Jim VandeHei
He co-founded and runs Axios, and before that co-founded Politico, after years as a political reporter at the Washington Post.
“People hate the damn thing. Like the idea that 80% of people hate data centers when 99.8% don't live anywhere near one should be an alarm bell. Like, well, how the hell do you hate something you've never seen and has nothing to do with your life? Because it's a metaphor for something new that scares the hell out of them.”
This is Gavin Newsom · October 2026
VandeHei tells Gavin Newsom that the early signs of the public's reaction to AI are awful, coming just as people sober up from social media algorithms. He reads the backlash against data centers as anxiety about AI itself. Newsom agrees, and adds that calls to shut the technology down are misleading.
Transcript
LLMs could be different, but I think That too is going to be, that's hitting just as people are sobering up from what hit them with algorithms.
And that's why I worry if you don't have more.
People thinking more deeply about this topic, this transition into AI is going to be really bad. And the early signs are awful. People hate the damn thing. Like the idea that 80% of people hate data centers when 99.8% don't live anywhere near one should be an alarm bell. Like, well, how the hell do you hate something you've never seen and has nothing to do with your life? because it's a metaphor for something new that scares the hell out of them even more so than social media scared.
And it gives them the power to be exactly against what they're anxious and it's concerned about i couldn't agree with you more on that i also couldn't agree with you more the tech genie's out of the damn bottle so this notion that you can stuff it back in and we could shut all this down is so…
And it's going to be really hard for your party, right? Yes.
It's very soothing to hear Bernie Sanders say, shut it down, pull the plug.
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