Thank you everybody for being here. Excited to talk with David about all the exciting stuff that's going on in the world of artificial intelligence. Obviously, you and Intellimize have been such a huge part of this. Kind of talk to us about some of these innovations that are going on. Some people when they hear about AI, they think of, you know, talking to my phone to get a recipe or directions somewhere, but there's so much exciting stuff going on. Kind of tell us some of the things that excite you and some of the things that Intellimize is doing there.
Yeah, absolutely. Sorry about that. I think we're sort of moving from a world where AI can answer questions to one in which it can perform missions. So, you're getting to the point where you can have long-running tasks that AI is capable of doing for you in a way that just wasn't possible before, and that's a result of sort of the changes that are happening on the state-of-the-art model side. And as it relates to telecommunications, I guess I'll do a little intro on Intellimize. We're effectively the global infrastructure layer for real-time AI. We enable our customers to be able to send and receive text messages, make and receive phone calls. You may know some of our customers if you've ever been reminded to check in for a flight on United or Hawaiian, or a friendly reminder to donate blood from the Red Cross. By the way, please don't mark those spam. Those are the sort of problems that we help our customers solve, and I think, you know, obviously very interesting to see what's happening at the enterprise, but the startup community is like doing some pretty incredible stuff in terms of building out interactions that I think, you know, what I like to think of is like competent AI agents are better than incompetent people. And so, that's sort of the world that we're shifting toward.
So that especially with the workforce, there's so many changes that AI is helping to supplement what American workers are doing. But there's also a lot of misconceptions about what's going on and what AI is doing and its effects on American workers. Can you talk about that? Maybe dispel some of those myths about AI?
Yeah, I think there's been a lot of doomerism about how AI is going to take white collar jobs, and I don't think anything could be further from the truth. Our folks are busier than ever. They're able to accomplish 10 times what they were able to accomplish even a year ago. And, you know, I think people need to realize it's not them versus AI, it's AI plus them versus the rest of the world. And so that's where the opportunity really is. You know, I just, you know, I remember seeing from someone at the company, they just sent me a note saying, 'I feel insane and all powerful.' And, you know, these are people that have never been able to build anything. They've had great ideas, they wanted to be able to execute on them. But for whatever reason, their requests weren't prioritized, they didn't have the engineering resources to be able to automate whatever it is they wanted to do. And now they can do it themselves. So, I think it's a pretty exciting time.
Can you give an example of how someone can harness AI? Maybe somebody who wants to start a company or expand maybe in a non-conventional way, but has been able to harness AI to help them kind of get their little piece of the American dream?
Yeah, yeah. So, I have a great story. I was in an Uber talking to an Uber driver. He had an idea. He was like, 'I have this idea,' you know, I explained to him what space I was in. He was like, 'I need to be able to text message people, but you know, will you partner with me on this? You know, I don't want you to take my idea.' And I said, 'Well, you don't need me. You know, we have a publicly available API and you can just use Claude Code or an equivalent to go build it yourself.' And he sort of looked at me and was like, you know, we traded numbers and two weeks later, he sent me a fully fledged built product that he had done himself while, I mean, effectively moonlighting as an engineer. And so, he's launching the product. He's raised some money. He's off to the races. Yeah, he's actually also concurrently started a consultancy to help businesses implement AI. So, I think more than anything, it's democratizing. There's no question that, you know, we have something unique in this country with ingenuity, an ability to adapt, and I think, you know, combined with the technology, it puts us at a huge, huge advantage.
It's exciting stuff. Anytime you have some kind of emerging technology, something that's growing as quickly as AI is, there's always the issue of regulation and all these other questions that arise with that. It seems like President Trump and his administration, there doesn't seem to be a lot of doomerism, as you said, with him. It seems like Trump has kind of understood this out of the gate, the need to, as he sees most things, he sees it through geopolitical competition with China. But he's talked so much about the need for the United States to lead on AI or else we will be led by China. Can you talk about some of the things that excite you that President Trump and his administration have done in this area?
Yeah, I mean, look, we couldn't be more grateful for the work that the Trump administration has done. I think, you know, I'll quote Jensen here. I may misquote him. But, you know, the unique strategic advantage that the United States has is President Trump, and he's been able to sort of see through all the noise and tackle this on numerous fronts, right? First and foremost, on the EO side, really hope Congress comes to the table and takes it across the line, but meanwhile, getting, you know, preventing states from sort of passing this patchwork of legislation, getting ahead of the energy issue. AI takes down a lot of energy. That's just the reality that's likely not going to change anytime soon. We're going to need more of it. And three, solving the permitting problem. We need more data centers. We need more fiber. It should be easy to build in the United States. So, those are all issues that the administration has been tackling, and we're obviously incredibly grateful for the work that they've been doing. So, yeah, I mean, look, there's always more that can be done, but we're in pretty good shape.
You talk about the patchwork of regulations. It seems like anytime this subject gets brought up, whether it's AI or anything else, California always gets brought into the conversation. What has California been doing with AI, and was it important for the Trump administration, Congress to act to make sure that California doesn't mess up America's position of leading in AI?
Look, I mean, I think maybe well-intentioned, I don't know, but the general gist is we're sort of stuck in this lowest common denominator framework. They're exporting their values to the entire country, and we're sort of in this situation where they're just an inhibition to building. So, you know, we're sort of looking, they have us to both the Fair Housing and Employment Act as well as the California Consumer Privacy Act. In both of those, if you use AI anywhere, you have reporting obligations to the state. You have, you know, safety testing that you have to do. You have the ability to opt out. And, you know, there is a concern with AI, right? It can be used by malicious actors. And so, like, we think that the best way to fight misuse of AI is AI. But now if you do that, you may be running afoul of some law in California. And we see this sort of, we saw this on the privacy side. I was talking to an entrepreneur. They're like, 'I was just served.' 'What were you served for?' 'I was served because I didn't have a cookie banner on my website.' And, you know, we were running some sort of application in the background there. And so, you know, here they are sort of having to hire a lawyer to fight off this privacy act stuff. And it's just unnecessary. It gets in the way. Like the big companies, they can obviously afford it. Like the large AI labs, they love regulation. They get to pull the ladder up behind themselves. They can deal with 50 different states, but it's the sort of upstarts, the entrepreneurs, the folks that are working in open source. Those are the folks that are most negatively impacted by what California is doing.
Yeah, you got to watch those cookie banners. Look, when conservatives hear California, they obviously recoil a little bit. But it's even like states like Florida who are acting in this. But even that, we talk about, you know, that patchwork of regulations. Even if maybe the policy is sound, it sounds to me like that could still impact all these companies across the country.
Yeah, I think what it comes down to is we just need, look, rules are okay. It's okay to have rules. We just need a single, clear set of rules, right? That everyone can follow, that everyone understands. And look, the world is becoming more competitive than ever. And you have to sort of think about folks like China, obviously, who don't have these issues and are able to sort of continue to push through. And we have an advantage, but we've sort of seen, you know, everybody was super excited about OpenAI a year ago. Now they're excited about Anthropic. The space is incredibly dynamic, and we're going to have to do everything we can to maintain our lead. And so, in the absence of a federal framework, I think we risk having to slow down. And this is not a time that we want to be slowing down. I think this is potentially the most important race in human history.
Can you talk more about what path forward you would like to see, whether legislatively or on the regulatory side, what actions Congress and the administration need to do going forward?
I think we just need to find an opportunity for common sense regulation at the federal level, preemption. You know, there's obviously issues that can be focused on by the states, but, you know, the sort of broad rules of the road need to be handled here in DC.
Great. So, kind of going forward, obviously there's so many changes being made to the workforce by AI innovation, but as we've talked about, a lot of it's good. What would you tell somebody who is in or about to enter the workforce, whether it's somebody who wants to start a business or maybe grow and expand or hire? What would your message be to them about the exciting future of AI innovation and how it can, if they're an employer, how they can harness it to grow their business, or if they're a worker, how it can make their job, their career much more fruitful and enjoyable?
Look, I think we've seen reticence, right? You know, we've sort of been talking about this now for a couple of years. I think seeing is believing, and so what I would recommend to anybody that has any concerns about this: engage the tooling, try to build something. It doesn't even have to be meaningful, right? Like you can do throwaway things, but you can start to understand the contours of the technology. And I would go as far as to say, like, if you can imagine it can be done by computer, you should ask a computer to do it, and I think you'll be pretty surprised with what that computer is capable of doing for you. So just, and look, the technology is changing tremendously all the time. I'm constantly surprised by what's happening. My favorite tool now is OpenClaw, and so open source tool, you can leverage any of the models, spin up a bot, give it a name, provide it a soul, and start to engage with that in a meaningful way. And I think what's truly amazing is anything is possible. And it's not about like building what's possible for the technology today. It's just changing so fast that you should be even thinking about building for what's going to be possible in six or 12 months.
A lot of exciting stuff ahead. David Cancel, co-founder and CEO. Thank you for joining us today.
Thanks for having me. Thank you.
All right, we're going to take like a five to seven minute break. Everybody grab some coffee, meet your neighbors, and we'll be back shortly.
Mhm.
All right, everybody. We're going to get rolling here if we can find our seats again.
Guys, if everybody could take their seats, we're going to get rolling.
All right, here we go. Before we get started, we just wanted to thank our sponsors, Telnext and the, I'm blanking, it's going to come up, World Liberty Financial. I'm still the CEO of Breitbart. And our partners, Alpha Institute and CGCN. And now, without further ado, our Washington bureau chief, Matthew Boyle, and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.
So, Mr. Chairman, thank you for taking the time to do this. We really appreciate it.
Yes, so glad to be here. Thanks so much to Breitbart. You know, Breitbart's doing phenomenal work breaking big stories. Your reporters in DC are great. Sean Moran has got a lot of really good stories out there, and I just love seeing what you guys are doing, what you're putting out there, and happy to chat with you today.
So, I want to start really big picture. Okay, so we've seen a number of different people across the establishment media. They've called you Trump's pit bull in the media. We've seen South Park talk about you. We've seen all sorts of different things. How about this? Let's hear it straight from the horse's mouth. What is your role as the FCC Chairman in the Trump administration? How do you approach the position? What does the president expect of you? How do you view this position? What are you trying to accomplish?
Yeah, thanks. Well, look, first and foremost for me, I try to stay out of the headlines. I try to avoid controversy. I try to avoid invites with late-night hosts or people that, you know, print ink by the barrel, but I seem to be failing in that effort. Look, if you step back, I think, you know, President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the entire media ecosystem. He's doing it in ways that most people don't even understand. They think it's, you know, various sort of direct, secret things that are happening. That's not it at all. When President Trump ran, particularly this most recent time, as every other time as well, he really ran directly at the legacy national news media. For so long, politicians just accepted the narrative that they were handed down. And they didn't want to fight that narrative. They didn't want to push back. They didn't have their own sufficiently big soapbox to push back. They just took the narrative. And President Trump fundamentally disrupted that, and he set the terms of the debate. And so many politicians are used to the terms of the debate being dictated to them by legacy media. And once President Trump did that, it really just smashed this facade that those gatekeepers get to control what we think and what we say. And you start to see the consequences of him deciding that, you know, the legacy media is the emperor with no clothes. You see all sorts of changes now. NPR defunded, PBS defunded, a lot of these legacy reporters from Jim Acosta to Don Lemon losing their jobs. You see a lot of change and upheaval in the media ecosystem. Again, I think it goes back fundamentally to Trump saying, you know, you don't get to set the narrative anymore.
So, one of the things that we've seen, and it was interesting, I was talking to a European journalist about this recently, is that the trust in legacy media, especially at the national level, is at the lowest levels it's ever been. Why do you think that is? What can we do about it? And by the way, on the flip side, people do trust their local journalists. I've seen you talk about this, right? They trust their local newspaper, they trust their local TV guys. So that's fascinating. But why do you think that problem exists? What can we do about it to fix it?
There's a big gap in trust between, you know, legacy national media and local news journalists. In fact, we can talk about this more, but you see newspapers close by the dozens all across the country. We lost a lot of really good gumshoe reporting. Now, local TV stations, you know, live at five, live at six, that's sort of the only thing left across the country of actual real gumshoe reporting. And we want to do a lot more at the FCC to try to support them and empower them. The problem is at the legacy level. You look at the statistics, it's something like only nine percent of people have a great deal of trust in national news media. I used to say or still say that more people trust gas station sushi than legacy media. And it's not just a throwaway line. There's actually a study that says 15 percent of people would eat gas station sushi, but only nine percent of people have trust in the legacy national media. And it's for a confluence of factors. I would say maybe three or four different things are going on. One, the legacy media in particular, unlike local, is just wildly out of touch with where the American people are. You can see example after example. So Super Bowl Sunday, people are gearing up for the big game, they're all excited about it. Washington Post out with a story that says the most important person to the Super Bowl, most recent Super Bowl, was Colin Kaepernick. Right? Something that no actual human being in America would reach that conclusion, but the legacy media thinks...
Even more important than Bad Bunny?
Right. That's what they think. And so just drastically out of touch. You see, you know, after the US men's hockey team wins a historic gold medal, you see ABC journalists saying that the US men's hockey team really missed the cultural moment because they spent time with the president of the United States. Or you see, you know, Time magazine, I think before the Olympics, ran a sort of CCP-aligned skier on their cover. So, it's just this one feature of it is drastically out of touch. A second feature is consistently being exposed for running hoaxes that go in one direction year after year after year. Mostly peaceful protest. Biden is of sound mind. Covington Catholic. Russiagate. Russiagate. Russiagate. I mean, the list of these hoaxes that the legacy media was running went on and on and on. Another feature, you have a lot of sort of straight news journalists that sit on the evening news. And when they eventually lose their job, the mask falls and they show you who they really are, whether it's Don Lemon or Jim Acosta or Dan Rather, Terry Moran. You know, once they sort of stop sitting behind that anchor desk, they show you that they're really just partisan actors. I think that just undermines the credibility of the other people then that take their place in the seat. And finally, I'd say people have access to news and information from so many different sources now that that gatekeeping role is eroded. You can actually find out the truth about stories. Again, just today, I mean, I could not believe it. I woke up this morning and CNN has this tweet up about how these, you know, two innocent kids were traveling to New York City on a warm summer day and lo and behold, they found themselves caught with charges of terrorism for dropping effectively IEDs at a protest. And CNN left that tweet up. They've now deleted it, but the story itself is still up there. And again, it's whether that falls in the hoax bucket or the out of touch bucket, I don't know, but it's just time after time after time. And that's why you see that trust in the legacy media just continuing to crater.
Okay, so now you guys have been taking some steps, speaking of like the local journalists out there, the local TV stations, right? One of the big challenges they're facing at this moment is they're competing with big tech on the big national playing field, and so you guys have taken some steps to lift the broadcast ownership caps. Can you talk to us a little bit about that policy and how that has helped maybe some of these local television networks compete on the bigger stage?
I think the best way to think about the media ecosystem as relevant to this question is to think about it as two main buckets of actors. On the one hand you have what we call the national programmers. So that's Comcast, Disney, Fox, Paramount. Those are national programmers. Those are the ones that create most of the daytime and nighttime shows that you're used to seeing, but they're not actually in that capacity...
Believe me, we're going to get to nighttime shows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're not...
But they're not in that capacity...
licensed by the FCC as programmers, just creating the programmers. That's one bucket of actors. On the other hand, you've got thousands of individual TV stations that are licensed by the FCC, and they're the ones that actually broadcast or disseminate the national programmers' content. Okay. Over the years there's been a pretty good balance of power between local TV stations and national programmers. So for instance, if a national programmer had a program that was really not a good fit for a particular local community, the local TV station could preempt, they could not run it. Sometimes in years past local TV stations would not run entire seasons of particular programs that they didn't think was a good fit for their community. But over the years that balance of power has shifted really dramatically in the hands of those national programmers such that your local TV station in too many cases is simply just a mouthpiece for programming being created in Hollywood and in New York. And so we've lost that balance of actual local news stations connected to the communities, licensed by the FCC with an obligation to serve the community where their antenna is. And so we've been taking a number of steps at the FCC to try to reinvigorate and re-empower local broadcasters. One issue that we've been looking at is this issue of a national cap. Historically, the FCC has limited the number of TV stations any entity can own. And actually, perversely, the idea originally was that was to prevent the national programmers from buying too many TV stations and getting too powerful. But over the years, the national programmers have amassed scale and power outside of owning TV stations. So we're looking at allowing TV stations to scale to better compete against those national programmers, and also to open up additional resources to actually invest in news gathering. But there's a lot of actions we're taking across multiple different dockets that are basically consistent with that same theme of empowering local TV stations to give the Heisman a bit more to some of the national programmers.
Okay. So now, speaking of late night programs, right? Like so, we obviously saw the big fight you had, the big dust-up with Jimmy Kimmel late last year. And now, in addition to that, we just saw very recently, and this is big-time news right now because the primary was just a week ago in Texas, where Stephen Colbert, another late night host, seemed to misuse on purpose your stated efforts to do equal time stuff for political candidates as part of a stunt to elevate James Talarico, the now, by the way, crazy radical moderate, crazy radical guy running for Senate in Texas on the Democrat side. They portray him as a moderate, but he's not. Everything that we've seen about this guy, his record's insane. But the point is that the Democrat establishment wanted him over Jasmine Crockett. And what they did was they did this stunt where they flew him out for an interview with Colbert. And now we've since learned since the election, the New York Times has reported that Talarico knew before he even got on the plane that the whole interview would never air on television. It was just for online, but they've tried to claim that you were the reason why this interview didn't air on television. That's not true. So I wanted to get your thoughts on what happened there with that whole Talarico thing because it seems like it's just part of this bigger trend, if you will, of these late night comedians being partisan political hacks.
Well, it wasn't that long ago that I think late night TV was, you know, broadly appealing to a big cross-section of the country. They were effectively court jesters. They would make fun of everybody, Republican and Democrat. It was largely popular programming, but they've shifted from, you know, the court jester mode to the court cleric mode where they are effectively enforcing very particular bespoke orthodoxies. They've gone from going for laugh lines to going to applause lines. There's been a real fundamental shift, and the consequence of that is you just see the ratings, just like CNN and others, continuing to go to the floor. And reports where Colbert was losing millions and millions of dollars. That's why his show is ending soon. But again, stepping back, you've got broadcast television is fundamentally different than any other means of distributing programming because they are licensed fundamentally by the FCC. You have to operate in the public interest. And when the FCC licenses a broadcast television station, again, different from cable, different from streaming, different from YouTube, different than newspapers, you're licensed by the FCC. That means the government has picked a winner, and the people denied the microphone are effectively losers. And so the FCC uses what's been referred to over the years as a public trustee model. When you are a broadcaster, you're not just looking out for your own narrow partisan interest, you're supposed to represent and serve the needs of the entire community around you. There's lots of different rules and regulations that come out of that basic concept. One of them is this concept called equal time, which is Congress passed a law that said if a broadcaster is going to air a legally qualified candidate for office, he has to provide comparable time and placement to all other legally qualified candidates. This has been a rule on the books for decades and decades.
But the FCC seemingly had walked away from enforcing that regulation, or broadcasters had simply misread the provision as not applying, because the provision does include an exception for things called bona fide news programs. So, if you're a bona fide news program, and Congress at the time had things in mind like Meet the Press, you know, real hard-hitting, you know, journalistic programs, you didn't have to comply with equal time. But again, over the years, people assumed that everything is bona fide news, and therefore the equal time doesn't apply. We put out a public notice a couple weeks ago reminding broadcasters that no, in fact, the equal time rule still exists. There is an exception for bona fide news programming, but you have to demonstrate that you're subject to that.
Okay. That brings us to the most recent Tallarico Colbert episode. But you're exactly right in how you describe it. Apparently what happened was CBS provided guidance to the Late Show to Colbert saying, 'You can run this interview. It may trigger an equal time obligation, and here's lots of different ways that you could comply with that equal time.' There was never any suggestion by the FCC, or apparently CBS, they couldn't run the interview exactly the way they wanted to, but instead of complying with the law and providing equal opportunity to Jasmine Crockett and others running, they decided to run with this censorship hoax.
And it was probably one of the more entertaining days I've had on this job. I woke up, I think it was a Tuesday morning, and I saw a tweet from the James Tallarico account saying, 'This is the interview that the FCC doesn't want you to see.' And this was the first time I'd even heard about this episode. It said something like the FCC refused to air that episode. As if we have some sort of dump button somewhere in the FCC that we prevent people from running different ads and we, you know, got up in the morning and ran down there and pushed the dump button and said, 'These are, you know, MAGA Airways now. You know, you're not going to run that interview anymore.' It didn't happen. It was a total hoax.
Then the story sort of unraveled further. They said, 'Well, it wasn't the FCC, but it was CBS itself that prohibited it.' Again, CBS then came out with a statement saying it wasn't. This was effectively a self-Streisand effect moment where someone was falsely claiming that they were censored by the Trump administration because they knew that the legacy media would eat it up and run with the story that someone was censored when they weren't. But it was all just a ploy to get clicks, to get donations.
Well, it worked. I mean, he's the Democrat nominee now for US Senate, right? Like I mean, if you think about it, right? Like I mean, they got what they wanted. Jasmine Crockett was leading in the polls by double digits before this all happened. After this happened, now all of a sudden James Tallarico takes the lead. So, I mean, do we do anything about this? What do we do to prevent future people from doing this? I mean, it's kind of genius of the Barack Obama crowd. I mean, Barack Obama was entirely all behind James Tallarico and one would think him and his team were instrumental in making this happen. But that being said, I mean, they basically rigged the election and stole it from Jasmine Crockett. I don't like Jasmine Crockett, but hey, you know what? I feel bad for her here, right? Like she got screwed, right?
The entire purpose of the equal time rule was to prevent media gatekeepers from deciding the outcomes of elections. The provision is designed to ensure that individual people and voters get to decide. And so, the fact that the interview didn't run on broadcast TV means that there wasn't an equal time issue there, but there were others. So, for instance, The View. The View had James Tallarico also on. They have claimed that The View is a bona fide news program and therefore qualifies for the exception to equal time.
Interestingly enough, that's not a position that is uniformly agreed to even within the broadcast community. So, I don't—this hasn't really been widely covered, but after Tallarico appeared on The View, again separate from the Colbert episode, which did air on broadcast TV, a number of local TV stations in Texas did file equal time notices in their political files signifying that they don't necessarily agree with Disney that The View qualifies as bona fide news. We have an enforcement proceeding underway right now where Disney's continuing to maintain and defend that The View is a bona fide news program, and we are working that matter up as an enforcement case right now.
Okay, so now shifting gears here a little bit. You mentioned streaming and one of the things that I think you guys are engaged in a listening tour, if you will. You're asking people for their experiences and whatnot, particularly with regard to sports, right? Like so, you guys are out there asking folks to weigh in on—so one of the things you see with sports streaming and all these different things with the—if you're, you know, you got the NFL or you're a baseball fan, I'm a big baseball fan personally, but if you're trying to watch the games in and out of market, there's especially in the world of streaming, there's different issues with this. Can you talk to us a little bit about this and how you guys are kind of—because this is a less political thing, but I think that it's something that consumers are very into, and then I want to get into more broader consumer protection efforts that you guys are engaged in.
Yeah, this is a really interesting one. So, you look, most Americans for decades, you could sit down on your chair, you could take the remote, you can find the game that you wanted to see quickly, easily. It was either broadcast TV or on your regular, you know, basic cable program on a broadcast TV channel. But over the most recent couple of years, that has become a lot more complicated. A lot more games have been going behind paywalls, people have to sign up for different streaming services. They can't remember what the passcode is, they can't get access to the game. You sign up for a service, then you got to remember to cancel it within 30 days, you don't have to pay for it, but it's become just much more cumbersome and difficult for consumers.
And so, we're taking a look at this to see if there's a role for the FCC, in part because broadcast over-the-air TV and sports leagues have had a really good relationship over the last number of decades. And it's one that's benefited everyday Americans because they can quickly, easily, and usually for free find the games they want. But that's starting to change. And we want to take a look at that. So, we're asking the public to comment on it. There are legal issues involved. There's an antitrust exemption that applies to sports leagues, for instance. Some of the key triggering language in there is about telecast. And so, there is a question that people are debating in the FCC record, which is to say, if you take an NFL game and you put it on a streaming service rather than broadcast TV, does the NFL still get to benefit from the broad antitrust exemption? So, these are all issues that we expect to get hashed out a bit in the FCC's record. You know, there's limits on what we can do from an authority perspective, but there is an important relationship between sports leagues, local broadcasting, investment in local newsgathering that we thought it made sense to tee this up and open it up for people to comment on.
