David Wallace-Wells

speaker

678 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6d ago

David Wallace-Wells’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Opinions · Is This the Fastest Opinion Shift in American Politics? · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

Yes.

you know, you and I talking about these issues, it can sound extremely technocratic.

Like we're, you know, we're designing this whole system in this little room, we're working on a whiteboard, we can see the trade-offs and we can then manage the trade-offs.

It's almost like we're making a case for the AI build-out and that everything is going to be okay.

But of course, the energy on the ground is not, you know, technocratic, techno-optimist, people in a room crunching the math.

The energy on the ground is, at least as it seems to me, like pretty heated.

And that heat is pretty widespread also.

And I think that that goes beyond particular objections to water use or even local pollution.

There's something like deeper and larger that seems to be unfolding here.

And it puts me in mind of, you know, Occupy.

It puts me in mind of the Tea Party.

You know, when you see videos of these town halls, people are pretty angry.

And one thing I've been struggling with is trying to figure out just how thick that opposition is.

We can see clearly in poll after poll that more people are opposed to local construction of data centers.

We also see people are worried about AI more generally.

But to the extent that we're then thinking about how this plays out going forward in the midterms, in the presidential cycle, at the national level...

I would love to have a clearer sense of how robust that opposition really is and what it points to when we think about, you know, the possibility of taking control or taking hold of this sort of AI industrial revolution that we're living through.

So like summarize all of that.

What you mean is like that this has a very strong NIMBY core.

NIMBY is so pejorative, but like I do think... But those are people who would object less if the proposed data centers were somewhere else far away from there.

Showing 441–460 of 678 · page 23 of 34