AI Power Grid Strain Sparks Bans and Pollution Fears

Hey everyone, happy Wednesday. You're watching Techstrong Gang. I hope you're watching Techstrong Gang.

Otherwise, you're on the wrong plane. Speaking of planes, though, my friends from DEF CON seem to have set up a Wi-Fi network on one of the planes home. Oh, man.

Go figure. What could be next? AI agents joining the Mile High Club.

Oh, no. I have an article about that out there, but we're not going to talk about that now. We've got so much more to talk about.

Let me introduce you to our gang for today. We've got the lady behind the picture in front of the brick wall, Terri Robinson. My favorite Aussie in Boulder, Andi Mann.

Our man on the West Coast, Jon Swartz. And of course, the redoubtable, redoubtable, redupitable, I don't know, he's Mike Vizard. He's up in Westchester.

Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm well, how are you? Good.

Gang, everybody here ready to rock? We are. Born for it.

Okay. Another interesting day in the news. You know talk is cheap.

They always say that, right? There was a lot of talk around doing right by the climate, and that seems to have fallen by the wayside in the wake of the AI data center tsunami. Mike, it's all kinds of stuff, though.

You got Elon- Well, yeah ... and all, it's crazy. Well, there's a lot of talk.

And the numbers being tossed around are not cheap, but to your point, I'll believe it when I see it. But it's interesting because shortly after Amazon gets dinged for creating one of what's allegedly going to be the most polluting of all data centers, even more so than the one that Musk built, Musk is out talking about how, well, he's going to build an environmentally friendly AI data center. Oh, my.

And this data center will be off the grid. It won't use the local power. It will have better water supplies.

It better be off the grid down there, because their grid can't handle a whole bunch. Yeah. Right.

That doesn't make it not polluting. But Mike, we digress. Finish your thought.

We do. We digress. So John, you wrote the first story on this.

Alan has a whole report that he put together on this whole data center green issue. It's clearly in the political landscape because it was part of these primary debates that's going on. So we are seeing the environment becoming a front and center issue, and it's part of all these protests, but what's your assessment here?

What's real and what's not? So, I think, was it Alan you talked about talk is cheap? And you're totally right.

So there's a stark contrast between corporate climate commitments. Remember when we kept hearing from all these companies about reducing their carbon footprints? Now- Carbon neutral ...

we got these im-- Yeah. And now we have these immediate compute needs. So they're clashing, and guess which one is winning?

The one that involves the financial upside. So as you mentioned, there are these two projects that we highlighted. I think James Maguire did the other story on Amazon.

8 billion terafab near Houston that SpaceX and Tesla are behind. It's designed for self-sustained energy, while Amazon's facility, which is also in Texas, relies on a dedicated 35-turbine natural gas plant. First, just really quickly about Musk's project, they are talking about an initial roughly $17 billion in capital investments.

But if you look at the state tax incentive filings, this thing's going to cost closer to $120 billion when all is said and done. At the same time, as Mike mentioned, we have the Amazon Texas facility, which is probably going to become the single largest point of greenhouse gas pollution in the US. So in a sense, these hyperscalers are bypassing public utilities through this behind-the-meter power, and they're reigniting fossil fuel dependencies, which in a sense is creating this widening rift between tech expansion and local communities.

And we're seeing this regulatory backlash. And I guess to boil it down, the inability of municipal and state regulators to adapt quickly enough has triggered this grassroots pushback that we're seeing in a number of campaigns. We have more than 500 local bans and moratoriums on new data center developments nationwide, and this thing is just going to continue to grow in terms of controversy.

And I'm going to go back to what Mike said, that I do have a high degree of skepticism about the scale of some of these facilities. And I just look at what's happened recently with Oracle and their problems, and they are scaling back Stargate a bit. And I don't believe these projects are going to be as big as announced, but nonetheless, they're going to create a ton of problems in terms of energy costs, environmental impact, et cetera.

So to your point, even Republicans are starting to push back on that. But there's also an article that was floating around, I think it was in "The Times," that said the president and the Trump administration, as far as AI is concerned, is tone deaf. And it's basically saying the benefits will outweigh any of the costs.

Yeah. Yeah. He sees, I'll be really quick.

Sorry, Terri. That's okay. I'll be quick here.

Trump, and I'm going to go back to the book "Regime Change," which I think is an excellent book, especially its look at tech executives and how they deal with Trump and how he looks at them. He's been convinced by them that this is his manufacturing boom that didn't happen in his first term. " And in the case of the Tesla-SpaceX project, initially you're talking about 3,000 high-paying jobs, which of course will all go away once this thing is constructed in whatever final form it has.

But for Trump, again, he only looks at the bottom line, looks at construction. He doesn't really care about the impact around it. Just look at the White House, with all those projects.

They've desecrated those grounds, and it's always about the ultimate goal of building something and helping- With his name on it With his name on it. Yeah. Or that's a- It's bad enough I lost an airport down here.

Right. But Alan, it gets better. The Washington Post is also carrying a report saying that the people who are building these data centers are wooing the regulators and telling them all kinds of interesting things during fancy dinners and little trips to- So Mike, I have yet another special report.

I actually have a three-part- I saw, you're a three-part. It's a three-part report I have a three-part report on follow the money behind these data center lobbying efforts. Mm-hmm.

And I actually have a number of freedom of information requests outstanding. They're sending me stuff from Louisiana and West Virginia, where it's more than buying dinners. Mike, they're buying the local zoning commissions and everything else.

People don't know till they wake up and the forest next to them is felled, or they start seeing concrete trucks showing up and pouring. Here's the thing. Number one, the Musk Terafab is not your average AI data center factory.

This is a vertically integrated kind of thing that you would see in Korea with Hyundai or something. Mm-hmm. Where Musk wants to build chips.

He's going to start building a fab for terrestrial and extraterrestrial chips. Right? Mm-hmm.

Where this whole fallacy, John, and you hit it, because they moved it off grid doesn't mean it's not polluting. It just means it's not taxing our grid that residents and other people use. But in many ways, it then allows them to escape.

Well, we've already gutted the Clean Air Act, so who gives a crap? But it allows them to escape local regulation because they're not on the grid. They can do whatever the heck they want.

And so, John, that Terafab is not a clean energy facility. No, not at all. It's also gas turbine.

And they're taking water from the local reservoir rather than the aquifer, the groundwater. But they're still taking water from the reservoir. That's the people's water.

Look, we are coming to a reckoning in this country, whether these AI data centers are going to roll over most of the-- And most of this happens in rural areas, let's face it, right? Where they're desperate. They're desperate for jobs, they're desperate for industry.

And there are some good points, right? The Richland Parish, Louisiana, teachers there got up to a $50,000 one-time pop bonus from the money Meta paid for the Hyperion data center. So they're good things that can happen, but on the most part, if you don't win in the court of public opinion, you lose the case.

And these people are losing the case. And I'll say it, I said it earlier on, I think it was yesterday or the day before show. This is part of this $8 trillion build-out.

If we figure out how to run AI on your phone, how to run AI locally at your house, we don't need $8 trillion in data centers to do this. And this is the dot-com fiber optics all over again. It's the railroads all over again, right?

Where they all went bankrupt within 25 years because it's not the grid that makes the lasting money, and that's the theme of my book. Well, Alan, I want to pull you in here. Is there an opportunity to maybe create something that feels like an observability framework for all this AI construction and data center, and stuff that we can monitor this stuff with?

Because I think to Alan's point, a lot of this is happening in a smoke-filled room somewhere in the middle of the night. Yeah, look, absolutely. And this is just so, I don't know, corrupt.

It's just corrupt. Don't forget that this is coming from an administration where, led by a functionally mob-style real estate developer, right? Mm-hmm.

And real estate, by the way, is one of the OG paths to corruption and bribery. You look at some of the real estate deals on the other side of the ledger, if you want, looking at prosecuting people for mortgage fraud, whether real or imagined. This whole idea that real estate is this fungible thing, and you can just put any value on it, and all of a sudden, that's a really strong vehicle for corruption.

So yeah, look, there are ways we can show light on this. Now, they say light is the best sterilizer. Put light on this.

Make this observable, if you will. Show who's getting paid, when, and why. Alan, I can't wait to read your book, your article, your series.

Because look, this is a fight for AI supremacy, and I get it, and we're trying to beat China, and I get that. But we could do it with clean energy. China just floated the world's largest solar farm just off the ocean, right?

We could power this in a different way. I think we need to have transparency into water usage, power usage. By the way, another thing that not a lot of people are talking about, but certainly these local organizations are bringing up a lot, is noise pollution.

Yes The constant... Look, I've worked in data centers for 20 or 30 years, and I just have a constant hum in the back of my head because of the decibel- But Andy, that's the computers. The real noise pollution here are the 35 gas turbines that are running 24/7.

Andy, I'm not sure that hum is because of data centers in your head. It could be something else. Wasn't there a song about a hum?

I hear a hum. " Yeah. " I don't know.

So, it's so- I think it might be a line from "Comfortably Numb," but yeah. Could be that, too. So interesting.

But I do think there's opportunity for us to have a better regulatory environment that shows, just exposes the usage, the power, the heat, the cooling, the water, the noise, and makes these things clear. And makes clear things like who owns the property that's being developed. There's been some cases, I think, in Louisiana, where the local politicians have bought up land mysteriously and then, oh, goodness me, three months later, sold it for millions of dollars to AI data centers.

Look, there's so much corruption. It's the Louisiana way. That's the Louisiana way.

This is nothing new. They do stuff like this all the time. And yes, and I have friends down there who are planners.

" I think those teachers in Richland Parish, I hope they banked that money that they got because they're going to live in an area that's going to be forever altered. It's already a poor area. That parish is very poor.

And if you drive through, it's a cute little town there, but it's just Rayville- No, look, when Cotton was king was the last time that place saw- 100%. If anybody- What students are they going to have to teach when everybody moves away? Well, that's the problem, is most of the people move out of there, and they don't.

They have to. So they have to, because of the pollution, because of the noise. Temporarily, the cost of living goes up there while all this stuff is going on.

It's ridiculous. But here's the thing, especially in Louisiana, Terry, the people and officials of Richland Parish, they woke up, and the deal was done. That deal was done at the state level.

This was right out of the Huey Long, Kingfish days. No, I know. And Jeff Landry and that whole crowd.

They signed and they made... Jeff Landry and them made all of the people involved sign NDAs that they're not allowed to talk about the deal. That's right.

That's right. No, I mean, he's- What a corruption with a capital C. So even people down there who voted for Trump, right, and who are considered kind of Trump- Which are most of the people down there Sure, a lot of the people down there.

They think Landry is off the charts corrupt. It's a very interesting thing, but yet he gets by with all this. And then it doesn't hurt the Republican cause or whatever, or this cause, that Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House because- Yes ...

he's a- Well, no, this one, this Richland... Look, in my book, in "The Inevitability Trap," I actually have this all written up. It was Mike Johnson and Congress that enabled this whole thing.

Right. Right? The corruption here is, and I use the word corruption, the influence peddling here- Yeah ...

and the influence buying here is off the charts- Yes ... at the federal level, the state level, and the local level. Yeah.

No, it's crazy. And again, not surprised with Louisiana because this is what has happened- No, but it's West Virginia, too. Another poor state.

There's a guy that lives near us. I hope I don't get him in trouble, but he's working with Google on data centers, and it's everywhere. He's talking about north of Denton, Texas, Israel, the Bay Area.

It's going to be a problem everywhere. Yeah. It's $8 trillion, gentlemen and lady.

$8 trillion worth of build-outs. Everybody wants a piece of that pie, but they're not going to get the piece that they think they are. I mean, the politicians, sure.

When AI doesn't need to run in that AI factory, that's a lot of expensive closet space. It is, and then the land's ruined. You don't get that land anymore.

You don't get it back. So when these data center folks show up with the local meetings, and they start handing out cash to teachers, and they start paying electric bills, and they start just throwing cash at this problem and wooing people with money, at some point, do those people just roll over, and they'll get what they want? Yeah.

Of course. Well, but I'll give you another example. Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania used to be oil country, but parts of farms there that aren't on oil country.

This farmer sold his $200,000 farm for $22 million because they're building a data center. The poor schnook farmer next door to him didn't want to sell because that farm's been in his family for five generations, so guess what? He lives next door to 18 gas turbines now powering a data center, and who the hell wants to buy his farm unless it's to build another data center?

Right? So you're creating a winners and losers here. Of the teachers in Richland, yeah, they got a one-time pop.

Right. But the jobs it created, you could fit in the diner in the little one-horse town there. Right.

So my friend who's a planner, I told him all this too. And he's smart. " Those jobs are not going to be a ton of jobs for a really long time.

These are jobs while these things are being built, and then there are going to be very few jobs in the data center. You're still going to have a poor community around it that doesn't have a lot of opportunity. Well, because they also got an 85% tax rebate.

Right. But let me tell you one thing. You talk about these people, yeah, and some of them have their price and they'll sell their land or they'll do whatever, or they're keen on this, but there's a huge, I call it huge by Louisiana standards, uprising among people on the right and the left against these things too.

Oh, no, there's a grassroots, and it's not just Louisiana. No. The people in Louisiana are not different than other states.

John, you said 500 separate- At least more than 500. I'm going to give us a pat on the back because we've been talking about this for months. Yeah.

We predicted this was going to happen. Yeah. We could see this coming.

Right here on The Gang- Exactly ... where some of the smartest people gather. You heard it here first.

But Mike, we're almost 20 minutes in here. We've got to hop. I just want to see, ultimately, there's a meter on the side of my house, monitors how much electricity we consume.

I just want a meter for AI. I don't see what's so hard. Yep.

It's observability. It's all just observability. It's going to be going off the meter.

Well, let's shift gears here because we are talking about, well, there's other types of AI models in the world, and everything is not around these LLMs, and there's this notion of a thing called a world model, which is starting to gain some traction out there, and Alan has a report out about this topic, and I think also LTC put out a new version of their world model that's a lot cheaper to run, and runs faster, and nothing you wouldn't expect at the end of the day. But it was interesting that they reported that their model's been downloaded 33 million times, so I think something's starting to happen here, Alan. What's going on from your perspective, and is there a new animal in the AI zoo?

It's not really new. ai. Here's the deal, though.

You look at Agentic. Agentic is based on generative AI. It's using a generative AI kind of LLM, large language model.

There are some things it gets and it does really well, and there are some things it doesn't. The classic example, ask an LLM, "I need to put gas in my car. The gas station's only a quarter of a mile away.

" Well, that's great, but I can't put the gas in my car. So it doesn't really know the real world. Mm-hmm.

It's just figuring out these things. A lot of people who are a lot smarter than me when it comes to AI say that if we're ever going to get beyond that, if we're ever going to achieve AGI, artificial general intelligence. AGI or even superintelligence, and they define that as AGI is smarter or as smart as a human, roughly equivalent.

Superintelligence is many times, 50,000 PhDs worth of smart, many times smarter than a human. If we're ever going to reach those levels, we need a different model. Literally, a different model.

And so the world models are based on real-world observation. Back to that word again, Andy. Sure.

Observability. Real-world observability. So when my glasses fall down, I could give you Newtonian physics on gravity on why it falls down, but I can anticipate it falling down when I see it leaving my hand.

That's what a world model does. And so in order to train these world models though, you need that kind of data. You need manufacturing data.

Our friends in China keep all their manufacturing data. They're using it. It's really excellent, a perfect fit for robotics.

Physical AI, as we call it. Because when a robot picks up a glass cup, it has to realize, "Well, that's a glass cup. I don't want to press it too hard.

" Generative AI doesn't necessarily go through that repertoire. It's just a glass cup. It grabs it.

How hard it grabs it is not in the equation. These are the kinds of things where they think world models take us to that next level, get us to AGI, get us to robots that actually can do very delicate and fine-tune work. There's a lot of money pouring into it.

One of the fathers of AI, Le Gong, I forget his name now. There's three or four companies that are really leading the charge here on these world models, and I think it was maybe $6 or $7 billion worth of money has been raised into them, which is, look, a mere pittance. You could buy a small corner in Elon's TerraFab for that.

But still it used to be that $6, $7 billion was a nice piece of change, and the question is- Does this get us the next leap? Do we need huge AI data centers to run world models? Do they run on the robot?

And if they run on the robot and all of that, what the hell are we spending the $8 trillion on? Uh-huh. All of the above.

I think your point about AI, and Andy and I are way old, so we can maybe reference this, but Andy, when we were young, it was all about bringing the compute to the data, and world model is about bringing the AI model to the data where the interactions are in real time. There you go. And so is this where we're going with this stuff?

Well, it's always been the accordion, hasn't it? It's like central computing, distributed computing, central computing, desktop computing, central computing, web computing, central AI, distributed AI. Look, it's the hype cycle.

And the hype cycle in AI, by the way, I think is following Moore's law. It's just every 18 months, the hype gets bigger. Mm-hmm.

But you're right, Alan, this is longstanding technology in some ways. The idea of digital twins, we've been working on for a long, long time. Sure.

And the idea that we can bring... I'm excited for manual workers to get shafted the same way that knowledge workers are getting shafted. We're replacing knowledge workers with bots.

Honestly, we've been replacing manual workers with bots for the longest time anyway. And if you could do it, they would've already done it. This is an extension of automation.

It's going to drive productivity and functionality, but it's again, we're driving an economic imbalance into another sector of our economy. That's something that worries me a lot about this model. But I just think it's going to take a lot longer than people expect.

I think this is Amara's law writ large. We're going to expect this to take over everything next week, and it will take over a lot, but not next week. So yeah, look- Mm-hmm ...

I have problems with the whole thing, but I think we're just going to deal with it. It's good work. We'll see where it takes us.

But let me connect the dot for you to that previous A block. So those construction jobs that you're talking about for data centers in all those towns, well, isn't there going to be a robot running some type of AI- Yeah ... world model that's going to go build those data centers in the future?

So what are those jobs? Sure. Or is it just a waste of time?

The human people get to build them first and then those- Just an intermediary step. But let me go one better. It's easier to put a robot in space than a person.

Mm-hmm. And if we're going to build stuff in space, like hear Elon says, it's going to be his robots. This TerraFab, that's the extraterrestrial chips is for the space-based data centers, and the other half of it is for inference for his Tesla robots.

The thing about that TerraFab is it's a joint venture between SpaceX and Tesla. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tesla made the announcement and you start with Tesla. We are thinking about what this, what, a spatial intelligence? I think you mentioned physical AI, but also autonomous vehicles- Yes ...

real world industrial automation. It's going to change all that because it's shifting the training target from what comes next to how the environment changes with an actual- Well, John, a self-driving vehicle is just another robot, my friend. Yeah.

Yep. And I just don't understand where the oligarchs think the consumer demand's going to come from. Right now I'm building into my product a whole bunch of headless functions.

So AI talking to AI. There's no user interface for it because there's no user for it. The user for the function is another AI.

So if we've got AI and bots building data centers to run the AI for the AI to talk to the AI, who's paying for this? Where's the consumption point? This reminds me of an old Star Trek, the carbon-based life forms- Mm-hmm ...

are useless. Eliminate them, V'Ger. Right.

That was a good one, V'Ger. But that is true, Andy. That's okay.

We're going to make up for it with all these new jobs we create through AI. Yeah, all the jobs it's going to create. Right.

There you go. But that's not a reason. That's not going to stop progress, guys.

Sure. Never does. Universal basic income for everybody.

Hey. I think we're going to have to go in that direction if all this comes true. Well, yeah, and then we'll invent the warp drive, go off into the solar system just when the Vulcans come by.

And then they can come back and live long and prosper. Wait. So universal basic income, AKA socialism, sounds pretty good all of a sudden.

What's going on here? Just look at- In light of... Yeah ...

New York. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm not going to touch that one. I just want to tell you the communists on my block- I was going to say, isn't socialism the same thing as communism? No.

Well, so the communist bookstore, which is lovely, they have great books on Harlem and whatever, and nice old people. They're older than me. They're mad that everybody's confusing communism with socialism.

With socialism. They've got their posters up all over this neighborhood. Got it.

And they're holding all sorts of stuff. It's very funny to see. So anyway.

Crazy. Just crazy. Mike, we're about ready to top for our third segment, though.

What do you got up your sleeve? Third segment here is an article that Terry wrote on Security Boulevard, and I suggest you all check it out, but it involves Huntress and a couple other folks. But it's a public-private effort to combat cyber criminals.

And we've been kind of poking at this for years now, but here's an actual example where the government, in collaboration with private industry, went on the offensive to go take out a bunch of cyber criminals by tracing them back to their source and then planting some code that kind of messed with their systems, and it was the kind of new approach to takedown. Terry, have we crossed some sort of Rubicon here? Oh, I'd like to think so, but I think it might be a one-off, Mike.

I'm a big fan of public-private collaboration, and I've been so concerned about it with CISA being decimated and all these intelligence people getting knocked out of government. It's been very difficult to see how you could have, yes, in one-offs, meaningful relationships and collaborations. But in this one, y'all remember Silk Typhoon, I'm sure, from 2021, and its hit on Microsoft Exchange.

So, the Huntress and the FBI worked together on this. Now, this was a while back, but they haven't been able to talk about it until now, and they're doing a series of podcasts that sort of explain all the intricacies of Silk Typhoon, but also of what they did. And, so anyway, they've been out now publicly talking about it, and it is supposedly the first time that the FBI and a private firm have used Rule 41.

So they used the back doors of the attackers themselves against them, and they pushed a patch directly to the victims, which was also sort of unique to just automatically push that patch out. They didn't just leave them hanging out there. And, so it's great and it's uplifting and it's a little hopeful.

And all the security people that I talked to were keen on it. " So it all needs to sort of come together. You need to have that kind of visibility for this relationship to work and be fruitful.

You think that this is a one-off, though, and this is not a harbinger of things to come. Why is that? Why do I think it's a one-off?

I'm a pessimist these days- ... when it comes to public-private. No, and you know what?

I'd like to think that this is the start of sort of the way we should be doing things. It really did seem to work this time, and without a lot of egos involved as well, that put the kibosh on it. So, I would like to think that this could be used as an example, and the FBI is using it as a template.

They've already- Yep. Go ahead. I was going to say, I had a conversation yesterday with an executive, not in the cyber industry, but in the tech industry.

We were talking about what I wrote about Black Hat, about how just over the top it was this year, in terms of who yells the loudest, who has the brightest lights, who makes the most noise, all selling the same three agentic solutions. God, was it noisy. Yeah.

And, so he said, "Well, but who's the bad guys? " What has changed fundamentally that makes this so much harder? Well, the obvious one is that all the bad guys use AI.

But when you look at who the so-called bad guys here is, I break it down into three groups. One is the same bad guys we've had for a long time, the financial people, the people doing this for financial gain. They make money.

It's very lucrative being a hacker, robbing old ladies of their credit cards and savings and so forth. Savings, yep. And that's not going away.

And they're well-organized, they're smart, they like to try new things. They push the limits, and I don't know how much we're going to make hay against them. Then you have the hacktivists, the terrorists.

They don't care how much money is made or lost in these things. They want to be heard. They want to make a statement.

And again, if someone's willing to strap grenades to themselves and blow themselves up in the square, not much we could do. Mm-hmm. Then there's the nation state, and that's what we have here with Silk Typhoon, right?

Right. And some of these others. And it's a great public-private partnership because it gives China plausible deniability to say, "We didn't know they were here.

" Russia's been playing that game for 30 years. So did a lot of Eastern Europe back in the day. But they wink-wink and allow these groups to exist, and in the case of North Korea, they actually share in the proceeds.

Mm-hmm. The only way you're going to defeat or combat that level is with the same public-private partnership You can't expect the federal government to do that itself. Federal government can't do it.

Private sector can't do it alone. It's got to be those two. And now the FBI is using this as a template for its Operation Riptide campaign.

Yep. So, you know. But technically, inserting code into a server that resides in another country is viewed, at least by foreign policy people, as an act of war.

Exactly. And the reason we've never been doing this up until now is that there is this concern that this is going to become something more than this. I think it's already on.

I don't think our government worries about- We don't have any rockets left. Yeah. Yeah.

We're done. We're out of munitions. We shot our load.

That's it. It's done. And I don't think we've ever really treated cyber terrorism as terrorism.

We haven't treated cyber war as war. I actually agree with you, Mike. And by the way, I actually love this article, Terry.

I think this was brilliant. The interviews were awesome. One of the ones that stood out to me is you interviewed the chief strategy officer at Merlin Group, and he talks about this is not just the technical success, but the evolution of the public-private operating model.

I love that quote, but I also think it's fundamentally wrong. I think that the beauty of this is absolutely the technical side. The idea that you can use an attacker's own backdoor to patch the intrusion, I love that.

I love the public-private partnership, by the way, as well. I love this. This is openness.

This is data sharing. I love that this is a functional cybersecurity defense from our federal government. Yeah.

We've been talking about the corruption in CISA and the problems in federal government around election security and other security things, and cybersecurity models, and the executive orders. This is an example of where we're doing it right. I'm actually super on board with this.

Well, right. Well- John So, Terry, like you, I am a natural pessimist, but after I read this, I actually was quite optimistic. Yeah.

I think this is a shift from reactive incident response to this proactive partnership. So- Yeah. And it also started in the Biden administration, so.

Yeah. So, I just give it that little cold water. I would point out two things.

One is the bad guys will get smarter about their infrastructure, and they'll start using things like blockchain. Right. It won't be so easy to take out their systems as much as it has been or should've been.

I think we could've done this for many years but didn't. But even now, they'll be putting stuff in place like blockchain, and it'll be harder to trace where the original source of that attack is from, anyway. But John, I want to explore this other concept with you because we already have the war on terror.

So, stealing grandma's life savings is an act of terrorism. So why don't we just expand the war on terror to include this stuff? Yeah, why not?

Yeah. Exactly. I'm all for it.

Well- Why are we trying to be... God, I hope I don't go down the bad path here. But I think of the Republicans and the Democrats.

One side doesn't play fair, the other side bends over backwards to be fair. It's like this is warfare. Look at that.

Well, but let me- Wait ... let me be the contrarian. I want to just point out for a second there that Jon Swartz is a neo-con, okay?

John, well, that's the one. Wasn't he in the W administration? Wow.

No. You're the first person who ever called him on that, Andy. But hold on a second.

Stealing grandma's money as a garden variety economic crime is not terrorism. I think we got to be careful. You know what?

If there's an attack against a particular minority, we race to call it a hate crime. If it's an attack against maybe an interest of ours, we race to call it a terrorist incident. That cheapens what a terrorist incident is, and we shouldn't lose sight of what terrorism, they do things that inflict terror on a population or a perceived enemy.

Right? Yeah. Wait.

Not just to steal money. Grandma's life savings were stolen, and she's- Yeah, but every bank robber is not a terrorist. There's definitely- No, maybe we just have to change how we handle crime.

So maybe it's not classified as terrorism, but maybe there's some other way that we- Right. But we do. We have special criminal statutes for terrorist activity.

Mm-hmm. And so we got to be careful about not classifying things that aren't terrorism as terrorism. I agree with that because everything becomes terrorism when it's so- If everything's terrorism, nothing's terrorism.

Yeah. That's right. And when it's something you're against, it's suddenly terrorism.

And I don't like it used as a- Well, that's the old saying. " Right. W.

Bush, right? But either way, if you create a special classification here, you are going to have the same issues you have with the war on terror, right? So now we're going to have special rules, special court- Yeah ...

and all kinds of things are going to get set up and you can say goodbye. We're going to compromise ourself by cutting corners. I probably overstated my point earlier, but yeah.

But can I just... Go ahead, Andy. Yeah, I just note that there are hacking incidents which are absolutely terrorism.

Jason, asymmetrical warfare right now, we're seeing potentially Iran, we don't know, keeps hacking into water supplies, right? Oh, I thought that was in Moscow. Right?

And causing problems like that. How do you then address a nation-state private-public partnership hacking into infrastructure in order to cause you- That's not terrorism, that's cyber warfare ... problems?

Okay. That's not terrorism, that's cyber warfare. Because let me turn it around on you.

Was Stuxnet terrorism, or was it just cyber warfare? Well, that was nation-state cyber warfare. No, because they were on your side, it was okay.

Right? Well, more because it was solely government actors doing that- It was ... in my mind.

It wasn't this public-private, this unholy- But if you ask Iran... Well, no, there was a public-private piece to Stuxnet. But if you ask Iran, they'll tell you it was terrorism.

Mm-hmm. And that's what I'm saying. Right.

Mike? And when they lost control of Stuxnet, and it spread everywhere, well, that too is a form of cyber... Is that collateral damage from cyber warfare, or is that- I get to use one of my favorite terms, blast radius.

Uh-huh. It was blast radius. But this is a problem.

But guys, we're running out of time. What a great discussion today. Great gang, great group.

Yeah. No one's shy about putting their two words in, 2 cents in here, so what a great discussion. John's going to be running for Congress in Utah soon, so.

In Utah? In Utah? Get on commitments to get behind you.

My stealth campaign. Yeah. Anyway.

Anti-data centers and anti-war. Hey, we will be back tomorrow with another Techstrong gang. Well, different gang line up, but similar discussions.

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