PN Prakash Narayanan On The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

“They go in and they acquire land at like pennies on the dollar using LLCs. And after that, they merge the pieces of land and then they're like, oh, Meta is here. And then people are like, if I knew I was selling to Meta, I would have asked for more. So people feel cheated, right? If you have political willpower, all contracts are worth dust.”

The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026

Context

The hosts were discussing the local ballot measures against data centers. Narayanan says developers bought land quietly through shell LLCs, the old oil-and-gas landman playbook, and argues that this fuels the voter anger.

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Transcript

The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis Around 02:09 into the episode

Speaker 2

The pace of things is definitely pretty relentless. It might be time to spend more time with our family because it does feel to me like basically the AI 2027 timeline more or less is coming true.

Speaker 1

Prakash Narayanan, my co-host. We were talking about the local ballot measures against data centers and how the developers have been going about buying land.

Prakash Narayanan

One of the things the companies have been doing, they've been doing the old school, you know, oil and gas landman way of acquiring land, which is they go in and they acquire land at like pennies on the dollar using LLCs. And after that, they merge the pieces of land and then they're like, oh, meta is here. And then people are like, if I knew I was selling to meta, I would have asked for more. So people feel cheated, right? If you have political willpower, all contracts are worth dust.

Speaker 1

Mike San Miguel of Luxor Technology, he sells GPU servers off its hardware desk and he set up its KYC department.

Speaker 4

There's some compliances. These things are traded more closely than some nuclear secrets. So every OEM is a little bit different. NVIDIA works closely with all the OEMs around allocation and around greenlighting orders. NVIDIA also typically is going to check every six months and make sure those…

Speaker 1

Brian Joe, a researcher at Thoughtful, he helped build Ballot Bench. Nine frontier agents, each given a week to forecast the midterms, and trading agents putting real money on their forecasts.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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