Hi, I'm Adam Grant, host of the podcast Rethinking, a show where I talk to some of today's greatest thinkers about the unconventional ways they see the world. On Rethinking, you'll get surprising insights from scientists, leaders, artists, and more. People like Reese Witherspoon, Malcolm Gladwell, and Yo-Yo Ma. Hear lessons to help you find success at work, build better relationships, and more. Find Rethinking wherever you get your podcasts. Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News Stacey, I'm a little concerned This studio that we're recording this episode of Everybody's Business in I'd say it's like 69, 70 degrees It's very cold It's cool, maybe too cool Well, that's a good point we have we're in New York where there have been lots of heat warnings and we have gotten a lot of encouragement to temper the coolness of our at-home use yeah both for our grids and also for the data centers we don't want to stop the AI companies from doing their the important work of building chatbots anyway we'll have Noreen Malik energy reporter with Bloomberg taking with us to take a deep dive into the state of the world's energy grids and why combo of heat and the AI boom are putting them under strain. Exactly. And another thing that I should say about this weather is it's really hard to get out and enjoy the summer when it is this hot. And as a matter of fact, this is not an isolated issue that we're having in this country. Apparently, here in the U.S., we have a fund deficit. That's right, Stacey. Fund traders on Wall Street have been, you know, ringing the alarm bells. The fund markets are hot. It's a scarcity. Yeah, there's not enough fun in the world. We're short on fun. Fun is getting more expensive. Sorry for all the Wall Street metaphors. We're legally required to do that. But in any case, we have Bloomberg reporter Ben Steverman here to talk about why basically all of the fun things that one might want to do in the summer, go on a trip, go to the beach, send your kid to camp. They're all getting harder and more expensive. It is a bona fide fun shortage. Yes, it is. Fun, it's not for everybody. Can you afford fun? Max, it has been very hot here in New York. It's hot now as we record this. It's hot now. It's been hot. Like over the 4th of July, I was invited to a barbecue. It got canceled for heat, which has never happened. Everything is getting canceled for weather, Stacey. Even for a brief moment. Now, I was out last week. You and Brad Stone were doing the Lord's work here on the Everybody's Business podcast. Yes, we were. Even the Great American State Fair was briefly evacuated. It sounded like it got pretty dramatic. Here's some tape. It sounds like a little more like War of the Worlds than a heat-related evacuation. Sounds fun. But apparently this is where we are in this world. But also, of course, this heat has huge implications beyond just this. We've got so much pressure on our grid right now, both the heat wave, which has been going on all across the U.S., but also data centers. And this is not just isolated to the U.S. This is going on all over the place. And we are really lucky to have Noreen Malik, an energy reporter at Bloomberg who is based in London, dealing with heat of her own. Noreen, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. those screams sounded like they were watching a World Cup game. I wasn't sure what was happening. Well, yes. That was the sound of Belgium destroying the United States. Oh, Noreen, first of all, before we kind of dive into the particulars of this, talk to us a little bit about this summer so far and what we've seen in terms of weather and electricity and some of the challenges that are coming up. Yeah, we've definitely seen some severe heat already on the East Coast, especially. And even when it wasn't that hot, and I mean like in the 80 degrees, low 80 degrees, we started to see signs of stress on the grid, especially around like Northern Virginia, which is part of a 13-state grid that stretches from like Chicago roughly to like North Carolina, the northern edge of it, and up to New Jersey. and includes Washington, D.C. So we've seen stress more frequently in the last couple of years, especially because you have a lot of data center demand growth there. It's growing so quickly that it is kind of like keeping an elevated demand around the clock. And then anytime you get a weather event, even if it's not that extreme, although in D.C. and Virginia, it's like a swamp even when it's like 80 or 70 degrees. So I would consider that extreme. But you do see a significant ramp up in grid stress. And how this is manifested is you'll see emergency postings on the grid operator saying, this transformer, which is meant to keep voltage flowing smoothly on a grid at safe levels, you'll start to put out alerts saying stress is popping up here and there. And then last week during the heat wave, we had PJM, the 13-state eastern grid, operate in an emergency situation. It was a low-level emergency. It's meant to put everyone on the right foot, like, hey, shore up your supplies, stop maintenance, kind of like everyone has to be ready to serve demand. And even then, you saw power prices jump to hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars per megawatt hour. At a time when it's not supposed to be that stressed, these are becoming more frequent. Noreen, you talked about the kind of how the grid operators experience these moments of stress. Like, what does it mean for like a regular power consumer? Like, so I assume, because I got these messages in New York, you know, you get text messages from your utility saying like, you know, turn the air conditioning up or whatever. To 78 degrees. Which is kind of like, that's like a standard thing they put out. It seems like every summer. But like, what happens for consumers, both in terms of kind of like what they're being asked to do, what they're paying, outages they might experience, that sort of thing? Yeah, I mean, we've definitely seen grid operators ask consumers to voluntarily conserve more in recent years. Like, it really started in California in 2020 when they had blackouts after that. Texas in 2021 when they had blackouts. And on the East Coast, like New York and New England, they'll ask, like, utilities will say, like, hey, there's going to be high demand just in case, like, power supplies on the East Coast are constrained and much of the U.S. are constrained because there's overall higher demand. So what it means is for consumers is, one, you have to more proactively think about it. There are solutions, like some thermostats will automatically, like smart thermostats will automatically, like, pre-cool your home so that, like, when it's, like, the middle of the day and there's a lot of solar, for instance, you can take advantage of, like, cheaper prices and pre-cool your home. So there is like a behavioral change that is starting to happen, and it depends like utility by utility. What happened during the heat wave was like the grid operator was like, hey, like in New York state, the grid operator was like supplies are tight across the entire grid. They put out an order to utilities and the utilities will ask skyscrapers in Manhattan to curtail. Now, these guys, when they curtail, they're getting often paid to like dim the lights and run fewer elevators. But as a consumer, the programs aren't as developed. They're starting to increase. But like you're not really getting compensated. So you're voluntarily doing this. But then you brought up the data centers, Noreen. And so how much of this is that like we are getting our electricity prices jacked up or being told to like turn our make our homes too warm because like some meta engineer is doing a really awesome prompt right now on, you know, on Claude or whatever. Like, do we have any sense of how impactful these data centers are? I mean, I know that it's a subject of a lot of controversy and the industry is pushing in one direction, politicians in the other. Can you just sort of break it down for us or at least break down the different points of view on this? Yeah. So as you said, this is super controversial and there's a big battle being fought over even just the perception of this. The truth is there is not much transparency. What we do know is I've talked to several CEOs of utilities and PJM and traders and across the gamut to understand this. And anytime you plop big demand into any area of the grid if it like Virginia or Ohio where there a lot of people already living there and the grid may already be tight then yes it going to overall increase prices There no way around it I found it interesting in Europe like when I went to like Finland or Lisbon for conferences it is a natural assumption or it's taken for granted that they bring in data centers, your power prices are going to go up. That's like a given. In the U.S., this is like a battleground. So does that mean that like we are competing against tech companies for energy? Because consumers are never going to have as much money. But is this what's happening? Are like tech companies competing with regular consumers? It's more like this grid had so much slack on the system, like 30, 40% spare capacity. And data center demand growth is the fastest growing demand. That's why we're like focused on them instead of like EVs and other electrification that takes like a decade to ramp up. So much has come online that it's like eating up all the excess supply. And so now the grid is under stress in a couple of short years. We're facing a shortfall next year if things don't turn around in terms of demand projections. So on that level, it's not that the household is competing with it, but somebody has to pay for the new supply. And that's the battle that's being fought out is like, who's going to pay for the new power plants needed for data centers? Because right now, all costs are socialized. Like every time you build transmission lines, and in some states you build power plants, depends on your regulation, then every consumer pays for a split of it. And so this is like federal regulators are weighing in. And in the next like month and a half or so, we're going to see the grid operators share with the federal regulators how to split the cost and how to make sure data centers pay for it. I know that utilities tend to be more expensive in other countries. I know you're in London, and I believe utilities are more expensive there. And I know in continental Europe, they're more expensive. Is the U.S. moving more towards a European model where energy just costs more because more things are kind of baked into those costs? Or is this a totally different situation? I think there's a lot of the same stressors. The difference with the U.S. is there is plentiful gas. And it feels like a lot of the push towards zero carbon energy is like not really being talked about, even though the hyperscalers say they're really committed to it. So the U.S. does have a lot of like energy. It's a matter of like delivering it to the right places and then maybe like increasingly converting it to electricity. In Europe, they seem to be very committed to zero carbon energy and trying to like take a more considered approach to like, how do you integrate them? These data centers, they want them for digital sovereignty, for national security, economic reasons, but they also really want it to be clean energy. So on that level, like that's where they bifurcate is like, can you have a U.S. that's very fossil fuel and increasingly fossil fuel focused, like pursue that strategy and like keep prices low for everyone versus like Europe, which sees like its advantage as solar as keeping prices lower plus batteries. So I think the problem statement is the same across them. They're moving at different paces. And so what happens in the U.S. could become lessons learned for Europe. Like people are moving much faster in the U.S. with the data center boom. And that's making all the difference right now. Should we just become more copacetic about being sweaty? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, in New York City, I don't know if you've noticed, I've never paid attention to the dew point, but the dew point has been a big issue the last few years. What is the dew point? It's like a humidity. Oh, yeah. It's like it's not just humidity. It's like the temperature of like when sweat evaporates is higher. So even if it's like humid and the temperatures aren't that high at like 70, the high dew point makes you feel like it's 90. So that has gotten worse. And that is like a whole other level of suffering we've seen in New York. In London, I've seen something I haven't seen anywhere, which is like everyone seems to have a tiny fan, like an electric fan and just kind of blasting it. Like that they take with them everywhere? Yeah, on the subway. I saw a woman with like a fan this big on the subway yesterday or the tube yesterday. Noreen just made a gesture as large as a person's face. Like a basketball. Yeah, basketball size fan. Yeah, it was surprising. I had no idea how she fit it in her bag. So that might be what our future looks like is that everyone just carries like a personal fan now. So the argument is like, shouldn't the new users be the ones paying for the new infrastructure instead of having the average American make that sacrifice of feeling hot and icky? Noreen Malik, thank you for joining us. Thanks, Noreen. Thank you. Stay cool. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card lets you earn daily cash back on every purchase, every day. Applying the Wallet app on iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. Max, we live in a world that is really good at telling us what just happened, but not always so great at explaining why it matters. That's what we do every Friday on Everybody's Business. Each week, Stacey, we take the biggest stories in business, markets, and the global economy and slow them down, adding the context you need to actually understand what's going on. And if you want even more of that reporting and insight, a Bloomberg subscription gives you unlimited access to the journalism behind those stories. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. I was reading the pages of Bloomberg recently. I learned some disturbing news. We've been talking about all sorts of sort of supply constraints and shortages. Tariffs, war, oil prices. Right, the tariffs, the oil prices, the chip shortage, and so on. There is a shortage. I think we were all aware of, but no one had put their finger on. Tell me. What? The fun shortage. A shortage of fun. There's not enough fun in your life? There's not enough fun in this world, at least according to our guest, Ben Steverman, who is a reporter here at Bloomberg, who joins us now. Ben, how are you? I'm doing great. Ben, what is the fun shortage? What are you talking about? What I'm talking about, my definition of fun is shared experiences with others. That is a good definition. vacation with family going out on a friday night with friends uh just even small talk with strangers kind of interacting with people in your community um you know if you talk to happiness researchers the fun that really matters that changes your life is not like scrolling through tiktok in fact that makes you just more bored and like and more unhappy and yeah like fun needs to be shared to actually be something that's lasting and fun. Okay. So I was laughing when you said happiness researchers, but your article has a lot of data in it. So how do you know there's a happiness shortage? Well, first of all, if you just ask people about their life satisfaction and there's a world happiness report that a bunch of academics, like serious people put together every year from more than 140 countries. If you ask people about their happiness in the United States, our happiness has gone down steadily for like 15 years. Most of the rest of the world is actually getting happier despite the fact that they are online just as much as we are in most countries, in a lot of countries. So something's going on there. Like when you analyze how Americans are spending their days or time, we're interacting face-to-face a lot less than we used to. True. And we're looking at screens a lot more. I spent a lot of time this year, you know, last couple months, just sort of looking at what are the places and activities that actually bring people together and get them out in the world? Like, how do you get people out of their homes? How do you tempt them to like, go do things together? And I really believe that the supply that's available of fun activities, the industries that provide it, the supply is shrinking and the demand is at a peak. So you go through a lot of this in the story, but bars and restaurants on the decline, lots of sort of outdoorsy things are popular, but also constrained in terms of supply. There's more people playing golf than like what in the sometime in the last like 15 or 20 years. And yet the number of golf courses is going way down. The number of bowling alleys is going down. Like a lot of these places where people congregate, where people have fun, there are fewer of them. And, you know, supply and demand, the natural sort of consequences of that is a lot of them are getting more expensive. So you have this sense that like if you want to go on vacation, you want to send your kid to a summer camp, you want to go to a show, you're going to be spending a lot more. You want to go on a road trip even. Yeah. Just something simple or take your kids to whatever, an amusement park. Yeah, exactly. I was surprised to learn that it was like, there no beachfront hotels being built in America today A new one just opened and it was like such a rare event that Bloomberg did a story about it Where was it Florida I can remember But like it so hard to build new stuff And- Because of interest rates? Well, construction costs have gone up. Interest rates have gone up. There's also just like a lot of the places you would want to put this stuff is already taken up because maybe a billionaire owns has built a mansion there. There's just like we are geographically constrained and then we're also financially constrained in terms of how much fun we can provide people. Our producer Jasmine made an interesting point that it seems like fun might be becoming kind of a luxury good. And you make this point in your piece that like a lot of sort of entertainment and diversions are free, but they tend to be on screens. and then a lot of the kind of experiential stuff that gets you out in the world, gets you interacting in real life is costing more. Is there something to that? Is there like a K-shaped fun economy? Yes, I think there definitely is. You have people at the top who actually can afford $600, $700 a night for the vacation rental that used to cost $350. I've seen this happen with the beach locations that I used to love, and they're just so expensive. So you have to either cut your vacation in half or just pay through the nose. But there are people in this – in America today who can afford that if you look at just the amount of wealth that's been created in the last decade. There are people who can do that. And then the people who get squeezed out I think are first of all lower income or even middle class people but then also young people who are at the beginning of their career. And they're like, well, I can't go out and pay $20 for a cocktail. we're going to stay home and like, you know, watch Netflix or whatever instead. So one thing that I was wondering as I was reading this story is kind of like, how do you untangle trends? There are fewer bowling alleys, but I'm guessing there are more gyms. There are fewer bars, but there are more coffee shops than there were 20 years ago. And so is it that we have like fewer of these, you know, like third place type places or that they're just changing? That's a really good question. I think that they, to the extent that they're changing, they're changing to places that allow less kind of face-to-face and community time together. So talk about coffee shops. We've had this shift in coffee shops from like Starbucks, which was never a very social place into the... It was more social. It was more social than the drive-thru coffee shop, which is the new trend now. Well, and that's the thing. Even Starbucks, there are tons of Starbuckses, but many of them look like what you just described. They're basically drive-thru windows. And people just order on their phone and they don't even interact with the person behind the counter. There's more gyms. There's more fitness centers. But, like, are you interacting with that many people? Some people do. Some people don't. But nightlife in America per capita is like a third the size it was when I was born in the late 70s. Like, that's incredible that we've lost that much of sort of bars and clubs where people just kind of let loose and had fun. Yeah, I just wonder if we're more talking about drinking. Oh. Like, drinking is like, is this just like a way of talking about the decline of alcohol consumption or something like that? Max wants to have a beer and go bowling. I think this is what I'm hearing. Because a lot of these new places, like, a lot of what you're describing is sort of like drinking culture. And a lot of the new places are like not about drinking in one way or another. I see what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, the weird thing about that is that drinking is actually like has declined a little bit among young people recently. Mostly because I think they're doing edibles instead. But it's actually at like we are drinking a lot. We're just drinking at home. hmm um and it's that doesn't sound yes and that does not sound great yeah that's so i've written i've written about that too like americans drink something like only 15 of their drinks are actually out in public and if you look at like spain it's more than half so like people don't aren't drinking together they're not getting together for this kind of shared experiences now nightlife is an obsession of mine but I was surprised to see sort of the same trends when we're talking about golf or country clubs or things that I'm not interested in pickleball too, pickleball has gotten so much more popular and I think that's mostly about demand but then it's crowding out basketball and golf which are also getting more popular, so what I think is new in this piece as well is I'm saying that I do think that there is evidence that people want to get out Like there's this assumption, I think, among some of the people who focus on our loneliness epidemic that it's all kind of our fault and that we just are stuck on our screens and we can't get out anymore. And we don't want to go out. We just want to stay there because it's safe or something. But like I'm looking at a lot of this data on travels, trends, and fitness trends and things like that. And people do seem to want to get out. It's just that when they go out or when they look for a vacation spot, they're just hitting these constraints and these barriers. What is the problem here? So we're having less fun. Why is this bad? What happens when we lose fun? There were a couple studies out of Europe that were really intriguing to me. They analyzed the closure of pubs in the UK and bar tabacs in France. Bar tabacs are like, I don't even know a farm. They're like a bar coffee shop, but you can also like buy cigarettes there. And you can make a bet. It's like a bodega meets a coffee shop. Yeah. So in the villages and towns where those closures have happened, right-wing voting goes up over time. Not just like conservative voting. I mean like the Nationalist Rally Party, like the far right gets many more votes in the decades after that happens. And what's going on there? I don't know. Like you could have different theories, but one is like people are just interacting less face-to-face. They feel less connected to their communities. They also feel more left behind, I think, in those communities. And you kind of wonder, is that something like that happening in America too, we're kind of shrinking into our homes. We feel less connected. We feel more left behind. We get angrier. We're like, do you look at like consumer sentiment data, which we've talked about on this podcast? Like people are really kind of mad, not just sad, not just unhappy, but like angry. What's going on there? And I think it might be that we're just like having less enjoying. We're enjoying our time together less and we're spending less time together. After I read your article, Ben, I was thinking and I was like, what's something that like you can do in the office that's fun? Because I feel like a lot of us are in offices. And I also I appreciated the rigor you brought to your article. Like, you know, and so I started to look around and see like what actually measurably increases fun that you can be done like inside in an office now. And I did discover this study from the 90s about bubble wrap. And apparently, yes. This is like the original TikTok. You pop bubble wrap, your, like, level of stress and anxiety goes down and your feeling of well-being goes up. So I actually, so that we could increase the joy in this room. Max could not be more excited. Stacey is, like, finding opportunities that we did not even know. You could open, like, a franchise where people get together and instead of drinking or dancing or drinking, you know, whatever, they just pop bubble wrap. Well, we can see if it works. I mean, we're like together face-to-face. There's not a screen. So we can see if it actually works. Ben? Ben's face. This is a lot of, oh, he's really going to town on the bubble wrap. I've never seen anyone pop bubble wrap in such a city. Both of you, just very systematically. Well. I'm going one. It's like the way I eat corn. It's like the way I eat corn. You know where I find fun is in parks and the like. And I know that the parks are more crowded and everything, but there's still. Barely touched your bubble wrap. There are tons of parks out there. You can go running. You can socialize. I keep hearing. You can bring bubble wrap to the park. We're going to be less depressing. I was just going to say that, like, I keep hearing horror stories about how crowded the national parks are. But I think that's true for the, like, the glamour parks. The, like, you know, Grand Canyon and so on. But there are, like, little smaller state and local parks that are, I don't know, my experience anyway. Yeah. I mean I think you know we had a party two weeks ago at our apartment Like just hosting a party or going to a house party Like there nothing better than that in my opinion Well Ben thank you for coming to talk about fun with us I feel like the discussion got very heavy, but it was really fun. It was fun to see you guys. Because we're socializing. Yeah, that's true. With bubble wrap. You earn daily cash back on every purchase every day. Applying the wallet app on iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. The Wired newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Max Chafkin, it is now that time in the show when we have fun and talk about our underrated stories of the week. You know, they don't have to be fun, Stacey. They can be serious. That's true. But this story I found at least a little bit amusing. So I don't know if you've been paying attention to President Trump's Truth Social as closely as I do, but he has been touting a new effort to lower gas prices. We've been talking about gas prices on this show all the time. Even a big issue right now as the sort of tensions in the Strait of Hormuz heat up again, and it appears, at least as we're recording this on Thursday, July 9th, that the Strait is once again closed. But don't worry, we have a new effort touted by the White House and President Trump coming to the rescue. Let me just play you a little clip. Okay. I saved money. I had to go back in and get my change. I thought gas was more expensive, but it's not. So thanks, Trump, for saving me some money. We're here at the first Freedom Fuel Network gas station right here in Philadelphia, leading the charge to lower gas prices $3.47. That's for our 47th president, President Donald J. Trump. Freedom fuel, Stacey. What is freedom fuel? Please illuminate us. Wait, no one knows? What is this? Is this like a state-sponsored gas station? This is, according to the White House, a new company that is operating, a private company that operates 25 gas stations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey that is selling gas for $3.47, cents, which they say is lower, between 40 and 50 cents lower than the average price in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the state prices. It's a little bit like the Mom Donnie grocery store thing, but with gas. Oh, right. We should say that Mom Donnie has talked about opening state-sponsored grocery stores with lower food prices. And so this is like sort of an equivalent? It's sort of a cross between that and the one we talked about a couple weeks ago that is in Atlanta. It's sort of a cross between the state-sponsored grocery store and Trump Steaks or like one of, or Trump Cologne, which we have discussed on this show before. One of these kind of like Trump branded products. This is sort of Trump branded gasoline priced at a very Trumpy price of $3.47 because he is the 47th president. And it is also an attempt to sort of, I guess, say that, like, the Trump administration is doing its part to lower gas prices. There are a whole bunch of issues here, one of which is these prices, although low, are basically the same as the price at Costco right now in the area. There is BJ's. So there are other gasoline discounters that that sell gas for a very similar price. So I think it's being oversold to some extent. There are also some questions about who exactly owns this thing. So unlike with the state-sponsored grocery stores in New York or Atlanta, the Trump administration, the White House has said there is no – there are no subsidies going in. This is a totally private thing. Does raise a question given that President Trump has a very large portfolio of private businesses, many of which have done very well during his presidency. Who owns this? Who owns Freedom Fuel? Do we know what – does the company have a name or do we know – Freedom Fuel, Stacey. Oh, Freedom – it's like Freedom Fuel, Inc. It's like Freedom Fries, but for your gasoline. Stacey, what's your underrated story? So my underrated story sounds hyper-local, but I would argue is of national concern, which is that earlier this week in New York, there was a building that was evacuated in Midtown, right by Grand Central Station, right in the center of New York, the very dense part of New York. Apparently, they were retrofitting this building. It's a building that's been there forever, I think since the 60s. And they were changing it from an office building to an apartment building. And they started to see it buckling. And they realized the core of the building was like buckling. And so they evacuated everyone. They evacuated all these people around the streets. And there was all this worry that the building was going to collapse. I mean, that's really scary. This is like nightmare fuel. Building collapse is not to be trifled with. It's a really dense area. Yeah, absolutely. Here is what I think is really interesting. So this was one of the largest ever building conversions. And of course, here in New York, we see this, but this is happening all over the country, which is the need for office space is just decreased a lot. And the need for housing has increased a lot. So one of the big solutions that was supposed to sort of solve these two issues was like, well, why don't we take all these empty office buildings and just turn them into apartment buildings. And of course, it's turned out that that's a lot harder than you might think because office buildings are built like they have a lot of depth. And they are weird. They're weird. Because of the because of the shapes are weird. The point you're making. Yes. You end up with these bedrooms with these spectacular, you know, all glass walls, essentially, and internal rooms, kitchens and so on that are basically dark, enveloped in darkness. And so I think this is potentially an issue here that like what sounds like perfect solution to these two really difficult problems. And here in New York, you see empty storefronts all the time. And it's heartbreaking because the housing is so expensive. There's all this open space. But I think the conversions are more difficult than people are letting on. And I did hear from a couple of kind of real estate people in New York saying that this is a really bad sign that investors are watching this and wondering if this means that this solution, which seemed pretty perfect, might be in for some trouble. Okay, so here's my pitch for you, Stacey. This data center boom, it cannot go on forever. I mean, we are living through the most clearly a bubbly moment in AI. And one way or another, we talked about it with Noreen, you know, electricity prices, one way or another, we're not going to need all these data centers. So maybe people could live in them. people could live at the data centers? In the data. We'll take out all the chips and just build housing. How is this a solution, though? Because I don't think they have any windows in a data center. Yeah, I mean, no, some drawbacks, undoubtedly. It just, you know, it's like when they do, like, convert warehouses into apartments. Sometimes, like, they're really awesome and they have really high ceilings. But also, you're like, this feels like a warehouse. This show is produced by Jasmine J.T. Green and Stacey Wong. Magnus Hendrickson is our supervising producer. Sam Rogich handles engineering and Dave Purcell fact checks. Special thanks to Jeff Muscus, Julia Rubin, Julia Press, and Maria Ling. If you have a minute, please rate and review the show. It'll mean a lot to us. And if you have a story that should be our business, email us at everybody's at Bloomberg.net. That's everybody with an S at Bloomberg.net. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next week. Thank you. Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
