Transcript: Tucker Carlson Interviews Clayton Morris on AI Data Centers

So wait, I thought you could just delete that stuff? Or Google tells you that after 30 days they delete this stuff. It’s all there. It’s fractals. It’s always going to be there.

So with Zoom, you opting into this “take notes” feature — I don’t know the full backend of what Zoom’s operation looks like, but most of it is all built on Amazon Web Services. Most of it is built on Amazon’s infrastructure — from Palantir to Flock Safety. They’ll tell you they’ve got their own proprietary layer of what they do with that data, but all of it’s built on Amazon infrastructure and this backend infrastructure. So where is that data going? It’s living in these data centers, being built out at a clip we’ve never seen before.

Right now there are about 809, give or take a few, data centers being built. There’s about 4,800 currently built. There’s another, I think, 3,900 projected to be built over the next year, doubling the amount of data centers in the United States. And they’re not getting smaller — they’re getting bigger, more massive. Take, for instance, Project Stargate in Abilene, Texas. Massive infrastructure that Trump was championing. And a lot of this was opened up, we shouldn’t forget, at the very beginning of the Trump presidency with executive orders, so that you could start building a data center without even getting environmental permits.

So you could start the construction. Local permits and you get started — forget the EPA requirements, like how much pollutants will be spun off as a result of the diesel generator backups, or water influx, or any of the particulate matter that will be spun off as a result of the center, the water usage. Don’t worry about it, because now the EPA doesn’t care. You can already start construction.

And then on top of that, you have Trump’s AI litigation team, which is pretty funny when you look at it. The Department of Justice has built an AI litigation team to go out to different states — you can see where the priorities are. So if there’s a state or a community that says, “we don’t want data centers in our backyard,” or they’re putting onerous rules and regulations in place because they don’t want these things there — well, here comes Trump’s Department of Justice and the AI litigation team to town. They’re not staying at a Best Western when they arrive, and they’re going to look at your community and sue you for onerous regulations against data centers. This was part of those executive orders and executive actions at the very beginning of Trump’s presidency. Glad we have an AI litigation team in place.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, so our Department of Justice, which I thought we owned as citizens, is now working on behalf of private companies, which we do not own, in order to force communities to subsidize those private companies?

CLAYTON MORRIS: Yes. So under the Attorney General, under this AI litigation team, this task force will go out and see: did this community in upstate New York put in place some toxic diesel particulates zoning law that’s not going to allow this data center to be built, because they’ll need backup diesel generators? And when those kick on every few days to test the diesel backup and shoot off these particulates, and the community says, “we don’t want that here, we don’t want it polluting our air and our waterways” — that’s what this task force will look at.

TUCKER CARLSON: Maybe we just don’t want it. Maybe we think it’s ugly, or we disagree with the whole project, or — it doesn’t matter what the motive is. It’s our community. And don’t we have some right to shape its future because it’s ours?

Misinformation About Data Centers

TUCKER CARLSON: I want to dive very deeply into it. I mean, you’ve already shocked me. So tell me about the misconceptions, or as you said, misinformation.

CLAYTON MORRIS: Well, for one thing — if you listen to Wall Street, or the sycophants on CNBC, the access journalists who love to have these CEOs on their shows and promote AI data center buildouts and all the new technology they’re rolling out — some of this technology is good. There is actual good cooling technology emerging from companies like Vertiv, VRT, which, instead of using water, cools with evaporation technology.

But — forget the electricity piece of this for a second, that’s the other big part of the story — this energy thing is like you can rob Peter to pay Paul. “Oh, we’re not using water.” Yeah, but you’re using the energy now, the electricity to use dry cooling to cool. It’s the shell game — it’s moving things around a board. So when you see these CEOs come on CNBC or Bloomberg and tell you how they’ve solved the cooling problem because they don’t need water — okay, now what about the massive amounts of electricity you need now to use dry cooling?

TUCKER CARLSON: It takes resources to make things. That’s just the bottom line. It takes resources to make things, and the supply of resources is finite. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make things — you should. But every act of creation is a trade-off, so it’s not clear why we have to lie about that. Let’s just be honest about it. But to the question of water — can you go into that? How much water, exclusive of this new and promising technology you just described, but in general, how much water does it take to cool a data center?

CLAYTON MORRIS: Hundreds of millions of gallons. And most of the data centers are using this evaporative cooling system, by a huge percentage. So it’s great that we’ve got some new technology out there that uses cooling plates, keeping it in a closed loop — the water is right up against the computers, the GPUs, and then it flows through and gets cooled, almost like an air conditioning unit, and comes back a little cooler. But still, that excess heat needs to go somewhere. It’s not — but the water usage, yes, you’re limiting that. On most of them, overwhelmingly, it’s evaporative cooling, so it’s all just being wasted.

Hundreds of millions of gallons. If you think about an average American home using about 200 gallons to run a home, you’re talking 300 million to 500 million gallons of water just for these data centers — and we’re talking about small data centers. So these communities are already pressed. If you go to the desert Southwest, or Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, a lot of the ranchers in these areas are at their limit with their ability to get water to feed their heads of cattle. Everything is so dry.

I just interviewed a rancher dealing with this right now. In order to get permits to pull water to feed their heads of cattle, they have to go to the city, the municipality, to get those rights. But most of those permits are already used. There’s no new permits just sitting there for Bob Rancher to come grab. So they’re already tapping into these aquifers, pulling out any kind of water they can. Those are already tapped a lot in the west of the United States. And then on top of that, now you have these data centers coming in, and all these ranchers are asking: how are they able to get water? We’ve applied for permits and we as ranchers are not allowed to get water, but they are. Where are they getting the permit?

So they’re carving out these special permits for these data centers, which is unbelievable on its surface. These ranchers then are having to compete for what little water scraps are left to feed their heads of cattle, which brings up a larger question about wanting to decimate the beef industry, of course. You have 68 million heads of cattle — how many of those are being whittled away? And then you’ve got wildfires out west on top of that, destroying the grazing land, so they don’t have enough water for that. But the data centers are fine to get these water rights somehow. People should ask questions about that — how are they able to get these carve-outs to tap into these aquifers in ways that these ranchers are not?

So the misinformation right now is this idea that, “well, now we’ve got this new liquid cooling setup, so therefore we’re not using as much water.” And that is the case in some instances with some of this new technology, but a lot of that isn’t even built out yet. You’re seeing companies like Vertiv exploding — their share price is more valuable now than Amazon’s, because they’re selling these cooling technologies used in data centers. But the majority of these data centers are using an enormous amount of water that we simply don’t have. And you’re having these communities now fighting over it.

And of course, the other big piece of this is the smart meters. Take, for example, Aurora, Colorado, not too far from me, where they implemented these smart water meters so they can monitor, at every 15-minute increment, the amount of water you’re using as a private citizen compared to the water being used by these data centers. I don’t know what sort of metering system they have on these data centers, but there’s a massive data center called QTS in Aurora, Colorado — massive, huge — using an enormous amount of water. And the homes around Aurora, Colorado are using these smart meters to monitor how much irrigation, how much water they’re using. They’ve sent out thousands of notices to people telling them they’ve used too much water. And these smart meters are only going to increase across the United States. But are those same municipalities sending out notices to the data centers to let them know how much water they’re using?

Why Data Centers Aren’t Built Where the Water Is

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m confused. One of the long-term and distressing trends in the United States is the explosion in population in places that don’t have the resources to sustain that population — Clark County, Nevada, Maricopa County, Arizona, Phoenix, Vegas, Denver, parts of California. They don’t have the water for this number of people. We know this, and no one seems to care. This is going to be a huge issue going forward. But there are other parts of the United States, the upper Midwest, for example, that have a ton of water and not a lot of people. So why would you ever build a data center in Colorado, for example, which already doesn’t have the resources to support the people? Who’s making these decisions and why? Why is every data center not being built on Lake Superior?

CLAYTON MORRIS: Because the money. Just take Quincy, Washington, as an interesting anecdote. The propaganda around Quincy, Washington is that data centers saved this town. Data centers came in, used the hydroelectric power there, and the influx — the tax basis now, with three different data centers built, saw a 56 percent increase in taxes flowing into Quincy, Washington. So they built a $120 million new school. They built all new sewer infrastructure, parks, water slide parks for the kids. Crime has dropped. And they point to and credit the data centers specifically. So all the money flowing into these communities from taxes is exorbitant, and they don’t want to turn away from that additional tax revenue. That’s always the money, right? That’s clearly the tax revenue coming in.

The other piece of this is that I think these companies are — I say they’re telling lies, but they’re certainly structuring these deals in a very interesting way, which is: “We’re not going to pull from your resources. We’re not going to tap the electricity in your town. We’re not going to tap the excess water. We figured that out” — which is laughable, because there’s always the spillover effect of these things. It’s not self-contained. But a lot of these new data centers being built profess to be self-contained — “we’re going to produce our own power so you don’t have to worry about it.” So they’re using SMRs, small modular nuclear reactors. There are companies like NuScale Technology exploding with this. Amazon can put a nuclear reactor at one of these data centers. We don’t need to rely on Three Mile Island — which, by the way, is being revitalized right now in order to power data centers. I don’t know if people recall what happened at Three Mile Island, but it’s being revitalized right now for data centers, so they can build self-contained power with modular nuclear technology.

The other story — I was speaking to a source at Amazon, and it was crazy to hear what their buildout looks like right now. They said that when they go in, they’re looking at defunct coal plants or other power plants nearby these data centers. And if they can’t get the power they need from the local community, they just buy up the coal-powered plant or the other power plants that were there. They buy them up and then revitalize them, bring in a couple thousand people, build it out to a new energy complex. And then you think, “oh, that’s great, the community will benefit.” No, no, no, no. They’re going to get all the power. They’re not giving any of this power back to the community.

The coal plants specifically — the ones in Nevada and Colorado, where Amazon is coming in and building these facilities — they’re buying them up and revitalizing them, turning them into natural gas facilities so it’s far cleaner. They don’t have to deal with the coal regulations, and then they use all of that energy. So then it won’t have an effect on the community, right? Energy prices won’t have gone up? No, no, no. In fact, the sources I’ve spoken to at Amazon said absolutely the energy costs will go up in those communities, and they already have.

So they’re self-contained — why are my energy costs going up? Because of the spillover effect of it all and the grid capacity and everything else. You’re already seeing this across the country. People without data centers even in their backyard yet are seeing increases to their kilowatt hour prices upwards of 12, 13, 14 percent. We in Colorado have already seen prices skyrocket, even without the massive data center buildouts, because it’s future projections — it’s the auction process of electricity. The future projections on the auction process believe there will be overcapacity, and local communities are saying to expect blackouts.

If I could give an example: Homer City, Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania, near where I went to college at the University of Pittsburgh. This is a really interesting anecdote, because Homer City’s energy prices have already increased, but they’re building this — the data centers that have come in there have revitalized the old coal plants that were shut down in 2023. Now they’re building this massive Homer City energy complex, on top of converting it to natural gas. But the people of Homer City don’t get the benefit of it. They don’t get any of that — it’s going to go to the data center buildout. And the mayor and the other members of the local city council have already seen prices go up and have said we should expect blackouts.

This is Pennsylvania — this isn’t Texas, where you get incredible heat waves. You still get heat waves and things, but not like Texas or Arizona. So expect blackouts over the next few years. Our grid cannot handle this. And the people who live in the surrounding area can expect to see their homes affected by blackouts that will unfold in these neighborhoods. And again, that’s Western Pennsylvania, nowhere near Abilene, Texas, or Arizona. So these things are very real for people, and the costs passed on to consumers, where energy costs are already skyrocketing, is very real.

I know the Trump administration says, “well, we’re putting this cap on as part of this AI buildout, so that we’re going to make these producers pay that.” But there’s no evidence that they are. We are already paying more for electricity.

Powerlessness and Pushback

TUCKER CARLSON: I guess I’m struck by so many parts of the story, but the one I’m fixated on maybe most is the total powerlessness of the people who live in this country to have any effect on any of this at all. Going back to what you said at the outset about the Department of Justice targeting anyone who complains about this or tries to slow it down — I don’t think most people are for this. I don’t think people understand exactly what the purpose of it is. I don’t think there’s been much of an attempt to convince us that this will improve our lives — which is to say the technology itself, AI, data centers. How does it make this a better country for my kids? No one’s spending any time trying to convince us that it is. It’s all scaring the crap out of people, maybe for good reason, maybe not. I really don’t know what the motive is. You talk to an AI person, someone developing AI, and they spend very little time telling you how this is going to cure cancer, and a whole lot of time telling you how it may end humanity. So I don’t really get what’s going on here, but I know that people aren’t for it. Has anybody had any success in protecting their own communities from destruction by this?

CLAYTON MORRIS: Maybe New York State is the only real story right now from a state level, where you have the state now banning the buildout of data centers. And you have Governor Abbott in Texas putting a one-year moratorium on data center buildouts through an audit process — you have to prove your energy efficiency and all of that in order to be built out in Texas. But I also love the hypocrisy there — it’s okay that we can have massive child trafficking operations happening right under your nose, in old Walmart facilities, thousands of children being trafficked, but we’re going to audit data centers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Abbott has overseen the total destruction of Texas. I’m not saying he’s evil, he’s just weak. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves for that, but it’ll be obvious in the next ten years.

CLAYTON MORRIS: But New York — I don’t know how much of this will continue, and will New York be the state that says, “we’re done with data centers altogether, sorry, go someplace else”? What will that look like? I don’t know if this will be rolled back pending some, “hey, we now feel that they’re self-sufficient, the power is self-sufficient, they don’t need to rely on us at all for energy, for water, and they figured out the diesel generation backup so it’s not spilling off particulates” — and now we can welcome them back to the state.

And then you have local governments, like in the state of Georgia, using eminent domain to seize land — just like you would to build a new highway — to seize people’s homes in order to build AI data centers, because, as President Trump stated explicitly as part of these executive orders, this is a national security issue for the United States of America. This is another big piece of this, and I don’t think enough people are talking about what the Trump administration did even just a few weeks ago with the FCC ruling. Are you familiar with the FCC ruling?

National Security and the FCC Ruling

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally ignorant, as usual. And I’m also confused as to why this is a national security issue. I don’t even know what that means. China, China, China, China, China — but okay, how is it a national security issue? What are you talking about? Do you have any clue?

CLAYTON MORRIS: I guess if you look at it from a military perspective, it’s to make sure we have the AI infrastructure to deal with the future of modern warfare, whether it’s drone capabilities or robotics on the battlefield. It all comes back to war, of course. Palantir uses AWS — it’s not really public, but they really use a lot of Amazon Web Services as the backend of Palantir, with their own proprietary frontend on top of it. Then you’re building out all these new government data centers that Amazon is helping build.

What’s interesting about these data centers that Amazon is building for the military, the Pentagon, or the CIA, is that you’ve got about eight layers of security in these facilities, so that even if President Trump wanted to go through them, he’d have to go through eight layers of bioscanning. It’s like the movies, where you walk through a corridor and one door opens and scans your eyeballs. So Amazon builds this for the CIA and others, and as they get to a certain level of the buildout, they basically hand the keys over to the guys on the inside and say, “we’ll take it from here.” Then Amazon’s like, “okay, we built it — call us if you need us.” And they’ll only come back if there’s some sort of massive power outage or something like that. Otherwise, the CIA runs these facilities.

By the way, some of these facilities are being built kind of in plain sight, but inside other facilities, like Veterans Affairs buildings. You think, “oh, that’s a Veterans Affairs building,” but inside is a hidden operations data center. A lot of these government buildings you think are one thing on the outside — an IRS building — but on the inside is a hidden data center for monitoring its citizens.

So national security — the idea is we don’t want China to have this AI layer for all the data collection we’re doing in the United States, whether it’s Flock Safety — I know that’s the most public-facing one right now, but that data goes somewhere, and it goes through AWS, through Amazon Web Services, the same way Palantir does, and all of it needs to be stored somewhere — massive facilities in Nevada and other places, all this data being collected on Americans, from phone calls to email, everything they’re using to scan and track us at this moment. They don’t want China involved in this, of course — that’s the outwardly facing enemy. We don’t want to use their AI models. We want to use our own models, built inside the United States and funded by the United States government, in part, with large grants and so forth.

So about a week ago, there was a story that didn’t get much attention, but it’s huge, and it’s going to further bring more AI buildout and infrastructure into the United States in a big way: the FCC’s ruling on hardware, basically the components for robotics. They cannot be built outside of the United States. So 65 percent of the component parts in humanoid robots or robotics need to be built within the United States now. Well, Elon Musk, Tesla, Optimus — that’s a huge shift for them dramatically, since most of it was being built in China. Most of it will need to be built in the United States now — the actuators, fingers for robots, all of that. That’s going to increase to over 80 percent by the year 2030.

So all this stuff will be built in the United States, presumably, and this AI layer inside the United States is just going to grow. Speaking to sources at Amazon — they’re sold out. This blew me away. If I wanted to build an AI data center, or even just use a part of compute with Amazon Web Services for my show, or you wanted to do it with the Tucker Carlson Network — sorry, we’re sold out through 2030 for capacity. We don’t have enough capacity now, and we’ve projected to be building out thousands of additional data centers in the next few years. So when I said at the beginning we’re not even at the beginning of this, and people are already talking about a bubble — no.

And there are so many other pieces to this — the robotics piece, the information layer, the factory piece, the efficiency piece inside these factories, the actual infrastructure to build out all these different data centers, and then all the companies surrounding those buildouts. This blew me away — I don’t know if you’ve heard of a company called United Rentals?

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

CLAYTON MORRIS: It’s just one example. When Amazon, or Meta, or Google, or whoever, goes in and builds a new data center, they don’t come in and change the community with thousands of people getting jobs. People come in for about 18 months at most, and then they leave. It’s kind of like the Gold Rush, or like a ghost town — they come in, do what they need, and then leave. So they hire companies to bring in Caterpillar earth-digging machines, and United Rentals is one of those companies. They’ve got sites in 1,000 different locations. “Hey, United Rentals, we’re building out a data center in Reno — do you have a location nearby you can bring earth diggers, movers, generators, backup generators?” “Yep, we’ve got you.” So they come in and bring all that equipment, build it out, and then leave. That’s just one piece of the puzzle — then you’ve got the porta-potty companies, and so many other pieces of this buildout.

So people say, “well, it creates jobs temporarily” — but a lot of those people come in for every job; they’re not creating new jobs every time, they just go to a location and then move on to the next one. And these data centers really only employ around maybe 50 people at most — and even that number is dwindling.

Is This a Bubble or a Business Opportunity?

TUCKER CARLSON: And maybe also a little bit silly. This is happening so fast, and as you’ve pointed out, it’s so complex, but it’s also so expensive, that you have to ask: what is this? I mean, it’s an effort obviously to snap the control grid into place and eliminate dissent — got it. It’s an effort to stay on par with China — got it. But it’s also an investment opportunity for a lot of people. And it’s the last hope of states like California, which have been completely hollowed out. The tax base in California is disappearing, and their hope is that AI is going to be incredibly profitable, and they’ll be able to keep their welfare state afloat. Is this a good bet from a business perspective, or is it a bubble? And if it’s the former, how exactly does it make money? I don’t understand that part of it.

CLAYTON MORRIS: Where’s the revenue coming from? Yeah, this is a great question. When people say we’re in an AI bubble, they don’t know what they’re talking about, I believe. When Mark Cuban says we’re building out so many of these data centers and we don’t need them, and they’re going to be turned into pickleball courts, I believe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. From every source I’ve spoken to, we’re not even at the beginning of this, and the demand for compute is off the charts from different companies. I don’t know what he’s talking about with pickleball courts. If anything, my theory is that these are eventually going to be turned into for-profit prisons — that’s just my theory, throwing it out there. They’re cement and steel, they’re out in the middle of nowhere, and we need prisons badly. Of course, the Trump administration loves the for-profit prison system, so I think that’s a perfect transition, not pickleball courts.

But anyway, right now we’re at the beginning of this. I was going through earnings reports over the past few weeks, and the reason I say we’re at the beginning is that I have not yet seen companies point to the AI buildout in their factories equaling a percentage of revenue. To answer your question, there are very few of them right now, but I believe that wave is coming — I’m not being hyperbolic — I really believe the wave is going to increase the demand a hundred times over.

There are a few companies that have now said, in small measure, their AI buildout has increased revenue. I’ll give you an example: there’s an outdoor furniture company, and I was going through their reports — they explained that with their AI layer, they were able to bunch furniture together in a certain way that was more aesthetically pleasing in their stores. It also increased the proficiency of their sales associates — it didn’t cost jobs, it actually increased their sales associates’ proficiency by about 82 percent, they claim, leading to about a 15 percent increase in revenue. I might have the numbers slightly off, but you get the point — they’d been doing something the same way for 30 years, and then suddenly they add in this AI efficiency layer, and their revenue increases by 15 percent without hiring anybody new, without building a new factory or warehouse.

Another company I was looking at — they claimed that by putting an AI efficiency layer in their metal processing facility, in the way it would chop off pieces of metal, which usually led to about $129 million in wasted scrap, they were able to save almost all of that — saving hundreds of millions of dollars.

So these are small anecdotes from a few companies that have shown some initiative with AI. If we see huge increases in efficiency and revenue, game over — there’s no bubble. With the dot-com bubble, there were people building fake websites — they didn’t have anything, it was fake, and there were so many greedy people building all these fake websites. I remember it well — pets.com and all these others — it was all just fake, and it was all greedy people. So I don’t know if this is all greed, or if these companies that have been doing something a certain way for 50 years in their warehouse suddenly add in this AI efficiency layer and their revenue increases by 20 percent. Maybe they don’t fire anybody — maybe they actually hire more people. I don’t know exactly. So anyone who says they know is — I just don’t know. Maybe Elon knows. He seems to know.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve — and I’m the last person who would know, I’m happy to admit that. But whenever I see lemming-like behavior, I suspect the cliff is near. Whenever every midwit you run across is saying the same thing about the future, I generally bet that’s not what the future is going to look like. But maybe I’m the midwit. I have noticed, all of a sudden, when the guy from Shark Tank is talking about stuff he doesn’t understand — the future is data centers — I’m like, I think the future is probably not data centers. But who knows? Maybe I’m just reactionary.

Human Connection as the Antidote

CLAYTON MORRIS: No, can I say this? I think the future is human connection. I’m always a glass-half-full kind of person, and I think one of the benefits of this, despite all of its downsides, is the human interaction layer. You’re already seeing it, actually — restaurants are reporting that young people are coming in, and number one, they’re not drinking alcohol. And they’re bringing a stack of playing cards and just hanging out all night, or a board game — Scrabble — and they don’t bring their phones at all. They just come in and are together. I think there’s going to be an insatiable desire for human interaction with this explosion of AI — call it slop, call it fakery, whatever you want to call it — I think there’s going to be a really insatiable desire for human connection, human interaction, and human content. People saying, “I’d rather watch Tucker’s show because it’s real human beings having a conversation than the fake AI-generated garbage that maybe Hollywood is putting out.”

So I think that’s one maybe benefit — among young people you’re seeing this shift, and I hope that’s the case. I’m more troubled about how this is going to affect young people than anything. My son just turned 16, and he’s going to go into the trades, because so many of these jobs are just being taken by AI. And they will be — if you don’t think that’s the case, you’re fooling yourself. Yes, I know a lot of these Wall Street types, the Shark Tank types, say this can create way more jobs, and maybe they’re right, maybe there will be so many jobs created to help the AI efficiency layer, help the robots. I don’t know that there’s any evidence that’s true. I think most of the jobs you can name and title yourself — I’m an accountant, I’m a pilot, I’m this, I’m that — are going to be replaced by AI. At what point soon will FedEx have all of their aircraft run by AI instead of pilots? Or maybe, because of a pilot’s union, there’ll be one pilot on board just to oversee the AI, but certainly not two, certainly not three.

So if you’re thinking about becoming a pilot, like my son was — he’s kind of stepped back from that, because those jobs are going to disappear. You’re already seeing it in the military — it’s already happening. So going into the trades — I’m just concerned with my kids — my son going into electrical engineering, learning how to work with his hands and do something meaningful. It’s a scary time.

I’m also really worried about the cognitive offload for children. I brought up the study back in 2011, the Google Effect study — the idea of how much we’re outsourcing search and other things to Google instead of doing it ourselves — the sort of idea of search offload, or cognitive offload. I’m sure you do it, I know I do it — if I know I can just search for it and find it, I don’t need to store it up here.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

CLAYTON MORRIS: It’s like Socrates and Plato — Socrates being worried that we won’t be able to remember things because we’re going to write everything down. And the only reason we know that is because Plato wrote it down. But now it’s really transitioned to something else entirely with AI, beyond just, “I don’t need to remember it because I can search for it later and Google will surface that one page.” Even with that, you had to go and do the research yourself — click on the link, read the book, synthesize the information, organize your thoughts, reason, write it down.

I think about college for myself — having to get five or six books on a topic. I remember writing a report on vanilla in Latin America, and I had to go to a special library at the University of Pittsburgh’s campus, under lock and key, because these were old rare books from 150 years ago. I couldn’t take them out because they were rare, and I had to do all this research on vanilla in Latin America. After reading these four or five books, I had to synthesize my thoughts, organize my thoughts — something I’ve struggled with my whole life, but I’ve gotten better at it because I was forced to — to write essays, to reason, to think, to put all of these things down in an argument or a narrative. Become a better writer just by writing over the years. And then present my paper and get a C, or a B — pretty normal for me.

But now kids are just outsourcing that fully. It’s the cognitive offload, where they’re saying, “hey, I’m in eighth grade, write me a paper as if an eighth grader wrote it about the fall of the Roman Empire, and don’t make it sound like AI.” No amount of research — forget the Google effect. Now it’s, “you’re going to do all the research for me, you’re going to synthesize everything, you’re going to organize everything, and then you’re going to present it, and I’m going to turn it in.” What these studies have found recently is that kids are actually doing really well with their projects using AI, and they’re turning in great work — but then when they’re tested on it, they fail, because they have no memory of having done any of the work. They didn’t sit in the library and research vanilla all afternoon. They just offloaded all of that, and they’re not remembering anything, and being tested on it, they can’t recall anything.

So I’m really worried about that part of it — what’s going to happen to my kids, our kids, going forward, in our ability to have conversations, to reason, to think, to have debates, to present arguments, to support your arguments, organize your thoughts. That’s the real human piece of all of this.

Does the Machine Serve the Person, or the Person Serve the Machine?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s kind of the question — what’s the purpose? Does the machine serve the person, or the person serve the machine? I think you could make a strong case — I think most people would make the case that for all the benefits of the internet over the last 30 years, it’s been a net loss for humanity. We don’t live in a more peaceful world. We don’t live in a more stable world, and we don’t live in a smarter world, a wiser world. We don’t. And there are probably many reasons for that, but the internet hasn’t achieved its core promises — peace, stability, knowledge, wisdom. That didn’t work. So knowing that, why would you triple down on the effect with AI? Of course you wouldn’t, if the goal was to serve people. And you really do detect, when you listen to technologists speak, that their orientation is totally different. It’s like somehow we have an obligation to serve technology. No one ever explains why — I guess because it’s a god, maybe the only god. And so whether that means higher energy prices, or less water, or dumber, more suicidal children, or whatever the result inevitably will be, that’s the price you pay to serve the machine. And it seems backward to me.

CLAYTON MORRIS: It absolutely does. Just sitting here thinking as you’re saying that — have we had a net positive with the internet? It’s hard to argue that we have, in any appreciable way. We’re sitting in a Third World War right now. Think about how the internet moves markets and creates incredible anxiety. You hear this palpable feeling of anxiety across the United States — I think you could largely blame that on the internet. When people jump on X or social media and they’re fed these dopamine hits of 15-second videos, they’re just like, “why did I do that to myself?” You feel sort of transported — getting sucked into voyeuristic content of people getting arrested or whatever it is — it makes you feel awful. You have influencers filming themselves on escalators, and you think, “what — is this what we want?”

That’s why I’m encouraged that younger people are saying, “I don’t want a smartphone anymore.” The internet and smartphones — combine them and add in this AI layer on top, and you’re just constantly online. So I think you’re going to start to see more Amish communities pop up, a pushback, sort of internet-free zones — “do not bring your phones in here.” I don’t know how big those things will be, and I don’t know what kind of pushback we’ll have from people who’ve gone through it. Will we have a moment where we all say, “enough is enough, we don’t want this anymore”?

There’s the argument that maybe we shouldn’t be connected in such a way to these AI models coming from China, from the United States, from OpenAI, Anthropic, and so on — get open-source models you can store on your own compute, in your own house, so you have all the wisdom self-contained. I know some libertarian friends of mine who believe that’s the way to go — you have all this compute living, I don’t want to say “Hillary Clinton style” on your own servers in your house, but you’re not relying on China, not relying on the government, not relying on these companies — you’re relying on yourself. And if you want to do some deep research on a project, you have access to it, because it lives on your own server in your house, disconnected from those people. I don’t know — I don’t have that.

The Robotics Layer

TUCKER CARLSON: Without getting too far afield — one of the biggest things that’s happened in technology in recent memory was the hacking of cold wallets and the theft of Bitcoin from cold wallets. The promise of a cold wallet was that it was disconnected from the internet — it was wholly yours, no one could put a finger on it other than you, and that was the assurance that your Bitcoin was actually yours. To see that get hacked somehow suggests that anything with an electrical impulse is not really under your control.

CLAYTON MORRIS: We even saw the story — was it three weeks ago? — about the AI model that was offline, not even connected to the internet, and managed to somehow connect and get online, hack, and then jump back offline.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

CLAYTON MORRIS: And then add the robotics layer to this on top of it all. The humanoid robot piece of this — you’re going to have this in warfare, humanoid robots — it literally is straight out of Terminator.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

CLAYTON MORRIS: This is what’s coming. And who can stop it? Is there going to be some sort of kill switch and the ability to turn this stuff off? I don’t think so. So are we going to build compounds with corrugated steel walls and turrets on our houses now to protect us against the coming AI robot invasion? We’re seeing it on the battlefield already, and we already know the U.S. military is years ahead in planning for where this is going. It’s the greatest, most bizarre, and biggest transformation in human history that we’re watching right now unfold before us.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I hate to say it — a lot of flawed people have had true ideas out there. Ted Kaczynski did call this thirty years ago, and because he was crazy and violent and killed innocents, we ignored it. But we shouldn’t have, because he was onto something, I would say. Clay Morris, thank you for that really informed and kind of amazing rundown of where we’re going. I’m grateful.

CLAYTON MORRIS: My pleasure. It’s scary. Let’s hang out and have a human, human conversation without AI.

TUCKER CARLSON: I can’t wait. Great to see you.

CLAYTON MORRIS: Thanks.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thanks, man.

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