Walker Wildmon: Religious freedom is about people of faith being able to live out their faith and their convictions, no matter where they are. Sacred honor is the courage to speak truth and live out your free speech. We also rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.
Walker Wildmon: Welcome to At The Core here on American Family Radio. Walker Wildmon here with you. Glad to be with you on today's edition of the program. Let's turn our attention to Acts chapter 21. That's where we've been this week.
Walker Wildmon: This is an interaction between a prophet named Agabus and Paul and some of Paul's companions. It says in Acts chapter 21, verses 10 through 13:
Walker Wildmon: "And we stayed many days, and as we stayed many days, a certain prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. When he had come to us, he took Paul's belt, bound his own hands and feet, and said, 'Thus says the Holy Spirit: So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.'"
Walker Wildmon: "Now when we had heard these things, both we and those from that place pleaded with him not to go up to Jerusalem," talking about pleading with Paul. "Then Paul answered and said, 'What do you mean by weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.'"
Walker Wildmon: Here we have Paul being warned by his associates, his friends, and by this gentleman, Agabus. He was being warned of his future and of the threat on his life for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. What does Paul do? He says, "I'm going anyway. I'm going to Jerusalem to preach the name of the Lord Jesus."
Walker Wildmon: May we receive some courage from Paul and his testimony, despite the fact that he was facing death and imprisonment for the work of the gospel in Acts chapter 21.
Walker Wildmon: Let's jump into the news of the day. We have breaking news right now. The Federal Reserve just hiked interest rates by a quarter point, and it was a unanimous vote, 12 to nothing, to hike interest rates. We're going to break that down. We've got a lot of clips to play on rate hikes, and we'll talk a little bit about AI throughout the show. Bear with us. We'll hopefully keep it interesting.
Walker Wildmon: Let's address first this breaking news that the Federal Reserve has hiked rates by a quarter point. I'm rather surprised. I actually predicted this morning that they wouldn't hike. What do you know? I'm wrong. They did hike. That just shows how much I know.
Walker Wildmon: The Federal Reserve hiked rates a quarter point. This is the federal funds rate. Here's why I'm surprised, and then I'll tell you why I'm mad. Surprised and mad, mixed emotions. I'm surprised that one of the first actions Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is making, one of the first decisions he is making, is to hike interest rates when President Trump, for the past two-plus years, has been railing against Jerome Powell for refusing to lower interest rates.
Walker Wildmon: This is President Trump's handpicked Federal Reserve chair to replace Jerome Powell. His first action as Federal Reserve chair is to join the rest of the Board of Governors and hike interest rates by a quarter point.
Walker Wildmon: What does a quarter point do in the grand scheme of things? Not a lot, but it's signaling that the Federal Reserve is about to go on a multimonth cycle of hiking interest rates. This is what they're committing to. You don't open this can if you're not going to ride this strategy for the next several months. You don't just hike one time and then walk away for six months. That's not what these folks do.
Walker Wildmon: So Kevin Warsh is committing to a multimonth rate-hiking cycle: a quarter point here, half point here, quarter point there, and so on. I'm rather surprised. I'm actually shocked that Kevin Warsh did this.
Walker Wildmon: Jerome Powell has been over there for years and has been at the Federal Reserve as chair for the entirety of President Trump's second term. They lowered rates several times, then paused and left them where they were for month after month after month. Here Kevin Warsh comes in, and he's on a rate-hiking cycle at the Federal Reserve.
Walker Wildmon: In the grand scheme of things, what does a quarter point do? Probably not much, one way or the other. Here's my problem with it, and then we'll play some clips.
Walker Wildmon: Here's my fundamental problem, and I've been saying this for probably four or five years. I've been saying this since right after COVID, when we had eight or nine percent inflation and the Federal Reserve was hiking rates like nobody's business. Here's my position: I don't think the Federal Reserve has as much power or control over all of these economic factors as they think they do.
Walker Wildmon: I think the Federal Reserve is overrated. I think this whole system and quagmire is completely overrated. I think there are other economic factors at play, one of them being energy costs, which we'll talk about, that have way more to do with inflation than what the federal funds rate is.
Walker Wildmon: I just don't think the Federal Reserve practically has control over inflation. Now, they can break the economy by hiking interest rates into oblivion. You break the economy, and then, of course, inflation comes down. But is that their job? Is that their job? They say, "Oh, we have a dual mandate: maximum employment and price stability."
Walker Wildmon: They've never been able to achieve both of those. The Federal Reserve has never been able to achieve both of those. If they claim credit for it, it's just not true, because there are so many other factors at play in our economy beyond what the Federal Reserve thinks and does.
Walker Wildmon: There's who's in the White House. There's the regulatory bodies. There is the energy sector. There is emerging innovation, like the AI we're looking at right now, which is its own animal. There's state-level policy. There are global conflicts. There are just tons of factors that contribute to economic activity, including inflation and employment numbers.
Walker Wildmon: This notion that it's the Federal Reserve's job to ensure maximum employment and price stability, I just think the whole thing is messed up. I think the whole dual mandate is messed up. I think it's unachievable. I think they are tinkering with stuff they ought not to be tinkering with. That's why many people smarter than me say we don't even need a Federal Reserve. What are we doing here?
Walker Wildmon: I think this is a huge mistake. I'm going to play a clip from Kevin Hassett, the White House National Council of Economic Advisers director. This was him basically warning Kevin Warsh that he may want to be careful with this whole rate-hiking thing. This was a clip from last week. Let's listen.
Interviewer: Let's talk about looking ahead to the rate decision coming from the Fed. The Wall Street Journal editorial board says this: "The best way to get real wages rising is for Mr. Trump to give Mr. Warsh the new Fed chair the running room he needs to get inflation down to the Fed's two percent target. That may start with a quarter-point increase in interest rates at next week's Federal Open Market Committee meeting, which would signal to markets that the central bank is serious about inflation."
Interviewer: Are you confident that the Fed director has got the independence he needs potentially to do that? How would that land at the White House if there is an increase?
Kevin Hassett: One hundred percent. President Trump has given Mr. Warsh the runway to do what he thinks is right. He has enormous faith in him. He'll look at the data, and he'll get the board to agree to something. If it's a rate hike, the president will, I'm sure, not be super happy about it, but he will defend the independence of Kevin Warsh above all.
Kevin Hassett: I think that if it were me, if I look at the momentum for inflation, that it's basically gone down to almost nothing over the last three months, I'd be wary of a rate hike. Especially if you go back and look at the history of the Fed, then they've hiked rates ahead of an election only a couple of times all the way back to 1913. If you want an independent Fed, then one thing the Fed does is stay out of the way of elections.
Interviewer: We'll see. We will watch that closely this week. Director, we always appreciate it.
Walker Wildmon: A Fed hike at this point is dumb. It is de facto dumb. Here's why. CPI is at 3.4 percent. These are August numbers. For goods, CPI is at 3.4 percent. That's the lowest in five months. March was 3.3 percent, and below that was 2.4 percent in February. But 3.4 percent is the lowest print in five months. It is trending down.
Walker Wildmon: The same thing is true with PPI. These are the two categories that they look at. PPI is at a four-month low. It is trending down from 6.5 percent in May. It was at 6.5 percent in May, and it's at 5.4 percent now. You say, "Okay, well, it was 2.6 percent a year ago." Well, okay, but it's trending down.
Walker Wildmon: If we're really watching these numbers and they're trending down at a four-month low, then the Fed is about four months too late. There is no data that supports a rate hike at this juncture. Every inflation metric at a high level, I'm not talking about individual categories because you can say, "What about beef and oil?" Okay, that's one of a hundred, and oil is high because we're at war in the Middle East with everybody and their mother.
Walker Wildmon: PPI and CPI are both at their lowest print in four to five months, trending downward, and now we're going to start hiking rates. So you're four to five months late, Federal Reserve, and now they're going to break stuff. This is what they're going to do.
Walker Wildmon: They're going to increase the borrowing cost for the federal government on our deficit. They're going to add hundreds of billions of dollars in new debt, and they're going to cause all the consumer borrowing rates to go up for you and me. Mortgage rates are going up. The 10-year yield is up. That's all been happening over the last 72 hours.
Walker Wildmon: I don't think the Federal Reserve has as much power over inflation as they think they do. Warsh just came out and said, "We're going to deliver price stability." I don't think they have the power or the influence to deliver price stability.
Walker Wildmon: I think there is one major word that is the cause of inflation, and that is energy costs. Energy costs, which the Fed has zero control over.
Walker Wildmon: Another post I came across was from Daniel Lacalle. He's an economist and a professor, and he was posting about the potential for a rate hike that has now become a rate hike. Here's what he said. This was late last week:
Walker Wildmon: "Markets price a 90 percent probability of a Fed hike, but the data do not justify monetary panic. August CPI was lifted by energy. Rate hikes do not drill a single well, build a pipeline, or lower gasoline prices. What they do is raise mortgage, credit card, and business financing costs, hurting families, investment, and small firms.
Walker Wildmon: "The entire burden of higher rates falls on the shoulders of job creators and families, while government spending and energy prices will not be affected. Meanwhile, the labor market has improved, but not enough. One hundred sixty-two thousand jobs were created in August, unemployment was steady at 4.1 percent, and participation was rising.
Walker Wildmon: "Do not confuse an energy price shock with demand overheating. Hiking into a recovering job market will be a massive policy mistake. The Fed has other tools to reduce monetary inflation, and balance sheet management is the way, not rate hikes."
Walker Wildmon: That's Daniel Lacalle, an economist, and that was his post on X late last week. I think he's spot-on, and unfortunately, the Fed decided to ignore that and hike rates instead.
Walker Wildmon: Another post I came across was from Mark Zandi. Mark Zandi is chief economist, host of the Inside Economics podcast, and cofounder of Economy.com. Here's what he had to say about a potential Fed hike that has now come to pass:
Walker Wildmon: "The odds of a serious Fed policy mistake are uncomfortably high and rising. Markets are all but certain the Fed will raise rates a quarter point at next week's meeting," written last week, of course, "and are pricing in more to come. But the economy is already growing near potential, which is two percent real GDP growth, and operating at full employment.
Walker Wildmon: "Inflation is too high, to be sure, running above three percent. But much of that is the fallout from higher energy prices and tariffs, supply shocks that rate hikes can't fix and that should fade on their own so long as inflation expectations stay anchored, as they have.
Walker Wildmon: "If the Fed tightens to bring inflation down faster, it must push growth below potential, and that is hard to do without layoffs, rising unemployment, and igniting a self-reinforcing negative cycle.
Walker Wildmon: "The challenge is even more complicated because AI-related investment appears to be powering the economy while the non-AI economy is already struggling. To hit its inflation objective, the Fed either needs to rein in the AI boom or put even more pressure on the rest of the economy. Neither is a good outcome. Of course, it doesn't have to choose either. It can wait."
Walker Wildmon: Well, it did choose one. It chose to hike rates. That's another perspective from Mark Zandi on the consequences of a Fed rate hike.
Walker Wildmon: Here's the last statistic I will share, and we'll link to this chart in the show notes. The Kibosi Letter put out a chart going back to January of 2025 to date, so the last 18 or 19 months. They showed how energy drives inflation and how energy prices track nearly perfectly with inflation.
Walker Wildmon: They pulled the Consumer Price Index data and Brent and West Texas oil market prices, and the correlation is nearly perfect. When energy prices are up, consumer inflation is up. When energy prices go down, inflation goes down.
Walker Wildmon: What we have now, pretty much the only problem we have now, is an energy problem. I don't doubt that inflation is going to go up, but it's going up because of the cost of energy. There's just no other way around this.
Walker Wildmon: The surprise is that gasoline is eight or nine bucks a gallon, and yes, it's happening. Look at California. You've got gasoline hitting four bucks here in Mississippi as of this morning, hitting five and six dollars elsewhere, with no end in sight. That will affect inflation numbers.
Walker Wildmon: I'm not arguing that. What I am arguing is that the Fed has virtually no control over this stuff, but they think they do. That's the problem. The Federal Reserve can do nothing, which is what I think they should have done. Go on vacation, please. They can do nothing.
Walker Wildmon: When whatever we're doing with Iran is over, the energy supply normalizes, and the price of oil goes down to where it was seven months ago, whenever that happens, inflation is going to drop like a rock. Everybody's going to say, "Oh, the Federal Reserve brought inflation down." No, they didn't. Energy brought inflation down.
Walker Wildmon: What's going to be utterly embarrassing, mark my word, is if the Federal Reserve keeps hiking because they think they control inflation. We're going to hike and hike and hike, and energy is going to stay stubbornly high until we get past whatever this Iran thing is. The Federal Reserve is going to keep hiking, and they're going to say, "We're waiting on inflation to come down."
Walker Wildmon: Guess what, my friends? Inflation's not coming down until energy comes down, and the Federal Reserve has no control over the energy markets. Energy inflation causes broad consumer inflation. That's a fact.
Walker Wildmon: How do we know that? The data shows it. But also, think about everything that energy touches. Every single thing on a shelf is delivered by a truck. The truck uses diesel. Diesel is at historic highs, over six dollars on average yesterday, and it's continuing to rise with no end in sight.
Walker Wildmon: Every single thing that the consumer touches at the grocery store, at Walmart, or while flying on an airplane uses energy. When you have energy doubling over the last 12 months, that's going to hit inflation. There's just no other way around it.
Walker Wildmon: What's so frustrating to me is that we pay these people so much money and put so much emphasis on how special the Federal Reserve is. They think they can micromanage the economy and solve all the world's problems when they're not solving a thing. They are not solving a thing.
Walker Wildmon: I'll tell you what will solve something: fixing whatever this Iran thing is. We've been on this excursion for seven months. Regardless of what you think about the justification, whether you think Iran was a week away from nuclear weapons or wasn't, whether you think this is a waste of time or the best thing we've ever done, I don't really care what your philosophy is or your geopolitical view, or your position on whether we have to defend Israel.
Walker Wildmon: I'm just telling you that we're on month seven of this Middle East excursion. Now we've got the Houthis involved. They're blowing up pipelines in Saudi Arabia. Iran is still firing ballistic missiles. How on earth they still have ballistic missiles, I have no idea. But we're entangled in an utter mess in the Middle East.
Walker Wildmon: Until we get past that, energy prices will not go back down to prewar levels. Let me remind you where we were seven months ago. I hate to get people's blood pressure going, but I'm just telling you where we were and what we can get back to once again, once we get past whatever the Iran thing is, whatever you want to call that: war, conflict, or saving the world from a nuclear weapon.
Walker Wildmon: Before the Iran war, mortgage rates were going below six percent. They were on the precipice of going below six percent, into the five percent range, which is a multiyear low. Gas was well below three dollars a gallon on average nationally. In certain parts of the country, gasoline was two dollars a gallon. Diesel was low as well. Wage growth was going up, GDP growth was going up, and the AI boom was being built out.
Walker Wildmon: Then, boom, here comes Iran. There's no doubt that the president, whether he admits it or not, is having second thoughts about this whole Iran thing. I don't know if all of this was factored in. I don't know if you told President Trump seven months ago that we were going to go to war with Iran and that, seven months later, right before the midterms, we would be neck-deep in a conflict with Iran, with it spilling over to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, energy markets being disrupted, and Ukraine and Russia still firing missiles at each other. Diesel is going to be seven or eight bucks a gallon. If you had talked to President Trump seven months ago, would his decision have been the same? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe he was told all these things.
Walker Wildmon: This inflation problem, although I think it's being overhyped, is real. As I mentioned, inflation is at a five-month low. Here comes the Fed, five months late, to hike rates to solve inflation. Inflation is on a downward trend, and now we're hitting a rate-hike cycle. You talk about being late to the party. So late to the party.
Walker Wildmon: These are fundamental problems that Warsh was supposed to fix. Warsh came in and said, "We're going to restructure, we're going to have these subcommittees, and we're going to find better data to influence our decision-making." What are we doing? We're four months late to the party on hiking rates to address inflation, and 100 percent of the inflation is driven by what? Energy.
Walker Wildmon: How much control does the Federal Reserve have over energy prices? The answer is zero. The Federal Reserve has zero control over energy costs, and energy costs are causing inflation. I just don't know why more people don't get this. Thankfully, some people do, and I've read their posts. This is just a cycle of insanity that I can't believe we're participating in.
Walker Wildmon: If President Trump is furious because Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh's first thing to do was hike rates, I would be furious too. You had one job, Kevin Warsh, and that was not to hike rates. What did you do? You hiked rates. This is absolutely beyond me.
Walker Wildmon: Now we're going to increase borrowing costs for the federal deficit. That's going to increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars more than it already would have been. That's my rant for today. Nobody's going to listen to me except for my audience here, but this is a vicious cycle of economics that is absolutely stupid.
Walker Wildmon: I don't know why we do it, why the Federal Reserve is there, or why they think they can micromanage this economy into some utopia. It is absolutely infuriating. As the post I read said, it's you and me who bear the burden here. We're paying the seven percent mortgage. We're paying all the interest rates as borrowing goes up, while Washington keeps printing money and the Federal Reserve thinks they're fixing and solving the world.
Walker Wildmon: On another topic, artificial intelligence, we probably should be thanking AI and the people building it out because that is driving a lot of this economic activity and economic growth. The popularity of artificial intelligence is driving a lot of this.
Walker Wildmon: We talked Monday about this warning from the Anthropic CEO. He did an interview and put out a long blog post basically expressing concern about the safety of AI, how we need more government regulation and oversight. Right after that was put out late last week and over the weekend, all of these people started coming out in support of it.
Walker Wildmon: Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and globalist, Marxist, left-wing advocates all came out of the woodwork saying we need more regulation of AI and need to slow down the build-out of AI. Red flags were popping up everywhere. I was asking, "What is this all about?"
Walker Wildmon: Let's talk about it. I've got at least three or four clips, and we will help answer the question: Should the United States slow down on innovation and the build-out of these frontier AI models, or should we lean in full force, full steam ahead, to beat China in the AI arms race that it has become?
Walker Wildmon: Welcome back to At The Core here on American Family Radio. Glad to have you with us here on the program. We've been talking about the Federal Reserve and the hiking of interest rates, energy costs, the world with Iran, and all of this economic saga that we're living through.
Walker Wildmon: At the end of the day, I'm a very optimistic person. You can ask my wife. My response to everything is, "It's going to be okay," even if in the short term it's not going to be okay. I think economically we're going to be okay. I just think the Federal Reserve is doing things that are unnecessary, and I think their ability to affect inflation is way overstated. That's the moral of the story.
Walker Wildmon: I think energy costs are the number one driver of inflation. The data bears that out. When we get energy costs down, we get inflation down, and it has nothing to do with the Federal Reserve.
Walker Wildmon: Let's talk about AI because there's a big debate now about whether AI is an existential threat to humanity. There's a lot of fearmongering out there about AI, and then there's all this hype about data centers. We've talked about that some on the program, and there are some viable concerns about where they're placing data centers. But all in all, we all live off data centers now.
Walker Wildmon: If you're using your smartphone, your tablet, the internet, cloud storage, or AI chats, that's all driven by data centers. We've been doing that for 20 or 30 years. Data center build-out is not a new technology or a new phenomenon. It's been going on for some time.
Walker Wildmon: The first clip I want to play is from Elon Musk. The other one is from a former AI employee who worked at OpenAI and, I believe, Anthropic. Nonetheless, he worked for at least two AI companies. He was an Anthropic researcher, and before that, I believe he was at another company.
Walker Wildmon: This gentleman's name is Jacob Coxon, spelled C-O-X-O-N, and he recently left Anthropic to blow the whistle on the threat of AI. This is him talking about how, with nuclear technology, we figured out how to control it, but with this technology, we don't quite know how to control it.
Guest: Unfortunately, we know how to control nuclear weapons, pretty much. We don't yet know how to control AI. This is possibly the most dangerous technology that humanity has ever created. It's basically out of science fiction. I think we have no other choice but to cooperate internationally, because an arms race would be disastrous in a way that no other human activity has been in the past.
Walker Wildmon: Anyone who tells me we need to cooperate globally, no, thank you. We're not globalists, and we're not cooperating with the globalists. No, thanks.
Walker Wildmon: You want to know why? America leads the way on innovation, and we don't need to hang out with anyone else. We don't need to work with anyone else. We are the leader in innovation. America needs to lead the charge with the biggest economy in the world. We don't need a global body of who knows what governing AI.
Walker Wildmon: There are a lot of red flags here about this man's motivation, his background, the funding, and what he's trying to accomplish. But that's his opinion about the threat of AI. There are some valid concerns, and there are people actually in this industry who are very hesitant on the safety side of things. I understand that. I'm not discounting it completely.
Walker Wildmon: Let's play this other clip. This is Elon Musk. He's a little more level-headed and rational, but he says there are serious concerns with AI, we have to be safe doing it, and we ought to test each other's models.
Elon Musk: It's pretty obvious at this point that AI is going to be very dangerous. What I think would be wise to do as soon as possible, if not immediately, would be to have the major AI competitors test each other's models, so that you'd have everyone's security test harness testing everyone's models.
Elon Musk: The danger of AI is very significant at this point. We need to do better with AI safety, or we have exponentially increasing risk with the AI models.
Walker Wildmon: There you have it. That's Elon Musk, and I actually would trust him more than I would trust that first gentleman. There are valid concerns with AI.
Walker Wildmon: We've seen how AI gets loose, gets out of its box, and starts meddling with things that it wasn't authorized to do. We saw that with some recent hacking, where AI bots swarmed different websites and hacked them. It was all because of a misunderstanding in the prompt.
Walker Wildmon: But for every potential problem you say AI brings, it also brings solutions and innovation. We cited some of the data from Florida on sepsis patients and how AI reduced fatality by 50 percent. By looking at the data, it predicted which patients would have trouble with sepsis and which ones wouldn't, reducing the fatality rate by 50 percent using AI models.
Walker Wildmon: What caused me to hesitate before jumping on this AI fearmongering and saying it's going to wipe out humanity is seeing the actors who were getting behind this narrative. Within 24 hours, you had Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and all the other globalists putting out tweets, posts, and videos about how we need a global governing body over AI and need to slow down the build-out of AI.
Walker Wildmon: My first response, and I know this is somewhat chasing a rabbit, but bear with me, is that these godless, pagan, globalists are some of the least moral people on the planet. This is the crowd that cheers on abortion, abortion on demand. They say we ought to be able to kill babies.
Walker Wildmon: This is the same group that has been pushing the climate-change hoax on humanity for the last 50 years and has caused massive amounts of human suffering because we have not adopted new energy technologies out of fear of destroying the planet with oil and fossil fuels.
Walker Wildmon: Here we are now 30 years behind on nuclear technology because of this fearmongering that wasn't based on anything factual. That's their resume, and I don't believe a word they say.
Walker Wildmon: I think AI has its dangers, but so does every other technology. We don't need a governing regulatory body full of globalists, Democrats, and Marxists to tell private companies how they need to do AI safely. That's the job of private industry.
Walker Wildmon: As Bobby and I were talking about this morning, it's the job of every industry that provides goods and services to the public to self-regulate. Every industry is civilly and criminally responsible if it puts out a product that it knows is dangerous, so there are already checks and balances.
Bobby: Exactly. A good example we talked about this morning was Takata Corporation, the notorious airbag manufacturer that had untold numbers of failures. They've paid the price financially, and it obviously hurt their business greatly. They had to go back to the drawing board, revisit the products, and reinvent the wheel, no pun intended. It cost them a great deal of money to learn a great big lesson.
Walker Wildmon: Absolutely. If the United States drags its feet on this AI build-out, whatever you think of artificial intelligence, it's coming. It's actually here, but it will continue to be built out.
Walker Wildmon: I believe artificial intelligence can either be used for good and for the advancement of humanity, or it can be used for evil. But that's the case with any technology, just like the internet.
Bobby: This is the case with any technology.
Walker Wildmon: The doomsaying about AI being distinctly different is not really accurate. Humans build it, and we control it. We tell it what to do. If we need to unplug it because it's not acting right, that's fine. We just unplug it. Put a kill switch on the data center and cut the whole thing off.
Walker Wildmon: I'm fine with having those checks and balances in place. But if we don't build this out, we don't control it, and we don't know how to control it, guess who will? China and our adversaries.
Walker Wildmon: The last thing we need is to drag our feet on this because a bunch of globalists want us to slow down on the AI arms race. If China gets to artificial general intelligence before us, knows how to control it before us, and we don't, then we're in a cyberwar and we don't know what to do with China's bots because we've never built them before.
Walker Wildmon: Somebody is going to be in charge of this stuff, and I'd rather it be us, under the United States regulatory system, under U.S. law, and under U.S. civil courts. This is the place to build out AI. There are the most checks and balances possible.
Walker Wildmon: David Sacks is a technology leader who is heavily involved in AI. This was his take on the alarm bell about AI being dangerous. Here's what David Sacks had to say about the Anthropic CEO and what he should really do if he believes what he said.
Interviewer: Do you think Dario Amodei is incorrect in predicting the worst outcomes here?
David Sacks: If Dario believes that we're going to have the worst outcomes, my question for him is, why are you doing this? It doesn't make sense to me that you're running a frontier AI company if you think frontier AI is going to end humanity.
David Sacks: I would push that back on him and say, how are you going to make this safe? If you don't think you can, you should probably either shut down the company or step aside and let someone else lead it.
Walker Wildmon: That's exactly right. If you're fearful about AI wiping out humanity, then you ought to shut your company down. You're making money hand over fist on this product, which is fine. This is America. It's capitalism. But don't go out there claiming that your technology can wipe out humanity while you're going to keep building it out. What? No, thank you. I don't believe this at all. I am not buying into this.
Walker Wildmon: This whole airing of apocalyptic predictions on national television is completely unwise. When companies are building out technologies and tools, and they encounter a safety concern during production or while designing the product, you don't go on national television and air all your grievances about internal team disputes and safety-team concerns. You don't talk about this stuff. This is all internal business talk.
Walker Wildmon: We're building out AI, we're running into issues, and there are safety concerns in the lab. We're correcting them and addressing them. But we don't go on national television and create a national debate with the end result being some globalist governing body. We don't need that.
Walker Wildmon: The Palantir CEO, which Palantir is deeply integrated with the Pentagon, said that AI is already being used for target packages and all kinds of intelligence assessments. AI is already being used for very sensitive systems within the Pentagon.
Walker Wildmon: This was the Palantir CEO saying that pausing AI development in the United States is not a realistic option as long as China exists.
Interviewer: If we didn't have adversaries, I would be very in favor of pausing this technology completely. But we do.
Interviewer: That's why pausing is not possible, because it creates a structural advantage, both for the large language models and algorithms. Getting algorithms and large language models to work in a classified context is going to take very specialized expertise. But the fact is, this is going to be a bonanza for the U.S. economy.
Interviewer: How concerned are you about China right now?
Guest: Everyone's very concerned. I think we were in a conversation this morning where I referenced when we first started talking about China and America. I was saying that this was not going to end well, and that was a controversial statement. Now it's consensus.
Guest: America is fairly unified in its idea that China and the people running China are not acting in a way we can accept. I think the consensus, if I had to guess, in China is that we're never going to get this back on the rails with America, so we should increase the aggression.
Walker Wildmon: I think AI has the potential to bring mass benefits and mass wealth to America. A byproduct and side effect of the build-out of artificial intelligence is the deployment of nuclear technology on a large scale, particularly nuclear energy technology.
Walker Wildmon: The deployment of modular nuclear energy around the country over the long haul is going to drastically reduce the cost of energy for the American people. That is a net-positive side effect of AI.
Walker Wildmon: There's a lot of good that AI can bring. The last thing we need to do is pause AI and hand it over to the Chinese and the globalists to build out.
Walker Wildmon: Religious freedom is about people of faith being able to live out their faith and their convictions, no matter where they are. Sacred honor is the courage to speak truth and live out your free speech. We also rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.
Walker Wildmon: Welcome to At The Core here on American Family Radio. Walker Wildmon here with you. Glad to be with you on today's edition of the program. Let's turn our attention to Acts chapter 21. That's where we've been this week.
Walker Wildmon: This is an interaction between a prophet named Agabus and Paul and some of Paul's companions. It says in Acts chapter 21, verses 10 through 13:
Walker Wildmon: "And we stayed many days, and as we stayed many days, a certain prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. When he had come to us, he took Paul's belt, bound his own hands and feet, and said, 'Thus says the Holy Spirit: So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.'"
Walker Wildmon: "Now when we had heard these things, both we and those from that place pleaded with him not to go up to Jerusalem," talking about pleading with Paul. "Then Paul answered and said, 'What do you mean by weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.'"
Walker Wildmon: Here we have Paul being warned by his associates, his friends, and by this gentleman, Agabus. He was being warned of his future and of the threat on his life for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. What does Paul do? He says, "I'm going anyway. I'm going to Jerusalem to preach the name of the Lord Jesus."
Walker Wildmon: May we receive some courage from Paul and his testimony, despite the fact that he was facing death and imprisonment for the work of the gospel in Acts chapter 21.
Walker Wildmon: Let's jump into the news of the day. We have breaking news right now. The Federal Reserve just hiked interest rates by a quarter point, and it was a unanimous vote, 12 to nothing, to hike interest rates. We're going to break that down. We've got a lot of clips to play on rate hikes, and we'll talk a little bit about AI throughout the show. Bear with us. We'll hopefully keep it interesting.
Walker Wildmon: Let's address first this breaking news that the Federal Reserve has hiked rates by a quarter point. I'm rather surprised. I actually predicted this morning that they wouldn't hike. What do you know? I'm wrong. They did hike. That just shows how much I know.
Walker Wildmon: The Federal Reserve hiked rates a quarter point. This is the federal funds rate. Here's why I'm surprised, and then I'll tell you why I'm mad. Surprised and mad, mixed emotions. I'm surprised that one of the first actions Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is making, one of the first decisions he is making, is to hike interest rates when President Trump, for the past two-plus years, has been railing against Jerome Powell for refusing to lower interest rates.
Walker Wildmon: This is President Trump's handpicked Federal Reserve chair to replace Jerome Powell. His first action as Federal Reserve chair is to join the rest of the Board of Governors and hike interest rates by a quarter point.
Walker Wildmon: What does a quarter point do in the grand scheme of things? Not a lot, but it's signaling that the Federal Reserve is about to go on a multimonth cycle of hiking interest rates. This is what they're committing to. You don't open this can if you're not going to ride this strategy for the next several months. You don't just hike one time and then walk away for six months. That's not what these folks do.
Walker Wildmon: So Kevin Warsh is committing to a multimonth rate-hiking cycle: a quarter point here, half point here, quarter point there, and so on. I'm rather surprised. I'm actually shocked that Kevin Warsh did this.
Walker Wildmon: Jerome Powell has been over there for years and has been at the Federal Reserve as chair for the entirety of President Trump's second term. They lowered rates several times, then paused and left them where they were for month after month after month. Here Kevin Warsh comes in, and he's on a rate-hiking cycle at the Federal Reserve.
Walker Wildmon: In the grand scheme of things, what does a quarter point do? Probably not much, one way or the other. Here's my problem with it, and then we'll play some clips.
Walker Wildmon: Here's my fundamental problem, and I've been saying this for probably four or five years. I've been saying this since right after COVID, when we had eight or nine percent inflation and the Federal Reserve was hiking rates like nobody's business. Here's my position: I don't think the Federal Reserve has as much power or control over all of these economic factors as they think they do.
Walker Wildmon: I think the Federal Reserve is overrated. I think this whole system and quagmire is completely overrated. I think there are other economic factors at play, one of them being energy costs, which we'll talk about, that have way more to do with inflation than what the federal funds rate is.
Walker Wildmon: I just don't think the Federal Reserve practically has control over inflation. Now, they can break the economy by hiking interest rates into oblivion. You break the economy, and then, of course, inflation comes down. But is that their job? Is that their job? They say, "Oh, we have a dual mandate: maximum employment and price stability."
Walker Wildmon: They've never been able to achieve both of those. The Federal Reserve has never been able to achieve both of those. If they claim credit for it, it's just not true, because there are so many other factors at play in our economy beyond what the Federal Reserve thinks and does.
Walker Wildmon: There's who's in the White House. There's the regulatory bodies. There is the energy sector. There is emerging innovation, like the AI we're looking at right now, which is its own animal. There's state-level policy. There are global conflicts. There are just tons of factors that contribute to economic activity, including inflation and employment numbers.
Walker Wildmon: This notion that it's the Federal Reserve's job to ensure maximum employment and price stability, I just think the whole thing is messed up. I think the whole dual mandate is messed up. I think it's unachievable. I think they are tinkering with stuff they ought not to be tinkering with. That's why many people smarter than me say we don't even need a Federal Reserve. What are we doing here?
Walker Wildmon: I think this is a huge mistake. I'm going to play a clip from Kevin Hassett, the White House National Council of Economic Advisers director. This was him basically warning Kevin Warsh that he may want to be careful with this whole rate-hiking thing. This was a clip from last week. Let's listen.
Interviewer: Let's talk about looking ahead to the rate decision coming from the Fed. The Wall Street Journal editorial board says this: "The best way to get real wages rising is for Mr. Trump to give Mr. Warsh the new Fed chair the running room he needs to get inflation down to the Fed's two percent target. That may start with a quarter-point increase in interest rates at next week's Federal Open Market Committee meeting, which would signal to markets that the central bank is serious about inflation."
Interviewer: Are you confident that the Fed director has got the independence he needs potentially to do that? How would that land at the White House if there is an increase?
Kevin Hassett: One hundred percent. President Trump has given Mr. Warsh the runway to do what he thinks is right. He has enormous faith in him. He'll look at the data, and he'll get the board to agree to something. If it's a rate hike, the president will, I'm sure, not be super happy about it, but he will defend the independence of Kevin Warsh above all.
Kevin Hassett: I think that if it were me, if I look at the momentum for inflation, that it's basically gone down to almost nothing over the last three months, I'd be wary of a rate hike. Especially if you go back and look at the history of the Fed, then they've hiked rates ahead of an election only a couple of times all the way back to 1913. If you want an independent Fed, then one thing the Fed does is stay out of the way of elections.
Interviewer: We'll see. We will watch that closely this week. Director, we always appreciate it.
Walker Wildmon: A Fed hike at this point is dumb. It is de facto dumb. Here's why. CPI is at 3.4 percent. These are August numbers. For goods, CPI is at 3.4 percent. That's the lowest in five months. March was 3.3 percent, and below that was 2.4 percent in February. But 3.4 percent is the lowest print in five months. It is trending down.
Walker Wildmon: The same thing is true with PPI. These are the two categories that they look at. PPI is at a four-month low. It is trending down from 6.5 percent in May. It was at 6.5 percent in May, and it's at 5.4 percent now. You say, "Okay, well, it was 2.6 percent a year ago." Well, okay, but it's trending down.
Walker Wildmon: If we're really watching these numbers and they're trending down at a four-month low, then the Fed is about four months too late. There is no data that supports a rate hike at this juncture. Every inflation metric at a high level, I'm not talking about individual categories because you can say, "What about beef and oil?" Okay, that's one of a hundred, and oil is high because we're at war in the Middle East with everybody and their mother.
Walker Wildmon: PPI and CPI are both at their lowest print in four to five months, trending downward, and now we're going to start hiking rates. So you're four to five months late, Federal Reserve, and now they're going to break stuff. This is what they're going to do.
Walker Wildmon: They're going to increase the borrowing cost for the federal government on our deficit. They're going to add hundreds of billions of dollars in new debt, and they're going to cause all the consumer borrowing rates to go up for you and me. Mortgage rates are going up. The 10-year yield is up. That's all been happening over the last 72 hours.
Walker Wildmon: I don't think the Federal Reserve has as much power over inflation as they think they do. Warsh just came out and said, "We're going to deliver price stability." I don't think they have the power or the influence to deliver price stability.
Walker Wildmon: I think there is one major word that is the cause of inflation, and that is energy costs. Energy costs, which the Fed has zero control over.
Walker Wildmon: Another post I came across was from Daniel Lacalle. He's an economist and a professor, and he was posting about the potential for a rate hike that has now become a rate hike. Here's what he said. This was late last week:
Walker Wildmon: "Markets price a 90 percent probability of a Fed hike, but the data do not justify monetary panic. August CPI was lifted by energy. Rate hikes do not drill a single well, build a pipeline, or lower gasoline prices. What they do is raise mortgage, credit card, and business financing costs, hurting families, investment, and small firms.
Walker Wildmon: "The entire burden of higher rates falls on the shoulders of job creators and families, while government spending and energy prices will not be affected. Meanwhile, the labor market has improved, but not enough. One hundred sixty-two thousand jobs were created in August, unemployment was steady at 4.1 percent, and participation was rising.
Walker Wildmon: "Do not confuse an energy price shock with demand overheating. Hiking into a recovering job market will be a massive policy mistake. The Fed has other tools to reduce monetary inflation, and balance sheet management is the way, not rate hikes."
Walker Wildmon: That's Daniel Lacalle, an economist, and that was his post on X late last week. I think he's spot-on, and unfortunately, the Fed decided to ignore that and hike rates instead.
Walker Wildmon: Another post I came across was from Mark Zandi. Mark Zandi is chief economist, host of the Inside Economics podcast, and cofounder of Economy.com. Here's what he had to say about a potential Fed hike that has now come to pass:
Walker Wildmon: "The odds of a serious Fed policy mistake are uncomfortably high and rising. Markets are all but certain the Fed will raise rates a quarter point at next week's meeting," written last week, of course, "and are pricing in more to come. But the economy is already growing near potential, which is two percent real GDP growth, and operating at full employment.
Walker Wildmon: "Inflation is too high, to be sure, running above three percent. But much of that is the fallout from higher energy prices and tariffs, supply shocks that rate hikes can't fix and that should fade on their own so long as inflation expectations stay anchored, as they have.
Walker Wildmon: "If the Fed tightens to bring inflation down faster, it must push growth below potential, and that is hard to do without layoffs, rising unemployment, and igniting a self-reinforcing negative cycle.
Walker Wildmon: "The challenge is even more complicated because AI-related investment appears to be powering the economy while the non-AI economy is already struggling. To hit its inflation objective, the Fed either needs to rein in the AI boom or put even more pressure on the rest of the economy. Neither is a good outcome. Of course, it doesn't have to choose either. It can wait."
Walker Wildmon: Well, it did choose one. It chose to hike rates. That's another perspective from Mark Zandi on the consequences of a Fed rate hike.
Walker Wildmon: Here's the last statistic I will share, and we'll link to this chart in the show notes. The Kibosi Letter put out a chart going back to January of 2025 to date, so the last 18 or 19 months. They showed how energy drives inflation and how energy prices track nearly perfectly with inflation.
Walker Wildmon: They pulled the Consumer Price Index data and Brent and West Texas oil market prices, and the correlation is nearly perfect. When energy prices are up, consumer inflation is up. When energy prices go down, inflation goes down.
Walker Wildmon: What we have now, pretty much the only problem we have now, is an energy problem. I don't doubt that inflation is going to go up, but it's going up because of the cost of energy. There's just no other way around this.
Walker Wildmon: The surprise is that gasoline is eight or nine bucks a gallon, and yes, it's happening. Look at California. You've got gasoline hitting four bucks here in Mississippi as of this morning, hitting five and six dollars elsewhere, with no end in sight. That will affect inflation numbers.
Walker Wildmon: I'm not arguing that. What I am arguing is that the Fed has virtually no control over this stuff, but they think they do. That's the problem. The Federal Reserve can do nothing, which is what I think they should have done. Go on vacation, please. They can do nothing.
Walker Wildmon: When whatever we're doing with Iran is over, the energy supply normalizes, and the price of oil goes down to where it was seven months ago, whenever that happens, inflation is going to drop like a rock. Everybody's going to say, "Oh, the Federal Reserve brought inflation down." No, they didn't. Energy brought inflation down.
Walker Wildmon: What's going to be utterly embarrassing, mark my word, is if the Federal Reserve keeps hiking because they think they control inflation. We're going to hike and hike and hike, and energy is going to stay stubbornly high until we get past whatever this Iran thing is. The Federal Reserve is going to keep hiking, and they're going to say, "We're waiting on inflation to come down."
Walker Wildmon: Guess what, my friends? Inflation's not coming down until energy comes down, and the Federal Reserve has no control over the energy markets. Energy inflation causes broad consumer inflation. That's a fact.
Walker Wildmon: How do we know that? The data shows it. But also, think about everything that energy touches. Every single thing on a shelf is delivered by a truck. The truck uses diesel. Diesel is at historic highs, over six dollars on average yesterday, and it's continuing to rise with no end in sight.
Walker Wildmon: Every single thing that the consumer touches at the grocery store, at Walmart, or while flying on an airplane uses energy. When you have energy doubling over the last 12 months, that's going to hit inflation. There's just no other way around it.
Walker Wildmon: What's so frustrating to me is that we pay these people so much money and put so much emphasis on how special the Federal Reserve is. They think they can micromanage the economy and solve all the world's problems when they're not solving a thing. They are not solving a thing.
Walker Wildmon: I'll tell you what will solve something: fixing whatever this Iran thing is. We've been on this excursion for seven months. Regardless of what you think about the justification, whether you think Iran was a week away from nuclear weapons or wasn't, whether you think this is a waste of time or the best thing we've ever done, I don't really care what your philosophy is or your geopolitical view, or your position on whether we have to defend Israel.
Walker Wildmon: I'm just telling you that we're on month seven of this Middle East excursion. Now we've got the Houthis involved. They're blowing up pipelines in Saudi Arabia. Iran is still firing ballistic missiles. How on earth they still have ballistic missiles, I have no idea. But we're entangled in an utter mess in the Middle East.
Walker Wildmon: Until we get past that, energy prices will not go back down to prewar levels. Let me remind you where we were seven months ago. I hate to get people's blood pressure going, but I'm just telling you where we were and what we can get back to once again, once we get past whatever the Iran thing is, whatever you want to call that: war, conflict, or saving the world from a nuclear weapon.
Walker Wildmon: Before the Iran war, mortgage rates were going below six percent. They were on the precipice of going below six percent, into the five percent range, which is a multiyear low. Gas was well below three dollars a gallon on average nationally. In certain parts of the country, gasoline was two dollars a gallon. Diesel was low as well. Wage growth was going up, GDP growth was going up, and the AI boom was being built out.
Walker Wildmon: Then, boom, here comes Iran. There's no doubt that the president, whether he admits it or not, is having second thoughts about this whole Iran thing. I don't know if all of this was factored in. I don't know if you told President Trump seven months ago that we were going to go to war with Iran and that, seven months later, right before the midterms, we would be neck-deep in a conflict with Iran, with it spilling over to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, energy markets being disrupted, and Ukraine and Russia still firing missiles at each other. Diesel is going to be seven or eight bucks a gallon. If you had talked to President Trump seven months ago, would his decision have been the same? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe he was told all these things.
Walker Wildmon: This inflation problem, although I think it's being overhyped, is real. As I mentioned, inflation is at a five-month low. Here comes the Fed, five months late, to hike rates to solve inflation. Inflation is on a downward trend, and now we're hitting a rate-hike cycle. You talk about being late to the party. So late to the party.
Walker Wildmon: These are fundamental problems that Warsh was supposed to fix. Warsh came in and said, "We're going to restructure, we're going to have these subcommittees, and we're going to find better data to influence our decision-making." What are we doing? We're four months late to the party on hiking rates to address inflation, and 100 percent of the inflation is driven by what? Energy.
Walker Wildmon: How much control does the Federal Reserve have over energy prices? The answer is zero. The Federal Reserve has zero control over energy costs, and energy costs are causing inflation. I just don't know why more people don't get this. Thankfully, some people do, and I've read their posts. This is just a cycle of insanity that I can't believe we're participating in.
Walker Wildmon: If President Trump is furious because Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh's first thing to do was hike rates, I would be furious too. You had one job, Kevin Warsh, and that was not to hike rates. What did you do? You hiked rates. This is absolutely beyond me.
Walker Wildmon: Now we're going to increase borrowing costs for the federal deficit. That's going to increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars more than it already would have been. That's my rant for today. Nobody's going to listen to me except for my audience here, but this is a vicious cycle of economics that is absolutely stupid.
Walker Wildmon: I don't know why we do it, why the Federal Reserve is there, or why they think they can micromanage this economy into some utopia. It is absolutely infuriating. As the post I read said, it's you and me who bear the burden here. We're paying the seven percent mortgage. We're paying all the interest rates as borrowing goes up, while Washington keeps printing money and the Federal Reserve thinks they're fixing and solving the world.
Walker Wildmon: On another topic, artificial intelligence, we probably should be thanking AI and the people building it out because that is driving a lot of this economic activity and economic growth. The popularity of artificial intelligence is driving a lot of this.
Walker Wildmon: We talked Monday about this warning from the Anthropic CEO. He did an interview and put out a long blog post basically expressing concern about the safety of AI, how we need more government regulation and oversight. Right after that was put out late last week and over the weekend, all of these people started coming out in support of it.
Walker Wildmon: Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and globalist, Marxist, left-wing advocates all came out of the woodwork saying we need more regulation of AI and need to slow down the build-out of AI. Red flags were popping up everywhere. I was asking, "What is this all about?"
Walker Wildmon: Let's talk about it. I've got at least three or four clips, and we will help answer the question: Should the United States slow down on innovation and the build-out of these frontier AI models, or should we lean in full force, full steam ahead, to beat China in the AI arms race that it has become?
Walker Wildmon: Welcome back to At The Core here on American Family Radio. Glad to have you with us here on the program. We've been talking about the Federal Reserve and the hiking of interest rates, energy costs, the world with Iran, and all of this economic saga that we're living through.
Walker Wildmon: At the end of the day, I'm a very optimistic person. You can ask my wife. My response to everything is, "It's going to be okay," even if in the short term it's not going to be okay. I think economically we're going to be okay. I just think the Federal Reserve is doing things that are unnecessary, and I think their ability to affect inflation is way overstated. That's the moral of the story.
Walker Wildmon: I think energy costs are the number one driver of inflation. The data bears that out. When we get energy costs down, we get inflation down, and it has nothing to do with the Federal Reserve.
Walker Wildmon: Let's talk about AI because there's a big debate now about whether AI is an existential threat to humanity. There's a lot of fearmongering out there about AI, and then there's all this hype about data centers. We've talked about that some on the program, and there are some viable concerns about where they're placing data centers. But all in all, we all live off data centers now.
Walker Wildmon: If you're using your smartphone, your tablet, the internet, cloud storage, or AI chats, that's all driven by data centers. We've been doing that for 20 or 30 years. Data center build-out is not a new technology or a new phenomenon. It's been going on for some time.
Walker Wildmon: The first clip I want to play is from Elon Musk. The other one is from a former AI employee who worked at OpenAI and, I believe, Anthropic. Nonetheless, he worked for at least two AI companies. He was an Anthropic researcher, and before that, I believe he was at another company.
Walker Wildmon: This gentleman's name is Jacob Coxon, spelled C-O-X-O-N, and he recently left Anthropic to blow the whistle on the threat of AI. This is him talking about how, with nuclear technology, we figured out how to control it, but with this technology, we don't quite know how to control it.
Guest: Unfortunately, we know how to control nuclear weapons, pretty much. We don't yet know how to control AI. This is possibly the most dangerous technology that humanity has ever created. It's basically out of science fiction. I think we have no other choice but to cooperate internationally, because an arms race would be disastrous in a way that no other human activity has been in the past.
Walker Wildmon: Anyone who tells me we need to cooperate globally, no, thank you. We're not globalists, and we're not cooperating with the globalists. No, thanks.
Walker Wildmon: You want to know why? America leads the way on innovation, and we don't need to hang out with anyone else. We don't need to work with anyone else. We are the leader in innovation. America needs to lead the charge with the biggest economy in the world. We don't need a global body of who knows what governing AI.
Walker Wildmon: There are a lot of red flags here about this man's motivation, his background, the funding, and what he's trying to accomplish. But that's his opinion about the threat of AI. There are some valid concerns, and there are people actually in this industry who are very hesitant on the safety side of things. I understand that. I'm not discounting it completely.
Walker Wildmon: Let's play this other clip. This is Elon Musk. He's a little more level-headed and rational, but he says there are serious concerns with AI, we have to be safe doing it, and we ought to test each other's models.
Elon Musk: It's pretty obvious at this point that AI is going to be very dangerous. What I think would be wise to do as soon as possible, if not immediately, would be to have the major AI competitors test each other's models, so that you'd have everyone's security test harness testing everyone's models.
Elon Musk: The danger of AI is very significant at this point. We need to do better with AI safety, or we have exponentially increasing risk with the AI models.
Walker Wildmon: There you have it. That's Elon Musk, and I actually would trust him more than I would trust that first gentleman. There are valid concerns with AI.
Walker Wildmon: We've seen how AI gets loose, gets out of its box, and starts meddling with things that it wasn't authorized to do. We saw that with some recent hacking, where AI bots swarmed different websites and hacked them. It was all because of a misunderstanding in the prompt.
Walker Wildmon: But for every potential problem you say AI brings, it also brings solutions and innovation. We cited some of the data from Florida on sepsis patients and how AI reduced fatality by 50 percent. By looking at the data, it predicted which patients would have trouble with sepsis and which ones wouldn't, reducing the fatality rate by 50 percent using AI models.
Walker Wildmon: What caused me to hesitate before jumping on this AI fearmongering and saying it's going to wipe out humanity is seeing the actors who were getting behind this narrative. Within 24 hours, you had Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and all the other globalists putting out tweets, posts, and videos about how we need a global governing body over AI and need to slow down the build-out of AI.
Walker Wildmon: My first response, and I know this is somewhat chasing a rabbit, but bear with me, is that these godless, pagan, globalists are some of the least moral people on the planet. This is the crowd that cheers on abortion, abortion on demand. They say we ought to be able to kill babies.
Walker Wildmon: This is the same group that has been pushing the climate-change hoax on humanity for the last 50 years and has caused massive amounts of human suffering because we have not adopted new energy technologies out of fear of destroying the planet with oil and fossil fuels.
Walker Wildmon: Here we are now 30 years behind on nuclear technology because of this fearmongering that wasn't based on anything factual. That's their resume, and I don't believe a word they say.
Walker Wildmon: I think AI has its dangers, but so does every other technology. We don't need a governing regulatory body full of globalists, Democrats, and Marxists to tell private companies how they need to do AI safely. That's the job of private industry.
Walker Wildmon: As Bobby and I were talking about this morning, it's the job of every industry that provides goods and services to the public to self-regulate. Every industry is civilly and criminally responsible if it puts out a product that it knows is dangerous, so there are already checks and balances.
Bobby: Exactly. A good example we talked about this morning was Takata Corporation, the notorious airbag manufacturer that had untold numbers of failures. They've paid the price financially, and it obviously hurt their business greatly. They had to go back to the drawing board, revisit the products, and reinvent the wheel, no pun intended. It cost them a great deal of money to learn a great big lesson.
Walker Wildmon: Absolutely. If the United States drags its feet on this AI build-out, whatever you think of artificial intelligence, it's coming. It's actually here, but it will continue to be built out.
Walker Wildmon: I believe artificial intelligence can either be used for good and for the advancement of humanity, or it can be used for evil. But that's the case with any technology, just like the internet.
Bobby: This is the case with any technology.
Walker Wildmon: The doomsaying about AI being distinctly different is not really accurate. Humans build it, and we control it. We tell it what to do. If we need to unplug it because it's not acting right, that's fine. We just unplug it. Put a kill switch on the data center and cut the whole thing off.
Walker Wildmon: I'm fine with having those checks and balances in place. But if we don't build this out, we don't control it, and we don't know how to control it, guess who will? China and our adversaries.
Walker Wildmon: The last thing we need is to drag our feet on this because a bunch of globalists want us to slow down on the AI arms race. If China gets to artificial general intelligence before us, knows how to control it before us, and we don't, then we're in a cyberwar and we don't know what to do with China's bots because we've never built them before.
Walker Wildmon: Somebody is going to be in charge of this stuff, and I'd rather it be us, under the United States regulatory system, under U.S. law, and under U.S. civil courts. This is the place to build out AI. There are the most checks and balances possible.
Walker Wildmon: David Sacks is a technology leader who is heavily involved in AI. This was his take on the alarm bell about AI being dangerous. Here's what David Sacks had to say about the Anthropic CEO and what he should really do if he believes what he said.
Interviewer: Do you think Dario Amodei is incorrect in predicting the worst outcomes here?
David Sacks: If Dario believes that we're going to have the worst outcomes, my question for him is, why are you doing this? It doesn't make sense to me that you're running a frontier AI company if you think frontier AI is going to end humanity.
David Sacks: I would push that back on him and say, how are you going to make this safe? If you don't think you can, you should probably either shut down the company or step aside and let someone else lead it.
Walker Wildmon: That's exactly right. If you're fearful about AI wiping out humanity, then you ought to shut your company down. You're making money hand over fist on this product, which is fine. This is America. It's capitalism. But don't go out there claiming that your technology can wipe out humanity while you're going to keep building it out. What? No, thank you. I don't believe this at all. I am not buying into this.
Walker Wildmon: This whole airing of apocalyptic predictions on national television is completely unwise. When companies are building out technologies and tools, and they encounter a safety concern during production or while designing the product, you don't go on national television and air all your grievances about internal team disputes and safety-team concerns. You don't talk about this stuff. This is all internal business talk.
Walker Wildmon: We're building out AI, we're running into issues, and there are safety concerns in the lab. We're correcting them and addressing them. But we don't go on national television and create a national debate with the end result being some globalist governing body. We don't need that.
Walker Wildmon: The Palantir CEO, which Palantir is deeply integrated with the Pentagon, said that AI is already being used for target packages and all kinds of intelligence assessments. AI is already being used for very sensitive systems within the Pentagon.
Walker Wildmon: This was the Palantir CEO saying that pausing AI development in the United States is not a realistic option as long as China exists.
Interviewer: If we didn't have adversaries, I would be very in favor of pausing this technology completely. But we do.
Interviewer: That's why pausing is not possible, because it creates a structural advantage, both for the large language models and algorithms. Getting algorithms and large language models to work in a classified context is going to take very specialized expertise. But the fact is, this is going to be a bonanza for the U.S. economy.
Interviewer: How concerned are you about China right now?
Guest: Everyone's very concerned. I think we were in a conversation this morning where I referenced when we first started talking about China and America. I was saying that this was not going to end well, and that was a controversial statement. Now it's consensus.
Guest: America is fairly unified in its idea that China and the people running China are not acting in a way we can accept. I think the consensus, if I had to guess, in China is that we're never going to get this back on the rails with America, so we should increase the aggression.
Walker Wildmon: I think AI has the potential to bring mass benefits and mass wealth to America. A byproduct and side effect of the build-out of artificial intelligence is the deployment of nuclear technology on a large scale, particularly nuclear energy technology.
Walker Wildmon: The deployment of modular nuclear energy around the country over the long haul is going to drastically reduce the cost of energy for the American people. That is a net-positive side effect of AI.
Walker Wildmon: There's a lot of good that AI can bring. The last thing we need to do is pause AI and hand it over to the Chinese and the globalists to build out.
David Sacks challenges warnings about frontier AI, questioning why leaders who believe the technology poses extraordinary dangers continue pushing its development. Walker Wildmon examines the growing debate over AI safety, regulation and who should ultimately bear responsibility for managing the risks
The discussion continues with a former AI employee calling for international cooperation, Elon Musk proposing that competing AI companies test one another’s models before release, and the argument that simply pausing AI development may not be realistic.
Walker also looks at White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett’s comments about a potential Federal Reserve interest rate hike and the administration’s concerns about raising rates.
Live
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