Sober Dad Crew Episode 94: Andy Masley: The Data Behind Alcohol’s Impacts

My guest this episode is Andy Mazley. I first learned about him in a recent New York Times article about AI. After reading more about him, I discovered he’d written an article entitled “Alcohol is so bad for society that you should probably stop drinking.” In this episode, we discuss the societal impacts of alcohol, the importance of data-driven decision-making, and explore how cultural norms influence behavior and how understanding facts can lead to better policies and personal choices.
 
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Be sure to subscribe, leave a rating, and share Sober Dad Crew with folks. Sober Dad Crew is an independent, DIY production created by Stephen Kimball, who writes, records, and produces the podcast. Copyright 2026.

Keywords

alcohol, societal impact, data-driven decision making, effective altruism, cultural norms, public policy, environmental impact, AI, data centers, social change

Key Topics

• Societal harms of alcohol
• Normalization of risky behaviors
• Data-driven approaches to social issues
• Effective altruism and global health
• Environmental impacts of AI and data centers
• Cultural influences on public policy

Chapters

00:00

Introduction to Andy Mazley's work and background

03:58

The cultural normalization of alcohol and other risky behaviors

07:54

The societal costs of alcohol consumption, including economic impacts

12:07

Comparing COVID-19 and alcohol-related death rates

15:56

The role of privilege in societal health issues

18:06

Effective altruism and the importance of factual understanding

20:09

How data can guide impactful charitable giving

22:04

Environmental impacts of AI and data centers

23:57

Misconceptions about AI's environmental footprint

25:48

The efficiency of internet-based activities for the environment

28:08

The importance of thoughtful technology use and policy

30:08

Be sure to subscribe, leave a rating, and share Sober Dad Crew with folks.

Sober Dad Crew is an independent, DIY production created by Stephen Kimball, who writes, records, and produces the podcast. To learn more, please visit soberdadcrew.com. Copyright 2026.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

I tried my best in the blog to try to add up like the full societal cost of alcohol consumption with all the negatives factored in, and came up with something like it's around like a thousand dollars per person per year.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Welcome to the SDC Podcast, an independent DIY podcast hosted, recorded, and produced by Stephen Kimball. Be sure to subscribe, leave a rating, and share the podcast with folks to help spread the word. And head over to SDCpodcast.com for more information. All right, my guest, this episode is Andy Mazley. I first learned about him in a recent New York Times article about AI, and they cited his research. And I really dug it because it was like fact-based and things about when AI searches like running your dryer for one second. I could really get my head around it because in my workplace and with my older kids, there's a lot of information about, you know, it's using a thousand gallons of water and data center. It just no one seems to have facts. So like it's nice to have some interesting facts presented in a way that people can get their head around. It kind of reminds me a little bit of the freakonomics guys and how they present information. So welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Yeah, really good to be here, Steven. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Yeah. And after I discovered you through that article, I then discovered a piece you wrote and you started the article by saying this is not something I would expect to write. And the title of the article was Alcohol is so bad for society that you should probably stop drinking. So, you know, how did you come to look at that and write that article?

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Yeah. So it was funny. It was entirely just I was basically convinced by some other intellectual arguments that I had bumped into. Um so I've never had a problem with alcohol personally. It's never been a big part of my life. I never really like struggled with it in the way that some of my friends have. I definitely knew a few people who had developed addictions in pretty scary ways and was from a town where it was a pretty common fact of life to know someone who had become addicted in one way or another. So was definitely aware of it and knew it was a problem, but hadn't really thought too much about why. I'd read a few arguments from a few different authors I like. I think I cited them at the top of the post, like Tyler Cowan, Fergus McCullough, a few other people who had all laid out a pretty straightforward case that like alcohol, while it doesn't affect the average person like necessarily negatively, and like I definitely put myself in that kind of like mid-range of like the average person's effect of alcohol, it's creating enough societal harm, both through addiction and just other second-order effects, that it actually seems good to start a practice of kind of denormalizing it in society, mainly for the sake of people who might just through like bad luck or genetics or things like that potentially become addicted to it. And I think that after fully reading about all the effects on society that alcohol has and the effects on addicts, especially, I was pretty compelled in general. And it kind of overlapped a lot with a lot of other stuff I was thinking about at the time as well, about like kind of what we owe each other and like cultural games we play with each other. One of my closest friends in DC actually happened to not drink for pretty similar reasons. So that was something else that pushed me in that direction.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Yeah, like the the big summary is sort of alcohol should be treated like cigarettes. And so I'm 55, so I grew up in the 70s when lots of family members smoked. You smoked on airplanes. I mean, I didn't, I was a kid, but restaurants, all that stuff. And I was thinking about this earlier tonight. So, like me being around a smoker has inherent potential harms, right? Like secondhand smoke and lung cancer. Me sitting at a bar next to someone drinking doesn't have that. But the counterpiece to that is no one's really been an impaired driver from a Marlboro Red, but from too many beers, they are. So it's an it's an interesting to me sort of connect, but also the lens is slightly different. Can you talk about that a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Yeah, definitely. So yeah, like like I said, I I think that like the average arm of direct alcohol consumption to the average person, I actually find myself assuming is somewhat overblown, even like I think it's like if you're not prone to say like addiction or something like that, like my personal take after reading the literature is that like it's people are perfectly capable of staying mostly healthy with like mild to moderate drinking. And so my argument isn't really based at all around like the immediate effects on you or even like the people around you, basically. It's kind of these tail effects and also the effects of just normalizing it in the culture more broadly. Like, I think when I was in college, I lost several friends to alcoholism. Like they're still with us, but they their lives basically fell apart to the point that they had either pushed a lot of people away or similar things. And I had noticed at the time how that was really, really enabled by this very strong culture in college about how, like, oh, it's this is a completely normal thing. You should drink as much as you want. You're only young once, you know, like this is the time to really go crazy. And if your friend is drinking like every single night, like it's lame to talk to them about that, you know. And so I was pretty attuned to the general effect that our immediate culture and our friends have on us. Like, I think there have also been a lot of other cultural changes just in my lifetime that I'm pretty confident have had like effects not so much on the individual people, but on the general message they send to broader culture about like what's normal versus what's something a little more extreme where the person could maybe use a little bit of external help or just gentle push. Like, even just one funny example I was thinking about the other day is that like every show I used to watch in the 90s when I was growing up, like often featured like a fight scene at school. Like kids would kind of gather together and they'd be like, fight, fight, fight. And this it was presented as this very like normal thing. Like violence is just kind of an inherent part of the school experience, and it's something you kind of have to learn to be brave about. And I think like making a show like that today, um, the vibes would just be very different. I think that would be seen as very extreme. Um and cigarettes are another example where, yeah, they used to be very normal. Um it smoking wasn't really questioned. And like I basically worry that in doing that, and having a very like permissive culture around things that potentially harm a huge number of people through no fault of their own, like that permissiveness itself might be something that's worth like pushing back against, not necessarily by being really mean about it, but just kind of like setting a standard of like, oh, hey, you know, like I don't really drink very often in public. I think alcohol is too many harms, and like my relationship to it is pretty complicated. And like I almost never drink at this point after learning more about it, like mostly because I want to send that signal, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Yeah. And like picking up on that with another example. I remember with my my oldest daughter, who's 19 now, I put on uh Footloose, the original Footloose. And there's a domestic violence component to that movie, which I had totally forgotten about. But I remember a time before like Anita Hill and a time before me too. And, you know, and this is sort of a lead into another thing you talk about. So things have changed, but beyond the sort of individual of alcohol, you know, you talk about, you know, increased likelihood of violence. You know, you have statistics about domestic violence and its likelihood by percentile based on alcohol consumption. So there's also like like that piece. Can you talk about that research a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Yeah. So again, I think this is like something that I'm kind of shielded from as like a pretty comfortable, you know, like upper middle class guy who just like lives a pretty easy life among like professionals in DC. A lot of difficulty, especially just like poor people face, often involve just being more exposed to violence in one way or another. And this isn't to say that domestic violence doesn't happen everywhere, but I think in terms of just like starting off with just like violent crime, like exposure to violent crime is often pretty predictive based on how much alcohol is being sold in a given area. And there's like pretty direct correlations between how available alcohol is in general and the crime. And obviously, there's a lot of confounders there, but there are also a lot of other pretty damning statistics statistics about the relationship between alcohol and violence. Like one is that it's something like half of all people who are in prison for a violent offense had alcohol, a significant amount of alcohol in their system when they committed the crime that they were convicted for later. And then another one, um, I know there's this one statistic from India. I'm not sure if we have similar statistics for the US, but like the rate at which husbands in India specifically drink is pretty strongly correlated with domestic abuse, specifically. And like, I think these are just two cases where, like, if there were basically anything else in society that had these kinds of strong correlations. Like I used to enjoy playing like Minecraft when I was younger, but I think if Minecraft had a strong association between, like, oh, there's just like the more people play Minecraft, the more serious violence happens. I think that would actually give me pause, even if it didn't seem like it was going to have any effect on me, because I may not want to participate in the general situation and maybe denormalize it a little bit, even if it wasn't gonna have that same effect on my own life. And yeah, I think that like the general effects of violence is are just like pretty consistently underrated and just like as being pretty bad. Basically, like I think the average person, like me anyway, like I'm pretty lucky to avoid a lot of that. Like I've never been the victim of like domestic violence or um never been involved in a violent crime. And I think like the just second-order effects of that on the victim and society more broadly are both just pretty bad. And I think, again, just something that is worth being cautious about. And I think like alcohol definitely has enough of a correlation there that it may be much more cautious about how I think about drinking.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Yeah. And I think while, you know, the likelihood of either of us being victims of domestic violence is lower, you know, take New Year's Eve or something, I sure as hell don't like to be driving after midnight. You know, so the likelihood and I've had a good friend in college who is hit by a drunk driver. And, you know, obviously, like I sort of said before, somewhat jokingly, a cigarette is not really impairing anyone's ability to navigate a motor vehicle, but obviously alcohol is, and the impacts of that are pretty staggering as well.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Yeah. Both on the like obviously direct horrific impacts of like, you know, just people either being killed or being injured for very long periods of time and having to deal with a lot of pain. I forgot the exact statistic. I should pull it up in my blog, but it's a surprisingly high percentage of like all serious car accidents, it's maybe like 20% that involve like some amount of significant intoxication on the side of one of the drivers specifically. So there's that statistic. But yeah, even like if we want to ignore the direct horrific effects of like pain or death, there's also just the huge economic costs that like impaired driving imposes on society. I tried my best in the blog to try to add up like the full societal cost of alcohol consumption with all the negatives factored in, and came up with something like it's around like $1,000 per person per year. And this is completely separate from the actual amount that we like spend on drinking. It's kind of like this implicit tax that we pay for like, you know, the direct impacts of say, like, you know, car wrecks, but also like second-order effects like, you know, like hangover hangovers may maybe like impair people from like working as well as they could. That one isn't nearly as bad. I think that's kind of just something people are opting into, but it's still, you know, a cost that society's bear bearing as well. Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

And, you know, health insurance costs, hospital costs. I mean, you had a very interesting statistic about COVID and COVID death rates versus alcohol death rates. And I'm in New York, and you know, all of a sudden COVID happened. Well, you could take get takeout cocktails, you could sure get alcohol. And my, you know, wife, the therapist, also said it's because we didn't need a bunch of people who were addicted, kind of without treatment, all of a sudden not having access. But the death rate from alcohol was actually higher than the death rate statistically from COVID.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Yeah. I I think that's the um the total global disease burden, which is also including like sickness and impairment and stuff like that. And so, yeah, it it does my impression is that the global disease burden from alcohol seems to be about the same as COVID at its peak. And so, like, one clarification is that yeah, like COVID was concentrated in specific places at specific times, whereas like alcohol, it seems like a lot of the really worst health effects are in other countries where maybe people just have like weaker societal norms or weaker like healthcare systems that can deal with this stuff. But yeah, this is like another surprising statistic. COVID is actually another place where I was thinking quite a lot about the examples that I set because in the early days, I think like immediately before like mid-March of 2020, I think a lot of people forget that like there was really no consensus on how to react to this stuff. There were still a lot of people around me saying, like, oh, you know, this is gonna blow over, like this just seems like the latest media hype cycle. And I think like one of the things I'm proudest of in the early days was just kind of setting an example of like, hey, like I really want to, you know, I'm very social. I want to see my friends, and it makes me really miserable to say this, but I need to stay home partly to just promote this idea that we really don't want to spread this right now and like kind of staying home to like quote unquote flatten the curve. I did think had a lot of effects in the early days. And so like COVID was another case where like I think it would be very difficult for me as an example, like to be the only person in a town like who chose to like wear a mask when I like got groceries and stuff like that. Whereas if everyone was doing that, it would be much easier and it would actually feel weird to not go with a mask, right? And like I think this is another clear case of just like the kind of positive social contagion effect of just like setting an example where I think the average person really underestimates just how much their example is actually impacting the people very close to them.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Yeah, and I think you know, the COVID thing is interesting too, and back to masking, because sort of where I live, which is a more rural conservative place versus where I work, which is much more liberal, you definitely saw some differences. And this touches on some of your other work because, you know, there was really scientific-based evidence that masking and social distancing had an impact. But at the same time, there was all this anecdotal stuff. And I'm I'm sitting here, I have a smoke detector on my desk, and I was thinking about this. So we've had a smoke detector in our house that a few times has just gone bananas. So I'm like, I think something's wrong with a smoke detector. But I thought to myself, why do the smoke detectors always go insane in the middle of the night? They don't seem to go insane any other time. There's no, I have no scientific basic. It is totally anecdotal evidence, right? There's no reason to think that a smoke detector goes off more at two in the morning versus two in the afternoon. But I sort of have this anecdotal evidence. And I think a lot of times we make these decisions not based on fact. And like another example I was thinking of, and it relates to alcohol and substance abuse, is there's a lot of people who will say, don't give people who are addicted housing, that they need to get clean first. But the evidence shows that stable housing increases the likelihood of people recovering and being in long-term recovery. So that's to me, because part of the work I do is related to affordable housing, is like there's the fact that goes against what a lot of people are saying without really any evidence supporting it. Just it's more of almost a shame thing, I think, in that example.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Yeah. It is really overwhelming as I've gotten older, how much I've realized like so many things that people will just casually say to me is like, oh, everyone knows this, or actually these like strange like cultural games of telephone based on like random intuitions. Like, yeah, I I think a lot of like ideas about like addiction and like homelessness and things like that, like if you actually poke at where people are getting these ideas, a lot of them are either coming from misconceptions or just biases against people who are struggling with addiction or homelessness. And like as soon as you start to pry apart, like what does the evidence actually show? It's usually like sometimes very counterintuitive, but otherwise very intuitive. Like I know for me, if I were struggling, like having a place to live would help, you know. And so, yeah, stuff like that. It's really overwhelming just how much of like our everyday intuitions like can kind of fall apart if you just poke at them a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

And I think, and it's always been this way a little bit, but it feels much more acutely this way now, the role of politics. And that connects to COVID too. There's such a political, like, you know, if you're, you know, MAGA, you're not gonna wear a mask and you're not gonna get vaccinated, you know, you seem to be willing to take GLP ones now to lose weight, but that's also anecdotal evidence. But the politicization of this stuff really makes it hard for people to know what's what. And that's part of what I like about your work is, and this touches on the effect of altruism is like, what are the methods to solve problems? Like I always like to say, growing up, you know, we wouldn't argue that homelessness was a fact. You know, now we seem to live in a time where you can say all trees are purple. And it's your right to say all trees are purple because you want to believe it. I mean, if you're six years old, that's fine, but if you're 40 years old, that's like kind of weak. But we're at this time where we seem to just not want to operate on any data points. So if you take homelessness or another problem, how do you actually think you're possibly going to solve this if you don't actually have a shared, like we can't even agree in theory that homelessness is a problem, right? Let alone the method to solve it. You know, so like, you know, talk about your work and sort of effective altruism and getting facts to like lead us to kind of a way to get to solutions to issues.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Yeah. A lot to say. Trying to think about where to begin. Yeah, the basic idea of effective altruism, which yeah, happy to talk a lot more about, is that we in very wealthy countries just have a lot of incredible capacity to do a lot of good with our time and careers. And a part of like trying to do the most good that you can or trying to have the largest positive impact that you can actually can very strongly depend on whether you're reacting to what's actually true about the world. And another general theme that is a little bit less clear until you read about it a little bit is that like a lot of effective altruists or people who identify with the general scene kind of think about a lot of everyday people's intuitions for how to do good as very strongly coming from social motivations to be kind of seen as a good person or to be seen as a member of their local political tribe or religious group or things like that. And that's not necessarily bad because like those systems can also communicate useful information. But there are also just all these ways where if you're just willing to kind of poke at the general consensus and like still very strongly defer to like experts, but just try to figure out what the experts are actually saying, even just that can give you a much better understanding of the situation and where you can actually have gigantic positive impacts. And the basic theme is that if you're willing to do that, you can sometimes do like thousands or even millions of times as much good would say your charitable giving or other things. And this sounds kind of like wacky, but it's actually pretty straightforward if you look at, say, like effective altruists work in human-focused charities. So, like one of the big originating arguments of effective altruism is that there are a huge number of people in very poor countries that who are currently dying of very easily preventable diseases. Like the biggest one that effective altruists will talk about is malaria, which kills 500,000 people every year and is mostly invisible to people in wealthy countries like America. Like I find that the average person is pretty shocked to find out that 500,000 people a year die of malaria specifically. And our interventions in malaria are basically cheap enough that most people who look into this come away thinking that you can probably permanently save a full human life for something like three to five thousand dollars donated to the right place. And there's basically nothing in America that can compete with that specific rate. And like another basic argument is like if you're going in trying to basically do the most good, and in one situation, you can literally save like thousands of times as many people per dollar as another donation. That just seems like a very strong argument that you should do that if you want to treat everybody as equal. And so this general mindset that like it's really important to try to get a full sense of what's going on in the world and what the numbers are actually telling you, and that your immediate social community, while it might be great, might also have all these kind of subtle, evolved social reasons to kind of like nudge you toward thinking that the thing that's happening right in front of you is the most important thing ever. And so maybe you're incentivized to donate to your local library instead. Like, again, that's not wrong, but it's just missing all this other stuff happening elsewhere. Like that's the general theme of how effective altruists think about stuff. And so for me, like my general goal is to say that like I think there are a lot of facts about the world that are actually pretty straightforward and available to us if we can dig. And I don't want my readers to like just blindly trust me. So I try to show them exactly how I acquired those facts. And the big thing I've been focused on in the last year, anyway, is AI's environmental impact, just because that's a surprising niche where I find that like I mostly disagree with both the majority of people who are writing about it and a lot of my fellow kind of like educated liberals in DC specifically. And so like it's an interesting area to write about.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

You know, and it is really interesting because there's it's there's a very generational component to that. Yeah. And, you know, an interesting part of what my wife does is researches that in social media stuff. She's uh has a doctorate in and social work and and teachers as well as having a private practice. And so, you know, finding the facts around that stuff, and there's you know, people equate generative AI with all this other stuff. I'm like, if you're listening to Spotify. Baby, you know, be that algorithm, it it's it's got you. So there's this interesting like people in their early to mid-20s are like enraged by the notion of of AI, and we'll speak of the earth burning, which it sort of is irregardless of AI here in upstate New York, where a couple of weeks ago, you know, we had a lot of wildfire smoke. But there's this, and I sort of said this at the beginning, there is a lack of actual facts about like what data centers are doing, what what their impact is. You know, what you should personally do, you know, and you talk about like people's watering their yards, we water only with rainwater catchment in my home, also because we're on a well. Yeah. But in golf courses, right, we should not water our lawns and no one should play golf and everyone should drive a hybrid. And that would actually have a much bigger impact than me putting my recorded meeting into Claude to generate meeting minutes, which saves me an extraordinary amount of time at work. And, you know, but there's just so much noise, you know. So like it's just, it's, it's useful work. Is there in, you know, is there any like let's dig into that a little bit? Because I think it's just such a hot topic that, you know, can you talk a little bit about those statistics and the and the impacts and like the thinking around how do how do we even think about AI and its and its impacts and should we use it, should we not use it? I mean, that's like an enormous question, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Just sticking to the environmental stuff. I I have three pretty separate angles in my blog that I try to talk to people about. Um so the first I'm basically trying to answer three separate questions that people worry about. So the first one is will using AI add a significant amount to my personal emissions or water use? And so I find that a lot of people seem to believe that it does. Like I still bump into a lot of people who assume that it adds a lot to their personal carbon footprint. Um, I disagree, can go into why in a second. The second question is even if AI doesn't really add very much to your personal emissions, maybe AI is farming the environment so much in these other more complex ways involving data centers that we should still boycott it. So, like, as an example, like the company Nestle has a reputation for doing a lot of bad stuff. And so I think it's legitimate to want to boycott Nestle, even if like on an individual level, it's not adding very much to your personal footprint, if that makes sense. And then the third, oh yeah, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Well, I was just gonna also just jump in. We've been boycotting Nestle for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

You know, and they're still Nestle.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

Yeah, 100%. But like I think that like it would be kind of silly for me to come up to you and be like, oh, you shouldn't boycott Nestle because it doesn't add very much to your footprint, because that's not really the reason you're boycotting it, right? Because and so like I think people have a separate legitimate worry about data centers and how they impact communities, similar dynamics around that. And so, like, I want to treat that as kind of a separate question from whether it impacts their personal water or carbon footprint. And then the third thing is like, how do data centers actually interact with communities? And if you find that a data center is going to be built near you, how should you think about that? And is this an emergency for your community or could this be potentially good? And so just for now, limiting the conversation to the first two, like having to talk about data center stuff later, on the individual impact situation, it is very, very hard for me to see how people could possibly meaningfully raise their emissions or water use using AI, at least using the normal models. Like coding agents can get a little bit intense. We could talk about that separately. But for regular use of like Claude or Chat GPT, if you just look at what all the estimates that we have for their emissions and their water are, and these aren't coming from me. I try to like summarize expert estimates from elsewhere and also like self-report from the companies themselves. They all seem to converge on these numbers that imply that you would have to send something like 200 to 1,000 prompts to raise your personal carbon emissions by 1% every single day. So like I would consider myself to be an AI power user, but I don't spent send nearly that much. And so it's very likely that one, I'm not, it's not even adding 1% to my personal carbon emissions. And two, like if you're doing something that is that low energy, it's actually very likely that you're being prevented from using more energy elsewhere. So like basically the most, the most environmentally efficient thing you can do in life in general is you know, not drive, but you can avoid it, live in a smaller house, be vegan. And like, because the internet specifically is just so environmentally efficient, it's just so energy efficient relative to what it delivers. Like basically spending all day on your computer, whether it's like playing a game or using a chatbot or watching a movie, like this is basically the most environmentally efficient way you can live. And it's just very hard for me to see using the actual numbers that we have, how this could actually add to be a meaningful part of my emissions. Like one example, um, one other example of this is that like for a while, people were under the impression that chatbots use, quote, 10 times as much as a Google search. And like that might be true. Like the actual answer is that it depends a lot on the prompt and this changes month to month. But I kind of wanted to stop people and just ask, like, have you ever in the past worried for the environment about how many Google searches you do? Like, if I told you I sent like 500 Google searches today, would your first response be, oh, this guy doesn't care about the environment? He's a crazy person, like we shouldn't listen to him. Something can be a large relative multiple of something else and still be incredibly small by the standards of our day, if that makes sense. And then the other, if I could just throw out one last like misconception, like almost everyone I meet is still convinced that chatbots use a whole bottle of water. And this is not agreed upon by anyone researching this, including the person who came up with that statistic. He now agrees that at the time that was a reasonable estimate, but the actual number then was something like 30 times lower, and now it's even lower than that. And so I think this is another common misconception that people have about water use that I'm happy to go into a lot more.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

Yeah, I I recently had somebody give me the half liter or liter statistic. And, you know, one thing I was like, I didn't have anything to counter it with either. I was like, it seems weird, but I like, you know, didn't have anything to counter it with. I think it also gets mixed up in, and I see this at work, and this could be true of any technology, is a lot of people are just using it in a sloppy fashion. So we, you know, I have a staff of two in the marketing department, and we were working on a presentation, and someone was at a conference and did this AI just basic vomit to us, which was like six pages when printed out, and it was just slop because slop in, slop out. And really, we could have like in five minutes of conversation done that. I can't take my meeting minutes and in five minutes summarize them, create tasks and strategic priorities. So part of I think what upsets people, at least that I'm seeing at work, is like you're just people are not being thoughtful about using it. And the same could be true and probably was true in the past when we first had telephones and other new technologies. I think people often get kind of hyped up about new technologies and and their impacts. I mean, the Industrial Revolution clearly had positive and negative impacts, right? Factories do put more, you know, smoke out into the air, but there were other sides of that, you know, that were positive. And I think, and I'm living in a place in the finger lakes where there's a lot of fights about data centers and it's New York State, and the governor just signed a data center moratorium. And that's not even something I'm opposed to because I think sometimes slow down and let's figure this out makes sense. And I think about it a little bit this way: like they're communities that used to lobby to get large prisons because they're employment engines. I, you know, I don't think building an economy around the prison industrial complex is a great model, but you know, that's my you know, personal left opinions. But communities that have been left behind economically through jobs moving overseas and other things and have huge rates of unemployment have a very different lens. Fracking was an example of this in New York State. And working in Ithaca, you know, where Cornell is, and going to Elmira, which was in a much poorer county, people had a very, very different view on should we be hydrofracking for natural gas? And the view was really based on the economic stability of their communities. So it's a very privileged lens, I think, to just say no data centers, no prison, no fracking, right? And we I I believe we also have to look at our own privilege. Like we sort of joke, you know, it's two white guys here. Like I walked the world with a with a lot of privilege. I grew up middle class, I went to college. Like, you know, it's a pretty, even as someone who's like in recovery from from alcohol, like I had resources. I had parents that weren't gonna let me fall through the cracks. So there is this like world of privilege to any of these arguments in a way. Even, you know, your argument about alcohol, all of this is easier when we sit in a chair of, you know, privilege in my home office with an with an air conditioner, you know?

SPEAKER_00 31:14

Yeah. And I think that like obviously that gives us much more responsibility for just like behaving in a good way. You know, I think that like for me with alcohol, like a just a constant thought I have is that like I've gotten pretty lucky to like not be especially like genetically be genetically predisposed to these specific types of addictions and I haven't been in cultures that like pressured me to drink a lot. And I think that like because I've lived such a comfortable life in other ways, I kind of owe it to people to kind of pay it forward a little bit and not promote things that could be really harmful for other people, even though they've been really chill for me in comparison. And then on data center stuff, I think a lot of people are really shocked when I say that like I think data centers are very often beneficial to the local communities that they're built, to the point that like I do think it becomes kind of a problem for equity in specific places to just block them without actually looking into them. And obviously, I don't believe that everywhere. I'm not super bothered by like, you know, New York putting a moratorium on data centers because I also agree, like, this is a major new industry and taking time to get the policy right. That makes a lot of sense to me. I recently had a really great conversation that I put up on my blog with a friend who's a city planner in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which is a very poor community. The median income downtown is something like $15,000 a year. It's very low on average. And a huge amount of the area's tax base is the single mall that isn't doing super well. And there was this proposal to build a data center in the community, and there was intense opposition. And while I obviously respect people's like democratic right to say no to stuff if that's what they want. I have to say that the nature of their opposition, like just reading what they were worried about, didn't really correlate at all with what I personally understand data centers to actually cause. Like the biggest concern that seemed to drive this opposition that did block the data center was concern about water pollution specifically. And there's this general sense from a lot of different places now that data centers pollute the water that they use. And if you actually just poke at that a little bit and you're like, is this actually happening? And again, like I'm not asking listeners to take me on faith here. You can just look at these stories for yourself. Um, basically every story I'm aware of of a data center polluting local water systems is actually due to construction, where water runoff from construction, which is a pretty normal thing that happens with any large building, can get into local groundwater and pollute well water. And that is bad. Like, I'm not saying like that's all fine and good, but it's very different from the normal operation of the data center, like polluting water consistently over a long period of time. And this is what people seem to believe. And so this is one specific case where I think like the kind of game of cultural telephone that's happening where everyone has this like kind of half understanding of what's going on based on like a quick reading of all these articles. Like it's building up all these ideas that I think together are actually blocking off a lot of potential massive amounts of tax revenue for poor communities that could really use just like upgrades to their general like public services.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

Yeah, another sort of funny New York thing is at the same time we have this moratorium in upstate New York surrounding Syracuse, we courted Micron and the state is putting billions of dollars into developing this chip fab. So it's a very like inconsistent.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

It's very funny, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:22

It's super funny where they've you know recently cut down hundreds of acres of trees. And because I work in the architecture industry, I was talking to the you know, one of the people in the construction company that has the site work for it, you know, civil engineering and such. It's a billion dollars of site work. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so we've we're a moratorium on that, but we're going ahead with Chipfab, which also uses water to, you know, some of them are cleaned in all that. But right, Chipfab historically does use a lot of water in the cleaning process. So it's sort of a funny like New York, like, where are we at here? Yeah, like one seems politicized.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

Yeah, very much. And I think this is actually a little bit of evidence where sometimes people will tell me, like, oh, this data center backlash is actually entirely because people don't like AI or they're just trust untrustworthy of it. And I have to say, just talking to most people who are worried about data centers, like they're just pretty like reasonable everyday people who don't seem to have especially strong takes on AI and kind of just have the sense that like these massive buildings drop into communities and just completely destroy them, because that's my understanding from all these other like articles that I've read. And like if you look at something else like a chip fab, like chip fabs are also being used for AI, but it doesn't seem like most people are opposed to them or even know what they are. And I think if this were a general reaction against AI rather than data centers specifically, like we would probably see way more opposition to that. And so, like, I I think a lot of this is actually coming from people's misunderstanding of the actual just role that data centers often play in the communities that they're built.

SPEAKER_01 35:53

Yeah, let's pivot a little bit because I'm like poking and let's have more fun. This has been very serious. So I'm under your favorite movies list. Rocon some of mine spirited away, definitely. Lord of the Rings. Yeah, where do you where do you land on the rings of power?

SPEAKER_00 36:12

I I have to admit I couldn't make it through. I think that like I like my first massive disappointment like with the Lord of the Rings was actually the Hobbit, the first movie, because you know, I I just had so much expectations for it. Like I was such a Lord of the Rings kid growing up, like seeing the movies when I was a kid, there was just like a clear before and after. It was like, how does anyone pay attention to anything else besides Lord of the Rings? This is the coolest thing ever. And I I think the Hobbit like left me pretty disappointed. I felt like it kind of all looked like a video game in comparison, and a lot of the like subtle taste was like.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

And you took one book and made it into three movies to make money.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Yeah, that are like nine hours in total. I'm just like, it's a book for like little kids, and like the it's this 10-hour epic with like, yeah, Legolas for some reason shows up and does all these like cool backflips and stuff. And I'm like, this is not at all like I I was actually really into the animated Hobbit in the 70s. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. That or from the 70s, I wasn't like myself in the 70s, but um that that was pretty great. And that's like what got me on to like Lord of the Rings more broadly. And I thought, like, coming out of the first Hobbit movie, I was like, oh, this is like that movie was so much better than this. It's crazy. And then um, yeah, the Rings of Power, I have to admit, um, I I just couldn't really get through. I definitely thought it was much better and more tasteful than The Hobbit, but I I kind of felt like it just was so unlike what I was kind of hoping it would be like, that like it didn't really mesh with me. But you know, I I wouldn't claim it's like a bad show or anything. What where did you fall in it?

SPEAKER_01 37:32

I thought it was okay. Yeah. Not not like the best thing I've seen recently. I mean, I've just I've been watching The Foundation, which you know, I read those books long ago, but I think like that's been a great adaptation. Andor has ruined all things Star Wars for me because it was so good. And you know, and I saw the original in the theater, I just thought Andor was incredible. Like the writing, the acting, you know, the references to like the the French resistance in World War II. It was so smart. Yeah. And like Star Wars is this is maybe a controversial hot take. Star Wars is better without Jedi. But, you know, there is some great stuff out there, but I just, yeah, I felt the rings of it was very forced to me. Like, oh, we have this great kind of stories to build on, and now we're gonna kind of just try and be commercial, and it's kind of a kind of a downer when there's so much better stuff that's out there.

SPEAKER_00 38:27

It did feel a little bit almost like in fact. I feel like a lot of media these days is kind of like infected by Marvel in a way. They're kind of these like epic appearances of characters, and they like show up, and you're it almost seems like the movie is pausing for everyone to like applaud or something. And obviously the original Lord of the Rings had that to an extent as well. Um, but yeah, I was finding that showed up a lot more to my shame. I haven't seen Andor yet. Like everyone's telling me it's just clearly the best Star Wars media. So I'm gonna sit down and watch it soon. Um, but I've been meaning to for a while. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:55

Yeah, it it's really smart. Okay, music. This is embarrassing because when you were a teenager, okay, computer, which did not come out when I was a teenager. It came out when I was an adult. But that and kid A for me probably arguably the best two radio had albums. Yeah, easy.

SPEAKER_00 39:13

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I'm like, you know, partial to In Rainbows, but if I'm being honest with myself, the ones that I go back and listen to the most are still Okay Computer and Kid A. And yeah, I think I was uh I think I was like 15 or 16 when In Rainbows came out, and that was my first, like, there was just all this talk at the time about how like, oh, this is this big band. And so, you know, I had looked at them, was completely blown away. I remember there was this live session that they did where they not only played a lot of their songs, this was on like YouTube from a basement or something, they not only played a lot of their songs, but they also like covered a lot of other songs for bands that would become very important to me. Like they covered like ceremony from New Order and then the headmaster ritual from the Smiths, and like that, put a lot of additional music on my radar.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

But yeah, I think Bjork Unravel, I think, is in that. Yeah, they cover some Bjork song. They cover some Biorksong. All right, the Pixies is that really sorry, I just need to pause for one second.

SPEAKER_00 40:05

My speakers just failed to just need a moment. Must they're cool, we're back. Sorry about that.

SPEAKER_01 40:09

All right, also on your high school list is the Pixies. Is that your New England roots? Is they are uh a Boston band?

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Yeah, it was um I I remember like getting really into uh like Doolittle and Surfer Rosa, and then like eventually as I was moving through their later stuff, like much later, I was like, wait a minute, they've got a song all about like UMass, and it's like the dumbest song you've ever heard. It's like really stupid. But yeah, yeah, I loved the Pixies growing up. I think like they were like pretty pretty obvious thing to say, but they just had such an amazing energy to them and were just having so much fun with what they were doing. I think even compared to a lot of bands I was listening to at the time, I think they were like a healthy break from Radiohead where you know I would kind of like listen to Radiohead as I was like walking around and be kind of like mopey about society and be like, what's what are we doing? And like the Pixies are like, yeah, let's have fun. And you know, that was much more entertaining for me.

SPEAKER_01 40:55

Yeah, long ago I had a music column briefly syndicated by Gannette that no one would find anywhere, but I got to introduce Frank Black slash Black Francis. Yeah, what a cool guy. He's like, you know, a yoga-doing dad, you know, who just tour. So that that was fun. Yeah, that's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

We'd be super curious about your favorite albums if you haven't.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

Man, well, I think it was funny. I was going through Seven Brew with my younger daughter after her soccer practice, and they had like what's your what was it, you know, the one song that you could listen to for the rest of your life or whatever. And I think I said Purple Rain. Yeah. And I sort of joke because I discovered like David Bowie Prince in the Clash all around like sixth or seventh grade, which was like super transformative to me. I mean, I think the Clash historically is probably as like an old punk dude, one of my one of my favorite bands. But you know, I also like listen to a lot of jazz. So like Wayne Shorter and and John Coltrane and stuff like that. You know, also depends on the day how mopey I'm feeling. I like a good sad song, but you know, I like I like to, you know, stay pretty like up on stuff. Like I see Charlie XCX on your list. Is I sort of kind of funny like listen to her, but like obviously she's almost as culturally as relevant as musically.

SPEAKER_00 42:20

Yeah. Yeah. I I think if you're if you're up for doing like a deep dive on Charlie stuff, um, there's this like kind of music collective called PC Music specifically that makes like really abrasive maximalist pop music that's like so sickly sweet that it's like eerie and strange. And she's like kind of coming out of that and like bringing that to a more mainstream audience. So I feel like for people just getting started, like going to like YouTube even and just finding like PC music compilations. And again, it's very like abrasive. It's almost like like pop music that's meant to just be so overflowing with this strange vibe that you're a little bit unnerved, and like that can be really fun. And she's doing a lot of stuff with that in a really cool way. But yeah, her uh 2019 album that's just I think it's just called Charlie is just like still like kind of a perfect pop album to me. Like obviously, Bratt, amazing. I haven't actually sat down with a new album yet. I know it's very different, but um, yeah, I've been listening to her for a while. And like of like major pop artists, I think she's my favorite. She just like has a very funny, like public persona as well, and it's kind of bringing a lot of the humor of PC music to a more mainstream audience.

SPEAKER_01 43:21

Yeah, I mean, of of new people, I've sort of, you know, the the boy genius ladies, you know, I like I like all of them. I think they're really smart. They're also like cross some borders of listening in the family with with kids. It's interesting to find that stuff. I mean, in its own way, like some stuff like Zach Bryan, and there's some other like what what are things that everyone will listen to um in the family? And that's always a good find for family road trips that aren't like Drake because I can't, I just can't. Um I'm like, can't we listen to Run the Jewels? Like, let's let's put on some political rap and not not Drake. I can't, I can't I can't hang or Tribe Call Quest, like let's go back and listen to something that's like pretty interesting. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:04

Yeah, my brother is um seven years younger than I am, so he's also like kind of useful for keeping me like musically relevant. But I guess he's also aging out of like what the kids are listening to now, so that's funny.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

Yeah, I think like having having kids, you know, and I have such I have such a range, you know, like a 10-year-old, a 14-year-old, a 19-year-old, and a 23-year-old that it's like I've kind of like got this wide range of of listening and and also like places and viewpoints in in the world, which you know, which is kind of fun. And it's either making me old or keeping me young. It probably depends on the day. Yeah, that sounds really amazing.

SPEAKER_00 44:37

That's cool.

SPEAKER_01 44:38

Well, this was awesome. I super appreciate you taking the time. Where can people, you know, find you on on the intranet or you know, put your name in Claude or something?

SPEAKER_00 44:49

Yeah, so probably the best place to start is just my website, just andymaisley.com. That has all my writing and a lot of other stuff I've created and just like information about me and a way to contact me. Readers in general, like if you have any questions or anything you want to chat about, like the bar should be very low. Uh, my email is just in my contact section. And I do really like having an audience is still kind of like new for me. So it's like a massive privilege to be able to talk to people who are reading my stuff. So yeah, really appreciated the podcast. And then also, like, all my writing is also hosted on Substack at blog.andymazley.com. And so those are the two places where you can find my stuff. Awesome. Once again, thank you so much. Yeah, this was a blast, Stephen. Really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 45:28

Thanks for listening. SDC Podcast is an independent podcast written, produced, and hosted by Stephen Kimball. For more information, head over to SDCpodcast.com. All materials are copyright 2026.