The podcast is offcially back, and today I’m sitting down with Sam Lyman, the head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and a guy who’s had a front-row seat to some of the most consequential debates happening in Washington right now. Sam most recently served as a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Bessent, and before that he was at Riot Platforms helping build out a one-gigawatt data center in Corsicana, Texas — an experience that taught him firsthand how astroturfed opposition to American infrastructure actually works on the ground.
We’re going to get into Sam’s new white paper, which traces a pretty alarming web of Chinese state media, CCP-aligned nonprofits like the Singham Network, and foreign billionaires who are pouring money into the campaign to slow down American AI and block data center build-out across the country. We’ll talk about how that influence is making its way into legislation (including the Bernie–AOC data center moratorium) what’s really at stake in the US-China AI race, and why Sam describes data centers as the “enriched uranium” of this generation’s defining technological competition.
Follow Sam Lyman on X: https://x.com/SamLyman33
The Bitcoin Policy Institute whitepaper: https://www.btcpolicy.org/articles/foreign-influence-in-the-campaign-against-american-ai
