AI vs. Bitcoin Miners – The Fight for Energy
Stuart Turley [00:00:00] We’re done here.
Irina Slav [00:00:11] And we live in the Energy Realities podcast with Texas Titans David Blackmon, Canada’s pundit energy analyst Tammy Nemeth, Oklahoma oligarch Stuart Turley, and a special guest today because we’re discussing artificial intelligence and Bitcoin mining. So we have Christopher Messina, a fintech industry veteran who was there when the industry was starting. He’s also a blockchain expert, and he’ll help us say a deep dive into the whole thing with energy needs and consumption and some things being a drain on the grid. Chris Hello.
Christopher Messina [00:00:51] Good morning, everybody. Thanks for having me on the show.
Irina Slav [00:00:54] This week. Tell us about Bitcoin mining and how much energy it consumes.
Christopher Messina [00:01:05] Right now because of the way the big convertible has worked and the the happening of Bitcoin rewards for miners as a subsidy on top of just doing transactions to run any sort of Bitcoin based business. That energy has ramped up considerably because of some core changes that were made to the Bitcoin protocol, which we’re not going to get into here, but around the decision around small blocks versus big blocks and the way that that structure was rolled out over time. The great news is, which is that for those people who are very concerned about it, energy companies love it. There are some large arguments made for the benefit to the country that host solar farm, for example. But all of that is being eclipsed by the fact that there is they can third and final Bitcoin protocol is being rolled out, which is still kind of a quiet project. We’re in Switzerland that I’m part of that will take the original Bitcoin whitepaper and implement that in such a way that miners and processors who run the protocol to enable radical democratization of finance around the world instead of running a massive server farms. You’ll be running a Bitcoin mining on an old laptop or a used box. So the the the huge amount of work that was done to build out these server farms, I don’t believe is going to be lost because a lot of them will switch over to things like AI processing for GPUs for embedded chips. But it is an important point for the listeners to understand that it is not inevitable. Constantly growing exponentially demand of power for doing Bitcoin mining. We’re going to change that with the gods tomorrow, which is kind of the third version of Bitcoin. So watch this space for people who are interested that it is not necessarily this massive drain on power.
Irina Slav [00:02:53] That’s a very good thing because it has been my impression that Bitcoin miners have been doing their homework much better than I did center operators and developers because I don’t remember hearing complaints from Bitcoin miners and blockchain. I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about these things. So I can I can understand it, but I have not seen complaints about there not being enough electricity to, you know, for their servers. While Big tech has been complaining increasingly loudly and now that they’re literally waiting in line to to get some more electricity supply. David, what do you think?
David Blackmon [00:03:38] Well, I mean, it’s it’s a real problem for the big tech companies out there. Washington Post, of all places. Had a major article Saturday about a guy that a centers that want to go in in Nebraska or dealing with the regulators in Nebraska to keep coal fired power plants open for at least five years longer than currently. So and we’ve had prior to that the several articles about well, I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, Three Mile Island, our nuclear facility in Pennsylvania that created the major incident in 1979, is now going to reopen to power data centers in Pennsylvania and New York because you have to have 24 seven power generation. You can’t do it with wind and solar and three hour cycle time batteries that it’s current technology. And so, you know, they’re looking at any way they can find to to have enough power supply to to power these data centers. And so, you know, to the extent that this revolution in Bitcoin mining that is going to relieve the demand from Bitcoin miners, which the state of Texas has been very concerned about here in recent months, that’s going to be a boon to to these companies and their data centers and data centers for other, you know, technological advancements as well. So I you know, I think what we’re seeing here and I’m so glad Christopher contacted us 15 minutes before we came on, my talk about this is, you know, how the advancement of technology is both creating new demands for energy, but also solving those demand issues as we go through time. And, you know, that’s just kind of a continuation of the advancement of the human race in general, isn’t.
Irina Slav [00:05:40] Yeah, hopefully, if we’re lucky, Tammy. Do you think we actually need all these A.I. data centers?
Christopher Messina [00:05:48] Well, that’s a big question. Who’s the we who needs.
Tammy Nemeth [00:05:51] Exactly. Exactly.
Irina Slav [00:05:54] Population. When I say we, I mean the general population.
Tammy Nemeth [00:05:57] Well, I passed around an article on the weekend where this guy was trying to say that the energy use per query of an AI is infinitesimal. And, you know, it doesn’t really matter. But when you calculate how many. Queries are being made, whether it’s an advanced model being used for YouTube or Facebook or any of the big corporations, because now I’m looking at webinars where they want financial industry to be using, you know, advanced learning mod models in order to predict, to do research and do all this different kinds of stuff. Well, that’s a lot of queries every day by how many billions of people? Because it’s not just North America. It’s a lot of people around the world who are using these things. And so, okay, 0.01kW hours per query or something like that. Well, now you you multiply that and my husband was doing the numbers. He’s like, my gosh, that’s an extraordinary amount of energy required for doing all of these different queries. So, okay, yeah, maybe each individual one isn’t so big, but now they’re it’s being promoted to be used for finance, for energy, for monitoring us. So I just want to sort of talk about the implications a little bit of all this, because during the energy issue with the war in Ukraine, the first thing the European Union did was say you have to cut back on your energy use. So if you’re cutting back on your energy use as an individual in order to make sure there’s stability on the grid. And they didn’t want to add reliable power. They wanted to have all this wind and solar in order to do the transition. It tells me then the transition now doesn’t matter. And it was never really about saving the planet. It’s about controlling us, because suddenly now you can turn on Three Mile Island and now suddenly you can extend coal power for another six years to have stable energy for the air to monitor us. So, you know, we have to control how much power we use. But now it’s okay to have all this power available, reliable power for air. And one of the interesting things about the server issue is that I’ve heard a lot of apologetics saying, well, you know, Microsoft and Facebook and Google, they’re doing offsets. They’re buying offsets and building wind and solar. Okay. They’re building wind and solar for us, which is unreliable, but then they’re getting the green light to build or keep going, reliable energy for them to have stuff that helps control us. So is this really about saving the planet or not? And if I could, I’m so glad Chris is on the show today to talk to us about the new energy requirements or, you know, less energy requirements for the new iteration of a Bitcoin, because what happens when they want to do central bank digital currencies? Is that also going to need different types of power usage? And so if civilians can generate revenue or Bitcoin with less power, then that gives more power to individuals. And so what what are the potential regulatory aspects of that to to prevent this democratization of currency?
Christopher Messina [00:09:32] I’m happy to answer that. So. So many layers. So, yeah, you’re spot on. Control of the population is, in some people’s minds, saving the planet. So those those two things are congruent, in our view, leaders minds. But the one of the most fascinating things I ever came across to this whole discussion. So Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the white paper with one person, many people, whatever, one of the one of one of them is a friend of mine. And I had him on my podcast and we were talking about it and he says a very, very, very smart move to be a long time to really get. He said, There will be only one Bitcoin, there will be only one eventually if if and elapses. Bitcoin is called cryptocurrency, which is odd because it’s neither currency nor cryptographic, but the idea that it’s a payment rail system that will be used by everyone to tap into this, whether you are a farmer selling $600,000 worth of wheat in Kansas or you are a farmer in Thailand selling $8 worth of water, buffalo, whatever. The point is that there is a system that instead of costing you 2.5% with a $3 minimum like Visa does for a transaction over the Internet as we’re running the goods tomorrow, which is the third final protocol for Bitcoin, we will get it to something like 200,000 transactions per penny, meaning if it cost you one 200 thousands of a penny to affect the transaction, you can literally make a profit by someone paying you a dollar a nickel at a time. You make a big profit doing that. So the way that’s going to work with energy demand is and I say this proudly as a Centenary member of the New York Culture Association, and so I’m a massive coal fanatic and a big time, big time Bitcoin fanatic because they both serve the same ends, which is to radically release human potential and create civilization as we know it now. So the way this ties into a central bank digital currency is our masterful overlords were busy flying private to tell the world how awful carbon is. They’re going to want to have a wallet which tracks everything you do so they can tell you you’re not allowed to buy that paper only by bullets. You know that the greatest thing about what we’ve done to morrow is and back to my point of there will be only one Bitcoin protocol and one cryptocurrency protocol, much like there were competing protocols to run what we call the Internet. Now, there was one in France, there are a couple of others distributed and they collapsed down, much like be it VHS and Betamax to one standard. And that’s the standard we all use. Then no one thinks about it. No one thinks about, I’m going to create a new variant. The hypertext transfer protocol is ridiculous. Why would you bother? This is doing similarly, the fragmentation you’re seeing in crypto is because the vast majority of these ridiculous coins were pump and dump schemes to make money for their originators and no purpose built, right? Yes, the protocol we built will mean that. And I’ll show up in 18 seconds. The protocol we built will will enable people to build the payment rails for their tools, including, if you would like, a crypto, a digital central bank, digital currency for your nation of choice. But what will drive them absolutely insane is they will not control it. Right? Currency is national, money is international. And when we finally get the original the Bitcoin protocol working properly, there will be one international money that know that you can flop your fiat currencies around all over it in terms of pricing. But there’s going to be one standard that works. And what will drive the control freaks crazy is they cannot control it. It is complete. We get we don’t control it. We’re building it. We’re setting free. No one will control it. So all the horrors of central bank digital currencies, we have torn the soul out of them and they will not be able to be used as a tool of oppression.
Stuart Turley [00:13:24] Is that.
Irina Slav [00:13:24] Just ban? It is. But isn’t it like some things?
Christopher Messina [00:13:29] How are they going ban it?
Irina Slav [00:13:30] I have no idea. I mean.
Christopher Messina [00:13:32] Cocaine is illegal to tons flow, right? Yeah. They’re going to ban it. Good for them. Then what? We’re going to ban their electronic digital signature spread across distributed databases. How are they going to make.
Irina Slav [00:13:45] And they will be able to prevent people from using it without a regulation.
Christopher Messina [00:13:50] Right now, if you right now, if you go down to your local farmers market and let’s say you’re really good at chopping wood, right, you can go down today and strike a deal in that market with someone who’s growing vegetables and they will agree to take a quart of wood for a month’s worth of vegetables. Normally can’t stop you from doing that. As much as they love to, they get. Similarly, once the court of wood, your alternative currency, is electrons on a cell phone. We’re going to do. How are they going to not only throw all of us in jail? Good luck
Irina Slav [00:14:21] and it will not consume humongous amounts of electricity because that sounds almost too good to be true.
Christopher Messina [00:14:28] No. Well, the original structure was built by kind of techno libertarian idealists. The way you read the Bitcoin white paper is explicitly about an experiment creating radical inclusiveness in economic affairs. That’s what it was for. It got turned into Bitcoin instead of Bitcoin and it turned into the number goes up always. But that was that was just an accident of history that suddenly it’s always like, no, I think it’s 8000, 40,000. You know, as I tell everyone that owns the Bitcoin portfolio, I’ll get I’ll buy out your whole position for a dollar. Like a dollar. Is that crazy? It’s worth $76,000. No. A dollar for all of it because it’s only worth the electricity it takes to generate it. And you created this system that now makes it more and more expensive. It’s like the ultimate ridiculous mix of Ponzi scheme and musical chairs. When it collapses, it’s going to make a lot of people look really stupid.
David Blackmon [00:15:22] So now’s the time to sell Bitcoin folks.
Christopher Messina [00:15:24] sell, sell,.
David Blackmon [00:15:25] Sell, sell, sell.
Stuart Turley [00:15:26] Wow. So let me ask you this. President Trump just recently in one of his speeches that when he was at the Bitcoin event said that he was looking at putting in a large reserve amount for U.S. to bolster the U.S. dollar since the current administration has totally thrashed and ruined the U.S. dollar by weaponization of sanctions around the world being the bully. So what do you think about having currency reserves in Bitcoin? If I just heard that it was worthless.
Christopher Messina [00:16:11] I think it’s a horrible mistake. First off, the Federal Reserve still values gold at $34 an ounce. The American people don’t get that. The gold is stored right there. Or the gold we have sitting in Fort Knox should have soared along with it because that’s that that is the index against the value of the dollar which has slashed its I so I could buy an ounce of gold at Costco $2,400 today. Meadows So the idea of taking the Bitcoin as a reserve currency, that’s madness is the first order. They know that. That’s just crazy waste of money. Trump God bless him. Whoever is talking to him is talking their own book. And someone who was a crypto anarchist who got into Bitcoin and a nickel is worth $76,000 per coin and they want to catch up. So someone told him, yeah, the US should buy all this bitcoin, buy mine. It’s a terrible idea. Terrible idea.
Stuart Turley [00:17:10] But so if we got BRICs as our Irina, if we’ve got bricks as a system that is coming out and they are, it’s really going to be 50 to 60% of the world after, you know, President Putin in his reign of bricks later this year. And you start looking at at the rest of BRICs system competing with Swift. This is a heck of a battle going on in the main area around the world. And you’re saying that bolting this in does not matter. Bricks, swift bitcoin doesn’t matter.
Christopher Messina [00:17:49] I love the fact that BRICS, which was an acronym created by a Goldman Sachs research analyst years ago. Right now, Brazil, Russia, India, China. And this is the last one having having come.
Stuart Turley [00:18:04] South.
Christopher Messina [00:18:05] South Africa. I mean, is madness madness as a friend and as the chief whip of the South African parliament told me years ago after going through a Commonwealth meeting, I don’t know why we have these meetings. We have nothing in common and we have no wealth. So they are over. What is flight to quality? Institutional investors are not going to put their payment rails and trust at a BRICs ecosystem over it. Still, a U.S. dollar denominated a euro access, no matter how imperfect it is. So yeah, they’ve been trying this for years. The Iranians have desperately wanted to have an oil exchange priced in anything but dollars. Yeah, I bid for this fight. I helped create the Dubai Mercantile Exchange, have worked in the Gulf and work in these exchanges like the Iranians who like well, luckily the mullahs will be dead shortly, but that’s a separate issue. But the idea to attack Israel 181 rockets, thereby shortening their life radically. They had this idea they were going to shift markets to another pricing mechanism. I don’t see it’s ever going to happen.
Stuart Turley [00:19:05] Wow. So on AI versus, you know. And Steve Reese, I want to give Steve Reese a shout out, Steve. His comment is, Steve Reese is one of the industry leaders in natural gas in the United States. And truly, I rely on his company for a lot of information and do we’re beginning to get approached by air developers to consult for natural gas supply. Air development is going to cause a new natural gas boom. And I Steve, I could not agree more with this, especially because we are not going net zero has been destroyed by simply having air come into the mix. We will never get to a net zero in and you sit back and try to look at this. I mean, why are people going to give this up, If you guys don’t mind? Let’s take a look at this. A guy is going to cause a lot of power consumption on searches, especially at. Right now.
Christopher Messina [00:20:21] Any society which doesn’t report the problems is propagation of this of wrong. In society.
Stuart Turley [00:20:26] That’s exactly right. I mean, look at this. Now, let me think. You’ve got all these cables and you’ve got all these kids out there going, I got to have me some AI And then you’re going to have this, blah, blah, blah. Right.
Christopher Messina [00:20:43] And AI.
Stuart Turley [00:20:47] Go ahead and try to do this on coal. Right. Now, here’s the other thing. I’m a dog kind of guy and I got to get me a dog, but And then you have.
David Blackmon [00:21:05] That’s perfect.
Stuart Turley [00:21:18] But, you know, if we go along and we don’t have a. I is going to and I have really worked on AI versus chatgpt and the others and testing them and the amount of energy use is amazing on that on those calls that you’re doing. I got to give a shout out to Elon and Gronk and X. I absolutely love the research for that. It helps me with on x Quitters is absolutely phenomenal. When you excuse me, X. I just. I just felt Elon’s back of his hand. Boom, hit me in the back of the head almost anywhere. But so when we sit back and think about natural gas is critical. The only way that these big tech companies are going to make it is with nuclear, natural gas and coal.
Tammy Nemeth [00:22:19] Yeah.
Irina Slav [00:22:20] Yeah. But they’re building so much wind and solar, you know, because they want to look green. And what’s the point if we’re using AI to do cat videos at our disposal and we’re doing cat videos.
Christopher Messina [00:22:36] The wind turbines are important because we need to kill whales, destroy fisheries and blind our radar to defensive purposes or.
David Blackmon [00:22:42] Migratory birds or, I got to get rid of them to.
Irina Slav [00:22:46] And birds too.
David Blackmon [00:22:48] birds
Christopher Messina [00:22:49] Quick. What I make about AI lot of the work that we do is around national security. The cat videos. Awesome. Wonderful. But it’s great to prove that that works because right now, to have the ability for swarms of battle drones for both taking video, transmitting information coordinated with with other swarms which are you know, they’re modeling on bird behavior. All of those calculations, the brute force calculations required to make 6000 drones act the way Sparrows act naturally is massive. Right. And that is going to win wars, keep actual soldiers from dying because, you know, it’s all mechanical. The Clone Wars are starting. That’s more important than the cat videos by a mile. But the chips have been proven out in a video chip. You know, the typical laptop is like 80 bucks to Intel when they finally deliver you a new laptop. Right. And it’s very powerful. And each embedded chip is 40 to $50,000 each per chip that goes into these massive server farms. And you buy them, right? You put a natural gas power plant next to that, especially, you know, over the Marcellus or somewhere. Okay. Fantastic. We got to get to nuclear. But until that. Until man. It’s a good solution.
Stuart Turley [00:24:13] Tom Kobach has an interesting question and I read it.
David Blackmon [00:24:19] What is the actual inherent value of AI when you really think about it? I realize there could be some value, but it seems like the majority of it is ridiculous. Entertainment making superhero movies and making people lazier by riding for them. Yeah. So what’s your point anyway? Is it worth adding so much extra power consumption to a grid that is supposedly going green? And that’s.
Irina Slav [00:24:41] Exactly. That’s what I was wondering about.
Stuart Turley [00:24:44] Yeah.
Irina Slav [00:24:45] But yes, Chris makes a good point about warfare and the welfare of the future, which will again require huge amounts of electricity. Where is this electricity going to come from? Because it’s not going to be free because it needs to be reliable itself.
Christopher Messina [00:25:02] It’s been massive. I’ve been yelling about the Climate Hysteria Church for 25 years now, and a professor at the University of Chicago never forget it was an Earth science professor and someone in the class made a comment about global warming. Never forget it, because the professor chose wisely, because the person that said it was not some young woman, it was a football player. And the professor took the old chalk eraser, turned and hurled it straight at him in a right in the chest. I don’t want to hear about that crap in this classroom ever again. No more global warming talking about it. So it’s been a grift from the beginning.
David Blackmon [00:25:40] So this all leads back to my something I’ve talked about for more than a year now. This if if we’re going to go down this road with AI and Big such a power hog with new technology, this is all going to lead. And we’re already seeing, I think, the groundwork being laid for it in Texas. Some some jurisdictions, some power grid managers going back to not just reactivating mothballed coal plants, but permitting the building of new ones to power all this stuff. And in Texas, you know, we have about a dozen big old, both bald coal plants sitting around. We don’t do what England and Germany do. We don’t explode these things of the molecule. When we close a heap of ground waiting for the day we need them. And and so, you know, Texas is all about economic growth and attracting all the new industry we can attract. And I guarantee you, within the next year now we’re not only going to see most of those old mothballed plants reactivated, we’re going to see the building of new ones because coal is the most reliable, cheapest and most abundant source for powering electricity that known to mankind. And, you know, we got a lot of natural gas and there’s going to be a lot of additional natural gas built in Texas. But I think there’s going to be some more coal built to.
Tammy Nemeth [00:27:07] I agree.
Irina Slav [00:27:08] That’s why I’m happy.
Tammy Nemeth [00:27:10] Especially because from a security perspective, you want to be able to have something that can be stockpiled. And the source is therefore reliable in the sense that it’s not as interruptible as, say, a natural gas pipeline, which, you know, you could take that out. And then that’s a problem. But with coal, you know, you have a big pile of it and you can keep going, which is one of the reasons why China and India, of course, are building out their coal as well as everything else. I think one of the interesting distinctions here, though, like Tom’s to Tom’s point about the value of air, I think there’s a distinction to be made between consumer use, trying to get people used to the idea that air is here and it can be helpful is rather benign or whatever. And then there’s the more industrial and military uses for it, which is probably where, as Chris was pointing out with respect to programing drones and doing all these really interesting things and stuff. So, you know, I sometimes think there’s a lot of inherent suspicion about A.I.. And then to have, you know, if you’re just making cat videos, it’s not so bad. You know, it’s helpful. They can do all these cool things and and stuff. And so does that then put people, consumers at a sort of disadvantage in thinking about what the possible negative aspects of AI out there for controlling managing us, I guess is maybe one way to think of it.
David Blackmon [00:28:45] Well, that leads right into this unidentified comment. The US FCC will the Federal Communications Commission will be assessing all internet traffic associated with feline and canine generative A.I. for bite slash bitwise fees in 2025. Mark my words.
Stuart Turley [00:29:06] Wow.
Irina Slav [00:29:07] The question is not too far fetched. Nothing is too far fetched.
David Blackmon [00:29:11] No, that’ll be the least they try to do. Yeah.
Christopher Messina [00:29:14] Absolutely.
Tammy Nemeth [00:29:16] Well, look. The Chinese social credit system, people are penalized if they’re on the web too much or. And they’re penalized for what they’re looking at and what they’re doing. So that’s where the backdoor.
David Blackmon [00:29:28] Yeah, that’s where the governments in the U.K., Germany, United States, Canada all want to go. I mean, we’re just five years behind China, basically.
Stuart Turley [00:29:36] David. As a matter of fact, in the United States and Canada, currently there are 836 retired coal plants. I’m trying to look and see how many of those are be available to come back online, even.
David Blackmon [00:29:52] Out of generating capacity, folks, each one is 1 to 2GB or gigawatts of power generation in.
Stuart Turley [00:29:59] Texas.
Irina Slav [00:30:01] In the mines as well.
David Blackmon [00:30:02] Right.
Christopher Messina [00:30:05] The moment.
Stuart Turley [00:30:06] It’s like the Sandown power station is like the sand out power station in Texas. It has a capacity of five units. It retired range in 2018. It has a capacity of thousand 614MW. There’s a lot of megawatts sitting out there in coal.
David Blackmon [00:30:26] And it’s our conclusion, guys, here’s where we’ve arrived. Today is the time to sell Bitcoin and buy coal and natural gas.
Christopher Messina [00:30:34] Amen
Stuart Turley [00:30:35] Wow. And and give a shout out to Steeve Rees, because there’s a lot of natural gas out there. I’d rather put it money into a natural gas plant coming in because I know that it’s cleaner technology.
Christopher Messina [00:30:52] I’m going to have something for your audience later. Coming up.
David Blackmon [00:30:55] Travis Lynn was our LinkedIn user.
Christopher Messina [00:30:58] For that will enable them directly into the real last Bitcoin as pricing coal coming out of a coal mine that is priced in in Bitcoin real one. The third. The third version. First one. No. BTC No. BSB No. God just coming. So you’ll have a unique opportunity to do yet in the last generation Bitcoin and coal production all at once.
Stuart Turley [00:31:23] I like it. How do people get a hold of you? Because we’re sitting here visit We didn’t we we got you like that. The airplane door was closing as you got on
Christopher Messina [00:31:35] Bridget in a guy just left that can grab a cocktail. Unless the Club is easy to find me. I’m on Messy times that show, which is that podcast. It’s a great day. Kind enough to join a few times and say you all be invited so you can find me there. Messy times dot show. Thank you.
Irina Slav [00:31:57] Thank you. Okay. Thank you.
Tammy Nemeth [00:32:00] Thanks for your work.
Christopher Messina [00:32:01] Thank you. I think it’s I think it’s a fantastic thing. I always find it fascinating whenever whenever someone says, well, what is good for I don’t know why you’re mad at me. Don’t go. Go read your religious texts and find out what everything’s good for. Why is entertainment bad and love The idea that somehow entertaining people is the worst use than coordinating drones to kill people? I don’t know. I think I’d rather everyone just because of you. But you know it was going to come down to it. One of the greatest things I’ve seen in a manufacturing group I work with. Massive amounts of machine learning. And again, I always have to say this A.I. happens on PowerPoint. Machine learning happens in Python, right? You know, I still stick with artificial intelligence is better than natural stupidity, which we’ve got lots of running. But here’s a great example where you’ve got a production facility for rare earth magnets that go into things like medical imaging systems, let’s say, where from the weapons and say I’m positive things. Right? To create the exact toroidal shape to create advanced imaging for a magnet. If you do it the way you normally do it now, would you take a bullet and use the tractive manufacturing you shaving away blocks of metal you’re putting into the right shape? That is an R&D process that could take months to get to the right thing. Using a AI tools based on empirical reality relating to how different magnets work. Right now they’re their their their vectors of force work better configuration of the magnet. Going through that iteration, gene that I know very well here in the Space Coast, they come up with that optimal design in a minute. So there are massive, massive benefits to being able to run basically abstracted kind of Monte Carlo esque simulations within a 3D space that the only way you can do it is with incredibly powerful GPU systems and a lot of electricity. And so the benefits to to humanity are vast far outweigh any criticisms. Yeah. So I’m on board and I’m playing with some generative A.I. image creation systems. Lot of fun making me giggle. But the power behind that is driving massive change for us.
David Blackmon [00:34:27] Yeah, you’ve got to be able to giggle. You either giggle or you cry about that stuff.
Irina Slav [00:34:32] Yeah.
Christopher Messina [00:34:33] Exactly.
Irina Slav [00:34:34] Yeah.
David Blackmon [00:34:36] Good deal. I think we have beaten that horse to death.
Irina Slav [00:34:43] Yes. lets head to headlines.
Christopher Messina [00:34:46] of limping the Ghana.
David Blackmon [00:34:50] Now. That was a great discussion, folks. This is me. Well, the first one I’ve already referred to, The Washington Post had a big story Saturday about these tech companies opening data centers in Pennsylvania and New York. I’m sorry, in Nebraska, of all places, now wanting to keep five different coal fired power plants open five years longer than currently scheduled. And, of course, you know, the regulators up there are going to agree to that because they want the business, they want the economic impact. They want the jobs in Nebraska. And so they’re going to do it. And it’s like Stu said, this this you know, this is happening all over the place. And it means net zero is even more a pipe dream than it already was. A second one. Ronald Stein had a really good piece that I just reprinted on my my substack about it’s too soon to abandon fossil fuels. Well, of course it is. Of course it is. And 50 years from now, it’s still going to be too soon to abandon fossil fuels. So anyone living on earth today, you’re never going to get to a point where fossil fuels are abandoned. That’s just a reality, a situation that is evolving so fast. These these climate busybodies and regulators can’t keep up with it all. And the the authoritarians at the EU and the Trudeau administration and the Biden administration, they’re lost. They have no ability to keep up with any of this. And, you know, we’re just going to we’re going to need to to produce energy with every tool we have available and make it cleaner as clean as possible. That’s the way to go and mitigate against any impacts from climate change. So that’s mine and I will go to the next person.
Stuart Turley [00:36:31] Okay.
Tammy Nemeth [00:36:33] Okay. So, yeah, this is these are my headlines where Zero Hedge had one saying that Google turns to nuclear to power its data centers. And of course, this is the story about restarting Three Mile Island and how that that power would be going directly to Google rather than onto the grids grid as a whole. And then the other story is from Canada, and that’s a bylaw in one of the the cities called Medicine Hat in Alberta. And it was the first city, I think, in Canada to have natural gas lighting back in like the early 20th century, late 19th century. And so they have a bylaw that would potentially allow industrial power producers to sell the energy back into grid. So if you’re one of these data centers and you set up your own power generating facility, you could whatever excess power you have, you could put that back onto the grid. Now, you would think, well, that should be just a no brainer. But apparently you need a bylaw for that. So it’s interesting that that that, you know, in Canada, who knows how the laws are constructed for these kinds of things, but apparently they need the regulation and the law to be able to sell that back to the grid. I’m just concerned that it doesn’t end up like a lot of the so-called green energy, you know, like the the wind and solar, where they have these power purchase agreements and sometimes it gets sold at a loss almost depending on the grid. Operator. Ontario is a mess in Canada. In the UK, the agreements are Byzantine. So it’s interesting to see how how this is forming. And, you know, to to go to David’s point about, you know, is net zero derailed because of all this kind of stuff? I think it depends on how you define net zero now. Are they going to change it? Like, is it society as a whole or is it really just meant for the citizens rather than these other things that that the elites think that they absolutely need to have to control the rest of us? So I think it’ll depend on how they define those kinds of things.
David Blackmon [00:38:55] That’s a great, great point. And I want to also just comment on the Three Mile Island thing. I think that this is such an extraordinary thing. People need to remember that that that incident with the unit number two at Three Mile Island, that near meltdown happened in 1979, and it literally killed an entire industry in the United States because of how deceitfully it was all reported in our news media and by government officials, both in the state of Pennsylvania, state of New York and at the federal level. It destroyed an industry, left it moribund for 45 years. And now, because big tech needs some energy, we’re going to restart Unit one at Three Mile Island, which was which it continued to produce. But it’s just such an amazing transition we’re seeing in attitudes towards nuclear generation. It makes me kind of optimistic that actually we may actually have a bit of a renaissance of that industry in the United States in the years to come.
Tammy Nemeth [00:40:06] Yeah. Thanks for that. That’s awesome.
Irina Slav [00:40:08] I wanted to add something to your second, so second story about selling boxes and that’s what’s happening now with the solar producers. If you’ve got excess energy, you can sell it back into the green, which is not a good thing for the grid or for the people running the grid because they have to balance it every moment in time. Yeah.
Christopher Messina [00:40:31] But also that’s a real problem. At what price do they buy it? I mean, California because any, any retail Yahoo! Who could afford to put solar panels on top of his or her already wildly overpriced house in Palo Alto would generate at their own cost and then they would sell it back into the grid at retail, which is nuts. And so they were losing, you know, billions on this. So they figured out at least the pricing in Canada and Madison has that makes a little more sense.
Tammy Nemeth [00:41:01] I don’t know. I think they’re still negotiating that that aspect of it. And you know, to Irina’s point, you know, before it was utilities, when we’d know precisely what they needed to generate, they would build the appropriate infrastructure in order to generate that that amount of electricity. But now there is all of these other players and actors on the field contributing stuff, pulling stuff off. And it is it’s a minefield and a terrible situation for the system operators to try and ensure that these things are balanced appropriately. But so is this another case with where they’re going to have to use the AI to do all of this balancing so you require more energy to help balance it for the air, to help balance the thing that they’re destabilizing. So. Interesting.
David Blackmon [00:41:50] Well, I hope, though, they’ll try to use it for that
Christopher Messina [00:41:55] The self looking ice cream cone.
Tammy Nemeth [00:41:57] Exactly.
Stuart Turley [00:41:59] Wow. All right. Irina.
Irina Slav [00:42:07] Okay. My first story is European carmakers planned dozens of cheaper models to survive EV winter. And I think the headline speaks for itself. Yes, these people are eternal optimist or they’re just getting desperate, I believe, because now they’re acknowledging that facing an easy winter of low demand. So they’re preparing models like dropping next year. My question is, how are they going to absorb the losses associated with these cheap models? Because if they have the capacity to make cheap models and not lose money on them, they would have already made them. But now they’re racing to to release these cheap models. How many billions will they suffer in losses? Its just
Christopher Messina [00:42:58] the taxpayers as well.
Tammy Nemeth [00:43:01] Yeah.
David Blackmon [00:43:01] Yeah, that’s a good. Transfer it to the taxpayers.
Christopher Messina [00:43:06] Yeah. But when you’re buying an EV for someone else. Yeah.
Irina Slav [00:43:12] But they’re between a rock and a hard place because they can either incur losses on these cheap models or have to pay penalties because of the government’s transition plans. Once they have no good move.
Christopher Messina [00:43:26] Then they’re going to go to the governments and ask for and lobby for a subsidy to get paid.
Irina Slav [00:43:31] Absolutely.
Christopher Messina [00:43:32] For the fines that they then pay.
David Blackmon [00:43:34] Right? Yeah.
Tammy Nemeth [00:43:36] Take it.
Irina Slav [00:43:38] Volkswagen. We’ll have to be bailed out at some point by the German government. Can you believe this?
Tammy Nemeth [00:43:44] Yeah. Well, are they going to take the tariff money that they’re extracting from China and redistribute it to the European manufacturers?
Irina Slav [00:43:54] I have no idea.
Christopher Messina [00:43:55] It would prove their religion to have more real than objective reality.
Irina Slav [00:43:59] I don’t think that happened.
Christopher Messina [00:44:01] was damage just for decades and they show no signs of slowing down.
David Blackmon [00:44:06] No. Yeah.
Irina Slav [00:44:09] And then the second story sounds snobbish, but it’s not the complexity of capital allocation for oil and gas companies. The story is actually the fact that oil and gas companies are increasing their investments and they will be increasing their investments next year as well. It’s a shocking turn of events as we’re trying to wean ourselves off oil and gas. And anyway, oil and gas demand is going to peak before 2030. The I and here they are, these oil and gas companies upping their investments because they want to produce more oil and gas. It’s a complete mystery why this is happening. But even against it is acknowledging it and reporting on it. Yes, such is life
Christopher Messina [00:44:57] We’re going to power the grid like unicorn, Fords and rainbows. I thought that was being legislated.
Irina Slav [00:45:02] Yeah. If it’s not.
David Blackmon [00:45:05] They’re trying
Tammy Nemeth [00:45:05] Trying.
Stuart Turley [00:45:10] UK.
Irina Slav [00:45:11] Back hard.
Stuart Turley [00:45:14] Irina The UK gas output has more than halved in the last 15 years.
Irina Slav [00:45:18] So a story earlier today. Yeah.
Tammy Nemeth [00:45:21] Yeah.
Stuart Turley [00:45:21] Whoops.
Tammy Nemeth [00:45:22] That’s not surprising.
Christopher Messina [00:45:24] You’re busy. They’re busy turning. They’re busy turning off the heat to pensioners who fought in World War Two to save money.
Tammy Nemeth [00:45:33] Yeah.
Christopher Messina [00:45:35] Fantastic
Tammy Nemeth [00:45:35] The sea. So apparently they’re saving something like 10 or 12 billion by cutting off these payments at the same time that they’re giving 22 billion to do a carbon capture project with BP and along with nationalizing energy, nationalizing the train service, paying up, paying off the labor unions and everything to like an extraordinary amount. But they don’t have enough money. They’re tight for for the elderly.
Christopher Messina [00:46:11] Well, it’s very similar to here in the U.S. So Helene and Milton came through North Carolina and Florida and hit largely Republican leaning voting areas. And magically, FEMA can’t get the money to fix those areas. So how.
David Blackmon [00:46:25] That worked.
Christopher Messina [00:46:25] On Election Day and it’s a miracle, really.
David Blackmon [00:46:28] Yeah.
Christopher Messina [00:46:30] So they’ve got billions of dollars to hand out to people who broke the laws to come here to attack cops and murder 11 year old girls in Texas. You got plenty of money for that. But they can’t pay for American taxpayers. A sense of thinking.
Tammy Nemeth [00:46:43] This same thing in the UK. Yeah. Yeah.
David Blackmon [00:46:46] Yeah. Yeah. Priorities.
Stuart Turley [00:46:51] It’s looking at the EPA power rules in this story. EPA Power Plant requires carbon capture, a costly technology not expected until 2020 2055. You’re right. You can’t buy this kind of entertainment. I mean, they insist carbon capture and sequestration technology is adequately demonstrated and that geological sequestration of CO2 is well-proven and broadly available. Yeah, sorry.
Irina Slav [00:47:29] Well, most affordable, I guess.
Stuart Turley [00:47:31] Yeah. And then the other one. I love this story. Voters strongly favor all of the above energy approach over rapid green transition. Isn’t that amazing? People are getting tired of the energy transition failures. At first we had Germany and green energy policies equal deindustrialization. Then we have the UK, we have New York, and we have a couple others. Then we have California. I have a video and David, Christopher and Tammy and Iryna. These are some likely voters that are in the energy transition space. They just want green only. Okay. And these are these are people that just think we need wind and solar only
David Blackmon [00:48:27] Ironically, they look like sheep.
Stuart Turley [00:48:29] Ironically, these are actually real sheep. Hearing this and listeners.
Christopher Messina [00:48:35] Sheep just want to have fun. No AI involved.
Stuart Turley [00:48:38] Theres no AI. I don’t know. And watch the and I’m like on and you see them here. Holy smokes. Okay.
Irina Slav [00:48:52] All right.
Stuart Turley [00:48:53] Christopher, I just bought your book on Amazon Messina’s as federal budget. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Christopher Messina [00:49:00] So thank you. I’d love to hear your comments. I roared with laughter when the Democrats started screaming about Donald Trump believes the radical project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation.
Stuart Turley [00:49:12] Right?
Christopher Messina [00:49:12] I cried with laughter because Project Green, 2025, is a soft on government liberal Marxist version of my budget. Right? Trillion to 2.2 trillion today and fire 1.6 million federal employees and strengthen their unions in year one.
Stuart Turley [00:49:32] As soon as we can. I’d love to have you on my podcast and talk about this. I’m ordering it today. Let’s get Your Honor, because I thought that was pretty entertaining.
Christopher Messina [00:49:44] So they’re all crying, Elon, and all of a sudden is going to Trump is going to tap Elon the attention whore to fix the fix the federal budget, unlike the new shows that inefficient because they googled Amazon you find my There are only two books written on the federal budget on Amazon mine and someone else’s, which is vastly inferior. So you’re like you just say, Great, I’m done. I’m going to get a copy of this book. We’re going to implement that and we should solve the federal budget problem.
Stuart Turley [00:50:12] So if we can get Elon on this podcast next week, we can have you have we can solve the the global budget because we’re taking this this solution globally. Is that what I just heard.
Christopher Messina [00:50:26] You just heard? That is exactly right. If people would just wake up, I mean, everyone has to be costly plugs. I spent a long time in DC for my sins and people say like, Well, what do you suggest we do? So I’m not an authoritarian. People have to get involved. The fact that 11% of registered voters in New York City voted to elect Bill de Blasio. I’m a native New Yorker. We left that day. We left to go to Florida and I can’t pick stupid. And the people aren’t going to pay attention and they’re not going to do what’s in their best interests. I’m sure I’ll keep shouting into the hurricane, but you’ve got to pay attention for five minutes.
Tammy Nemeth [00:51:09] And not be making cat videos.
Christopher Messina [00:51:11] They can make cat. Videos their spare time. In fact, they can let the AI rule over reading my book.
David Blackmon [00:51:16] You can multitask.
Christopher Messina [00:51:17] They can have videos of cats reading my books. It’s in all good.
Irina Slav [00:51:24] Use, not videos for our messaging.
Christopher Messina [00:51:28] Happy to do whatever it takes to break through.
Irina Slav [00:51:31] People like to get into things and not think a lot about things. But while they could be spurred into thinking. I know
Christopher Messina [00:51:42] That’s why my entire life I guess we refer to as advanced, enlightened tainment.
Tammy Nemeth [00:51:48] Think.
Irina Slav [00:51:49] Learning through entertainment.
Christopher Messina [00:51:52] Exactly. Whatever is going to make us.
Tammy Nemeth [00:51:59] I think Chris should be like if if Trump is elected and Elon is the efficiency guy. I think Ellen needs to get Chris in there too, to show them how to do it.
Christopher Messina [00:52:10] I have I have been asked to help my my nation before. I will do so again. As I said to the last Trump administration, that’s going to come in for a under-secretary role. I will do anything that is not require Senate confirmation because I will lose my mind and scream obscenities at Democrats because I will feel a moral imperative to do so for the good of the nation. Thank you all for having me on. I appreciate it. This is a great conversation.
David Blackmon [00:52:41] Thanks for joining.
Irina Slav [00:52:42] Thanks to be here.
Christopher Messina [00:52:45] So it’s kind of awesome to break the fourth wall and be on the inside.
David Blackmon [00:52:51] All right, folks, remember, sell bitcoin, buy coal and you’ll be good.
Stuart Turley [00:52:57] In natural gas. have a great week.
Irina Slav [00:53:02] bye everyone.
Christopher Messina [00:53:04] Ciao, thanks.
Tammy Nemeth [00:53:06] bye
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