Yeah, that, that would be the start I would say, and, uh, make sure that, you know, this, this power accumulation can't, can't happen again after whatever, whatever happens with this, uh, uh, the dust settles, that sort of thing.

Yeah, I think a big, uh, or an important aim of our bubbling up movement here across the country is to have that awakening among people to better understand the, what's happening and why it's happening, and help them understand how we can fix that in a constructive manner instead of blaming the wrong group or entity or, uh, looking toward false solutions that are not actually addressing the root cause of this.

Uh, so there's, you know, uh, you know, one type of reaction, you know, that I think I've heard sometimes is, "Why are they building the data center here? They should build it somewhere else," and that somewhere else is usually a disadvantaged community or, you know, in the eyes of the person a l- you know, a lesser community.

"I don't want it in my backyard.

It should be in those other people's backyards." And we need to then use the opportunity to be like, "Well, why should we put it in anybody's backyard? Why is this ...

why would it be, you know, fair to put this injustice, put this exploitation on a different community?" Um, and to kinda help use this opportunity to educate people and build solidarity as opposed to building, um, you know, division 'cause that's, this is gonna be an opportunity for, um, you know, some folks to try and create the division, you know? We're, we're seeing it with the, the AI, the pro-AI group, right? They're trying to say us versus China, and it's a nationalism battle.

We have to pursue this at all costs 'cause we have to beat China.

And I'm curious what it's, what it's felt like these last few months to kinda, like, watch our whole political system reorder itself according to your [laughs] worldview and according to the, like, shit that you've been saying now for, you know, a while.

So it's, it's not left to right, it's, it's top bottom at this point here in Indiana.

Yeah, exactly.

I think while President Trump and, you know, all the money he's taken from big tech companies t- and, you know, the policies that he's adopting to do their bidding are, you know, particularly egregious, you know, it's definitely not a one party, uh, only situation, you know, in terms of support for data centers.

We're seeing, um, you know, a lot of Democrats also be, uh, particularly weak on this issue, uh, you know, one, because they're afraid of labor unions that support them, um, that support data centers as well, uh, and also because a lot of Democrats are taking a lot of money from big tech and have historically.

They support in many ways a lot of the things that data centers are doing.

So this is really, you know, as Bryce is pointing out, this is really a, you know, few elites at the top versus the people, you know, the mass of people at the bottom, uh, type of an issue, and that's what we're really seeing, you know, across Indiana, where it's, uh, you know, you can be in a, a beet red county with, you know, uh, with, you know, Trump voters primarily, and they can, you know, you can have the hundreds of people turn out in opposition of a data center, but you can have the same thing in Marion County, where Indianapolis is.

That's a, you know, historically Democrat voting city.

And I'm curious what it's, what it's felt like these last few months to kind of, like, watch our whole political system reorder itself according to your [laughs] worldview and according to the, like, shit that you've been saying now for, you know, a while.

How can we do things better? Are there technologies that the data centers just simply aren't investing in and they should?

Sure, there's some examples of things they could be doing better, but at the end of the day, I feel like a lot of these initiatives are putting lipstick on a pig.

It's kind of like trying to make a coal plant sustainable.

It's like, you can put the scrubbers on it, you can do all sorts of things to make it more efficient.

But at the end of the day, it's a coal plant and it's generating tons of pollution.

It's a huge environmental negative, no matter what you do to it.

And that's how I feel about a lot of these, especially hyperscale data centers.

What do you think about the transparency issue when you have these commitments to monitor water?

Ben, could you talk a little bit more about those details of what goes into that research and how you would describe the sort of pros and cons list of data centers that maybe developers aren't sharing in full?

Yeah, I would say a big challenge in Indiana and elsewhere across the country is just the lack of transparency anywhere.

that these developers are providing on their proposed data centers.

So it's leaving a lot of communities in the dark on the very basic information about things like their energy and water consumption, about the potential tax subsidies they're getting, about the money, even the property taxes they're going to provide to the local government often are not clearly identified up front.

And so they're making these kind of very generalized claims about providing some construction jobs and long-term economic benefits, but there's really not a lot to back up a lot of these claims that they're making.

They're often relying more on rhetoric.

And so what we're trying to do is look for every possible public source of information to triangulate as much credible information as we can about the data center proposal That requires a lot of work on multiple fronts.

Do you have any specific statistic or story that stands out in your mind when you're thinking about AI data centers of like, how someone has reacted to the research, a data point that stands out to you that you would pull out to help people understand why there are groups called madness, monopoly madness, cropping up in the state with thousands of members.