September 14, 2026 • 36 mins
Hour 1 of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show focused overwhelmingly on the rapidly escalating debate over artificial intelligence (AI), AI regulation, data centers, U.S. technological competitiveness, and the growing geopolitical battle with China over AI leadership. The hosts opened by discussing recent comments from President Donald Trump, who forcefully argued that America must lead the AI race and rejected calls for excessive government regulation. Clay and Buck framed AI as one of the most consequential economic, political, and national security issues facing the country, emphasizing that whoever wins the AI race could dominate global innovation, economic growth, and military power in the decades ahead. They also briefly previewed upcoming discussions on key Senate races in Michigan and Texas, as well as Trump’s continued support for proposed $5,000 taxpayer rebate checks if Republicans perform well politically.
A major theme throughout the hour was the hosts’ belief that Democrats are increasingly positioning AI and data centers as political targets ahead of the midterm elections. Clay argued that anti-Trump messaging has become less effective and that affordability concerns remain tied to lingering economic issues from the Biden era. According to the discussion, some Democratic strategists may now be turning to fears about AI, automation, and data center development as a new political rallying point. The hosts compared current AI fears to previous public anxieties over Y2K, COVID-19, climate change, nuclear war, and overpopulation, arguing that predictions of societal collapse frequently fail to materialize.
The conversation then shifted into a broader philosophical discussion about technological progress and public fear. Buck referenced the concept of “extinction anxiety,” arguing that warnings about humanity’s destruction are often used to influence public opinion and policy. Both hosts expressed skepticism about efforts to slow AI development, particularly when rival nations continue to advance the technology. They highlighted concerns that some AI companies publicly advocating for regulation may actually benefit from rules that limit competition and protect their market dominance. The hosts repeatedly argued that Congress lacks the technical expertise necessary to regulate AI effectively.
Another significant topic was the impact of AI on education, literacy, reading comprehension, and intellectual development. Clay cited statistics showing low recreational reading rates among Americans and growing concerns about declining literacy levels. Buck argued that reading remains one of the most important intellectual skills because it improves critical thinking, communication, and reasoning. The hosts debated how AI could make people more intellectually dependent on technology by instantly summarizing books, assignments, and research, potentially reducing incentives for deep reading and independent analysis.
The hosts devoted extensive attention to the economic implications of AI, describing it as a driving force behind stock market gains, technology sector growth, and future productivity increases. Buck argued that AI may be essential to sustaining long-term economic growth and managing America’s enormous national debt burden. Both hosts rejected calls to slow AI development, suggesting that such actions could undermine American competitiveness while rival nations continue advancing the technology. They emphasized that AI is already transforming industries and influencing investment decisions across the economy.
National security emerged as another central focus. Clay and Buck repeatedly contended that China is the most important factor in the AI debate, arguing that the Chinese government is aggressively pursuing AI leadership while the U.S. wrestles with regulatory concerns. They discussed President Trump’s assertion that “whoever wins AI wins” and argued that AI will increasingly determine military superiority, cybersecurity capabilities, surveillance systems, autonomous weapons, drone warfare, and intelligence operations. The hosts compared the current AI competition to Cold War-era technological rivalries and warned that slowing American innovation could create strategic advantages for China.
The program also explored practical applications of AI already affecting everyday life. Clay described using AI-powered search tools to quickly obtain information, statistics, and research that previously required extensive online searching. Buck highlighted how AI can help small business owners analyze finances, improve efficiency, develop growth strategies, and create sophisticated business plans within seconds. They also discussed the disruption AI is creating in publishing, where authors and publishers are increasingly confronting questions about AI-generated books and content cr
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome everybody, Monday edition of the Clay Travis and Buck
Saxon show, better known to the folks as Clay and Buck.
We begin right now, we've got a lot to discuss
with you.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It is.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
A big, I'm going to use the Clay word, Donnybrook
right now over AI, AI regulation, people are scared, people
say don't be scared. The president weighing in heavy on that.
We're going to dive into this here shortly because, yes,
the AI revolution is real.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
It is here.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
The world is changing very quickly. These are the, really now,
in many ways, poised to be the most powerful companies
in the world. Some would argue that they already are
pretty close, if not there.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So we'll discuss that, where Trump falls on all those issues.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
He's weighed in. He came back from Ireland recently. And
he talked a bit about golf. I saw he was
discussing things on the plane on the way back. We
have a whole bunch of clips. I watched about a
10-minute or so Trump impromptu Q & A addressing many
of the big issues. Also, these big Senate races, two
(01:13):
that we're going to be talking about a lot. One,
of course, down in Texas. We hit that one pretty
hard last week. But today, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan said,
This is going to come down to less than probably
100,000 votes, could come down to less than 10,000 votes.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
I would put a lot of money on less than
100,000 votes. I think it's going to come down to
20K probably one way or the other.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
So very, very tight for a populous state like Michigan,
a Senate race that has huge, huge votes.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
We'll discuss.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
But let me let me let's set the table here
a bit with where things are on. Oh, Trump also
spoke about the five thousand dollar checks rebate rebates or
whatever they're being called. He says it's happening. If if
if if the Republicans win, he doubled down on this.
He says it's happening. So just we'll discuss this. But first, Clay,
(02:05):
we have some truths coming out here from the president
of the United States. For example, this one, just in
the last hour or so, the only control or guardrails
that AI needs... is a strong and smart, high IQ president.
And the USA has that in spades. The Trump administration
(02:28):
has stopped AI people from doing bad or potentially bad
things like Dario of Anthropic AI, who is now pretending
to be a perfect little angel. And we will continue
to do so. We already have tremendous criminal and regulatory
power over these companies. There is a sick conspiracy going
(02:48):
on against AI and data centers, and the only one
who is happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins,
all caps. We are leading China and all others and
will continue to do so. Conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors, and leakers, beware.
Thank you to your attention in this matter. That is
(03:11):
a roundhouse kick to the face of anyone who thinks
that you're being a fool, a wimp or whatever. If
you want us to win an AI, if you believe
the data center should go where communities allow them to go,
et cetera. Big time stuff from the president.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
This feels very calculated to as we sit here in
mid-September coming up on the midterm election. It feels like
Democrats are pivoting in some way to AI is the
boogeyman and we're going to protect you from the boogeyman.
And data centers roll into this, too.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
And.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Politically, it does make some sense. to give them credit
here as much as it pains me to do so,
because I think Trump is going to destroy the nation
has just not worked.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
I mean, I'm not hearing very much. You correct me
if you think I'm wrong on this buck. I'm not
hearing very much anti-Trump talk from Democrats. It is affordability.
And I think that Republicans have parried on affordability fairly
well in the grand scheme of things, because basically the
reason we have an affordability crisis is the Biden era.
(04:30):
So Democrats are arguing, yes, we started the fire, but
you can trust us to put it out. And I
think a lot of people are looking at that argument
and saying, I'm not sure that I buy it. And
so now the big bad boogeyman is no longer Trump.
It's AI. It's data centers. it's we're all going to
be dead in 10 years. Now, here is where I
(04:51):
get skeptical. At some point in time, it may well
be the case that humanity ceases to exist, Buck. But
we have heard a lot in the last 20 years
even about humanity ceasing to exist. I mean, some of
us remember Y2K, which is probably the all-time biggest false
(05:12):
alarm in the history of everything's going to shut down,
the whole world's going to collapse. COVID just happened six
years ago, and many people who told you that the
world was going to end because of COVID are now
upset and just want to pretend COVID never happened. That's
their grown-up response to that. It's just, I don't even
know why you still care about that. Why are we
(05:32):
even talking about that? Climate change. Wasn't it only a
few years ago that AOC told us that all of
our beaches and all of our communities were going to
be over, like the world was going to end because
of climate change? Greta Thunberg's kind of vanished. I just
feel like in general, the person who says this is
going to ruin the world and we're all going to
(05:54):
die and robots are going to take over or a
virus is going to kill us. they're almost always going
to be wrong. Now, one time they're going to be right.
And maybe if you believe in the apocalypse, um, but
nuclear weapons were going to kill us. Like there's been
a lot, if you're 75 and listening to us right now,
you've lived through a lot of things that were going
to be the end of humanity, including overpopulation. And now
(06:15):
we've got the opposite problem. So I, I philosophically totally agree.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And in fact, in, uh, my book manufacturing delusion, which
is still makes a great gift as we're entering the
fall season for reading and, and, uh, holidays. Um, There's
an extinction anxiety, Clay, is one of the things that
I write about, which is a way to manipulate people.
You're all going to die because of this thing unless
you put me in charge and I'll save you from
the thing. It's longstanding, whether it's climate change, COVID, all
(06:42):
these issues. It's very it's powerful. It's essentially playing on
the fear centers that people have. And it's a real thing.
Extinction anxiety so much so that The New York Times
and others will write articles about. about how people don't
want to have kids because they feel like they're adding
to the CO2 that's going to kill all of humanity.
So they don't want to replicate humanity to save humanity.
It's a mental illness, really. But on this AI issue,
(07:03):
something else is going on here. You have companies that
are having very, you know, the founders, the CEOs, the
very senior people, and these are companies that have valuations
that you're already talking about trillion-dollar companies as some of
these go public. If they're not there already, they will
be there. So these are going to be the most
valuable tech entities really in the world, certainly in the
(07:27):
top 10, top 20 companies, or whoever is the winner.
Maybe I should revise it a little bit, Clay. The
winner of the AI race, or rather, if there is
one company that breaks out ahead of the others.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
The Google for search, if you will.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Now, Google's in the AI race too now, but I
mean 20, 30 years ago, there may be one company
that becomes the AI leader and its value will be
in the trillions of dollars and the influence it'll have
on so many things will be enormous. Clay, why is
it that some of these companies seem to be asking
(08:04):
for regulation right now. It seems to me that instead
of allowing the tech to be guided by the people
who are involved, we have this public, hey, we need
someone else to be writing the rules of the road
for us.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
That's why Trump is saying, look, I'll look at this stuff.
Congress regulating AI is a guaranteed thing. Own goal. A
guaranteed mess. Yes. There's no, well, Chuck Schumer's going to
be running AI legislation. Chuck Schumer can't log into an
AI platform. I get so many thoughts on this. First
(08:40):
of all, the government getting involved in AI is, I believe,
an awful idea. Because to your point, most people involved
in government have no earthly idea. And I would say
one thing that the Clinton era got right, Buck, as
it pertains to big tech, was they mostly stayed out
of the way as the Internet became a big thing
(09:04):
in this country. Now, there was a dot-com implosion, as
many of you know, and oftentimes my concern with AI,
as I have said on this program, is actually that
we're overbuilding data centers, and it's going to be similar
to what we saw with the bandwidth issues when suddenly
people The cost of AI is going to plummet and
we're going to have actually too much. But they mostly
(09:26):
got out of the way. Well, you had a.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Republican House and Senate in 98. I mean, when the
Internet really got churning and burning, things were going. You
had Bill Clinton. busy with other things while a Republican
Congress under Newt Gingrich was making smart decisions. I also
think there wasn't the, maybe Y2K kind of took over
the fear.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Do you remember?
Speaker 1 (09:47):
I never, I was a kid, you know, I never
thought Y2K was something to be worried. It always struck
me as absurd.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
I don't remember a panic setting in over the internet's popularity.
Maybe it was because it it took a while. For
those of you out there who remember when you had
to have the dial-up Internet and you would hear the
rotation going on and you would hear the buzzing and
all those things. I feel like AI is coming on
faster as modern technology gets adopted faster. Maybe that's, to
(10:16):
a certain extent, the apprehension. I also think it's this, Buck.
A lot of people– I saw this stat this morning,
and I thought, man, this explains so much in this country.
What percentage of Americans every day read for fun? 16%.
It's terrible. 16% of Americans read for fun today. I
(10:39):
think we are entering into the most manipulatable era that
any of us have ever lived in with video and
the lack of basic facts and how quickly things go viral.
I think you have not seen anything. And I think, Buck,
and I understand people get fired up when I say this,
I think this is all China. I think this is
(11:01):
manipulating our minds because China recognizes the scale and impact
of AI victory. And I think they are seeding all
of this because you know who's not panicked about data centers?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
China.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah, this is like when we were freaked out about
climate change and China was building a coal-fired power plant.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Yeah, they could care less.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
And they're just churning out everything as fast as they
can and upping their industrial capacity and stealing our tech
and reengineering it. Clay, first of all, there was a
troubling article in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend.
which I would say the Wall Street Journal does fabulous
profiles on radio.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Love their work. I don't know if you know about those.
Their profiles on radio hosts are amazing.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
But especially when they say those radio hosts are dominating
the airwaves.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
That's a quote.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
That's a nice quote about your favorite radio. Your favorite
radio hosts, Clay and Buck. But Wall Street Journal had
a piece that kids are getting dumber. Which is a
thing that when you click on it.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
There's data. Reading scores 25-year low, right, Buck? Yeah. I
say this all the time.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
People need to read. Reading is the thing. Reading makes
you a better thinker, makes you a better speaker. I
would actually go back, Clay, and say that people that
say that we did too much pushing kids to do
calculus and all this stuff, yeah, okay, it's fine if
you're good at that, but Having a pretty high-level reading
(12:25):
ability or a high enough level reading ability and a
habit of reading is, I think, more important for someone's
intellectual development than basically anything else. Because it makes you
a better speaker. It makes you a better thinker. You're
borrowing the brains, essentially, of the most brilliant people to
have lived, depending on what you're reading. And even still,
(12:48):
just processing that. And Clay, the trouble is, it used.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
To be, oh.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Well, people need to read, but they also need to
be able to write, to communicate and everything else. With
these AI programs now, how do you test someone's reading comprehension?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Everybody can just... Oh, what's the reading assignment? You need
me to read Moby Dick?
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Okay, AI, tell me every important factoid from Moby Dick
that I need for this. And it breaks it all
down for you. It's like Cliff's Notes, if you remember
those on steroids.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
The ability to.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
force people or encourage people to read is a huge
thing that we need to talk about more. In the
context of AI, Clay, I think as well, people are
just going to get lazier and lazier about some of
these intellectual habits that they need to have. Nonetheless, I
will just say, because we got a little heat here
on the data centers, a little heat from our people,
a little heat on the flock cameras. Now, Trump hasn't
(13:40):
weighed in on that, to be fair, and heat on
the AI stuff. Trump is more all in on AI
than I've heard him on anything except like Deporting illegals
and building the wall and trade stuff. I mean, Trump
is all in on we need to win this. So
if someone needs to explain to me why Trump is
(14:01):
so off on this, but he's so right on so
many other things, I think it's really important.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
And he understands we have to win this one. We'll
talk more about it.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
But it's a huge story right now. It affects so
much of the economy. By the way, it affects your 401ks.
You want to look at the stocks that are really
propping up the market?
Speaker 3 (14:17):
They're tech stocks. Right, Clay? At some level, the U.S.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Economy, certainly in a short-term sense and maybe in a
long-term sense, has become a bet on AI productivity. The
only way we're going to be able to handle the
$ 40 trillion in debt, the only way we're going to
be able to continue to grow at the pace we
need to in order to sustain what we're already doing.
So at least that's how I feel about it.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
I agree with all that. We're going to get a
lot of fire up, fired up responses.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
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Speaker 3 (14:47):
And you guys can weigh in. And it is going
to be I'm just telling you, it feels like you
are seeing a coalition of Democrats coming together. I don't
think it's I don't think it's a surprise that this
is happening in mid-September of an election year as Democrats
in many ways. fumble for a calculated message of why
(15:10):
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common sense never sounded so good clay and buck owning
(16:38):
the airwaves welcome back in clay and buck um president
trump referring to ai as the golden goose in a
truth that he just put out in the last few
minutes And it is true, Buck, to your point as
we were going to break, the degree to which we
are seeing spending on AI that is propelling much of
(16:59):
the growth of the economy and is putting the stock
market at basically record levels. And I just think we
have heard so much negativity about AI. I just would ask,
we'll take your calls, we'll take your talkbacks on this.
I would ask you guys to think, Why is none
(17:20):
of this being shared in China? Why are the Chinese
people not being told that AI is going to destroy
the world and the data centers in their backyards are
an incredible danger? Why are only Americans hearing it? And
I do think that is an interesting point. The other
thing I would say, Buck, and we can get into this,
(17:42):
is the big AI companies who are saying we need
regulation are There is an argument that they recognize they
have control largely of the AI industry in the United
States and that regulation will keep other people from being
able to compete with them, preserving their advantage. I think
that's something to think about, too, in a dynamic industry space.
(18:05):
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Speaker 1 (18:55):
Trump weighing in pretty clearly and heavily on AI from
Air Force One over the weekend. Here he is talking
about The and I want to get this all on
the record, too, because, Clay, what I'm seeing a lot
online are people take this position.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Oh, you've been told.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
That it's about China, but has nothing to do with China.
Why would that everyone who knows anything about quite honestly,
anything knows that AI is a very big deal. Everyone
who is assessing investments and the markets and technology and
can see how things are changing is.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
This is real. It is here.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
It is important. This is not a Y2K scenario. This
is not a, oh, no big deal. This is changing
the world right now, changing the world that we live in.
Why would China not really care about it or why
wouldn't that be something we would take into account?
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Again, I'm surprised.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Weird, I don't want to say disinformation, because then that
gets some people very upset. But some, we could do
it in the Russian, disinformation. There seems to be some
disinformation on the right side of things. And there are
people who are, influencers who are being paid money by
foreign entities and they do not disclose that this is
(20:11):
a real thing it is true so keep in mind
your your humble uh clay and buck radio hosts here
are completely aligned with president trump on this issue what
why would we all be wrong on this i'm not
saying you think we're wrong but there are people online
who are making weird insinuations and accusations. This is cut for,
(20:33):
here's Trump talking specifically about China and AI.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country
in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it
that way because whoever wins, AI wins. And we can
put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I
think you have a lot of negative voices that are
bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up. And
they're bringing up things that won't happen.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
But whoever wins with AI wins. It's an expression that
I came up with, and it's true.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Clay, I also would add this. Here's what I can
tell you is absolutely true. They're not actually going to
self-regulate AI beyond what these companies think is to their
advantage to do, meaning there's not going to be some
UN-style climate agreement about AI. If there was a UN-style
(21:24):
climate agreement about AI... about artificial intelligence. China would violate it.
China wouldn't sign on. It wouldn't matter. They're going to
do what they're going to do. Our own companies here
domestically aren't going to feel bound by some vague ethical
principle of not going too fast. So I just think
the whole thing is a virtue signal right now because
(21:46):
no one's really going to hold themselves back if it
gives them advantage. So why pretend that we want some
framework to hold back these companies from the abilities that
they think will be unleashed by ai i just think
they're fundamentally unserious about it and having congress regulated is
the that that's the worst idea what percentage.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Of this audience do you think uses ai on a
daily basis.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
That's a great question i don't know i have i
honestly have i i might use ai to try to
get some sense uh what the answer is the reason
why i bring it up is i think it's easier
to scare people about something if they aren't using it
themselves And I think there's actually a relatively small percentage
(22:30):
of Americans that are using AI right now. And I
understand when I say I'm using AI, I don't mean
that I've got all of these different digital assets where
people are responding for emails for me or posting on
the Internet for me or any of those things. There
are really high level AI users that are engaging with
(22:52):
it on a very high level. I am basically, and
I think it would be true, Buck, you tell me
if this is incorrect, I am basically using it to
make better my search results. And by the way, on
things that may or may not be very serious, I
talk about college football and the NFL, and it would
(23:12):
have taken me a lot of time to look up. hey,
how is this coach done against this team in his career?
I can look at that information in 10 seconds, right?
And so same thing with, hey, what is the murder
rate in Washington, D.C. this year, and how does it
compare to past years? Unlike with Google, where you would
have to click through a wide variety of different AI,
(23:35):
I think if you use the right query, if you
know what questions to be asking, it makes you more
effective and efficient, and it isn't intimidating. But I think
if you're not using it at all, it is something
that you are fearful of, and I think that's what's
being taken advantage.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Of right now.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So let me put it in a way that I
think might be helpful here.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
So let's say one of you listening to us.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Is a– you are a local plumber, contractor and plumber, okay?
You could take an AI model that are publicly available
right now, upload all of your financials, what your profit
loss is month to month, basically how many jobs you're doing,
what you're making on those jobs. And you could ask AI, hey,
(24:23):
how can I expand my business? How can I make
it more efficient so my profit margin goes up? Should
I or should I not bring on more personnel? How
could I have a pathway to being acquired if I
wanted to in five years? And it will come up
with a business plan for you In 30 seconds, that
(24:45):
is more advanced than what you'd be able to get
from a financial planner some years ago if you gave
them a week to crunch the numbers. It's just, it
is a tool, but once you understand how effective the
tool is and how effective it can be for everybody,
it's amazing. Some places it's going to cause real problems
that I don't know how to solve for, like in
(25:06):
the publishing industry, for example, Clay, I was just talking
to a friend of mine who works in the publishing
industry in the last few days, and he was just saying,
They're having to sort of agree in advance, are you
going to use AI for your book or not? You're
going to essentially have to have people be honest about
it because it can write a book for you in
a minute. You can write a 250-page book now by saying,
write me a 250-page biography of Napoleon.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
And it will do it.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
And it will read like, now, it won't be great.
It'll look choppy, and it'll be AI. But that's the
reality of where we are right now, and it's only
getting more intense. This is the Palantir CEO. Palantir is
also a very advanced tech company that's doing a lot
of stuff.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Alex Karp.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Clay, here he is making exactly the arguments we've been
making on the show about this is happening, and it's
not stopping.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Play 22.
Speaker 5 (25:54):
If we didn't have the adversaries we'd have, I would
be very in favor of pausing this technology completely, but
we do. And that's why pausing is just, you can't
pause it because it's a structural advantage both for LLMs
and algorithms. So getting algorithms and LLMs to work in
a classified context is going to take very specialized, I
(26:17):
could explain how it works, but the fact is this
is going to be a bonanza for the U.S.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Economy.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
How concerned are you about China right now? Everyone's very concerned.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
I think we were in a conversation this morning where
I referenced when we started first talking about China and America,
and I was saying that this was not going to
end well. That was a controversial statement.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Now it's consensus.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
America is fairly unified in its idea that people running
China are not acting in a way we can accept.
And I think the consensus, if I had to guess,
in China is we're never going to get this back
on the rails with America, so we should up the aggression.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Yeah, look, I think, Buck, this is super important. And
you were the first person on the show to point
it out. But I think it cuts through a lot
of the noise. If you just strip away the AI
aspect and you take us back to the 1980s and
in the middle of the Cold War, if Russia had
started to fuel and they probably were, I don't remember
(27:18):
it well, but if they had started to fuel an
argument in the United States that we need to stop
inventing and advancing with our overall ability to combat Russia,
implementing new weaponry, all of those things, I think a
lot of people listening to us right now would have
said that's crazy. Russia's going to continue their innovation. They're
going to end up with better weapons than us, and
(27:39):
at some point in time, that's going to lead to
Russia having more success in the United States on the
global scale. That's exactly what's going on right now with AI.
And you were stripping away. I really all military advancement
is occurring in AI, all drone warfare, all the data
that is necessary to power increasingly sophisticated, intelligent weaponry is
(28:03):
being fueled by AI.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Let me give you another example. And this is this
is hypothetical, but it's not. It's not crazy. Okay, we
slow ourselves down, and Chinese AI gets to the point where,
first of all, we wouldn't even know how advanced it
would be, but they decide to make a move on Taiwan, finally.
And we say, oh, no, they'll never do it because
Taiwan has all these sophisticated... What if they can scramble
(28:27):
all of the communications inside of Taiwan? What if they
can shut down Taiwan's defense capabilities such.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
That they could land.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
massive forces with de minimis response from Taiwan because they're
able to knock them essentially knock down all their comms
between the very now. Taiwan's very sophisticated, too. I'm not
saying this is going to happen. But those are the
kind of things when you think about what will be
possible here. You know, we right now it's okay, we
have drones, they have drones. What if their drones are faster,
(28:59):
think better, communicate better and can hack into our drones
and use them against us? I mean, these are the
sort of things that AI is going to make a
reality or make a possibility at least, or it is
a possibility at least. And I think everyone needs to
see that for what it is.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Like the days of us having to worry mostly.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
About medieval jihadist lunatics strapping suicide vests on, driving around
some dusty village somewhere. I don't think that's really going
to be what the conflict of the future is. It's
going to be with near peer nation state powers like
Russia and China who are going to be pushing the
envelope wherever they can for more territory and more influence
and using technology clay on the forefront of doing it.
(29:42):
That's what we're heading for. I don't see a way
around that. I think Alex Karp certainly sees it that way.
And the guy who runs Palantir probably knows a thing
or two about it. Yeah, I think, again, the lack
of use has got people nervous. I also think it's this, Buck,
and I asked a question of a top AI guy
I was out to dinner with recently at one of
the big tech companies. When does the scale of change slow?
(30:05):
Change makes people uncomfortable everywhere, across all industries. When there
is a rapidity of change, it just makes people uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
Feel uncomfortable? How is this going to impact me? Why
can't I still do it the way I used to?
All of those things. I think we are at such
an inflection point of how rapidly things are going to
change that that angst, that discomfort is going to be
politically a very powerful element. And then when you combine
(30:37):
it with China spending thousands Billions of dollars to influence
American politics in a way, frankly, that we aren't able
to do to the same degree in China. Then I
think you've got a recipe for a real mess. I
actually think, by the way, let me say this to Trump.
The easiest thing for Trump to do would be to
play into this fear. A lot of politicians may know
(31:01):
that the fear is not justified, but they see the
way the tide is going and they say, oh, we've
got to stop data centers. Oh, we've got to hit
pause button on AI. The easiest thing for Trump to
do as a traditional politician would be to lean into
the emotional discomfort that many people are feeling associated with AI.
(31:21):
He's doing the exact opposite. which is not what a
traditional politician would do. So I do think the calculus
on this for Trump, he really believes this is important
and he's on the right side, even if large elements
of his base, including Steve Bannon, who's doing a rally
tomorrow with Bernie Sanders, are saying we can't do this.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Yeah, I think they're on the wrong side of this issue.
I think Bannon and Sanders are wrong on this. And
since those two are coming together on it, I would
also say, Clay, you can listen to people. I think
Elon Musk certainly knows a thing or two about where
technology is going. For people who are saying, well, why
do I like this or whatever, or why should I
like this? AI-enabled surgical robots will be a reality within
(32:07):
the next three to five years, according to Elon. They
will make no mistakes. They will effectively be able to do, say,
a triple bypass, without a shaking hand, without a, you know,
a slip of the wrist or whatever. I mean, medical, uh,
medical mistakes kill tens of thousands of people every year
(32:28):
in this country. And it's just the way it is.
There are medical errors happen. Um, that can be dramatically
reduced by this as a tool. Imagine you go in
there with a beloved family member. And in a few years,
an AI enabled scan essentially looks at finds a tumor
and says, Oh, Don't worry. We know exactly what this
(32:49):
tumor is and exactly how to treat it.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
These are the.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Kinds of things they are working on. Again, we're not
there yet with that, but we are there with get
into a car, it'll drive you 300 miles perfectly and
park for you. We're there on that already. So these
things are happening. Another technology I want you to know
about is rapid radios. These walkie-talkies like to talk to
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(33:15):
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Speaker 6 (33:51):
Level up your brain and balance out your day with
the right amount of information and entertainment. Clay Travis and
Buck Sexton on the iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
App or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back in,
Clay and Buck. We got a bunch of calls from
across the country here. Let's go to Eric in Pennsylvania. Eric,
you're in a battleground state. What is the vibe on
AI where you are? Thanks for calling in.
Speaker 6 (34:19):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Pennsylvania, I'll tell you what, is terrible. You know, Josh
Shapiro is just.
Speaker 7 (34:28):
Downplaying AI and trying to scare everybody about the whole thing.
I'll tell you, one thing about being a Republican is,
for me, is our party's horrible on messaging.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
You know, think about it. Let's give us a top.
Speaker 7 (34:46):
Ten list of Unbelievable things that AI can do for us,
like in science and medicine, et cetera. I mean, realistically,
we could sit down and we could have a top
thousand list.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
It's going to be amazing. And I'm 65 years old,
and I'm excited about it. And I'm stoic by nature.
I don't get excited about much, but I can't wait.
It's going to be incredible.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Eric is like my AI spirit animal.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
I'm with you, Eric. I would say, thank you. If
you're 65, I'm glad that he mentioned his age. I
bet you would sign off on this too, Buck. You
have immense things to gain from AI for health alone. Enormous.
Over the next five years, if you are 65, you
are going to be moving into an era of your
(35:36):
life where healthcare becomes paramount in much of what you do.
The advances that AI can provide for healthcare... I was
going to mention as we were going to break last segment, Buck,
these full body scans, I'm getting one on Monday. I've
never gotten it done before. But these full body scans,
I'm 47. I test well on all the health metrics.
(35:59):
But I've just seen a lot of guys dropping dead
with heart conditions that they didn't know they had, right?
Like you've got an aorta issue or whatever else. I
want to make sure that my body is fully healthy
on things that I might not know about. The technology
of this, of the advance, of just being able to
get in a tube and have your entire body analyzed
and then say, oh my goodness, you can treat this now,
(36:20):
but you could have dropped dead from this if you're
in the gym working out because you've got a heart issue.
There's so much that's coming that is going to be
incredibly positive. We're going up.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
With Michelle Tafoya coming up next, but Clay, I'm sure
she'd agree with me, you don't look a day over 46.
Welcome everybody, Monday edition of the Clay Travis and Buck
Saxon show, better known to the folks as Clay and Buck.
We begin right now, we've got a lot to discuss
with you.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It is.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
A big, I'm going to use the Clay word, Donnybrook
right now over AI, AI regulation, people are scared, people
say don't be scared. The president weighing in heavy on that.
We're going to dive into this here shortly because, yes,
the AI revolution is real.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
It is here.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
The world is changing very quickly. These are the, really now,
in many ways, poised to be the most powerful companies
in the world. Some would argue that they already are
pretty close, if not there.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So we'll discuss that, where Trump falls on all those issues.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
He's weighed in. He came back from Ireland recently. And
he talked a bit about golf. I saw he was
discussing things on the plane on the way back. We
have a whole bunch of clips. I watched about a
10-minute or so Trump impromptu Q & A addressing many
of the big issues. Also, these big Senate races, two
(01:13):
that we're going to be talking about a lot. One,
of course, down in Texas. We hit that one pretty
hard last week. But today, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan said,
This is going to come down to less than probably
100,000 votes, could come down to less than 10,000 votes.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
I would put a lot of money on less than
100,000 votes. I think it's going to come down to
20K probably one way or the other.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
So very, very tight for a populous state like Michigan,
a Senate race that has huge, huge votes.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
We'll discuss.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
But let me let me let's set the table here
a bit with where things are on. Oh, Trump also
spoke about the five thousand dollar checks rebate rebates or
whatever they're being called. He says it's happening. If if
if if the Republicans win, he doubled down on this.
He says it's happening. So just we'll discuss this. But first, Clay,
(02:05):
we have some truths coming out here from the president
of the United States. For example, this one, just in
the last hour or so, the only control or guardrails
that AI needs... is a strong and smart, high IQ president.
And the USA has that in spades. The Trump administration
(02:28):
has stopped AI people from doing bad or potentially bad
things like Dario of Anthropic AI, who is now pretending
to be a perfect little angel. And we will continue
to do so. We already have tremendous criminal and regulatory
power over these companies. There is a sick conspiracy going
(02:48):
on against AI and data centers, and the only one
who is happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins,
all caps. We are leading China and all others and
will continue to do so. Conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors, and leakers, beware.
Thank you to your attention in this matter. That is
(03:11):
a roundhouse kick to the face of anyone who thinks
that you're being a fool, a wimp or whatever. If
you want us to win an AI, if you believe
the data center should go where communities allow them to go,
et cetera. Big time stuff from the president.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
This feels very calculated to as we sit here in
mid-September coming up on the midterm election. It feels like
Democrats are pivoting in some way to AI is the
boogeyman and we're going to protect you from the boogeyman.
And data centers roll into this, too.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
And.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Politically, it does make some sense. to give them credit
here as much as it pains me to do so,
because I think Trump is going to destroy the nation
has just not worked.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
I mean, I'm not hearing very much. You correct me
if you think I'm wrong on this buck. I'm not
hearing very much anti-Trump talk from Democrats. It is affordability.
And I think that Republicans have parried on affordability fairly
well in the grand scheme of things, because basically the
reason we have an affordability crisis is the Biden era.
(04:30):
So Democrats are arguing, yes, we started the fire, but
you can trust us to put it out. And I
think a lot of people are looking at that argument
and saying, I'm not sure that I buy it. And
so now the big bad boogeyman is no longer Trump.
It's AI. It's data centers. it's we're all going to
be dead in 10 years. Now, here is where I
(04:51):
get skeptical. At some point in time, it may well
be the case that humanity ceases to exist, Buck. But
we have heard a lot in the last 20 years
even about humanity ceasing to exist. I mean, some of
us remember Y2K, which is probably the all-time biggest false
(05:12):
alarm in the history of everything's going to shut down,
the whole world's going to collapse. COVID just happened six
years ago, and many people who told you that the
world was going to end because of COVID are now
upset and just want to pretend COVID never happened. That's
their grown-up response to that. It's just, I don't even
know why you still care about that. Why are we
(05:32):
even talking about that? Climate change. Wasn't it only a
few years ago that AOC told us that all of
our beaches and all of our communities were going to
be over, like the world was going to end because
of climate change? Greta Thunberg's kind of vanished. I just
feel like in general, the person who says this is
going to ruin the world and we're all going to
(05:54):
die and robots are going to take over or a
virus is going to kill us. they're almost always going
to be wrong. Now, one time they're going to be right.
And maybe if you believe in the apocalypse, um, but
nuclear weapons were going to kill us. Like there's been
a lot, if you're 75 and listening to us right now,
you've lived through a lot of things that were going
to be the end of humanity, including overpopulation. And now
(06:15):
we've got the opposite problem. So I, I philosophically totally agree.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And in fact, in, uh, my book manufacturing delusion, which
is still makes a great gift as we're entering the
fall season for reading and, and, uh, holidays. Um, There's
an extinction anxiety, Clay, is one of the things that
I write about, which is a way to manipulate people.
You're all going to die because of this thing unless
you put me in charge and I'll save you from
the thing. It's longstanding, whether it's climate change, COVID, all
(06:42):
these issues. It's very it's powerful. It's essentially playing on
the fear centers that people have. And it's a real thing.
Extinction anxiety so much so that The New York Times
and others will write articles about. about how people don't
want to have kids because they feel like they're adding
to the CO2 that's going to kill all of humanity.
So they don't want to replicate humanity to save humanity.
It's a mental illness, really. But on this AI issue,
(07:03):
something else is going on here. You have companies that
are having very, you know, the founders, the CEOs, the
very senior people, and these are companies that have valuations
that you're already talking about trillion-dollar companies as some of
these go public. If they're not there already, they will
be there. So these are going to be the most
valuable tech entities really in the world, certainly in the
(07:27):
top 10, top 20 companies, or whoever is the winner.
Maybe I should revise it a little bit, Clay. The
winner of the AI race, or rather, if there is
one company that breaks out ahead of the others.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
The Google for search, if you will.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Now, Google's in the AI race too now, but I
mean 20, 30 years ago, there may be one company
that becomes the AI leader and its value will be
in the trillions of dollars and the influence it'll have
on so many things will be enormous. Clay, why is
it that some of these companies seem to be asking
(08:04):
for regulation right now. It seems to me that instead
of allowing the tech to be guided by the people
who are involved, we have this public, hey, we need
someone else to be writing the rules of the road
for us.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
That's why Trump is saying, look, I'll look at this stuff.
Congress regulating AI is a guaranteed thing. Own goal. A
guaranteed mess. Yes. There's no, well, Chuck Schumer's going to
be running AI legislation. Chuck Schumer can't log into an
AI platform. I get so many thoughts on this. First
(08:40):
of all, the government getting involved in AI is, I believe,
an awful idea. Because to your point, most people involved
in government have no earthly idea. And I would say
one thing that the Clinton era got right, Buck, as
it pertains to big tech, was they mostly stayed out
of the way as the Internet became a big thing
(09:04):
in this country. Now, there was a dot-com implosion, as
many of you know, and oftentimes my concern with AI,
as I have said on this program, is actually that
we're overbuilding data centers, and it's going to be similar
to what we saw with the bandwidth issues when suddenly
people The cost of AI is going to plummet and
we're going to have actually too much. But they mostly
(09:26):
got out of the way. Well, you had a.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Republican House and Senate in 98. I mean, when the
Internet really got churning and burning, things were going. You
had Bill Clinton. busy with other things while a Republican
Congress under Newt Gingrich was making smart decisions. I also
think there wasn't the, maybe Y2K kind of took over
the fear.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Do you remember?
Speaker 1 (09:47):
I never, I was a kid, you know, I never
thought Y2K was something to be worried. It always struck
me as absurd.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
I don't remember a panic setting in over the internet's popularity.
Maybe it was because it it took a while. For
those of you out there who remember when you had
to have the dial-up Internet and you would hear the
rotation going on and you would hear the buzzing and
all those things. I feel like AI is coming on
faster as modern technology gets adopted faster. Maybe that's, to
(10:16):
a certain extent, the apprehension. I also think it's this, Buck.
A lot of people– I saw this stat this morning,
and I thought, man, this explains so much in this country.
What percentage of Americans every day read for fun? 16%.
It's terrible. 16% of Americans read for fun today. I
(10:39):
think we are entering into the most manipulatable era that
any of us have ever lived in with video and
the lack of basic facts and how quickly things go viral.
I think you have not seen anything. And I think, Buck,
and I understand people get fired up when I say this,
I think this is all China. I think this is
(11:01):
manipulating our minds because China recognizes the scale and impact
of AI victory. And I think they are seeding all
of this because you know who's not panicked about data centers?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
China.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah, this is like when we were freaked out about
climate change and China was building a coal-fired power plant.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Yeah, they could care less.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
And they're just churning out everything as fast as they
can and upping their industrial capacity and stealing our tech
and reengineering it. Clay, first of all, there was a
troubling article in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend.
which I would say the Wall Street Journal does fabulous
profiles on radio.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Love their work. I don't know if you know about those.
Their profiles on radio hosts are amazing.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
But especially when they say those radio hosts are dominating
the airwaves.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
That's a quote.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
That's a nice quote about your favorite radio. Your favorite
radio hosts, Clay and Buck. But Wall Street Journal had
a piece that kids are getting dumber. Which is a
thing that when you click on it.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
There's data. Reading scores 25-year low, right, Buck? Yeah. I
say this all the time.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
People need to read. Reading is the thing. Reading makes
you a better thinker, makes you a better speaker. I
would actually go back, Clay, and say that people that
say that we did too much pushing kids to do
calculus and all this stuff, yeah, okay, it's fine if
you're good at that, but Having a pretty high-level reading
(12:25):
ability or a high enough level reading ability and a
habit of reading is, I think, more important for someone's
intellectual development than basically anything else. Because it makes you
a better speaker. It makes you a better thinker. You're
borrowing the brains, essentially, of the most brilliant people to
have lived, depending on what you're reading. And even still,
(12:48):
just processing that. And Clay, the trouble is, it used.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
To be, oh.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Well, people need to read, but they also need to
be able to write, to communicate and everything else. With
these AI programs now, how do you test someone's reading comprehension?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Everybody can just... Oh, what's the reading assignment? You need
me to read Moby Dick?
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Okay, AI, tell me every important factoid from Moby Dick
that I need for this. And it breaks it all
down for you. It's like Cliff's Notes, if you remember
those on steroids.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
The ability to.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
force people or encourage people to read is a huge
thing that we need to talk about more. In the
context of AI, Clay, I think as well, people are
just going to get lazier and lazier about some of
these intellectual habits that they need to have. Nonetheless, I
will just say, because we got a little heat here
on the data centers, a little heat from our people,
a little heat on the flock cameras. Now, Trump hasn't
(13:40):
weighed in on that, to be fair, and heat on
the AI stuff. Trump is more all in on AI
than I've heard him on anything except like Deporting illegals
and building the wall and trade stuff. I mean, Trump
is all in on we need to win this. So
if someone needs to explain to me why Trump is
(14:01):
so off on this, but he's so right on so
many other things, I think it's really important.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
And he understands we have to win this one. We'll
talk more about it.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
But it's a huge story right now. It affects so
much of the economy. By the way, it affects your 401ks.
You want to look at the stocks that are really
propping up the market?
Speaker 3 (14:17):
They're tech stocks. Right, Clay? At some level, the U.S.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Economy, certainly in a short-term sense and maybe in a
long-term sense, has become a bet on AI productivity. The
only way we're going to be able to handle the
$ 40 trillion in debt, the only way we're going to
be able to continue to grow at the pace we
need to in order to sustain what we're already doing.
So at least that's how I feel about it.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
I agree with all that. We're going to get a
lot of fire up, fired up responses.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
800-282-2882.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
And you guys can weigh in. And it is going
to be I'm just telling you, it feels like you
are seeing a coalition of Democrats coming together. I don't
think it's I don't think it's a surprise that this
is happening in mid-September of an election year as Democrats
in many ways. fumble for a calculated message of why
(15:10):
they will fix what Americans are upset about. And so
anti-AI seems to be the direction that they are going
right now. And the politics of this could get very
intriguing as it continues, particularly the next six weeks. Look,
if you are out there right now and the weather's
still warm, it's a good time to get your roof
checked and see whether or not it might make sense
(15:32):
for you to get a new roof. And you can
get it for free from Erie Home. If you need them,
they'll help with repairs and replacements. This is it. No
shot against them, but this is not some guy showing
up with a van suddenly taking your roof off and
you look around and you say, boy, I hope this
guy knows what he's doing. This is a well-established nationwide
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common sense never sounded so good clay and buck owning
(16:38):
the airwaves welcome back in clay and buck um president
trump referring to ai as the golden goose in a
truth that he just put out in the last few
minutes And it is true, Buck, to your point as
we were going to break, the degree to which we
are seeing spending on AI that is propelling much of
(16:59):
the growth of the economy and is putting the stock
market at basically record levels. And I just think we
have heard so much negativity about AI. I just would ask,
we'll take your calls, we'll take your talkbacks on this.
I would ask you guys to think, Why is none
(17:20):
of this being shared in China? Why are the Chinese
people not being told that AI is going to destroy
the world and the data centers in their backyards are
an incredible danger? Why are only Americans hearing it? And
I do think that is an interesting point. The other
thing I would say, Buck, and we can get into this,
(17:42):
is the big AI companies who are saying we need
regulation are There is an argument that they recognize they
have control largely of the AI industry in the United
States and that regulation will keep other people from being
able to compete with them, preserving their advantage. I think
that's something to think about, too, in a dynamic industry space.
(18:05):
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Speaker 1 (18:55):
Trump weighing in pretty clearly and heavily on AI from
Air Force One over the weekend. Here he is talking
about The and I want to get this all on
the record, too, because, Clay, what I'm seeing a lot
online are people take this position.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Oh, you've been told.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
That it's about China, but has nothing to do with China.
Why would that everyone who knows anything about quite honestly,
anything knows that AI is a very big deal. Everyone
who is assessing investments and the markets and technology and
can see how things are changing is.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
This is real. It is here.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
It is important. This is not a Y2K scenario. This
is not a, oh, no big deal. This is changing
the world right now, changing the world that we live in.
Why would China not really care about it or why
wouldn't that be something we would take into account?
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Again, I'm surprised.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Weird, I don't want to say disinformation, because then that
gets some people very upset. But some, we could do
it in the Russian, disinformation. There seems to be some
disinformation on the right side of things. And there are
people who are, influencers who are being paid money by
foreign entities and they do not disclose that this is
(20:11):
a real thing it is true so keep in mind
your your humble uh clay and buck radio hosts here
are completely aligned with president trump on this issue what
why would we all be wrong on this i'm not
saying you think we're wrong but there are people online
who are making weird insinuations and accusations. This is cut for,
(20:33):
here's Trump talking specifically about China and AI.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country
in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it
that way because whoever wins, AI wins. And we can
put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I
think you have a lot of negative voices that are
bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up. And
they're bringing up things that won't happen.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
But whoever wins with AI wins. It's an expression that
I came up with, and it's true.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Clay, I also would add this. Here's what I can
tell you is absolutely true. They're not actually going to
self-regulate AI beyond what these companies think is to their
advantage to do, meaning there's not going to be some
UN-style climate agreement about AI. If there was a UN-style
(21:24):
climate agreement about AI... about artificial intelligence. China would violate it.
China wouldn't sign on. It wouldn't matter. They're going to
do what they're going to do. Our own companies here
domestically aren't going to feel bound by some vague ethical
principle of not going too fast. So I just think
the whole thing is a virtue signal right now because
(21:46):
no one's really going to hold themselves back if it
gives them advantage. So why pretend that we want some
framework to hold back these companies from the abilities that
they think will be unleashed by ai i just think
they're fundamentally unserious about it and having congress regulated is
the that that's the worst idea what percentage.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Of this audience do you think uses ai on a
daily basis.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
That's a great question i don't know i have i
honestly have i i might use ai to try to
get some sense uh what the answer is the reason
why i bring it up is i think it's easier
to scare people about something if they aren't using it
themselves And I think there's actually a relatively small percentage
(22:30):
of Americans that are using AI right now. And I
understand when I say I'm using AI, I don't mean
that I've got all of these different digital assets where
people are responding for emails for me or posting on
the Internet for me or any of those things. There
are really high level AI users that are engaging with
(22:52):
it on a very high level. I am basically, and
I think it would be true, Buck, you tell me
if this is incorrect, I am basically using it to
make better my search results. And by the way, on
things that may or may not be very serious, I
talk about college football and the NFL, and it would
(23:12):
have taken me a lot of time to look up. hey,
how is this coach done against this team in his career?
I can look at that information in 10 seconds, right?
And so same thing with, hey, what is the murder
rate in Washington, D.C. this year, and how does it
compare to past years? Unlike with Google, where you would
have to click through a wide variety of different AI,
(23:35):
I think if you use the right query, if you
know what questions to be asking, it makes you more
effective and efficient, and it isn't intimidating. But I think
if you're not using it at all, it is something
that you are fearful of, and I think that's what's
being taken advantage.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Of right now.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So let me put it in a way that I
think might be helpful here.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
So let's say one of you listening to us.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Is a– you are a local plumber, contractor and plumber, okay?
You could take an AI model that are publicly available
right now, upload all of your financials, what your profit
loss is month to month, basically how many jobs you're doing,
what you're making on those jobs. And you could ask AI, hey,
(24:23):
how can I expand my business? How can I make
it more efficient so my profit margin goes up? Should
I or should I not bring on more personnel? How
could I have a pathway to being acquired if I
wanted to in five years? And it will come up
with a business plan for you In 30 seconds, that
(24:45):
is more advanced than what you'd be able to get
from a financial planner some years ago if you gave
them a week to crunch the numbers. It's just, it
is a tool, but once you understand how effective the
tool is and how effective it can be for everybody,
it's amazing. Some places it's going to cause real problems
that I don't know how to solve for, like in
(25:06):
the publishing industry, for example, Clay, I was just talking
to a friend of mine who works in the publishing
industry in the last few days, and he was just saying,
They're having to sort of agree in advance, are you
going to use AI for your book or not? You're
going to essentially have to have people be honest about
it because it can write a book for you in
a minute. You can write a 250-page book now by saying,
write me a 250-page biography of Napoleon.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
And it will do it.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
And it will read like, now, it won't be great.
It'll look choppy, and it'll be AI. But that's the
reality of where we are right now, and it's only
getting more intense. This is the Palantir CEO. Palantir is
also a very advanced tech company that's doing a lot
of stuff.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Alex Karp.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Clay, here he is making exactly the arguments we've been
making on the show about this is happening, and it's
not stopping.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Play 22.
Speaker 5 (25:54):
If we didn't have the adversaries we'd have, I would
be very in favor of pausing this technology completely, but
we do. And that's why pausing is just, you can't
pause it because it's a structural advantage both for LLMs
and algorithms. So getting algorithms and LLMs to work in
a classified context is going to take very specialized, I
(26:17):
could explain how it works, but the fact is this
is going to be a bonanza for the U.S.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Economy.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
How concerned are you about China right now? Everyone's very concerned.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
I think we were in a conversation this morning where
I referenced when we started first talking about China and America,
and I was saying that this was not going to
end well. That was a controversial statement.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Now it's consensus.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
America is fairly unified in its idea that people running
China are not acting in a way we can accept.
And I think the consensus, if I had to guess,
in China is we're never going to get this back
on the rails with America, so we should up the aggression.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Yeah, look, I think, Buck, this is super important. And
you were the first person on the show to point
it out. But I think it cuts through a lot
of the noise. If you just strip away the AI
aspect and you take us back to the 1980s and
in the middle of the Cold War, if Russia had
started to fuel and they probably were, I don't remember
(27:18):
it well, but if they had started to fuel an
argument in the United States that we need to stop
inventing and advancing with our overall ability to combat Russia,
implementing new weaponry, all of those things, I think a
lot of people listening to us right now would have
said that's crazy. Russia's going to continue their innovation. They're
going to end up with better weapons than us, and
(27:39):
at some point in time, that's going to lead to
Russia having more success in the United States on the
global scale. That's exactly what's going on right now with AI.
And you were stripping away. I really all military advancement
is occurring in AI, all drone warfare, all the data
that is necessary to power increasingly sophisticated, intelligent weaponry is
(28:03):
being fueled by AI.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Let me give you another example. And this is this
is hypothetical, but it's not. It's not crazy. Okay, we
slow ourselves down, and Chinese AI gets to the point where,
first of all, we wouldn't even know how advanced it
would be, but they decide to make a move on Taiwan, finally.
And we say, oh, no, they'll never do it because
Taiwan has all these sophisticated... What if they can scramble
(28:27):
all of the communications inside of Taiwan? What if they
can shut down Taiwan's defense capabilities such.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
That they could land.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
massive forces with de minimis response from Taiwan because they're
able to knock them essentially knock down all their comms
between the very now. Taiwan's very sophisticated, too. I'm not
saying this is going to happen. But those are the
kind of things when you think about what will be
possible here. You know, we right now it's okay, we
have drones, they have drones. What if their drones are faster,
(28:59):
think better, communicate better and can hack into our drones
and use them against us? I mean, these are the
sort of things that AI is going to make a
reality or make a possibility at least, or it is
a possibility at least. And I think everyone needs to
see that for what it is.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Like the days of us having to worry mostly.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
About medieval jihadist lunatics strapping suicide vests on, driving around
some dusty village somewhere. I don't think that's really going
to be what the conflict of the future is. It's
going to be with near peer nation state powers like
Russia and China who are going to be pushing the
envelope wherever they can for more territory and more influence
and using technology clay on the forefront of doing it.
(29:42):
That's what we're heading for. I don't see a way
around that. I think Alex Karp certainly sees it that way.
And the guy who runs Palantir probably knows a thing
or two about it. Yeah, I think, again, the lack
of use has got people nervous. I also think it's this, Buck,
and I asked a question of a top AI guy
I was out to dinner with recently at one of
the big tech companies. When does the scale of change slow?
(30:05):
Change makes people uncomfortable everywhere, across all industries. When there
is a rapidity of change, it just makes people uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
Feel uncomfortable? How is this going to impact me? Why
can't I still do it the way I used to?
All of those things. I think we are at such
an inflection point of how rapidly things are going to
change that that angst, that discomfort is going to be
politically a very powerful element. And then when you combine
(30:37):
it with China spending thousands Billions of dollars to influence
American politics in a way, frankly, that we aren't able
to do to the same degree in China. Then I
think you've got a recipe for a real mess. I
actually think, by the way, let me say this to Trump.
The easiest thing for Trump to do would be to
play into this fear. A lot of politicians may know
(31:01):
that the fear is not justified, but they see the
way the tide is going and they say, oh, we've
got to stop data centers. Oh, we've got to hit
pause button on AI. The easiest thing for Trump to
do as a traditional politician would be to lean into
the emotional discomfort that many people are feeling associated with AI.
(31:21):
He's doing the exact opposite. which is not what a
traditional politician would do. So I do think the calculus
on this for Trump, he really believes this is important
and he's on the right side, even if large elements
of his base, including Steve Bannon, who's doing a rally
tomorrow with Bernie Sanders, are saying we can't do this.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Yeah, I think they're on the wrong side of this issue.
I think Bannon and Sanders are wrong on this. And
since those two are coming together on it, I would
also say, Clay, you can listen to people. I think
Elon Musk certainly knows a thing or two about where
technology is going. For people who are saying, well, why
do I like this or whatever, or why should I
like this? AI-enabled surgical robots will be a reality within
(32:07):
the next three to five years, according to Elon. They
will make no mistakes. They will effectively be able to do, say,
a triple bypass, without a shaking hand, without a, you know,
a slip of the wrist or whatever. I mean, medical, uh,
medical mistakes kill tens of thousands of people every year
(32:28):
in this country. And it's just the way it is.
There are medical errors happen. Um, that can be dramatically
reduced by this as a tool. Imagine you go in
there with a beloved family member. And in a few years,
an AI enabled scan essentially looks at finds a tumor
and says, Oh, Don't worry. We know exactly what this
(32:49):
tumor is and exactly how to treat it.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
These are the.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Kinds of things they are working on. Again, we're not
there yet with that, but we are there with get
into a car, it'll drive you 300 miles perfectly and
park for you. We're there on that already. So these
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Speaker 6 (33:51):
Level up your brain and balance out your day with
the right amount of information and entertainment. Clay Travis and
Buck Sexton on the iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
App or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back in,
Clay and Buck. We got a bunch of calls from
across the country here. Let's go to Eric in Pennsylvania. Eric,
you're in a battleground state. What is the vibe on
AI where you are? Thanks for calling in.
Speaker 6 (34:19):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Pennsylvania, I'll tell you what, is terrible. You know, Josh
Shapiro is just.
Speaker 7 (34:28):
Downplaying AI and trying to scare everybody about the whole thing.
I'll tell you, one thing about being a Republican is,
for me, is our party's horrible on messaging.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
You know, think about it. Let's give us a top.
Speaker 7 (34:46):
Ten list of Unbelievable things that AI can do for us,
like in science and medicine, et cetera. I mean, realistically,
we could sit down and we could have a top
thousand list.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
It's going to be amazing. And I'm 65 years old,
and I'm excited about it. And I'm stoic by nature.
I don't get excited about much, but I can't wait.
It's going to be incredible.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Eric is like my AI spirit animal.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
I'm with you, Eric. I would say, thank you. If
you're 65, I'm glad that he mentioned his age. I
bet you would sign off on this too, Buck. You
have immense things to gain from AI for health alone. Enormous.
Over the next five years, if you are 65, you
are going to be moving into an era of your
(35:36):
life where healthcare becomes paramount in much of what you do.
The advances that AI can provide for healthcare... I was
going to mention as we were going to break last segment, Buck,
these full body scans, I'm getting one on Monday. I've
never gotten it done before. But these full body scans,
I'm 47. I test well on all the health metrics.
(35:59):
But I've just seen a lot of guys dropping dead
with heart conditions that they didn't know they had, right?
Like you've got an aorta issue or whatever else. I
want to make sure that my body is fully healthy
on things that I might not know about. The technology
of this, of the advance, of just being able to
get in a tube and have your entire body analyzed
and then say, oh my goodness, you can treat this now,
(36:20):
but you could have dropped dead from this if you're
in the gym working out because you've got a heart issue.
There's so much that's coming that is going to be
incredibly positive. We're going up.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
With Michelle Tafoya coming up next, but Clay, I'm sure
she'd agree with me, you don't look a day over 46.
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