking about how they are suddenly going to make a billion dollars available to help the locals wherever their data centers happen to show up. And I couldn't help but wonder if there was any kind of, well, geez, it was a hell of a coincidence that just as the Republican Party is starting to bang the drum with Trump, that they come out and finally say something about this because, well, it's not like this issue hasn't been floating around. Am I going to see every other provider of some sort of AI service start talking about how much they care about the local community and how much they're going to bump that?

What does that do to this? What do you think? Yeah, they're going to say this as long as it benefits them, and then they're going to wait this out, and maybe once the elections are over with, and again, we're in the last month or so, so this is only going to intensify.

We're going to see plenty of advertisements. We already are. We're going to see more money going into lobbying.

But once the elections come and pass, we have very short attention spans in this country, I think, in general, and we'll just move on to the next shiny object. They'll do something else very soon, perhaps, and then they've started to back away. You're saying we're never going to see that billion dollars or any other billion dollars.

No, we're not. No, we're going to lack the $5,000 checks we were going to get from Trump. These are all just these little distractions that are going to be going on.

All the companies have spent so much time around Trump, they're learning his tricks. I'm not going to turn this into a political discussion, but I think in a sense, what they're doing is they're kind of distracting us and trying to mollify us until they get what they want, and then they move on to the next thing. Yeah.

You see, guys, I think this whole thing about data centers is a red herring. My understanding is that Trump is going to convert his ballroom into a big data center in a hurry, so. There you go.

" Sure. And we have all these local races, and I'm trying to figure out how much of those races are going to be influenced by the politics of the local data center, or is this really more of a national referendum on AI and the data center is just the tipping point of the angst, but it's really something larger than just the fact that my local data center is noisy and taking up all my water. Yeah.

You're right. It's local. The bottom line to all of this is it's not a national issue.

If you put a data center in my backyard, my electrical bills are going to go up. Traffic probably will go up. I'll lose green space.

You're going to use water. And so at the end of the day, what most people are saying, especially now given the affordability crisis that we're talking about with gas at, what is it now, John, in California, $6 a gallon? Six, yeah.

50. Yeah. Regular gas.

It's a real issue, and that's what people are looking at. There are places, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, have lots of space. You can put it out in the middle of nowhere, then the problem becomes, okay, so how do I power this thing?

Well, they're going to put in gas generators. Okay, great. So does that mean my gas bill is going to go up when I have to heat my house here in the Northeast during the winter?

It's really more of an economic issue than anything else. The other bottom line that people ignore is that other than construction, data centers don't produce a lot of jobs. Mm-hmm.

You're talking about maybe a couple of dozen people in a huge data center running the place. It's not a great job producer. So that's a big deal as well.

And frankly, there's also just a lot of bad information out there about AI and what it will do for us or not do to us, or will do to us. That's affecting us as well. The social media, for lack of a better term, crap that goes out there, is just turning people off.

So there's a lot going on here. It's not just about, yeah, Trump thinks we need to compete with China, which we do, but they have their own issues. And so this is going to be a really big deal.

All right. Chris- Oh, I was going to mention before, I'm sorry, Chris, let me just mention one thing really briefly. In addition to data centers, the job displacement argument to blame AI, and I think even "60 Minutes," the new "60 Minutes" had a segment about that last night, so that's also playing part of the mix, and it also appeals to our fear not only of affordability, but just your job stability.

Chris, did you ever imagine that conversations about data centers and technology would be at least one of the top five issues driving a political campaign conversation in debates? I'm kind of surprised looking back in time, but here we are. " So over the long term, yes.

As a data centers particularly, but all we touched on, this is not about data centers, it's about a lot of things. So here in the Niagara Peninsula, people talk about surveys, because that's what residential construction has turned into, is you take some agricultural land, you survey it, and you print a row of townhouses on it. It has no life, no culture, no stores, no nothing.

And the data center is not necessarily a bigger real estate thing, but we're all used to this. Buildings go up, there's systems, they don't make anybody sense. So this, I'm part of this conversation.

I don't particularly know on a case-by-case basis if this data center is really necessary and the water impact and the power impact, but I do know that none of us believe anyway. And Jack, you touched on it, there's so much cynicism about AI out there and oligarchs and, that this is an issue that people can push at. And I'll tell you, because we all know, everybody knows how this works out, that if you have an upper...

Well, the upper middle class is a thin layer right now with more authority. And if you live in one of those, I have a good friend who's pushing back on a data center right now in an area where everybody can afford to, and get the lobbyists and everything else, which means they'll get pushed to where the poor folks are, which is most people these days, and they're not going to have any say about it whatsoever. So whether each individual case plays out that way or not, we all know.

If you've been watching since medieval times, this is what happens when too much power accumulates in one spot, so nobody believes anything. Yeah. Well, John, we saw, I think it was last week, I lost track of my timing, but we all agreed that we were going to have some AI regulations because it was the morally right thing to do, and so we're all going to salute that flag.

But couldn't the same concept be applied to the building of data centers? Could not everybody stand up and say, "Hey, you know what? " Yeah.

We've had this history in the country of we had fast, almost irresponsible... It's hard to predict how something's going to end up when you first start doing it. With manufacturing, there's always been a pushback.

It applies to other things. And you try to correct those mistakes, I think even back to Upton Sinclair type of era, where you look at the consequences and then the big tech back then, we had the oligarchs. They were reined in or they were held responsible.

Eventually technology moves fast and we then catch up with it later. And the last people to catch up with technology are always legislators because they're the least inclined to understand it, and I think that's happening all over again. It's weird, we're doing the same thing that happened with the Foxconn debate and the manufacturing push by Trump, seen in his first campaign.

We're going through it all over again. Maybe he thinks this will resonate and work to message, but I think one of the takeaways is there is such animosity towards the tech bros and the billionaires. One of the numbers that comes out of the Wall Street Journal poll, and it was a significant poll, is that 63% of the people they talked to want some sort of wealth tax on billionaires.

There's actually a proposition out here, which is 40, and there's this whole game going on around 40. It's the billionaire tax proposition. There have been two other propositions, 41 and 42, that have been introduced via big tech that are meant to muddy the argument or to confuse the consumer to nullify 40 or at least defeat it.

Again, our big commerce leaders push things. They want to create wealth for themselves. They want to create jobs in a certain sense, and there's a public backlash that usually comes from legislators after we figure out all the bad things that can happen in data centers, which is I think just the latest example of the smokestacks we had before or the nuclear reactor centers that we were going to build.

We're just going through this argument all over again. Jack, I feel like a certain amount of arrogance went into these decisions because everybody was forced to sign these NDAs, and basically they went out of their way to make sure that nobody had any visibility into what these data centers were going to be about. And yet, you and I have been around for a while.

" These are fundamental decisions about building data centers that have been around for decades, and yet it seems like we went out of our way to willfully ignore them. So, is this just stupidity coming home to roost? Yeah, look, there's a few things going on here.

First of all, to John's point, technology moves very fast, regulation moves very slow. And so we don't learn what the downsides are until something has been in place for a few years. Nuclear power is a great example.

Lots of different things. Greenhouse gases. It's a whole bunch of stuff.

The other piece, though, that I think we need to be cognizant of is that, at least in this country, and probably in other countries as well, money talks. Let's face it. If I'm throwing a lot of money at things and you've got the billionaires and the billion billionaires and the big hedge funds and all the financial guys throwing money at this stuff, they're going to get their way.

Politicians will not buck, for the most part, money that's going into communities. And so that's something that we can't ignore either from a data center perspective. The only time that that doesn't work is if those guys get kicked out of office.

They get unelected. But for the most part, that doesn't happen. So, in one sense it's a boondoggle in the sense that these things are going to get built.

It's just a question of where, because there's just too much money behind it. The boondoggle part is the politicians running around saying either for or con, "Yeah, I like it," or, "Yeah, I don't like it," excuse me, depending on what they think their electoral role, or the elections will help them with. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that, Jack, because out here, also there's a pretty mum about this.

The people that represent us in both parties, especially Democratic Party, they are tied into big tech through lobbying, through donations, through the number of people who can vote for them. They are conspicuously silent or have been. And actually, one of the ironies too is that we had, I think, Governor of Pennsylvania, Shapiro, kind of reverse course on data centers.

Yeah. And I don't know how accurate this is because Trump said it's probably wrong, but he mentioned Sherrod Brown, who was a proponent of data centers initially. Maybe he said something that was favorable about data centers.

And so I think it cuts across both parties. Yeah. In a sense, they don't understand it, but they're also afraid of losing financial and even electoral support among the companies.

These companies employ a ton of, a lot of people. Right. And they spend a lot of money in elections, John, don't forget that part.

They spend a ton. These PACs, these super PACs, we're talking about tens of billions, maybe, I'm saying hundreds of millions. Let's be safe.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are going into it. All right. " Right.

So anyway, at some point, we definitely need to find a way to more cost-effectively and economically friendly and environmentally friendly drive AI. I think the first wave of this stuff, though, is definitely not an example of how to go about doing something, for sure. All right.

Let's move on to our next topic, which is kind of like the future of IT. But it didn't get as much attention as maybe it should've, but AWS is talking about a new agent that they're previewing, and the agent sits there and looks across your entire IT environment and basically balances cost and performance and security and governance issues to come up with some recommendations about how to balance your IT environment. And Chris has a post talking about the aeroplane, which is a term that's getting kicked around over the years.

But he's saying that in the age of AI, it's become more problematic because there's voice and you can now describe intent, and if you don't understand your intent, well, bad things can happen. But on the other side of it, we may be getting to the point now where you can't make a mistake because AI will just surface it back to you and say, "Hi, this thing you just did is probably going to have some cascading impact later," and at some point, maybe it'll just fix it itself automatically based on whatever goals I've set. So Chris, what does the future of IT look like from your perspective?

Because so much of it historically has been people manually configuring things with a wing and a prayer and crossing their fingers. Well, I'll take the hook from the end of the last block, and we look for patterns, and in emergent periods and so forth, what happens in early stages is fairly predictable. And as you said at the end of the last block, you expect to see a lot of good examples of how not to do things.

Right? And that article, in fact, is a triumvirate. Anybody watching that feels like who has way too much time, look at my LinkedIn, I posted yesterday an article there linking to a cyber dot set piece for Bill Руди folks.

It's all on the same stuff. Right? I look around, and you have to understand, I spend all of my time on AI governance, all of it.

As a company, as a person, as a professional, we're doing this all the time. I'm involved with the United Nations, and the SANS Council in Canada, and ISO, and IEC, and ITU, and all these different organizations, and we're all having these same conversations. And then I come here and to the conversations like this and look at the news articles, what's happening at the geopolitical level, frankly.

Right? And Mike, you're here for almost every episode I do, right? We keep coming back to this.

The politicians don't know because we don't know. I will righteously pick on OpenAI right now and just as an example, I use them a lot, and I'm on their cybersecurity radar, right? So their AI governance safety stuff now says Chris Blask talks about cybersecurity a lot.

We better block some, but not all of the actions. And I can tell that they're blocked. I can't tell why they're blocked.

I can't tell why sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. There's no clarity coming back from the platform whatsoever. Right?

So my point in yesterday's piece is that by definition means that system cannot be used in any critical path by anyone, ever. Right? You cannot run a power grid.

You can't run an airplane engine, right, with probably, usually, always works, certainly has the capability, but may stop. And that's it, again, not just picking on OpenAI, this is where we are. The best and the brightest there at this huge, well-funded organization can't figure out that that's not even an option.

That's not even a solution. So, yes, the airplane, right? So yeah, we have voice to text that everybody's using, and it's not getting it right, and the systems are capturing that as intent.

So what could that possibly mean? And I think, the optimistic point to take the end of your intro to this rant, we either have to get to that point or we have to stop using electronics, or AI, or everything. I don't see any other solution.

And I really am hugely optimistic about how these systems can actually solve a lot of existing problems. But we literally have to get past the things we talk about here every week. It's, if not unexpected, it's ridiculous.

Hey, Chris, so as we add AI, does the airplane become the terror plane? No. Well, that's the thing.

I don't think... There's language models and large language models and language systems and chatbots. We talk about AI as if that means something in particular.

It does not. What we're talking about really is everything we've all been doing. " Guess what?

We were right the first time. You have to have these functions in these systems, and we've gotten away with it for a couple of decades because people don't do that. We can more or less count on folks.

AI aren't folks. AI will do literally what we tell it to, and we're finding out that our systems have been lacking things that the more pedantic amongst us have said we needed from the beginning. But aren't we going to wind up being so structured around intent that we have to be so deliberate in what we're saying that it takes away the joy of the thing?

Because I sometimes wonder when somebody describes intent, I'll give you my teenage son, for example. If I say to him, "Take the garbage out," he will take the garbage out. He just won't get it all the way to the end of the driveway.

" And so the systems are like that as well, and they're requiring us humans that we have a lot of shorthand for how we express intent, to talking to machines that are very deliberate and very specific in how they want to be instructed. Is that fair? Well, but you look at that, so I think the short answer to your question is no.

Right? I'm looking to build systems that survive contact with the real world, where all of that's true. " I got to say, "How do the people who use manufacturing control systems behave?

What is the entire... " So you have to make systems that actually work, and that includes the fact that people are people, right? And I'm a field test right now.

I use AI systems with prompts like you hear me saying right now. I'm not sitting here engineering the exact prompt. " That's where that airplane article came from.

" And it loops back to my obsession, which is local. Because Mike, right, Google and OpenAI cannot know all your metaphors in the Westbury plant, West End, number 13, night shift. Right?

You do. You already know that. Local systems, they can use external platforms that have the local, literally metaphors, the slang we use, and will take that as part of intent, have to exist.

Otherwise, we can't have any of these things. And we have to be a little bit careful here, though, if I can jump in here for just a minute- Yeah ... especially around the start of this conversation was about AI taking over a lot of this network management stuff, right?

We've been doing those automated systems, automated discovery systems for years. The difference here, I think, is that in the past, there was much more oversight, human oversight. Now we're looking at AIs and saying- Yeah ...

we don't need to have human oversight to do that kind of stuff. And that's the risky part. Do we have the right AI model to be able to replace the human in the loop?

And I think that's the riskier part of all of this going forward. Well, yeah. I'm betting my chips on the table this time that we can, because that's the kind of thing that I'm trying to build all the time.

And our network, our mesh, is actually quite deep and complex these days, and it is autonomous as the hell can be gone, and we do not have the kind of problems that come up in articles like this. Chris, I don't disagree with you. I think we can.

The question is, will we? And the question is, will somebody put out a model that isn't verified, that isn't restricted as to what action it can take? That's the risky part to me.

It's not that we can't do it. It's that, are we going to do it? Well, bad actors, whether it's conflict or accident, security folks always have to think about, oh, they will.

The worst things you can think about are being done now, and folks will continue to do that. I think the real, from a defensive perspective, the two things are, can I make a system that will survive that? And if I want to get globally competitive about it, can I make something better, faster, cheaper that people will just use instead of that?

Well, I think- Better, faster, cheaper, that's the problem. But I think ultimately, this is playing out on two ends of a spectrum. On the front end, we will be expressing an intent with voice that AI will convert into some actual code that will go configure something, and then there's going to be a second set of AI on the back end that will review what was actually put together and installed and come back with the best practice because our intent didn't describe the best practice properly in the first place.

So I'm not sure there's a human in that loop as much as there's a human supervising it, or maybe there's a human over that loop. Chris? Human on the loop is the term that's showing up in standard talks these days, and it's yes, but take that to 11.

It's not one AI and another AI. It's a lot of AI systems, depending on the depth of what you're dealing with, going back and forth. Right?

My primary AI system is Lumina. That's my interface to the whole thing. But there's lots of And we use different terms of residents.

There's an AI continuity system resident to a project or a device. And they work things out between them, and when they fail, we as engineers, architects stand back and say, "That's interesting. " And so far, we just find things to build in.

But it's not as simple as one AI does everything, another one checks it. Again, any more than would be with one in a critical application where we do that with people. Right.

So Jack, are we mere mortal human IT administrators going to be able to understand the relationship between all these AIs that Chris is talking about and keep track of that, and this will be the revenge of the general purpose administrator? Or are we still going to need all these IT specialists who are the guy who knows the database and the person who knows the servers, and then there's another storage thing, or is that all going to be an AI that does that, and we're going to be able to just kind of orchestrate? Yeah.

To quote "Monty Python," I think IT is not quite dead yet. I think it's going to be around for a while. The bigger risk, I think, is when we move into real agentic AI, when agents are talking to agents, are talking to agents, and they're interoperating, because it just becomes nearly impossible for people to keep up with that.

Right? Agents move at the speed of light. We move at the speed of whatever we had for breakfast, or caffeine maybe.

And so that's the real risk, but I don't see IT going away anytime soon. I see the roles changing. I see what we do and how we do it changing.

The workflow changes. AI becomes a real important assistant if it's done right. But I'm not really scared about just IT going away.

Well, I'd have to fast-forward this because, Jack, we're there now. While we're talking right now, I and my group of bandicos, there's all sorts of AI systems agentically talking to each other, developing things, creating systems, but no human oversight over those systems. On a daily basis, I, as our little company grows, the usual things.

You're not a founder just anymore. You're managing people and systems. How do you delegate out?

It's no different with the AI systems themselves. Right? So we talk future tense around that one all the time.

When we go agentic and fully, we're there. Some of us are doing it now. Yeah, because remember- Some of it may be more broadly later.

But Chris, and I don't mean to pick on you specifically- By all means ... but I will. Oh, please.

Yes. Folks in our business are the top 10%. It's the other 90% or 80%, pick whatever percent you want, that are way behind.

Yes, it's advancing for us, but for the vast majority of companies out there, they're still trying to figure out how to make this work. Yeah. And this is, again, in cybersecurity or anything, in areas of expertise, this one just happens to be really popular right now.

That's always true. Yeah. And I try to be clear, this is not an ad for my business.

We're early in this. We seem to be finding a way through it. We're helping others with it.

It seems to make sense. But this is still early. Three years from now, there might be a different answer, but I still don't think it's the centralized, either the company or some government is going to come up with rules to tell us all to be good.

There's no there there. Yeah. Good luck to them.

So this is, to me, a classic example of why the general public is terrified of AI, like from the 37,000-foot view. So they're hearing about all these rogue AI agents. We're fraught with them.

And then Amazon comes forward with this idea to reduce the standard low-level operational failures, which in turn might lead to error plane. I think about this rogue kind of gone wild sci-fi plot boiler, where the voter or the person over in Ohio who Trump is talking, trying to convince, is thinking, "Oh, okay, there is a solution. Oh, wait a second.

" It just builds into this whole kind of paranoia about the unknown. Hey, John, it's self-driving cars. Yeah.

Same thing, right? Until we become accustomed to them, we were terrified of them. Now, where I live, they're everywhere.

And I don't think twice about it. They're actually better drivers. Well, until they have a crash, or they can't go up the driveway.

Then they freeze, right. Yeah. One second.

No, it's an issue, but it's interesting. I was talking to SnapLogic about this, and they have come up with a way to pull the metadata out of legacy app servers, and they're using that to therefore convert an old app over to something that will run on their integration platform, and I think a lot of different companies are doing something similar where they're kind of using AI to reverse engineer the legacy platforms to get out from underneath this data issue. And historically, I've often referred to a lot of these big application platforms, they're roach motels, right?

Data gets in, data doesn't get out. So Chris, are we on the cusp of something here where we can maybe finally take back control of our data and control of our IT destiny? What do you say?

I think we have to, and I was just thinking how to respond to this one. So bias warning, right? I have a commercial interest, but yeah, Jack, to your point, I look around me at a lot of big companies, and they literally, their entire business model, I try to project to the future.

Can they make their data portable? And I think that the answer is no for a lot of them. Not because they can't, because their business model will fail.

Their entire revenue model is premised on the fact that I own your data, you don't. You pay me to own your data for you. And like a lot of things, I'm betting, we as QuietWire, we cannot do that.

That breaks our model. If we ever find ourselves doing it, some future version of the company does that, the company should fail. I'm trying to build that in.

Right? When your data has to go with you. It has to.

It has to be with you to begin... These platforms don't go away. Right?

We're not all going to make AI systems. But the idea that a company can only survive by doing things that are morally and ethically wrong, only because that's just the way it was done, and that's the way the big companies were done, that's a dystopian future. It's either possible or it's not possible to have a persistent, coherent, commercial function entity, a company, that doesn't do that.

And frankly, I think that because, the type of issues we were talking about in the first block, the public perception thing, I think is a huge advantage to say, "No, we are not going to hold your data. We will make sure that you have it, and if you want to stop doing business with us, just say so. " Yeah, but wait a minute.

If you're American Express, if you're Bank of America, pick Chase, they have no incentive whatsoever to turn that data into something that's readable by other people. Right. So again, maybe 100 years from now, they're still here, and that's still a major business model.

Maybe they're not. Maybe that's not the business model going forward. Maybe.

Maybe mainframes are dead. Maybe. But let's think about it this way, and maybe this is a little far out there, I'll throw it to John, but maybe the fact that we don't own our data is the root of all IT evil to begin with.

Yes. And the issue here is we have so many versions of our data. It's supposed to be our data, by the way.

But to Chris's point, the minute you enter it into somebody else's application, it's no longer yours. And maybe that's fundamentally what's wrong with IT. I don't know.

John, is there a future here where we just take back control of the data? Yeah, I think that should be more of an issue than the data centers, right? It all boils down to this, our data privacy, our data security, we seem to have no control.

I remember we've talked about this over time, where I think, Mike, you were saying that you would drive by something or you would interact with something, and then you would get some sort of cryptic message that would appeal to your algorithm, which was eerily accurate. I'm getting that increasingly more so than ever. And I think that's the one thing that I think the public resonates.

That's the biggest issue I think they've always had, and it's aimed squarely at companies like Facebook, where we've ironically volunteer our information. But this idea that we have no control over the data we have, that we're constantly under surveillance. That we are just basically pawns that are being used to be monetized by big tech companies.

So when I think about initiatives, I'm not usually a big proponent of initiatives, but I find this one interesting and in a sense it's this noble effort at least, or maybe noble end goal, I'm hoping. I'm hoping it is. Because at this point, we seem to have no control over our lives.

We're watched not only by camera, but we're watched I think almost ethereally by everything we do, every app we use. You still won't have control, John. What's that?

You still won't have control. They'll just share your data with, it won't just be Facebook. Yeah, I know.

When you mentioned that about the... Yes, I know. I'm trying to be optimistic for a change, but this is not working.

Obviously it's not working. Optimistic. I'm being naive about it, but I'm being trying to be hopeful, but you're right.

It just keeps compounding itself where you're almost a slave to... You are the product, right? I will be the optimist in the room and just say you're both wrong, right?

I understand where you're coming from, but this is a 64 gig stick. This is a 256 gig. These are capable of, for the average person, human being, this is fine.

You have all of your information, everything you care about is on this, and you can build systems that start from there now, for a company that, right? We're not talking about the old days. I see a lot of brittle structures, technical structures, financial structures, and back to your point, if you are a company that has to exist by using these inefficient, brittle structures, I think your future is not as rosy as people and systems and countries and cultures and economic systems that don't base themselves on that.

I hope you're right. I genuinely hope you're right, Chris, and I think you might be, but I don't know. I think it's an interesting possibility in this regard.

If we are having political conversations about AI and data centers today, chances are good we're going to have a conversation about data and data ownership next, because there's more people who are starting to be aware of what this whole thing is. But Mike, wait a minute. We've been having this discussion for years.

I know we in the geeky world has, but I don't think the average person has, and I don't think- Well, yeah. It is entering more of the mainstream. For years, for decades, for a century, Americans for the most part have absolutely no interest, or they just have a fear of technologies that comes along, and then they eventually learn to coexist with it.

But I think there's this data debate, which has been going on forever, as you said, Jack. " But John, if I can interrupt, you know why that's changing? Because people now understand that there's so much data about them out there that the spammers can come in- But they see it every day, right?

They see it constantly ... Right. They steal your identity, open your bank account.

That's what's changing the conversation. All right. Okay.

And standardizing the data doesn't help that. All right. " Hey, guys, thanks for being on the show.

Or give me my data, Mike. That's pretty cryptic. Guys, thanks for being on the show and sharing your insights.

Everybody, thanks for watching today's episode. Please stay tuned for the rest of the replay of the TheTechStrongTV lineup. And we have a little also a word from one of our upcoming events coming after the show.

So with that, it's only Monday. Who knows what the rest of the week is going to bring. We'll see you all tomorrow.