Should We Be Using GenAI?

Introduction

As you have likely worked out on your own already, Artificial Intelligence is not going away. It has gone from being a joke to a novelty to the bogeyman to a tool that many of us use all the time. And yet, there are still holdouts, perhaps you among them. In my workplace, it’s a mixed bag. As recently as 2024 I was forbidden to use ChatGPT or other AI platforms at work; now, my employer  is wheedling, exhorting, begging, and all but requiring my colleagues and me to adopt it. On the family front, one of my daughters uses it a fair bit (sometimes frivolously), the other not at all. My wife is wary of it.

So should you use AI? I consider myself fairly well qualified to answer this. I have been dabbling in AI for almost fourteen years; have devoted a fair amount of research to kicking its tires; and now use it extensively both at work and at home. I’ve blogged about it a bunch of times. I’m unbiased, since I don’t work for the AI Industrial Complex, but I also don’t have a knee-jerk fear of technology.

I’ve blogged before (here) about how we can use AI, describing two fundamental ways—operationally vs. creatively—that people do use it. Today’s post is more about whether we should use it, and how often, particularly in light of the resources (electricity and water) that it consumes. Is environmental responsibility a compelling reason to curb our use of GenAI?

Some housekeeping

As I’ve explained here, AI is much bigger than the Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots that we consciously use as the natural successor to Google. We generally speak of AI as a productivity tool, but a whole lot of AI is devoted to the invisible algorithms on social media, YouTube, etc. that grab and hold our attention, threatening to reduce our productivity. I think of this as secondhand AI (like smoke). Meanwhile, you’re surely hearing a lot of hype about “agentic AI,” which can supposedly act on its own volition to achieve a goal. At this point I’m scared of agentic AI and think you should be, too, but that’s another post. The AI I’m considering here is Generative AI (GenAI), which is the type of chatbot (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude) that you feed a prompt to as a way to research something, or as a way to quickly compose an essay, letter, or picture. This is how I believe most people think of AI, which is why the terms “AI” and “GenAI” are so often used interchangeably.

(Note that if you are reading this post long after April of 2026, and there isn’t a single living human not using GenAI, and/or the robots have taken over and enslaved you, treat this post as a historical artifact. At least you’ll get a sense of how society initially approached this technology.)

GenAI at work

If you work for a corporation that is clearly embracing GenAI, providing you a commercial, “walled garden” version of it, and the training to go with that, adoption is a no-brainer: do as you’re told and embrace GenAI immediately. My employer is already monitoring my use of it (though they haven’t said exactly how), showing my compliance on a dashboard. (My “AI Tools Usage” is showing 87% and green.) I could bristle at this, but a) I have always know my use of company assets is monitored, and b) my employer’s expectation that GenAI will make me more productive is reasonable, as is their expectation that I will be as efficient as possible. 

It’s remarkable how quickly all this has changed. I have seen GenAI’s use go from something my colleagues formerly tried (in vain) to hide, to something that my manager will outright ask me about. When asked, “Did you use AI to help you with this?” I now assume that the correct answer is a version of “yes.” (This answer is necessarily nuanced. Both in terms of being honest and articulating my ongoing value as an employee, I am sure to explain both how it helped and how it fell short of doing the task for me.) This week my boss tasked me with figuring out how to create a NotebookLM chatbot specializing in expertly summarized minutes of every meeting anyone on our team attends (or previously attended), which updates its training data automatically. So if our colleague Joe is on vacation we can ask the chatbot, “Why did Joe Blow switch out the vPlan in Blascorp’s EZ-Pluck profile?” and hope to learn the history. I feel like this assignment would have been unheard of a year ago.

But what if you work for a small business, or have your own? This is a greyer area, of course. A member of my family is a sole proprietor, and so far has shied away from GenAI because she’s concerned about becoming too reliant on the technology. I get her point, and have blogged before (here and here) about how doing our own thinking and writing prevents us from falling into intellectual torpor. But isn’t a tool that legitimately improves efficiency something we ought to rely on? After all, we wouldn’t even think of trying to run a business without email, a laptop, a smartphone, in many cases videoconferencing capability, and (depending on the business) various types of specialized software. All of these tools were new once, and any small business owner still using a typewriter to generate invoices is surely a) in the minority, and b) wasting a lot of time. From that perspective, it’s all but inevitable that any small business owner will ultimately adopt GenAI for his or her business … so why wait?

GenAI at home

Using GenAI outside the workplace is a more complicated matter, since it’s not helping put food on the table. I mentioned earlier in this post that my older daughter has occasionally used it rather frivolously, such as to punk me. Consider this drawing she had ChatGPT create to memorialize an accident I had at a hotel pool back in 2024, when I got out of the hot tub too fast and fainted:

Her prompt for this was, “Can you create an image of a tall skinny white man feeling faint after leaving a hot tub?” As you can see, the man portrayed looks more hunky than skinny, and my daughter tried three more times to get the picture more accurate. Given that these were throwaway efforts (or would have been had I not used them in an early AI analysis here), this was devoting rather a lot of computing resources to a pretty trivial problem, or shall we say exercise. (Of course part of the point for my daughter was exploring the early technology; it’s not like she’s stuck with throwaway art as her primary use case for GenAI.)

On the flip side, her sister won’t use GenAI at all, somewhat on grounds of intellectual authenticity but mainly due to its environmental impact. The constant construction of ever-larger data centers is all over the news, with some shocking statistics thrown around about how much power and water a single GenAI prompt requires. Today I decided it’s time to vet this claim a bit, studying the available data and describing it in a context that could help guide our behavior appropriately.

How much electricity does GenAI use?

With the help of Claude, because it works better than a Google search, I did some light research and found some great analysis (here) on the website of Epoch AI, a nonprofit founded to “help people understand what is happening in AI from a neutral perspective and grounded in the best possible evidence.” Epoch AI partners with Stanford’s AI Index, which I’ve come across in my professional life and seems well respected, as well as the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation, & Technology, which I trust even more (since it doesn’t have ties to the tech industry like Stanford does). I must acknowledge that truly disinterested AI research is hard to come by, because almost every organization doing serious work in this realm has a business relationship with it. So to spread out the risk of misinformation I also put this query to ChatGPT, which came up with similar numbers but from other presumably trustworthy sources, including ScienceDirect  (which Gemini says “is considered one of the most reliable and authoritative sources for factual data in the world”) and Cornell University.

So: Epoch AI, in an article from about a year ago, examined a widespread previous claim that “an individual ChatGPT query requires around 3 watt-hours of electricity, or 10 times as much as a Google search.” Epoch AI, leveraging “more up-to-date facts and clearer assumptions,” arrived a the following conclusion:

We find that typical ChatGPT queries using GPT-4o likely consume roughly 0.3 watt-hours, which is ten times less than the older estimate. This difference comes from more efficient models and hardware compared to early 2023, and an overly pessimistic estimate of token counts in the original estimate. For context, 0.3 watt-hours is less than the amount of electricity that an LED lightbulb or a laptop consumes in a few minutes.

For further perspective: according to this article, “Google says that its median text query uses around 0.24 Wh of electricity. That’s a tiny amount: equivalent to microwaving for one second, or running a fridge for 6 seconds.”

But that’s just text queries. Creating a picture uses a lot more resources. According to this article by the University of Southern California, using GenAI to create a picture uses 2.9 Wh—over ten times as much as a text query. I had Gemini come up with some household use equivalents to give this number some context, and here’s what it came up with:

• Phone: charges your battery about 19%
• LED bulb: about 19 minutes of light
• Dishwasher: about 14 seconds of a cycle
• Clothes dryer: about 2.6 seconds of a cycle

These seem pretty trivial, but if you consider all the millions of people using GenAI, it can add up, especially if people get it the habit of iterating a dozen or so times to get the image just right. (For what it’s worth, I got the cover art for this post in two tries.)

How much water does GenAI use?

Water is another matter, and very difficult to quantify because the location of a data center has a lot to do with how efficiently it can cool all its servers. This“ Washington Post” article documented a study, involving research from the University of California at Riverside, that found that using ChatGPT to write a 100-word email consumed 519 milliliters of water, which is a little more than a standard bottle. Obviously that is really high, especially considering how many people use GenAI and how much that’s growing.

At the same time, as pointed out by this article, many other industries also use a ton of water, and people don’t seem up in arms about it: “A single burger takes more than 400 gallons of water to produce; a humble cotton T-shirt takes more than 700. The United States’ 16,000 golf courses, meanwhile, each have the potential to use on average between 100,000 to 2 million gallons of water per day. (For comparison, Google says its thirstiest data center in Iowa consumed about 2.7 million gallons per day in 2024; most of the company’s data centers used substantially less.)”

A less abstract comparison

To be fair, it’s not like we all sit around eating burgers all the time; for most of us, that’s a treat. Meanwhile, I would hope most albertnet readers are enlightened enough to hold out for grass-fed beef, which uses a lot less water to produce. And if you’re like me, you buy a lot of clothing secondhand, which helps mitigate the resources required for your wardrobe. So what’s a better comparison that can help us frame the environmental cost of using GenAI? I propose: beer. (I know what you’re thinking: that’s my answer to everything.” Well, okay … guilty as charged.)

So here is my thought exercise: how does using GenAI compare to cracking open a beer? And what is the value of the former vs. the latter? Obviously this is a wide-open scenario so I’ll narrow it down to how I most often use GenAI: when researching a blog post.

Here’s what Claude had to say about the electricity required for a 30-minute research session:

Based on current estimates, a substantive text exchange with an AI like this one — say 20–30 back-and-forth exchanges — is probably in the neighborhood of 5–10 watt-hours of electricity. Google has reported that after major efficiency gains, the median Gemini prompt consumed about 0.24 watt-hours, representing a 33× reduction in energy per prompt compared to a year earlier. At that figure, 30 prompts would use about 7 Wh — roughly equivalent to running a phone for 20 minutes or leaving an LED bulb on for half an hour.

Regarding water use, a Mistral AI lifecycle analysis citied by the Brookings Institution found that a typical 400-token exchange consumes about 45 milliliters of water—about three tablespoons. Multiply by 30 exchanges and you’re somewhere around 1.5 liters of water—very roughly two or three bottles’ worth attributable to the 30-minute research session. (This varies enormously by data center location and cooling method, so we should treat it as an order-of-magnitude estimate.)

To compare the electricity cost of the GenAI session vs. the can of beer, I downloaded a spreadsheet-based waste reduction calculator directly from the EPA’s website. It is designed to help consumers like me understand the value of recycling something vs. tossing it. It calculated that recycling a 12-ounce aluminum can saves 0.3 kWh—which is roughly 40 times more energy than what’s consumed by an entire 30-minute GenAI research session. Granted, I often generate a picture to go with my post, but even if we assume it takes five tries to get it right, the energy cost of those five images is still only about one-twentieth of the energy wasted by tossing a single beer can in the trash. And since this is only the energy cost of recycling, which is less than producing a can from scratch, these numbers are highly conservative. (Meanwhile, I haven’t even factored in the energy required for brewing and transporting the beer itself.)

Meanwhile, the Water Footprint Network, as described here, estimates a total water footprint of 298 liters per liter of beer—so a standard 12-oz can of domestic beer takes over 100 liters of water to produce. More than 90% of that water comes from the agricultural supply chain (e.g., growing the barley) while the brewery uses about 6–8 liters per liter of beer (though a large facility may achieve a 3-to-1 ratio). So my 30-minute research session uses something like 1–2% of the water embodied in the can of beer I might have next to my keyboard. (Full disclosure: there’s a now-empty pint glass on the arm of the sofa as I type this. Yes, drinking while blogging: a rhetorically risky and planet-impacting combination. So sue me.)

Factoring in value

So that covers the environmental cost of researching a blog vs. drinking a beer. But what about the value of each? Discounting pub crawls with my friends—which occur far more seldom than I would like, to the point that they’re a rounding error—I’m really talking about unwinding with a solitary beer at the end of the workday. So in general the value of that beer accrues solely to me.

So does my blog-related GenAI research create any value to justify its water and electricity use? In the interest of humility I won’t merely assume this, and will instead dive into the data. Pageview stats across my blog wouldn’t be very representative, as at least half my posts don’t require any research at all. So for lack of a better idea, I’ve decided to analyze the pageview count for each of the albertnet posts that are about AI. After all, those have to be among the most GenAI-intensive of all, because in writing them I was test driving the various platforms. Here’s a brief summary of how these posts have performed:

• Total pageviews across nineteen AI posts: 15,578 (so far)
• Average pageviews per AI post: 819.9
• Average pageviews per AI post per month: 35.5

I could conclude that, from a somewhat abstract viewpoint, each post is seen by a person a day. But averages aren’t very reliable, and greater specificity is more revealing. Lurking in that “average pageviews per AI post per month” is a bit of (GenAI-performed) number crunching, accounting for the fact that the posts that I published years ago have had a lot more time to accrue pageviews. Ranking my AI posts by pageviews per month shows that they are gaining in popularity, with the more recent ones averaging two to three views per day. Here’s the ranking of all these AI posts over time, so you can see the momentum:

№	Views/Mo	Total Views	Title
1	102.5	1,742	Tech Check-In – How Good is the Latest A.I.? – Part II
2	85.7	257	New Year's Resolutions — AI Edition
3	82.8	1,077	What Is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
4	69.9	1,189	Tech Check-In – How Good is the Latest A.I.? – Part I
5	62.4	312	AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
6	58.0	290	More AI Smackdown – ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry
7	51.2	256	Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
8	27.4	1,040	A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
9	27.1	1,031	A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
10	23.0	597	Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
11	20.0	739	Schooling ChatGPT
12	11.1	719	Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
13	10.6	680	Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
14	10.0	1,230	A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
15	8.8	563	Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
16	7.3	1,201	Almost Intelligent – Part I
17	6.3	838	Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
18	6.2	1,016	I, Chatbot
19	4.9	801	Almost Intelligent – Part II

It would be reasonable to conclude that the more recent posts, which leverage more GenAI research, are reaching more readers, thus providing a better ROI. Of course I can’t account for all the possible reasons these posts are more popular, but I reckon that to some degree it’s because of the better use of GenAI. Using this tool won’t make be a better writer, but I’ve always been pretty lazy about research and there’s no doubt GenAI helps there. And whether or not this ROI calculation is completely airtight, I hope this helps you at least appreciate my effort to weigh my GenAI “footprint” against its value.

The bigger point here is that the can of beer is consumed once, quickly, leaving nothing behind (except maybe a nice belch). In contrast, the energy that goes into researching a blog post has an effective cost-per-view that keeps dropping every month it’s up, in perpetuity. If you use GenAI to draft an email, how many people will it reach, and low long is its tail? Could you have drafted it on your own—thus exercising your brain—or did you really need GenAI?

I’m not trying to imply that only bloggers should use GenAI; this is just one illustration of a cost/benefit analysis of the use of this tool. If you are doing something useful and an AI chatbot is helping you do it better or more efficiently, then it’s arguably worth the energy and water—or, at least, is a more worthy use of it than shopping for a bunch of clothes, going out for a burger, and then having a few beers.

The point is to be aware of the environmental cost of this technology, the same way so many of us do when we decide among driving, biking, walking, or taking mass transit  somewhere. Just because GenAI takes less water than beef or cotton doesn’t mean we should ignore its environmental cost, since it’s a whole new way people are consuming energy and water. As recently as three years ago, almost nobody was using GenAI in their daily lives; now, it’s an increasingly entrenched behavior, data centers are expanding rapidly, and in some regions power grids are struggling to keep up with demand.

This being said, I truly don’t believe opting out of GenAI is the solution; just reflecting on how much it helped me write this post, I can’t imagine not taking advantage of it. Instead, I’d like to see the millions of people already using it stop acting like it comes without a cost. It’s the same as driving: did I really need to surround myself with two tons of steel and burn a cup of gasoline just to travel a mile to the gym and back? (That was a rhetorical question. I always bike to the gym.)

Speaking of cost: one way to keep yourself honest with GenAI is to not pay for it. If you are on an unpaid account and use up your tokens, so that your chatbot cuts you off for some number of exchanges, maybe that should be your indication that you’ve gone overboard. Come to think of it, video games, YouTube, and social media should have that “feature.”

A final note on GenAI at work

Now that I’ve examined the environmental cost of GenAI, it’s worth pointing out a final wrinkle: using it in the workplace is actually much more efficient than using it at home. Corporations get the most benefit out of GenAI through Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which is where, instead of asking a large language model to answer from its entire trove of training data, the GenAI retrieves relevant documents from a corporate knowledge base (contracts, manuals, research reports, emails, whatever the organization has indexed), then passes those retrieved chunks to the model as context for its answer. Tools like NotebookLM, most enterprise Copilot implementations, and corporate deployments of models like Gemini or Claude typically work this way.

This is much more efficient than “raw” GenAI like consumers use. The retrieval step is computationally cheap—essentially a sophisticated search. The generation step is shorter because the model doesn't have to work as hard to “remember” or construct relevant context; it’s been handed it. And the answers tend to be more accurate and require fewer iterations, which means fewer wasted queries. For a user to opt out of using it on environmental grounds makes little sense, because the big resource expense has already been incurred. As Claude puts it:

The infrastructure cost of a corporate RAG deployment is largely fixed relative to usage. The vector database has to stay current whether 500 employees query it or 5,000. The embedding pipeline runs continuously. The API connections to the underlying model are on retainer. So each additional active user essentially dilutes the per-capita environmental and financial cost of that overhead. An employee who declines to use the tool isn’t reducing the infrastructure footprint; they’re just reducing the output derived from it. In accounting terms, they’re lowering the return on a sunk cost.

Synthesis

Wow, I just threw a ton of words at you, didn’t I? Maybe I’m the most verbose Large Language Model since, well, ChatGPT! Anyway, here’s my final conclusion: of course you should use GenAI. It’s an amazingly powerful tool, and it’s getting better all the time. Now that it’s here, declining to use it makes about as much sense as blending a smoothie with a knife and a whisk, or doing arithmetic with an abacus, or churning your own butter. But use GenAI judiciously. Ask yourself: is this improving the quality or efficiency of my output? Or am I just being lazy?

Other albertnet posts on A.I., in order of publication

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry
• New Year’s Resolutions — AI Edition

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XVIII

Introduction

This is the twenty-eighth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, and Volume XXVII is here. I never expected my collection to be so, well, voluminous, but here we are.

So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re the closest thing to tweets or X posts you’ll ever get on albertnet, in that they’re rather short bulletins. But then, they’re nowhere nearly as short as the original 140 characters of SMS and Twitter updates. (In fact, today’s post might include one of my longest-ever Bits—or is it a Bob?— at over 500 words.) These are excerpts from letters or emails to friends and family, which I’ve decided ought to be amusing to a much wider audience (i.e., all 6 billion users of the Internet).

Since many of my friends and family probably ignored these bulletins originally, you may be the very first living human to pay them any attention! Read them all at once; one at a time over days or weeks; randomly; sequentially; capriciously; deliberately; repeatedly; not at all; or according to your own scheme that I haven’t even thought of. For each dispatch the date is provided and where I was living.

April 5, 1989 – Santa Barbara

I showed up late to my English final, and started in on the first part, which was looking at ten quotes from stuff we’d read, and identifying the work and the character quoted. Assuming (for some reason) that the exam was open-book, I started flipping through one of my books. The professor said, “Dana … what are you doing?” I was like, “Uh, just looking up one of the quotes.” The prof stated, “The identification section of this exam is not open-book.” The entire class started laughing. I said, “Uh ... sorry.” Then the whole class was on the floor. “You’ll go far in life, I can tell,” said the prof.

April 12, 1989 – Santa Barbara

Today I gave a pal a ride home from the cycling team meeting. He’s big for a cyclist—over 175 pounds, looks a bit like Bob Roll—and he was sitting on the handlebars of my mountain bike. I had the tires (Farmer John’s Cousins) at real low pressure because of an incident I suffered a couple of days ago. But that’s another story. A good one, though, so I’ll share it with you. 

It all started when I went to visit Geoff [in San Luis Obispo] for spring break and took my Tioga City Slicker tires with me. Why, you ask? Well, we held the first SLO Parking Garage Invitational Midnight Criterium last week. The parking garage, a brand new building that has received harsh criticism for its avant-garde architecture, has five, count ‘em five, floors, with hairpin turns all the way down—perfect for testing people’s bike handling skills. If you take the turns too wide, which can happen when a competitor forces you out, you hit these six-inch-high domes of painted cement. Gnarly! It was a total blast. 

Anyhow, when I returned to Isla Vista, I forgot to bring the City Slicker tires back with me, and had to mount up the Farmer Johns. They were really old, had been sitting around a good while. Well, on Monday I was just riding along, minding my own business, on the celebrated UCSB bike path when all of a sudden . . . BLAM! The rear tire just blew clean off the rim. Everybody in the vicinity jumped about three feet in the air. Being late as usual, I had to just keep riding the dang thing. It was pretty funny. Anyhow, upon careful inspection when I got home, I noticed that about a four-inch section of the rear tire had a severely damaged bead. I should have replaced the tire altogether but don’t have the time or the money, so I’ve continued to ride that baby, just at real low pressure. 

Which returns us to my original story. So I’m giving this guy a ride on my handlebars; the bike’s squirming around everywhere due to the low tire pressure; I can hardly see around the guy; I can hardly reach the brake levers; his full backpack is smashing into my face; it’s dark; and we’re wearing sunglasses. (Okay, it wasn’t dark and we weren’t wearing sunglasses … just couldn’t resist the “Blues Brothers” reference.) But hey, none of this is any problem because I’m a bike racer, right? We crash up and down off the bike path a number of times, narrowly missing other bikers and pedestrians, wobble quite a bit during slowdowns, and I actually enjoy some success in creating the illusion that I’m in control. That is, until we come within a block of [my apartment building] La Loma and a tiny Chicano kid, a toddler really, rides right out in front of us on his tiny bike. 

Well, his reflexes obviously haven’t developed yet, and ours are severely limited, and we’re on a collision course! I don’t know which way to go around him because I can’t predict what he’s gonna do, I mean it could be anything, or nothing. So my friend and I both begin yelling, like the two convicts in “Raising Arizona” when they realize they have left a man behind: “AAAAAAAAAUGH!” After narrowly averting disaster through my expert bike handling and our ability to remain cool in a pinch (well, okay, maybe it was just luck), we look over at the parents of the kid, expecting them to be super pissed, ready to kill us for recklessly endangering their child. But instead they’re laughing. Laughing! Cripes, don’t these parents know danger when they see it? They certainly wouldn’t have been laughing if little Junior had been trampled into the asphalt by over 350 pounds of man and bike, the unmistakable tread of the Tioga Farmer John’s Cousin embedded in his face!

October 12, 1991 – Berkeley

I need to find a dentist out here. I’ve asked my pals for recommendations and usually get kind of a blank look. But a guy at the bike shop, B—, who looks and acts like Bill or Ted from “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” did give me the name of his guy. I think I’ve mentioned B— to you before, he’s the guy who separated his shoulder mountain biking and then sold all his prescription Vicodin so he could buy ganja. Anyhow, he said his dentist is “totally kickback” to the point that B— talked the guy into dispensing unnecessary laughing gas, just for the hell of it, and for free no less. (B— is quite the salesman.) That doesn’t seem entirely professional to me. And then, as if an afterthought, B— told me about the last time he had a cavity filled. He’d had all this Novocain, of course, and then afterward he decided to smoke some weed, which of course gave him the munchies, so he went and bought this big sandwich, and he was eating away on it and then something seemed wrong and he looked closely and the sandwich was all covered in blood. Turns out he’d been chewing on his tongue because he couldn’t feel it! Daaaaamn!

March 13, 1992 - Berkeley

A couple of my roommates and I have a Thursday tradition of boys’ night out. (Not like there are any girls in our lives to exclude from these outings, of course, and if there were girls in our lives, we’d surely bring them along, or more to the point they’d bring us along … but I digress.) We sometimes start at the Come Back Inn, which is a barebones place, not much furniture, mainly linoleum, and I think their name is based on how they routinely get shut down for serving alcohol to minors, and then they do their time and re-open. It’s not uncommon to stand around there with a pitcher of beer since there’s no place to set it down. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen dudes drinking right out of the pitcher. But we also like the more upscale places, Henry’s and Raleigh’s. My roommates are always hoping to hit it off with some hot coed, and they have this theory that if they pump iron right before we go, their muscles will look bigger and they’ll become irresistible to women. (They have a home weight set, including  a bench press.) That strategy just might work for them one of these times, but as you know I don’t have any musculature to speak of and if I tried to pump iron I’d just injure myself.

So anyway, we were at the pub and E— was scoping out the babes, kind of like a lion surveying the savanna deciding what prey to go after, and finally decided on this cute blonde. He caught his reflection in a mirrored beer ad, checked his hair, straightened his red Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, shot us a quick look as if to say, “Watch this,” and set out to start a conversation. He headed over and exchanged what couldn’t have been more than a few words before turning away and walking back to us, tail between his legs. Man, he was pissed. “NorCal sucks,” he said. “In L.A. and San Diego women were actually cool, they’d give you the time of day. But you get a chick up here who’s even halfway good-looking and she’s totally stuck up.” M— and I gave him a hard time for getting shut down so hard, but we held back a bit as he was clearly smarting.

Well, then he spotted some other young beauty but speculated that she’d be just as snooty, even though her blond hair was obviously dyed. Somehow we got to daring each other to go ask her what color her hair really was. We all liked the idea in principle but nobody was volunteering, so we ended up doing roshambo (i.e., rock-paper-scissors) and of course I lost. So I went over, sat next to her at the bar, said hi, took a few moments and a few sips to get my courage up, and then—looking her right in the eye—popped the question: “What color is your hair, really?” She said, “Oh, this is my natural color.” What could I say? Looking at her dark eyebrows, I said, “Well, what about your eyebrows, then?” Without missing a beat she said, “Oh, I dye those.” Wow. I was impressed. Such quick thinking, totally unrattled, and best of all not hostile! I replied, “Well, you did a great job. I never would have guessed.” 

I was kind of pleased with myself for not seizing up completely at her retort. And since she was pretty fly to begin with, it seemed well worth trying to turn this into an actual conversation. So I tried, and I’d say I lasted at least another 90 seconds before completely running out of things to say. I suppose I felt like how a rodeo rider must feel, where every second he stays on the bucking bronco grows his achievement. It didn’t even occur to me to buy her a drink, which would have bought me at least a few more minutes. But what can I say? I got no game, and eventually I wandered back over to my pals. “Well, you didn’t strike out as fast as E— anyway,” M— remarked. Gloating just a bit (I have to admit), I tried to deploy some swagger: “You know, that’s actually a pretty good pickup line. At least it was novel. I’m gonna use that again. I totally could have gotten her number, if I’d wanted.” Of course my pals just laughed in my face. That’s what friends are for, right?

July 15, 1997 – San Francisco

For my birthday E— bought me this cool a magic lamp thingy. It’s is a cube-shaped wooden frame, open at the top and bottom, with rice paper for walls. Inside is a cylinder of thin paper with figures cut out of it, with colored cellophane covering the cutouts. The cylinder’s roof is a paper pinwheel, and the center of it is a tiny glass dome that sits on a little needle, to form a bearing. Beneath this there’s a little light bulb. Heat from the bulb is turns the pinwheel, and thus the cylinder, so that the figures of colored cellophane are projected on the rice paper walls. The effect is a moving picture of the figures (dancers, animals, etc.) that seem to dance across the rice paper, seeming to grow in size as they near the edges. I guess this would typically be a nightlight for a kid’s room. We’d seen it in a shop window in the Marina when we were out for a walk and E— noticed that I liked it, so she sneaked back there and bought it. Anyhow, we had a friend over who just stared at it, perplexed, trying to understand the point. Finally her eyebrows went up like she’d had an “aha!” moment and she said, “Oh, I get it! It’s because you guys don’t have a TV!” Um… right. That’s it.

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Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2026 Paris-Roubaix

Introduction

This race needs no introduction. But this blog post does, if you’re new to my blow-by-blow reporting, which is biased because I’m a blogger, not a killjoy journalist. My first bias: Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates XRG) wins too much and needs to not take victory here today. If he did, he would have won all the Monuments in a single season, which would make the sport look like a joke.

Biased Blow-By-Blow — Paris-Roubaix 2026

As I join the action, the riders have 65 kilometers and 13 cobblestoned sections to go. Phil Liggett is announcing and has offered up a brilliant insight: “Every rider has ridden to the level of their capacity because they all want to beat Tadej Pogacar.” Odd verb tense … meaning they have ridden that way so far, but no longer are? Have they given up? Should Phil?

Okay, before we get too far into the footage, here’s a little pop quiz for you: what do Pogacar, pre-race favorite Mathieu Van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech), and the Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart all have in common? I put this to my online correspondent, who is both a cycling and a Shteyngart fan, but he failed the quiz. The answer? They all rock expensive watches.

That’s a classic Shteyngart Instagram setup there: food, drink, fancy watch all prominently featured. Of course, Shteyngart isn’t as much of a baller as the racers. His most expensive watch, a Patek Philippe, is worth only about $100K. The Richard Mille on Van der Poel’s wrist above goes for over $400K, and Pogacar’s is surely right around that much. (Not that these riders have to pay for them. In fact, it’s probably an elaborate insurance scam.)

Okay, enough of that—back to the race. There is a group of nine off the front, which features Pogacar. They have just over thirty seconds on a small chase group that includes Van der Poel, who is doing most of the work.

Pilippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers) decides to be the exception that proves the rule.

No, your vision is not failing. These are really bad pictures. Peacock blocks screen grabs. I’m holding my phone camera as still as possible but I’ve had a lot of coffee.

Up ahead, Wout Van Aert (Team Visma-Lease a Bike) attacks!

Who is this jackass in the black shirt waving at the camera? How is the camera more interesting to him than the actual race? What’s he gonna say later? “Yeah, I was at the race, but somehow my back was turned when the racers went by. But hey, I was on TV!”

Only Pogacar is able to bridge up to Van Aert! The breakaway is suddenly in shambles!

“Everybody is giving a hundred and ten cents,” Phil says cryptically. After a pause to collect himself, he says, uncertainly, “Uh, percent.”

Van Aert continues to drill it! Pogacar is just holding his wheel!

Daaaaaamn, Van Aert is going so hard he’s gapped Pogacar!

Behind, the original breakaway has come back together, and I think they’ve merged with the VdP group, but the gap is 23 seconds. Ganna drops back to air out his armpits, one at a time.

No, actually, it appears he’s signaling a wheel change. He has a flat tire, bummer! With these modern through-axles a wheel change could take like 30 seconds, so he better hope they have a bike for him. Fun fact: it used to be that to signal a front flat, you would raise your left arm; for a rear flat, your right. That way the mechanic knew which wheel to bring. I guess these days it’s always a whole bike they bring, since Ganna has a rear flat but is holding up his left arm.

The gap is still hovering at around 25 seconds to the VdP group, despite all the crazy action at the front. I wish I knew how VdP missed the original break of nine. I gambled today that I could get up at a reasonable hour (quarter to six) and still catch the main action of the race. I lost.

Now Pogacar pulls through. I wonder why he’s not leaning farther forward, to be more aero, considering he’s in what could be the winning move in the biggest one-day race on the calendar. Maybe he’s just being nice, giving Van Aert the best draft possible?

It looks like Mads Pedersen [Lidl-Trek] is the only rider still ahead who was in that break. So here’s a question for you: if the peloton determined that this guy doped more than average, would they nickname him Meds Pedersen? Or would that endanger the omertà?

Laurence Pithie (Red Bull – BORA – Hansgrohe) crashes!

What a pithie. Er, pity. There’s never a good time to crash but I feel like the fate of the race is unfolding at this very moment.

“Pedersen is a wise old man,” Phil projects optimistically and pointlessly.

Gosh, the gap is up to 41 seconds. The chase group is fracturing a bit. It looks like Pithie never made it back on.

VdP has dirt on his chin. How? Or is that Oreo residue?

Amazingly, the gap is coming down. It’s 35 seconds. It’s so refreshing to see anybody closing in on Pogacar. I guess I should acknowledge that it’s not just Pogacar, it’s Pogacar and Van Aert. Technically this is a two-man breakaway, which is normally far more dangerous than a guy going solo, but honestly, let’s admit this is Pogacar doing his normal solo breakaway and Van Aert happens to be with him, like a fly that finds its way into your car and travels with you all the way to Pittsburgh. It’s not even remarkable that Van Aert isn’t doing his share of the work. Pogacar would never expect him to. Within the peloton, Pogacar has the same role I have around my house when it comes to jars. If there’s an unopened jar with too tight a lid, my wife simply hands it to me and I open it. I never say anything like, “Have you tried everything? Did you run hot water over it? Did you whack it with a knife, or use that floppy nubby rubber disc thingy we can never find? Why should I have to open this? How are you ever going to get better at this without trying? What if I went on a business trip and wasn’t here to do it?” That would be silly. Of course I just open the jar, because (having the hand strength of a former bike mechanic) I’m the logical person to do it, just like Pogacar is the obvious person to lead a breakaway the entire time. He’s just better at it. He’d never say to Van Aert (or anyone else), “Why don’t you help pull?” That would be silly. The obvious answer, “Because I’m not you,” doesn’t need to be said. It’s like for Pogacar to ever draft anybody would be an unfair advantage.

Take last weekend’s Tour of Flanders, for example. Pogacar and VdP were in a breakaway together, and VdP pulled only occasionally. During the post-race interview, VdP was asked if he’d been toying with Pogacar by not doing his fair share of the work. VdP looked perplexed and said, “I did my pulls. Not very many, but it wasn’t necessary. Tadej was just glad to get a little rest here and there.” (I admit I normally make shit up when transcribing rider interviews, but that bit I rendered as faithfully as memory allows.)

Whoa, VdP overcooks a curve and goes into the grass! What happened there?

It wasn’t a tight curve … maybe he just zoned out? (Yeah, of course I’m just playin’ with you. VdP’s focus is of course extreme.)

They’re recapping what’s happened so far. Pogacar has had two bike changes, and VdP at least one, and it was a disaster because he got a bike from a teammate but his cleats weren’t compatible with the pedals on it. That would never happen in amateur cycling because club racer types like me have encyclopedic knowledge of everybody’s equipment selections. (I once had some great mischievous fun debating Speedplay vs. Look with a pal over email. I actually don’t have any strong feelings about pedals whatsoever, I was just baiting the guy, and it was great, he got really worked up.)

The gap is back up to 43 seconds and man, it’s looking like a two-man race. On this fairly flat course, I can’t imagine Pogacar riding a baller like Van Aert off his wheel, but he also shouldn’t be able to beat him in a sprint. I wonder if Pogacar remembers how to attack in a one-day race. Typically he doesn’t need to, he just goes so hard everyone gets sawed off, one by one, even VdP last week. That’s not going to work today, not without a hard climb to play with.

Ah, I have a text from my online correspondent! Probably some scintillating insight on this race! The text reads, “So how did they start calling it Botswain? Ball sweat is a better name.” So he’s continuing our conversation from last night, when I Beck’sted him a photo of my Trader Joe’s house brand IPA.

So much for illuminating commentary … my correspondent joined the action even later than I did.

Van Aert goes to the front and immediately the gap starts shrinking. This is what happens when somebody besides Pogacar pulls. It’s crazy that Pogacar’s dominance is so extreme, and what that’s doing to the sport. No longer is it man vs. man; it’s really peloton vs. Pogacar.

As if to prove my point about Van Aert’s insufficient speed, Pogacar impatiently takes the lead again and the gap goes back out to 43 seconds.

Back in the chase group, VdP is getting some cooperation from the others but it just doesn’t seem like it’s going to help. They won’t be going fast enough on the front, since he’s as physically superior to them as Pogacar is to Van Aert, and yet he can’t do the whole chase alone.

Even though I pay actual money for Peacock Premium or whatever it’s called, I still have to sit through commercials. They’re showing an ad for Disneyland. Which is really absurd.  I mean, who would get up this early on a Sunday morning to watch Paris-Roubaix other than a middle-aged man? And what middle-aged man would want to go to Disneyland, ever? The Walt Disney Company should only advertise during children’s programming, to get the children begging their parents to go. Fun fact: my wife and I never took our kids to Disneyland. We flat refused. And yet as far as I know, these kids aren’t even in therapy.

The man in the photo above is not a father, I hasten to point out. He’s a grandfather, more than happy to take his granddaughter to Disneyland. He’s about to ask her, “Will this be your first time trying LSD?”

Amazingly, the gap is now coming down! VdP is riding like a beast because with only 18 kilometers to go, he must know time is running out. “This is the cord in the elastic,” Phil says. I’ve never heard this metaphor extended in that way, and I’m not sure I understand it. I mean, some garments (e.g., pajama bottoms, Sansabelt trousers like Phil wears) have an elastic waistband, and others have a drawstring (aka cord), but does any garment feature both? I think not.

The gap is down to 28 seconds! Pogacar looks back at Van Aert as if to say, “Can you help me with this jar?” Van Aert doesn’t need to say anything. His face says it all.

The gap is down to 18 seconds and now Pogacar drills it a lot harder on the front. He was probably loafing until now. The gap quickly goes back out to 23 seconds.

I’ve been wondering how VdP missed that nine-man breakaway and my online correspondent texts, “Reading thru the cyclingnews feed, it looks like VdP needed a bike change which put him 1:30 down and then he flatted a bit later and was as much as 2:00 down until he got going again.” Man, terrible luck.

With only 12 kilometers left, the gap is up to 28 seconds. Almost all the footage now is of the leading duo because everything behind them has become irrelevant.

Van Aert is pulling surprisingly often. Perhaps he’s figuring if it somehow ends up in a sprint and he wins, he doesn’t want anyone accusing him of being a wheel-sucker. Or who knows, maybe he’s actually got better legs!

They’re heading to the penultimate cobbled sector, and if memory serves, the last sector is a joke. So this may be where the final move is made. It’s a three-star section, with one Yelp reviewer complaining, “Good latté but the guy said the coffee cake was baked that day but it was totally stale.”

Van Aert must be feeling pretty good to still be taking pulls when it’s clearly unnecessary. In the chase group VdP isn’t even leading that much. He’s racing for third at this point.

Van Aert takes a long pull, oddly long, without Pogacar coming through, like he’s starting to play games. Van Aert flicks his elbow. Pogacar finally pulls through.

It happens again: Pogacar leaves Van Aert on the front instead of pulling through. Again Van Aert flicks his elbow. This is how I feel when my wife asks me to take over at the stove halfway through her dinner prep. I’m like, how do I know when the corn-on-the-cob is done? I can’t cook, I’m just the jar guy!

Tim Van Dijke (Red Bull – BORA – Hansgrohe) attacks the chase group! VdP chases him down.

The cobbles are basically done, and Pogacar hasn’t shed Van Aert. With 2.4 kilometers left, we might have a race here! I text my correspondent, “Needless to say, I would LOVE to see this come down to a sprint with Van Aert winning.” He replies, “Me too!”

Now, in the chase group, Jasper Stuyven (Soudal Quick Step) attacks! He immediately gets a huge gap!

Not much response from this so-called chase group. I suspect for its members it’s more like the “can this just be over already?” group.

And now the leaders are on the velodrome! Pogacar leads, perhaps unwisely.

Pogacar looks back as if to say, “Care to lead this out, Wout?”

They come past the finish line and the bell is ringing! One lap to go!

And now, just before the final curve, Van Aert makes his move!

He immediately pulls ahead, he’s freakin’ flying!

The gap widens!

They round the bend for the final stretch and Pogacar is still giving it everything, still in the hunt, now in the draft!

Van Aert is closing in on the line and it looks like he’s got it! He looks over his shoulder to make sure.

And he’s got the win! Unbelievable! Van Aert finally conquers Paris-Roubaix!

Jasper Stuyven (Soudal Quick-Step) rolls in for third … evidently the chasers never did catch him.

It’s a tough sprint for fourth! VdP is up against Christophe Laporte (Team Visma – Lease A Bike)!

With a bike throw, VdP takes the sprint!

Missing the podium probably doesn’t bother VdP that much compared to not winning his fourth Paris-Roubaix. It’s a rounding error. Good on him that he wasn’t too proud to sprint for fourth.

Here is the top ten:

Van Aert is mobbed by cameramen. Are there camerawomen around him as well? Possibly. I guess that’s not really the point.

Van Aert covers his face, surely feeling overwhelmed.

VdP comes over to congratulate him. Note the Euro-mullet.

Now Van Aert spots a friend or staffer, runs to him, and jumps into his arms.

Wow, that took some confidence. Van Aert judged that this guy would be able to catch him and hold him up. Imagine if the guy’s footing wasn’t good and he was just bowled over backwards, and if he were badly injured in the process. That would be an unpleasant footnote to this brilliant victory.

Van Aert finds his family and kneels down to engage with his small kids. Look at the cameraman in green, there on the right. What’s he pointing his camera at? A bird?

Van Aert high-fives his kid, who probably cannot remotely grasp the significance of this victory.

I’ve long been a big fan of Van Aert, based in part on a previous post-race family interaction. It was just after stage 15 of the 2022 Tour de France, and (as I described it here):

Right after the finish, cameramen milled around looking for the requisite heartwarming footage of riders in tears, hugging their teammates, managers, significant others, etc. They certainly got the desired response with Philipsen, but van Aert didn’t have much reaction at all. Instead, he tended to his little daughter, trying to wash her hands off with a water bottle. Sure, a minute earlier he’d been almost crashing into another rider at 40 mph, but now his fatherly duties took precedence over having some big melodramatic “moment” after all the action. Despite being one of the most prominent riders in the biggest bike race in the world, he evidently hasn’t forgotten that he’s just a guy. A dad. 

You can watch footage of that lovely family moment here.

Here’s Pogacar. He looks pensive, perhaps wondering, “How did I let that come down to a sprint? What was I thinking?”

Now Van Aert is being interviewed.

INTERVIEWER: So much emotion. What  does this mean for you?

WOUT: It means everything to me. I first did this race eight years ago, and ever since it’s been my goal. I was 18 and that year I lost a teammate, Michael Goolaerts [during the race, due to a cardiac arrest]. Ever since then it’s been my goal to come here and point my finger to the sky. This victory is for Michael, but especially for his family, for his wife Marianne, for Christophe, and all my friends and teammates from my previous team. It was a really tough day, and ever since that day, so many times I was so unlucky in this race, but it brought me also experience, so even today when luck was not on my side, I kept believing in it, and finally the reward is there.

INTERVIEWER: Everybody was talking about Tadej, about Van der Poel, but you, you never stopped believing.

W: I did stop believing, a lot of times, but the next day I always woke up and fought for it again, and honestly there’s no more beautiful way than going to the line with the world champion, and he gave me such a hard time, beating him in the sprint mano a mano is something really special for me.

INTERVIEWER: Take me through the final, what was going through your mind?

WOUT: When I saw the velodrome I was just sticking to my plan. In my dreams and in my preparation I pictured this sprint so many times, so I knew exactly what to do. The hardest part was getting to the velodrome I would say, there’d been so many attacks on the day, I was at the limit to stay on his wheel, and  yeah, it was all worth it.

INTERVIEWER: There were a lot of tough moments for you [this season], a lot of injuries, a lot of crashes, so to win here, this is a tidal win.

WOUT: Yeah, exactly, it’s such a chaotic race, everybody coming to the line has his own story and that’s what makes it so beautiful. It can be hard but on a day like this it’s the best race there is.

If you’ve read my race reports before, you might be scratching your head right now and thinking, “Weird, that interview transcript actually sounds plausible!” It is the case that normally I stray pretty far from verbatim on these, putting all kinds of words in people’s mouths to make the interview interesting. But this was such a huge win for Van Aert, and his actual words so heartfelt and meaningful, I think clowning around would have been inappropriate.

I just updated my wife on the race, telling her that the guy I’d hoped would win, but who I didn’t think had much of a chance, did win. “Who was that?” she asked, automatically, almost accidentally, in accordance with a habit she formed as a journalist twenty years ago. I told her, excitedly, “Wout van Aert!” She replied, “You say that like I would know who you’re even talking about, like I’ve ever heard of Woof Van Aert!” Woof. I love it. A new nickname is born!

And now (over two hours later, following the finish of the women’s race) the winners mount the podium. Pogacar gets his rock trophy for second place and looks thoughtful. Already thinking about next year, perhaps?

Van Aert hoists his trophy and is stoked! Look at the cheeky French dignitary photo-bombing the podium, eclipsing Stuyven.

The riders take their hats off for the Belgian national anthem. What is up with Pogacar’s goofy two-tone hair? It’s even worse on proper video vs. the crappy photo I was able to get.

And now Van Aert congratulates Franziska Koch (FDJ United - Suez), winner of today’s Paris-Roubaix Femmes, which finished just before the podium ceremony.

In case you’re wondering, Koch was in a three-up breakaway with two Visma - Lease A Bike riders, Marianne Vos and last year’s winner, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, and managed to beat them in the sprint. But that’s a whole other story, a whole other race I wasn’t able to cover today.

Before I wrap up, I want to say one more thing: obviously I wasn’t rooting for Pogacar today, but I don’t hold anything against him other than being too dominant. And while it seems unrealistic for a stage racer to contest these spring classics, I have to honor Pogacar for trying. It’s a big risk to ride a dangerous course like Paris-Roubaix, and I like to see him putting panache before prudence.

But to summarize today’s race: GO WOOF!

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