Exploring AI Agents and Energy Choices

Hey, everyone, do I have an AI agent for you? You're watching Techstar gang. Happy Tuesday, everyone in Talent.

Shimmel for Tech Strung gang. Glad to have you on. You know, we, we've got a lot to cover today, starting off with some agentic AI information.

I'm starting to feel like I, I remember those people in downtown New York when I first started in tech and I what we called Silicon Alley. There were guys there literally with the, with the coats. And when you'd walk by, they'd open their coat, do you wanna watch?

And they had all these watches, right? You could buy, of course, they were real Rolexes. And, um, it's kind of be the same thing with the Agentic ai.

Hey, you want an, you want an AI agent? I got one for you. But, um, we're gonna dive into that and more with our outstanding gang today.

Let me introduce you to them. First of all, she, I, I, from the background, I'm going to guess she's home in, in Colorado, analyst extraordinaire, Kimberly Bates. Hey Cam, how are you?

I'm doing great, thanks for Oh, on, uh, next couple weeks I'll probably be back on East Coast, so there you go. Really? Oh, we're looking forward to that.

There might be a, maybe there's a Boca trip in your future. Um, but thanks for joining us. Moving to the East Coast, the east coast of Florida, that is in the Space Coast Orlando area.

He is a data ai, uh, IT expert and a long career in it. Uh, my friend JP Morganthal. Hey, jp, how are you?

Good. And good. I wanna say good morning, because that's when we're recording, but whoever this could be seen at any time, so hope I'm doing well, and thanks for having me.

All Right. Good day. Does that some kind of power grid background there?

Uh, I, well, I, I had the data center background and, you know, it just looked like you're, and I, and I'm like, that's not me. We wanted to get something more neural networky. This is kind of, this is what chat chit came up with when I asked it for a background for this.

Alright. Hey, I appreciate the, uh, honesty. Very cool.

Alright, moving along to Hudson, Ohio, the man from Hudson, uh, founder of Tech Field Day, my friend Steven Foskett. Hey, Steven, It is nice to be here once again. And, uh, by the way, Kimberly, if you, I do recommend taking him up on the offer of a Boca trip.

Well, to truth be told, my husband's gonna be down there and I was saying, Hey, could I just get a Bogart on your hotel room? And he said, no, he's with his brother down there. So he said it was an absolute, it wasn't even a, he wasn't even a question mark, he said, no.

Well, hotel rooms are cheap here because it is harder than hell. Mm-hmm. And, and we have good corporate rates talk.

We'll talk. Mm-hmm. Steven, is that a chat?

GPT generated background for you as well? Yes. I said, uh, generate something that looks boring and brown.

Good for you. It's Actually a piece of paper. Here we go.

Bonk. All right. Um, all right.

Moving from Hudson to Harrisons, but staying in the hs. I guess he's a little, there's no joy in Harrison after the Yankees struck out this weekend, but he's our chief content officer, Mike Ard. That is true.

And as soon as I get off this call, I'm hopping in the car and driving to Philadelphia for AWS Inforce Philly. Very nice. Very nice.

Say hello to all our friends in Philly. Um, alright. Oh, you forgot me again.

I didn't forget you. I was just gonna say, sitting here in, in our studio with me, it's hard to forget. We're only two people on the same screen here.

Yes. Um, she is our Echo Insights analyst and advisor and editor Bonnie Schneider. Hey, Bonnie, how are you?

I'm great. Thanks for having me. Good.

Um, it's good to have you here. Okay, cool. Go forward.

Yes, let's go forward now. Um, so Mike, I I opened things up with yet another agentic ai make it easy to do more AI agent story. Yeah.

So as the song says, there's something happening here, and last week Databricks was talking about how they're gonna make it simpler to create these AI agents. And part of that issue is they have a large pool of data already that enterprises are also using. At the same time, century's also talking about a Lego like approach to creating AI agents and stringing them all together.

And what seems to me, at least both these things have in common is they're very enterprise centered approaches to building out AI agents. And they're not dependent upon, you know, outside of the LLMs, but they're not looking towards all these startups to do that. They're kind of looking into their traditional vendors.

Jp I know you follow this face, but is it me or is it gonna be like really simple to create the next AI agent? Well, you know, I was trying to create the picture, uh, from a macro perspective looking at, uh, Accenture dis distill AI distillery and, and the announcements from Databricks kind of in the same context. And, um, you know, they're, they're really a yes at trying to approach the same audience with the same set of, uh, capabilities.

Uh, Databricks though is a product company and in a natural extension of what they do is to help customers leverage the existing investment in their tools and technologies. And then, and, and the, you know, the natural next step is to take that data which is housed in their products and make it available for ai. That to me is a very intuitive step.

It, it would be surprising if they weren't, you know, providing these tools. I think they're in demand. Whereas Accenture, I tried to look into more of this distillery, uh, and refinery concept and, you know, you get to, you know, whereas everybody else is putting out a ton of, go to my GitHub download this, here's the free entry, the free tier.

You go to Accenture. It's like, call us. So, uh, I I, you know, the more I, the, as much as I looked into it, I couldn't help but feel like Accenture is, uh, as many system integrators.

They're not alone in this. They're in a, you know, precarious spot. I think AI is affecting their business, or the belief in AI is affecting their business.

I think they're trying to do everything in their power to pivot and be, uh, you know, to have relevance in this AI world. But I think they're gonna have to, uh, step up and be more of the traditional AI community if they want that. The call me to find out more is not gonna play when you have, you know, the likes of small startups and all the model creators putting out a ton of similar type projects that you can just download either from hugging face or GitHub.

And, uh, so, you know, I, it it's a traditional old world that Accenture, I own it. 0. Um, but as far as the getting people on board, you know, that are not looking at Accenture, you know, I see it as a leap right now for them to get there.

And, and to be relevant, Alan is JP onto something because historically we needed all these consultants to kind of provide the knowledge, where shall we call it, to leverage all the IT technologies. But if I look at these AI agents, it seems like so long as I understand my business processes, I may not need to engage with a consultant so deeply to go build something interesting. You're always gonna need a consultant, Mike.

But honestly, here, here, here's the situation. I think there's a bigger issue. Jp you touched on it around this AI stuff.

Ultimately, is AI going be the, the domain of giants of the, of the big four, the Accentures, the PWCs, et cetera, of, of the Mag seven, Google, Amazon Meta, Microsoft Open ai, I guess is part of that royalty as it re re regards ai? Or is there room for new growth forest for a bunch of saplings to come up in here? Is there a place for companies that are gonna make easy, easy to distill, easy to deploy agents that are going to do a lot of the grunt work, if you will, that Accenture does for companies, or, you know, a lot of these bigger, uh, uh, you know, consulting companies do?

Because make no mistake, AI agents can really, I mean, you know, digital workers as we're calling them, a lot of, you know, a lot of the businesses of the Accentures and the PWCs, and quite frankly the Beltway mandates as well is body shop business, right? They're putting people in butts, in seats for, for, for the government, for enterprises and charging for it. And a lot of that work could be done by digital workers.

So my experience though, tells me, and much like JP says is, look, you're never gonna eliminate these guys all together. There, there's always gonna be a place in the ecosystem for them. But I really am looking forward to seeing a new crop of AI empowered startups that, that, you know, a pushing through the old growth, looking for the rays of the sun and achieve escape velocity.

And that to me is what's, what's gonna be interesting, right? Because nine times outta 10, innovation happens at the, at the new growth layer, not, not the old growth. And any consulting firm worth their salt has gone through already a strategic process at this point in time to say, how do we rearchitect the company?

If, if you're a developer and you're a body shop and your pwc or your Accenture and your business has been development, uh, for these companies, um, if they haven't sat down and gone, okay, what are the scenarios? Let's play the scenarios out from the executive standpoint. Um, because when you have, your entire environment has changed, which fundamentally it seems to have changed for the development.

I'm not a developer, but if you look at, you know, this is one of the number one places that AI is being implemented, um, in, in full force, is you have to re-look at the business completely from the ground up and where, where is that business and what is our service offering? Um, I'm actually surprised that we haven't heard a lot about layoffs from those companies, and maybe I just haven't been watching for it. But that to me is, you know, that that is super at risk and would be the requirement of any kind of board to say, okay, so what's the strategy here?

I think Deloit and Accenture went through around those layoffs, uh, 20 23, 20 24. I think they went around with some read more recent layoffs as well. But jp, you know what was also interesting at the Databricks conferences, Jamie Diamond showed up, and one of the things that he said was that, at least in their organization, um, AI reports to the CEO and the CEO and directly.

And he said it was too important to have it report up through it. And the perspective was is that, um, AI is gonna drive business process re-engineering all across the bank. And, uh, the question then becomes, you know, what, what is their relationship gonna be between AI and IT going forward?

Are other companies gonna do the same, or is AI part of the IT CIO responsibility? I, I, I just wrote about this. Uh, I did a LinkedIn post.

Uh, I I made it very clear that, you know, there needs to be a, uh, you can't put this into the realm of it. You can't just shirk this off as another IT project. Uh, this is, this is, this goes far beyond the, uh, you know, the, the realm of it, and you end up with a different outcome and a different product when you focus, when you just shrug it off that this is just yet another IT responsibility, uh, that, you know, you won't get the, the value out of it that you're expecting because it's, it's girth and it's need for understanding, uh, what, what feeds it is typically beyond the relationship that it has with the rest of the organization.

So what I wrote was about that, you know, what are you missing? You're missing that bridge. You have your business analyst, right, which typically does your trans from the business requirements into IT requirements, but these people have not been upskilled and they don't understand what it can do.

So how do you translate to a language you don't understand yet, right? How do you go from English to Greek if you don't know Greek? Right?

So you're, so the, so the typical translator can't be your translator here. Your IT people truly understand systems, but the value here is not in the systems, it's in understanding the business. And so you're, you're, you're missing that critical bridge if you're leading with it in order to do your AI initiatives.

And I think that gets back to kind of what our skills are gonna be needed here. I mean, you look at, as you said, jp, it's the business analyst skills. It's that, and that goes with any kind of discipline you're talking about, whether it's development side of the house, if it's a financial side of the house, if it's a, um, sales kind of sales operations that discip that analyst capability, that, that has that expertise within that field to look at the information that's coming at them from an AI standpoint and do that analysis and provide that information becomes critical.

Because we do know where some, you know, we're already, we see where some of the limitations of AI is in terms of its reasoning capability, which we, I talked about on another podcast, um, in terms of the information that it's delivering. So this to me, is a very logical place that we're going in terms of how packaging, new packaging about how we deliver something, but it still needs the expertise of the domain. I, I personally think thinking about AI just along the lines of it is, is, you know, when you're a hammer, everything's a nail.

So of course, we look at it that way, but it's, it's, there's so much more that AI's gonna do here in terms of disruption and effects on civilization than just it, not to minimize the importance of it. But The, the other thing that came out of that conference too is they invited the chief AI and data officer, which I thought was an interesting title in its own right from MasterCard, who said that they are in the process of building, uh, AI agents that are designed to engage with other AI agents that are buying things. And so people are going to be assigning the authority to an AI agent to go buy something, or at least that's what MasterCard's assuming, and that thing will have AI agents negotiating transactions back and forth.

So, I don't know, jp, um, if you're comfortable with that notion of assign giving an AI agent, what an allowance to go buy stuff. That's a good point. Uh, the allowance point, right?

I, I assume there are individuals who, uh, are less concerned about the negative downside. Look, it, if you look, if you did a per, if you're a person, you order from Amazon and you don't like what comes, you know, you take it back over to Kohl's or UPS store, you drop it off and you'd get a return if, you know, and there's no cost. So I, I, I think the risk of, uh, you know, acquiring, uh, goods and that cannot be returned.

So it, it depends on where you are from a level of what you're, you know, purchasing. I wouldn't allow it, I wouldn't hook it to my WTI crude, you know, you know, have to, except 20 barrels of crude to my house, which oddly enough I learned earlier in my career, it can happen if you play around in WTI crew trades and you don't trade your, for the execution of your stock, you actually end up having to take delivery. I'm sure it's happened to people, but, so, so, yeah.

So I don't think MasterCard's funding that or, you know, it's not like a new, how did this BMW show up? I love the commercial for this, right? New BMW shows up in the driveway Who bought this?

And the, and, and you hear like a little Alexa thing in the background though I did for you. Yeah. Uh, so I mean, it, it, it, it's, it's, I think visionary.

I don't think it's there yet. I I know people are using subscription based models already on Amazon and Chewy and other places like that. So, um, this is yet possibly a yet another attempt to mitigate or negotiate better pricing your procurement agent, if you will, right?

Last week, this was cheaper on Amazon. This week it's cheaper at Chewy. So instead of me putting the subscription with those services, I am now going to do a, you know, watch the prices and procure for you all that seems very reasonable within the realm of something I would trust AI to deliver today.

I agree. I agree. All right.

My AI agent is telling me we've gone over our allotted time for this, and I need to take a break. We're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about what's going on at, uh, NOAA with our sustainability analyst, Bonnie Schneider. You're watching Tech Junk Gang.

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The core principles of crisis management and the evolution of CSO leadership. Register now for free. Well, uh, across the Atlantic, it is now hurricane season, which began June 1st.

And this isn't really the busiest time of the year. That will come August and September, but already we're thinking about new technology that NOAA is using in the United States to help forecast hurricanes better and track them better. And guess what?

You may be surprised it's ai. So I took, decided to take a closer look at the AI NOAA will be implementing this year, how they're doing it, and also the goes 19 satellite, which became, um, effective in, uh, April, and see how that is also gonna come into play, which with what is expected to be a busy hurricane season, Hurricane season 2025, brings major advances in forecasting. Noah is expanding its use of artificial intelligence building on several years of AI integration to test new models alongside traditional methods in real time.

Early research shows AI systems can improve tropical storm tracking by 20 to 25% over two to five day periods. They also work faster. Traditional physics-based models require hours of processing time.

AI delivers the results in under a minute. The National Hurricane Center will use AI tools to supplement, not replace official models. Supporting these improvements is Noah's new goes 19 satellite, which just became operational in April, monitoring tropical regions.

It will provide more detailed and timely data than previous systems. So in terms of tropical activity, what can we expect this year? Noah predicts and above average hurricane season 13 to 19, named storms, including six to 10 hurricanes and three to five major hurricanes.

The integration of AI and advanced modeling systems represents a significant step forward in protecting lives and property from these destructive weather systems. So right now we're looking at an active season, as I mentioned, above average in the forecast. And I think it was important to note that for people that are concerned, because obviously this is the serious stakes here with hurricanes lives property, that AI isn't doing it alone.

It's enhancing existing meteorologists that are there and forecasting, and they're also kind of tracking it real time to see how the AI does versus the human. And I think the outcome of this season will determine a lot of what's gonna happen going forward. You know, they're, they're putting a big bet in here because they've gutted the hurricane, uh, office, you know, outta Miami.

Mm-hmm. You've got a guy running FEMA who didn't know it was hurricane season, so they gotta make it like we're doing something as a resident of Florida. God help us, God help us.

I'm praying that we don't get hit with a hurricane here because we won't know if it's coming and we won't be able to help do anything if it does. You know, I, I hope this AI exceeds, uh, expectations. But realistically speaking, where Ro, I know Steven, I think I saw something about Noah was also working with HPE and Google, and they're trying to build some more advanced systems, but this whole weather forecasting thing, I feel like we've been talking about it for a decade now with it and trying to make it all better.

But, um, you know, they still can't tell me if it's gonna rain at three o'clock. Well, it, it's a, honestly, I think a cynical attitude and, uh, out of touch with reality. Um, weather forecasting has actually gotten a lot better in the last few decades, thanks to advances in technology, um, And modeling and so forth.

Yeah. Modeling and satellites. Um, I think it's important as, as you mentioned, Bonnie, this is, uh, goes 19.

Um, this one replaces, uh, goes 16, which was, uh, had been, uh, providing a lot of this data for the last, uh, few decades since about 2000. Um, you know, all of these satellites that go up, I think that this is an example of sort of the quiet advancements in science that don't get a lot of attention, and frankly don't get the, uh, the applause that they should because we, you know, we have scientists working on, you know, basically continually updating these, uh, geostationary, um, weather observation satellites. Uh, for example, uh, goes 17, had a problem with its heat pipe goes 19.

They fixed that. They also added instruments to this, um, for example, to replace the, um, solar wind monitoring that was taken offline, uh, after the soho satellite was retired earlier this year. So again, this is scientists doing science stuff in a way that benefits all of us.

And so I'm really happy to see this stuff move forward. I am very alarmed as you are, uh, Alan, about the, uh, gutting of the science, uh, funding at NOAA and basically every other, uh, part of the federal government, because this is an example of, like I said, of of the US government and of science and NASA and NOAA doing good for all people. Hopefully the, uh, predictions from this AI based system will prove, uh, effective.

Uh, I see no reason to think they won't. AI has actually shown great promise in, in weather prediction and, and modeling. But, uh, you know, if we don't continue to fund, um, this sort of basic science, uh, earth science geoscience, then frankly, we will be up a creek, as Alan says, when not knowing when the next hurricane is coming.

So I'm really glad to see that this satellite went up. I'm really glad to see that it's coming online, uh, replacing the old satellite, um, replacing the retired, uh, satellite. Hopefully we will continue to fund this sort of work.

I'll say something else. Hold on, Mike. One other thing I want to say to your point, Mike, about whether or not it's gonna rain at three o'clock, and we get that right, let's not confuse that sort of point in time, you know, weather forecasting with the ability to say our climate is changing and what the trends are and what could happen in spite of what you may read on third rate social networks or extreme, extreme tv, 24 hour news cycle TV shows, right?

The fact of the matter is our ability to, to predict trends in weather and climate is pretty damn good in getting better. It it is, it is Alan. Uh, it is.

But, and, and whether, and the NFL are probably the two best examples that I know of to demonstrate and talk intelligently about generative ai. So both of those things that I mentioned are non-deterministic on any given Sunday, you, you're, you're the, the, the team that is picked to win with a, with, with, you know, um, on a blowout. You know, the quarterback gets rolled over in the first play and they bring in the second stringer and lose the game, whether it's a non-deterministic game as well.

It's all prob it is, it is. A transformer is a generative AI transformer in live. What happened 1600 times in the past doesn't happen.

1,601. Um, these are great examples in the real world of what a generative AI transformer actually is doing. It's, it's non-deterministic.

It, it follows and analyzes patterns that we've had in the past that it's seen in the past, at any moment in time, all that could change. So, having lived in Florida for a few years, speaking on behalf of the great Florida man that you occasionally encounter from time to time, they will say no one ever was surprised by a hurricane. It's not like you don't see this thing coming for a week.

And the other thing that they will say is, regardless of how much you tell me that hurricane is coming, I ain't going anywhere anyway. Well, that, that's, that's whole other, that's a whole Florida man thing. The, the, there's more to that.

Um, I just wanna add one thing. It's not just about, um, the, the forecasting of the storms. One of the, the cooler things I think will come out of this is understanding them better, getting closer looks at the, at the rapid intensification when that happens.

You know, we've had so many of these category five storms in recent years that it's been unprecedented. So studying how that happens when that happens, and the, and the mechanics behind it, getting more science and information on that is also gonna be really beneficial. Yep.

Jp, you were gonna say something? Oh, there's a great book about what happened the last time the government gutted Noah, before it was Noah by Eric Larson. Uh, it's called Isaac Storm.

It's about the 1900 hurricane that took out Galveston. Uh, yeah. And, and that, so it, it, it, it's, it's relevant because, you know, the, the thinking is that, um, you know, we have technology, we don't need people, and it, it's really the Jesuit priests, priests that were in Puerto Rico who understood the pattern that was coming towards the US based upon the way that the storm came across Puerto Rico, and they ignored Them.

Well, there you go. Mm-hmm. Great way to this one.

Yeah. All right, we're gonna take a break here on the gang. We're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about power politics.

We're talking power grid in data centers. You're watching Textron Gang. Hey, folks, we're back and we're revisiting a subject we've talked about in the past, but it's about data centers, energy consumption, and the grid.

I think we've kind of established in some earlier shows that maybe we're gonna get more efficient in the way we build data centers themselves, and we'll get better at running those AI models. But there's also a question about the grid itself, Steven. And there's a lot of reports now that are suggesting that the grid, as we know it today, just isn't up to the task.

'cause it's not just data centers, it's cars and everything else. And it might take us a generation to rebuild the grid. Oh, it's gonna take us a generation, we're gonna be continually rebuilding the grid.

Yeah. The, the, the, i, I guess the point at hand here is the 2025 state of reliability assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which is, uh, basically an insider, gobbly, good kind of corporation that, uh, studies exactly that question. How are we gonna handle the, uh, demands for electricity going forward?

And specifically, how is the growth of data center construction and AI and cryptocurrency affecting the reliability of the grid and the ability of generation to handle that? So, as you said, uh, we are building more and more and more data centers. I'm certain that, uh, we've, if, if you have watched Textron Gang at all, or if you have paid attention to any of the other, uh, media related to data center construction, you've noticed that we're building a lot of these things and they're getting bigger and they're getting more powerful, uh, and they're demanding more and more electricity to the point that we are seeing, um, organizations like AWS and Microsoft and Google, uh, locating next to nuclear plants to make sure that they have the ability to power these, these things.

In fact, another story that we see this week is, um, AWS and a company called Talen, uh, expanding their existing relationship in Pennsylvania, Susquehanna to use, uh, the nation's, I think second largest nuclear plant to power, uh, data centers in Pennsylvania. And this is the sort of thing that we're seeing happening everywhere, uh, whether it is, uh, in Pennsylvania where a lot of these things are being built because of, uh, good nuclear power and, and plentiful, uh, water, uh, to places like Ohio and, um, Indiana and all over the country. A lot of data centers are also going into places that don't have as strong and reliable power grids like Texas and California.

And that's something of a problem going forward, because these data centers are going to need power, as it says in this report, it's not that the number is actually all that great in terms of the overall power usage in the United States. This is a, you know, two to 3% to 5% increase. The problem is that the grid is not built to handle even increases of that sort, because typically power usage has been pretty steady with slow and predictable ramps.

Uh, when you build a new industrial facility, a steel or aluminum processing plant, or a giant factory or something like that, it typically takes five, 10 years to come online so they can build additional, uh, generation capability. But as we've seen, for example, in Tennessee, uh, AI plants can come online and take a significant portion of the power resources in just a few months or, or, or a year. And that's really what we're seeing now with AI and data centers.

Essentially, it's not the fact that we're going from 2% to 3% to 5% growth. It's the fact that that growth is gonna happen in 25, 26, and 27 when the generation of power just can't keep up. And in reaction, what's happening is companies like Amazon are actually moving to what's called, uh, front of the meter, which essentially says, you know what, instead of getting special deals and special requirements, we're just gonna tell the world that we're buying more electricity and you better be there ready to meet us when we need it.

I don't blame Amazon for moving to that market, and I don't blame companies like Talend for, uh, attempting to work with them, but frankly, this is gonna be a big challenge. It's the quick, uh, uptick of electricity demand that that is really causing problems. And you know, Steven, we talk about nuclear, right?

So prior to this AWS talent deal, of course, there was the Microsoft three mile island. Oh, they don't call it three Mile Island anymore, I don't think. Yeah.

Uh, also, you know, buying nuclear and, and, and there's other examples of this, the problem, you know, one may say, wow, this is the greatest thing for nuclear energy we've had in a really long time. But the problem is the, the lag time in bringing new nuclear energy plants on online. You know, who, who the heck can look seven to 10 years out?

We, we need stuff online, as you said, in the next 18 months. Yeah. And it's not just the lag time, it's the fact that they're just not building these things.

I mean, they can ramp them up, and that's what they're trying to do with Susquehanna is ramp up the power output from this existing nuclear plant. They're not building a new nuclear plan anywhere in the us. Well, they did talk about one of the things that AWS did talk about was the investment into small nuclear power, um, capabilities in that space.

So perhaps with that, you know, there's more interest in here. So there's more research going into this. So it, there is the American ingenuity of going into building out what we're gonna need for energy, um, in this space.

But the other thing that you're saying is like, you know, the, the estimates are you, they sound small, three to 5% or whatever that increase. But what it seems to be is that you have these, that that's, that's an average over the United States number as opposed to what I need coming out of Pennsylvania or Tennessee or Texas, or wherever these particular data centers are going in. The number is got to be significantly more than that.

And with that kind of big of a jump is where the stress is going to be placed on it. I, I, I think elections are gonna turn on this issue, and it's happening here in New York already, where, um, the cost of electricity has gone up for everybody in their residences. And, uh, the governor is now pointing the finger at the company that manages the grid in New York State.

And part of the issue here is you're gonna have is we're not gonna increase the supply to keep up with the demand. And what happens then is prices for electricity tend to go up, and then they take it out on politicians. So I think there's gonna be a lot more tension in this system.

Jp, what do you think? I, uh, I, like, first of all, I think that fusion is becoming a po possibility. Uh, and we've had some interesting successes here lately, and I think that there is a ton of money chasing that.

I have hope that there's some actual something behind all of that research and that that potential there is real, which would change, I mean, the game significantly. But, uh, well, this Is the year of Linux desktops Fantastic. We're 10 years behind in actual implementation, right?

But, but, you know, I I, when handled properly, you know, I think nuclear is a great option. I think fear has been holding back, uh, the world, definitely our country for moving forward and taking advantage. Uh, understanding how to deal with the waste has been an issue.

Uh, people don't understand that there are actually positive, uh, ways to deal with waste. Uh, and they do have fears from what happened with meltdowns in the past, even though the technology is, what, 30 years from three Mile Island. Um, and you know, sure, you know, you get an earthquake, you end up with, uh, you know, a, a bad incident, right?

So let's not put them in earthquake sensor or earthquake zones. Uh, not a good idea. But, you know, the, the amount of power they generate for the, what they cost is, you know, it needs to be paid attention to, it needs to be getting serious attention again in this country, in addition to, uh, you know, the ergonomic ones, the, the solar, the wind.

They, uh, I, I, I seen true, so where was I recently? Oh, epic. The new theme park by, uh, for Universal.

Um, they have these garage areas or parking area in the lot where, where they, they have overhangs over them, and the overhangs have solar panels on top of it. And the, those solar panels power the entire parking area and the, and the opening of the, the entrance of the park. I would be remiss if, as Mr.

Solar, if I, I can't let you down. Uh, I, I, I gotta say yes, you're right. Uh, one of the nice things about solar is that it can be deployed very, very quickly and economically.

Uh, the technology is here today, and it's being rapidly deployed everywhere around the world. Unfortunately, solar is, um, not a great match for these AI data centers because it doesn't run 24 7 and, uh, you have to pair it with battery or with, uh, spot production. I, I will say that although it would be great if fusion, uh, energy would answer this problem, that's certainly not something we're gonna see in the next 24 months.

Um, if, if ever and, and small modular reactors, um, talk about American ingenuity. The only place these things have actually been even attempted to be deployed are Russia and China. Um, America has been messing around with small modular reactors for two decades.

We've Got one approved, but it hasn't even been put into production. Uh, if you wanna invest in it, it's SMR on the stock market. That's how, uh, how hyped this technology is.

But it ain't, uh, gone anywhere so far, and the company's managed to go almost bankrupt. So I think part of that is regulation, Stephen, or, or, or fear of nuclear from a, a country and our, our view of it, uh, as a country. And so it's gonna become, getting back to Mike, where the pol you're talking, the, the politics or regulation or, or government, government oversight on this.

It has from us as people of the country having a new view of this. I mean, the French are nuclear. There's other countries that are nuclear to say, okay, so are we willing to do that?

I mean, Japan has done that and they've survived the tsunami. Um, and so there is some proof that this, you know, this can be reliable and that we can look at it from a practical standpoint. Um, every one of the energy capabilities that we, we has has a, a downside to it.

I mean, I look at, you know, look at the field of, you know, your wind energy and what that's doing to the environment and the animals that are there, or the, you know, the acres that are in Nevada that cover the desert, that some people believe that there's nothing there. Well, there's a lot there and, and those kind of things. So those are the downsides to that.

So each one of these have downsides to it, and it's a trade off to how we want, you know, how we as a country view it and how we wanna support and deploy these areas. Jp, I gotta go find my college paper that I worked on in 1981 saying Fusion was right around the corner, baby, I'm gonna dust that ba In, in, in the realm of things. You know, that's a couple of years, man.

The realm of the universe. That's, you know, that is right around You should find it and publish it on LinkedIn and see what kind of comments you get on it. People will say AI wrote it.

All right. Um, we gotta pull the plug here on this in edition of Text Drunk Gang, Bonnie, Kimberly, JP. Steven, Mike, thanks for joining.

I'm Alan Schmo. Stay tuned for the rest of Text Drunk tv, but we're out.