The Center Edge

RAMnesia: How AI is Eating the World's Memory

• Evan Swarztrauber • Episode 5

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The cost of memory chips is skyrocketing, and even the biggest companies are feeling it. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told the Wall Street Journal that raising prices on Apple products is now "unavoidable," likening the spike in chip costs to a hundred-year flood unlike anything he'd seen in forty years in the business. And it's not just Apple. If you're in the market for a new laptop, gaming console, or even a car, you may have noticed the sticker price creeping up. High prices have been a stubborn fact across the economy for a while, but what's happening with electronics is unique: it isn't really about broader macroeconomic trends, supply-chain snarls, or the price of gas. It comes down to AI.

The data centers behind the AI boom run on memory chips—the same basic kind that sits inside your phone, your laptop, your car, and your home internet equipment. Only a handful of companies make them, and the AI giants are buying up everything they can at almost any price. When a few buyers with bottomless budgets corner the market for a part everyone else needs, the price goes up for everyone—including the companies that build and operate America's broadband networks, whose routers and gateways run on those same chips. Recently, a broad coalition of industry groups wrote Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warning of an "urgent imbalance in the market for memory chips that could lead to significant and sustained near-term price increases for American households."

Evan is joined by former U.S. Senator Cory Gardner, now President and CEO of NCTA—The Internet & Television Association. His organization represents Internet service providers building broadband across the country, much of it fiber in rural America, as part of government programs to close the digital divide. They dig into Gardner's proposed policy solutions to the memory-chip crunch, the other ways AI is reshaping his industry, wireless spectrum policy, the security of our networks, and more.

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SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Center Edge. I'm Evan Swartstrauber. The cost of memory chips is skyrocketing, and even the biggest companies are feeling the effects. Recently, Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that he planned to increase prices on Apple products like the iPhone, calling it unavoidable. He likened the rising chip costs to a hundred-year flood, the likes of which he hadn't seen in 40 years in the business. It's not just Apple. If you're in the market for a new laptop, gaming console, or even a car, you may have noticed the sticker price creeping up. Now, high prices have been a stubborn fact across the economy for years now. But what's happening with electronics is unique. This isn't just a consequence of broader macroeconomic trends, supply chain difficulties, or the price of gas. There's a specific, unusual pressure being put on the devices we all rely on, and of course, it comes down to AI. The data centers behind the AI boom run on memory chips, the same basic kind of memory that sits inside your phone, your laptop, your car, your home internet equipment. Only a handful of companies in the world make them, and the AI giants are buying up everything they can at almost any price. When a few buyers with effectively bottomless budgets corner the market for a part everyone needs, the price goes up for everyone and for everything built with it. And that includes the companies that build and operate America's broadband networks. The Wi-Fi routers, the gateways, the equipment that carries the internet to your home runs on those memory chips. So the cost of building broadband could be climbing right as AI puts more demand on it than ever. Recently, a broad range of industry groups wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick raising concerns about an urgent imbalance in the market for memory chips that could lead to significant and sustained near-term price increases for American households. The industry groups represent a wide range of firms across sectors: broadband providers, telecom equipment makers, medical device manufacturers, auto companies, and retailers. My guest today is former U.S. Senator Corey Gardner, now president and CEO of NCTA, the Internet and Television Association. Among the member companies in his trade group are internet service providers that build and operate broadband across the country. Many are building fiber and rural America as part of public-private partnerships to close the digital divide. Gardner has been calling attention to the memory chip crunch and other issues impacting his members. We'll discuss his proposed policy solutions and other ways that AI is relating to his industry. We'll also get into wireless spectrum policy, the security of our networks, and more. Senator Gardner, thank you so much for joining the show. Hey, thank you for having me. So before we jump into the MIDI stuff, I want to start with a little bit of your background. You now represent a trade association that includes members building in rural America. You are from rural America. Tell me a little bit about uh where you grew up in Colorado and how that informs your current approach to your job.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you know, I grew up in a part of Colorado that most people in Colorado don't even know exists. They don't even know it's there. It's the part of Colorado that's not the mountains. Uh, this is the Kansas part of Colorado, as some people affectionately refer to it as, it's the high plains, uh, a town of about 3,000 people. I at one time I did the math, I was like part of 0.001% of the population that live like two hours away from the nearest Starbucks. Uh so I am out in the middle of nowhere. In fact, when I was on the campaign trail, I used to tell people in Colorado, around the state, they'd be like, Well, where's Cal, where's Yuma? Where is that? And I said, Well, it's the place that goes by on the bottom of your television screen, hail storm coming, take cover. Like, oh yeah, I know where that is. Uh so you know, that that upbringing in that little tiny town. Uh, you know, I watched my dad on city council. Uh he was kind of a nerd. I mean, I guess I became a U.S. senator. You could probably tell when I was 12 years old because I was interested in his city council uh experience in a little town. They probably met like once a month. And he, I remember he joked he got paid enough to buy a buy a pack of cigarettes every month or something like that. But uh so I remember going through the the cable franchise fights. You know, back then I probably didn't know it was called a franchise fight. Today I know that. But back then I remember he'd come home and said, Hey, we're getting four new channels. We're adding four channels. Uh, you know, so we went from, you know, 12 to 16 or 16 to 20 or something like that. And it was always exciting. What are we gonna get? And uh and you know, it was everything from the the shopping network to uh TBS, uh, or uh I remember it wasn't until college where we actually added a Fox station out of Denver uh so we could watch The Simpsons for the first time. I was a little behind the times uh with some of my college classmates, but that experience of growing up in an area where uh you had uh radio to listen to. It played real old country music up until about seven or eight o'clock at night, then it went off the air. And the only thing we had to connect us to kind of a modern world as a kid, as a teenager, uh were Friday night, Saturday night videos that they would play. And we'd again, the IP attorneys are probably going to freak out when I say this. We would hold up the cassette recorder to the TV, hit play and record, uh, and and you know, that's how we had a week's worth of rock music that we would listen to instead of the old uh country station that we were stuck with. Uh so you know, really seeing the evolution of information uh economy reaching our rural areas, being very passionate about bringing new generations of families back to those rural communities, keeping generations of families on the farm, it is about that connectivity. And that's why it's exciting to have, you know, fought for that in the Senate, fought for that in the House, fought for that as a state legislature, and now being able with the industry to work for that throughout all of all four corners of our great nation.

SPEAKER_01

So now, ironically, you after all that experience, you now represent many of these companies that you just mentioned, right? Programmers who bring programming into people's homes through cable, right? And then, of course, cable became a broadband mechanism. And one of the aspects of that broadband network that maybe people never think about, why would you, right? Is is memory chips, right? When you when you're a consumer and you have a Wi-Fi router in your home, you're not thinking, oh man, I wonder what the price of the memory chip inside of this Wi-Fi router is. And it's not just the Wi-Fi routers, it's other equipment. And so there's this, some people have called it RAM-aged in, right? Because it's, you know, it's some some term of terms of art here, right? We're talking about dynamic random access memory or DRAM. Uh, we're not going to get too technical, but uh, you correct me if I'm wrong here, if I'm oversimplifying. But right now we're seeing this massive data center build-out. Data centers use very advanced AI chips that are your members are not competing for. But in order to make those AI chips, you know, the logic chips, they could some people call them the brain, in order to make them work, you need lots and lots of memory chips that are kind of like a desk. And one metaphor I saw was if you have a really big brain, but your desk is very disorganized, it's not very helpful. So AI companies are buying up tons and tons of memory. And the memory chips really haven't advanced as much in how much they you squeeze out of them as much as these AI chips, right? So you're the more advanced the AI chips are getting, the more memory they're trying to stack vertically, right? They're just buying up tons of it. And right, we're talking about hyperscaler companies that are trillions of dollars in market cap. And this market for memory chips is the ones that are relevant to your members, is really it's like Samsung, SK Heinex, and Micron. So two of those companies are South Korean, one is American, and that's 90%. And naturally, this is a market. So when a big AI company is willing to pay a lot, their steering capacity there. When did you start hearing from your members about this concern? And, you know, what are they telling you about how this is impacting their business?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you know, this is a really interesting challenge, and it's because it's a it's a it's a problem of success. This isn't something that has failed and oh gosh, we don't have this supply because something has failed. We're we're actually having this problem because things are growing, economic growth, uh, new innovations, new opportunities, and that's creating a real challenge and not just for us. One of the unique things about the Internet and Television Association that I represent is our board is made up of CEOs. And so we have very active participation, not from the head of office in Washington, D.C. or the general counsel of the organization. We actually have the CEOs. And so, you know, last year we started hearing from these CEOs as they were talking at board meetings saying, hey, what's going on with memory? We're seeing this happen. We have both suppliers on our board, we have the CEOs of Comcast Charter, the actual operators themselves. And they started talking about how they were seeing, you know, three, four, five X increases in the price of memory. And again, this isn't uh fancy uh chips we're talking about. It's not high bandwidth memory that is being, you know, driven by artificial intelligence and the and the data centers. We're talking about just your old-fashioned DRAM, the something that you probably put together when you're buying your very first gateway computer years and years ago. Uh how much DRAM do I want? Uh, and uh this is something that's just really driven cost. Uh give you an example. Uh the cost of a router, something that we all have at home for for internet uh uh it was about memory made up about three percent of the cost of a router just a year ago. Right, just a hardly at all. Today that's over 20%, just in less than a year. We're talking an 800, 900 percent increase, not just over five years. We're talking from January 1 of 2026 to December 31 of 2026. That's what we anticipate. So that is a massive increase. And it's not just us. You know, when we started talking about this, our CEOs were really some of the very first to talk about it. We started hearing from other companies that like you mentioned in your your opening, the healthcare companies, the healthcare in manufacturers, device manufacturers, car companies, Sony PlayStations, uh, you know, your your Microsoft Surface, all of these things sing price increases because of this memory.

SPEAKER_01

Now, one might think the AI companies have a reason to worry about this, right? Because yes, they are wealthy enough to outbid your companies or to just drive up the price so that the RAM makers decide to divert capacity, right? And that's part of the problem, is like even though it's a different product, right? That the same company is making two different products. So they're going to divert capacity to the one that's more lucrative. But as you have argued in op-eds and otherwise, right, is AI going to be as effective if the if the networks that need to be built to sustain the high bandwidth applications aren't being built, right? And you you can imagine these AI companies are not dumb, right? They're very sophisticated. They could see what's happening. And as you want your smartphone to be able to process more AI on the phone, that needs memory chips, right? If you want to have compute at the edge of a network, right, that requires chips. Do you think they are aware of the potential cliff that we're heading to? If if if they don't maybe tell their own suppliers, like, hey, yes, we're really glad you're diverting so much capacity to us, that's really great. But maybe can you reserve some for the legacy guys? Because actually, if they can't get compute, that's a problem, or if they can't get memory chips, that's a problem for us. Like, do you think they're thinking about it that way?

SPEAKER_00

I do think they are. I actually think, you know, I know conversations between CEOs of my members and some of the founders of the biggest, uh, most uh recognizable names in AI have said we can't survive without your infrastructure, right? We need your infrastructure. And they don't just need uh, you know, dial-up type uh of connectivity. Uh they need broadband infrastructure that is modern, that is uh, you know, we're talking about an industry that has put over $400 billion into uh the ground in the last several decades, uh $25, $26 billion just last year alone, right? That's what they need to survive. So think about it as your body, right? I mean, your brain's the data center, right? But your brain doesn't operate if you have, if you don't have the whole system that's feeding it with oxygen and the blood that gets to it. Uh that's what, that's what our broadband network is providing. It is providing uh that that information gateway, that highway to the data centers, both up and down, upstream and downstream. And if we don't have that, if we don't have the speed, the bandwidth, the size to be able to manage what they drive, we won't win in AI. We won't succeed in AI. We won't see that edge compute capacity capability that we need. We won't be able to take on China and actually get this right. And if we don't take on China and get this right, they set the standards, they set the rules, and we lose out. And so it is a whole system approach that we have to. So uh, yes, they've recognized it, they've acknowledged it. I do think it would be very helpful if if uh there would be more unified voice from them saying, hey, we need this all, right? Because yes, we're getting high bandwidth memory, yes, we're getting uh more complex chips being made, and we're really excited that people are converting over to what we're using as hyperscalers, but we can't succeed if we don't have this whole system succeed and being brought up with us. So uh, you know, we're bringing we're talking to them, we're talking to the manufacturers, we're talking to uh the whole coalition of users, uh, and we're starting to make make a lot of inroads in terms of what is being uh understood and the need to be met and how to meet it. And you are also looking at talking to government, right?

SPEAKER_01

Because if if those conversations were enough to solve the problem, right, I I doubt you would be writing uh Secretary Bessant and Lutnick. And and some of these effects that we're already seeing, right? Micron, one of the three, one of the big three, winding down consumer memory, right? That could be concerning, of course, because they're the only American major producer of this, and and chips are a strategic good these days, and we like to have domestic producers. You also see uh Honda cutting a hundred and some thousand vehicles. Intel, a chipmaker of CPUs, right, that that's very involved in AI deployment, said they don't see any relief coming until 2028. Elon Musk, not exactly someone who is hurting for cash these days, said that Tesla is going to build its own memory fab. I guess he's very frustrated. And even Apple, a company with tens of billions of dollars of cash on hands, as I mentioned in the intro, they're feeling the crunch, right? So you all have written, and when I say you all, the associations I mentioned in the intro, to these uh cabinet members of the Trump administration.

SPEAKER_00

What are your ideal policy solutions here? Right. Well, uh we have a couple things. Uh number one, I think we just touched on it. I they these AI, hyperscalers, data centers, they need us to succeed. So uh, you know, hopefully the companies themselves will realize look, we're gonna keep making DDR4 chips, we're gonna keep making uh DDR4 type uh chips, which are type of DRAM that that we that we need. Uh and so you hopefully they won't just abandon it and drop it as they shift to other higher profit, higher margin products. Look, I I get it, I understand why they want to do what they're doing, but if they only feed that stock into one side of the system, the whole system collapses as as we talked about. So uh, you know, there's there's opportunities for us to work with the manufacturers, uh, opportunities for us to work with the AI companies themselves to help make sure that they're putting the appropriate attention to this, to build the coalition up, to talk to the government about a couple of things. Number one, the American taxpayers put up about $50 billion not too long ago in the CHIPS Act to try to encourage more chips being made, onshore, developing, building, manufacturing, those kind of things. Well, great. We didn't intend for that to actually then result in lower chip production that would hurt the hurt overall industries at the same time. So, okay, uh, so if the public policy is to help chips, we mean all chips, not just uh this over here. So we've got to, I think, right size that and make sure that that is, you know, that policy is meeting what it was intended to do. Uh secondly, what the government needs to do to look at how how do we make manufacturing easier in this country? What we can do for infrastructure, what we can do for permitting, how do we uh have the right tax policies? Are there things that we can do on existing tax uh credits or existing tax policies uh to look at uh how we how we turn around and make them benefit uh DDR4, uh DRAM type manufacturing. So those are all policies that we think the government can bring to bear. Maybe we need to look at a strategic stockpile as well of chips and making sure that we have enough going forward so that we can avoid these kind of cliffs uh as we go along. I I don't think the American consumers have seen, you know, nearly four or five dollar price of gas per gallon, maybe that's coming down. Now all of a sudden they're gonna see a increase in their mobile handset cost, they're gonna see an increase in their Microsoft Surface, they're gonna see an increase in the cost of medical devices, iPhones, uh you name it. Um even your your game, your Sony PlayStation console uh increasing as a result of this. So a number of government policies can be brought to bear that I think are in line with existing uh current policies that they've done and just making it easier to do things to get things. I also think we're talking about chips that are not national security concerns. You're not logging into these chips and having them control other things. This is memory. Uh, this is your desk, as you talked about. And so, you know, maybe there's other opportunities uh that we can partner with to get through this gap, this bridge as we build that domestic capability here.

SPEAKER_01

So some of the policy solutions around permitting, there's a lot of agreement there, you know, on left and right. The issue there is that these fabs take a long time to build, right? And we we we we know that there's gonna be, you know, a micron new fab in Idaho, but that's 2027, maybe another one in Virginia in 2030, right? And even if tomorrow the US government right-sized its permitting, I don't know how quickly that gives you relief. So then when we look at what is a more short-term option, right? There's the government has a strong bully pulpit, right? You see the AI CEOs, they were at the inauguration of President Trump, they're at the G7 hanging out with global leaders, right? Many people have written that these guys are almost seen as like on the same level as nation states these days, which is kind of wild. And there's a lot of thoughts people can have about that, but it but it is the case. The the same government that is very pro-AI and and wanting to accelerate the technology, of course, has been working with companies to make it easier for them. So maybe there's just the phone call, like, hey, can you do X, Y, and Z to relieve some pressure here? Um, but there's also more formal action, right? You mentioned the CHIPS Act. Some of the funds for the CHIP have not even been dispersed yet. So in theory, the administration could attach some conditions to that and say, like, in exchange for this grant, you can't shut down DRAM production over here. There's also more blunt instruments, right? You could say to the South Korean firms, maybe in particular, like, if you don't cooperate, we're gonna tariff you. Like, is that should all of that be on the table effectively?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I do think so. And I think you're right on the bully pulpit. Uh, the government has tremendous ability to drive the right policy. Uh, and and again, this is a this is a policy that's driven by success. Uh, this isn't a thing where we're saying, hey, you know what, can you keep the jalopy on the road for just a little bit longer? No, that's not what we're saying here. We're actually saying, hey, in order to make sure that the best is moving forward in technology, uh, that we're meeting this incredible drive right now that creates uh incredible opportunities for our country, that we also have this as a part of it, whether it's in the set-top box or a router uh or a mobile device that you have uh to connect to Wi-Fi, uh, that's all part of it. So I think uh as they look at talking to the manufacturers, yes, that's part of it. They need to look at foreign partners as well uh as we meet the demand here in the United States. So I do think there's sort of this all of all of the above strategy to bring this because it is a crisis. It's a it's an affordability crisis, uh it's a it's a sort of advancement crunch, because if we don't meet the crunch, if we don't fix the crunch, then advancement's going to slow in terms of innovation and opportunity. So yes.

SPEAKER_01

Now, you are a Republican, you were a Republican senator, and you were in Congress for this realignment that I'm gonna, you know, tap the sign. I talk about this all the time on my show, right? But of you still have a lot of legacy kind of libertarian free market thinking of like government needs to not intrude in markets, but then you've also seen a lot of Republicans get more comfortable with industrial policy and the CHIPS Act passed with wide bipartisan support. And of course, President Trump is a manifestation of like new thinking of yes, we're free market, but also we're gonna intervene here and here for things we think are strategic. Now, a lot of what we've talked about already, if you know you're a kind of fundamentalist market guy, you're like uh right, it makes you uncomfortable because what you would say, right, if you're if you're just like econ 101 lens of this topic is okay, the market is saying the highest and best use of Micron, Samsung, and SK Heinex fabs is AI. And the fact that the price of your chip is increasing just means that prices will have to go up, supply will be constrained, maybe consumers will react by not buying as many laptops or not replacing their phone as often. And that is a market correction. When you go to some of your former colleagues or to members of the administration and you talk about the potential policy solutions, right? Some are very market-friendly, like uh permitting reform. Who opposes that unless you're just like an enemy of progress, right? But others maybe make people a little bit more uncomfortable of the market, we don't want to be picking winners and losers. We don't want the government pressuring companies to make a certain product, right? The market will eventually self-correct. And yes, if consumers have to change their behavior, that's all part of the you know invisible hand. Have you gotten pushback from that? How do you think about that as someone who was very much in Congress at the time of evolving Republican thinking on economics?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, but I mean, even in Congress, I would remind people that you know Milton Friedman said even the free market needs a referee. Uh and so this isn't about trying to say some kind of demand and control, command and control system, excuse me. Uh this is about saying, hey, what can we do from a government policy to fix a problem we have? Why are there only three companies making 90% of this? Maybe there's a barrier to entry problem that we should address. Let's get more competition. That's a that's a good free market uh idea, is more competition. Uh let's let's make sure that we are uh targeting tax incentives to do this. That's something that uh Republicans from uh you know five years ago, ten years ago to today uh are are supporting. Free market Republicans to uh you know, or a populist Republican who may uh think more control is necessary. But uh I think these are all things that Have been embraced in all sides of the Republican Party and all types of conservative efforts over the years. So tax policy, incentives, making sure that we fix barriers to entry, permitting, you know, onshoring, dealing with partners overseas, making sure there's no national security risks, I think we can accomplish it all, regardless of sort of the i ideological sprint that may be required.

SPEAKER_01

So two more questions on chips. I promise not to but I find it very interesting.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, it's these internet guys, I mean, what are they talking about? But you know, trying to get then when Tim Cook is in the Wall Street Journal talking about it, you know, where I'm just like, yes, uh, you know, they referenced our letter. I was excited about that. When the medical guys, when the car guys are starting to talk about it, you know, that's hitting all the right cylinders to use a car term that we needed to hit in order to get people's attention on this. And so far, we have the attention, and the White House has been great. They've been very responsive. We just got off the call again on Friday with the National Economic Council talking about this. So, you know, my credit and commendation to them for the attention that they're putting to this.

SPEAKER_01

Aaron Powell So you mentioned one of the potential relief mechanisms could be um there there is a Chinese company that makes chips, CXMT. And there's been kind of a back and forth in the US government of like how much of this, how much is this company a threat to national security, you know, oversimplifying, but it's been kind of like on and off the restrictive list. Currently it's not generally speaking, right? Chips were is something that we're trying to onshore, we're trying to friendshore. There's this Pax Silica agreement that you know Sweden and the EU and others are were asking them to sign, which is basically like allies need to band together to prioritize allies, right? So we want, we want the South Korean manufacturers to sell to us, not to China, et cetera. At the same time, there is this Chinese company that doesn't have a ton of market share, but if you, in theory, allowed them into the market, that could have some price pressure relief. Yet at the same time, there are these controversies around this company. You had mentioned you don't necessarily see for this particular type of chip the same surveillance concerns that we've seen with Huawei and drones, et cetera. Given the national security implications or not of potentially allowing this company, and Tim Cook has suggested this should be on the table. How have those conversations gone about, you know, given the sensitivities here? And do you think there is an appetite to at least temporarily allow this company to sell to us and to allies?

SPEAKER_00

Well, first of all, I think there's a broad understanding of what's happening here. You know, we've met with everybody from the White House to Senator Schumer's office, and they all acknowledge the problems. That's step number one. They see it, they understand it, and now it's solution time. And so when it comes to all of the ideas that we've talked about, on this particular one, I think we have to answer a very basic question. That's the security question, right? And that's what we're doing now, is just saying, all right, we know these chips aren't something that you're logging into and driving out. It's not, you know, uh a high bandwidth memory chip that's you know pervasive in an artificial intelligence system that's using these, driving the compute at a data center kind of thing. So uh, you know, showing that and saying, hey, here's a here's a solution as we build what we want. And nobody out there is saying, you know, we shouldn't have any of this in in the country. That's not what people are saying. Saying, look, as we do this, as we build the industrial policy, as we build industry back in this country, let's make sure that we're not driving costs to the consumer who are already under huge pressure. And at the same time, we're not choking down the uh progress on AI build-out. So I think that's just it. I think that's that there's, you know, answer the national security question, give them the proof, and then those opportunities will be open for us to use as the bridge.

SPEAKER_01

You mentioned that in conversations with some of the AI companies, you're making progress in terms of the chip issue and that there's a recognition and that maybe there will be some voluntary or just uh you know collaborative approaches that that solve some of the pain points. You're also talking to the government. You know, one dynamic that that stood out to me is that there's been a lot written about AI is not necessarily very popular, right? Americans don't want to live near a data center. There's been this huge backlash against it, despite all the promise of the technology. And I could see it as a huge political problem for these companies that the prices of popular products, yes, right, laptops, Wi-Fi. I mean, I'm not sure people are super jazz about their Wi-Fi router, but it's probably a lot more popular than an LLM. That's all people talk about. They just recorded I want to talk about my router.

SPEAKER_00

They're really at the grocery store. That's all they want to talk about.

SPEAKER_01

Laptops go up, my phone goes up, Wi-Fi router goes up, Nintendo Switch goes up, car goes up. These are generally products that people are excited about or happy about or neutral on. And then a product that is not pulling very well, that's the reason for the price increase. Do you think that that dynamic, you know, could cause a shift? Because we've already seen some, you know, coming to Jesus moments from the AI industry of being more comfortable with guardrails, right? Being more comfortable with safety testing, agreeing to pay for their own power, right? There seems to be a recognition that that the telling everyone they were going to lose their jobs wasn't the best PR strategy. Yeah. Um, and things are changing. But this one seems like it's kind of bubbling up and we're in an election year, and there's it could get bad for those companies if consumers start making the connection between all these products. Do you think that might spur some action?

SPEAKER_00

It really is an interesting challenge because you now have a Wall Street that wants to reward companies for tying anything to AI, right? I mean, they could be cutting, you know, 10 jobs in Toledo because those 10 jobs aren't necessary because uh, you know, they've invented a better paperclip than they had before. But if they blame it on AI, Wall Street's gonna say, oh my gosh, this is great. They're saving money, they're doing this, and so they're rewarded. At the same time, 10 people just lost their jobs, and that community is now absorbing 10 people that that had their lives completely disrupted, and what are they going to do? Uh, that's a big challenge, and that's a human-scale problem that has to be addressed. And that goes to the heart of what I talk about a lot. And that's sort of the the the Henry Kissinger dynamic that he identified in you know 2016, 17, 18, when he talked about what do we have from a moral ethical standpoint that we're actually building around AI to help the American people, to help the common person realize what's happening and how do we adjust for that. I live in that rural town that we've talked about. Uh it's a lot of truck drivers in that town. And in Colorado, I remember reading a story in the news about the first ever fully autonomous delivery uh in a in a truck uh of goods. And of course it's Colorado, so the good was beer. Uh it was the first ever truck delivery of beer from Denver to Colorado Springs fully autonomous vehicle. And a truck driver friend of mine came up to me and he said, Hey, did you see the story about that truck delivery? And I said, Yeah, wasn't it great? And he said, Yeah, but what's gonna happen to me? If we don't get the what's gonna happen to me part of this right, you bet uh this is gonna be a bad, bad for a Democrat, bad for a Republican, uh, bad for the AI companies, and bad for investment into it. And it'll be eventually be bad for Wall Street. So that part of it needs to be right. That's why you see Meta, I think, recently talking about how they're doing workforce training, jobs training in a handful of states, uh, the skills training. I I I carry around this 1930s International Harvester Salesman's manual uh about what happens when you switch from a horse to a tractor. And it was about how to get salesmen to convince a farmer who'd used nothing but horses their whole lives for generations to switch to a tractor. And some of the fears back then were well, if everybody uses a tractor, there won't be any farmland left because there'll be nothing but factories acre by acre to build all these tractors that we have to have, or the price of commodities are gonna drop because the horses won't be eating the grain anymore. Uh and and so there'll be this crash, you know, boom. I mean, excuse me, this this this price crash uh and doom, not boom, uh, as a result. Well, none of that materialized. And so the American consumer needs to have the skills to understand opportunity. And I believe the AI companies, the government, we all have, all of us involved, have an opp obligation to make sure that we're bringing every American up with us and not trying to keep it on the outside because that's fear, that's scare, scary to their families, and it's it's really a harmful way to try to drive investment.

SPEAKER_01

So broadband has been one of the stories of counterinflation or stable with inflation, different than a lot of other products like beef, et cetera. And you wrote about this in the Washington Times and an op ed the typical bill, about $75 a month. It's about 1% of household income, half the FCC's 2% affordability benchmark. It relates well when you look at electricity or other kind of essential services that consumers want. And are you worried at all that this situation with the chips kind of ruins that? Or like what when do you expect that might have an impact? Are you trying, is that one of the reasons you're trying to avoid it? Like, is this something that your members are talking about that you're talking about with members of Congress of like, hey, broadband is this non-inflationary or stable inflationary story in a time when it seems like nothing is immune to inflation? Let's not mess that up.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's right. You know, I look, I mean, this is one of those stories that you get to tell and you say, hey, we actually have higher speeds at lower costs. I mean, you can't say that about hardly anything else in our economy that says we're gonna give you a better product year after year after year. And in our uh terms, better product means higher speeds, you know, greater downloads, you know, greater upload speeds. I mean, you know, this is what we're talking about. And we're gonna do it at a lower cost, year after year after year. Uh and uh so, so, you know, when people see their broadband bill or their internet bill go up, it's because uh in many cases they've chosen for a higher speed or they've actually wanted more capacity, ability to do more things in their house. I mean, the average house has now like 20 devices connected to uh to the internet through Wi-Fi, uh, which, you know, Wi-Fi carries about 90% of cell phone data today. So uh it's really incredible, all of that leading to affordability. And so if you have a router that goes from 3% memory chip cost to 20 plus percent memory cost, if you have uh chips that are increasing 800, 9%, 800 to 900% year after year after year, that does affect the consumer. And so here's a story where uh, you know, over 90% of American households have have access to a very basic, even more affordable plan of like, you know, $15. Uh and you know, if you get up to the $75, $80, $90 plans, you're talking about incredible speeds where you're you know looking at 8K ultra HD opportunities or even higher, uh, the gaming opportunities that create. So uh but we are seeing, you know, per megabit. I think if you go back to 2015, uh we've seen dramatic drops in prices per megabit. Uh, we've seen dramatic prices uh in speed increases as we've gone uh over the years. And it's year after year. In fact, I think just in last year alone, uh a consumer saved about a billion dollars uh in efficiency and in cost because of the speed and affordability that we've been able to bring. And so uh we don't want the consumer to see price increases as a result.

SPEAKER_01

You have members that are actively building fiber in rural America. I know that's very important to you and personal for you, as we discussed earlier. Now, with the widespread availability of low Earth orbit, Starlink satellite service, Amazon Leo, formerly known as Kuiper, is launching satellites to be a competitor uh for rural broadband. You're seeing this conversation that has been bubbling up over the years of should the US government be spending any taxpayer money to build fiber in rural America? Those just that decision was already made, right? Back in back in 2021, uh in the infrastructure bill, you had the Bede program and you had the capital projects fund. You also have state programs. There's there's many government programs to build fiber. And not to give anyone the wrong idea, private companies are still putting up, in some cases, the majority of the capital in those projects, but the long-standing issue of how do you get the economics right when there's one house per mile, right? Or, or uh maybe a few houses per mile. There's always been that market failure, not in a bad way, of just how do we get that service out there. But a lot of these programs go back to times when there wasn't as much satellite availability of the high-speed satellite, right? The legacy satellites where you're kind of cracking. Those kind of things. Yeah. And, you know, no offense to them, it's a different technology, but people generally on those services on a cruise ship or on an airplane weren't raving about how fast geostationary satellite service was. Starlink, very different product. So you see some academics, you see SpaceX itself questioning the need or or the wisdom of funding any infrastructure deployment anymore, saying effectively the deployment challenge is solved. Given that you have companies that are literally laying fiber, digging trenches, attaching it to poles, doing this work that some are saying shouldn't be funded anymore. How do you think about that, given this conversation about, you know, should we be spending this money anymore?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, absolutely. Look, there's no doubt that the advent of Leo and the ability to have uh satellites in low Earth orbit, getting direct-to-consume or direct to sell, whatever you want to call it, sort of uh opportunities for broadband from space uh is is remarkable today compared to what it was. Uh I'm old enough to remember some of the dish big dish satellites at people's houses. We used to take little matchbox cars and throw them up in the dish and see what would happen to them. Uh but uh, you know, uh I I you we'd go out and watch the move as you tuned in that was on the TV side, not necessarily on the internet side back then. But, you know, it look, it's a great product, and there are absolutely use cases where that and that alone makes sense. But I also don't want to sort of relegate rural America to here's your slop, that's it. And I don't I'm not saying it's slop, that's a, I don't mean that at all. I just say here's your here's your one meal a day, you're gonna be content with that, have that, and nothing else. So look, if if that's what works and if that's what's necessary and that's what reaches them, that's great and that's fantastic. But I do think that rural America deserves to have the same kind of opportunity that urban America does. And that means that only things that broadband providers like I have are going to be able to match. That's the kind of speed, the kind of pipeline that they need to be able to compete with AK or 8K Ultra HD or 16K Ultra HD viewing experiences or gaming experiences or AI experiences and development experience. It's because of those opportunities that we're gonna be able to do a lot in rural America to diversify their economies. You know, my hometown, it is agriculture. If if the if the price of a bushel of corn drops a dollar or two dollars or this year, uh, as an example, if it doesn't rain and the wheat crop just goes away because you're not gonna harvest it because it's not worth anything, uh that is a huge impact on the economy. And that means this year, this entire year, not just this week, not just this month is gonna be bad. This entire year is going to have an economic downturn as a result of that. And so that one point of failure, I don't think America deserves. Uh, rural America certainly doesn't deserve it either. And so having opportunities for Leo is great. Having opportunities for uh high, high capacity bandwidth, like we're gonna be able to provide, is important to all of them. Now, uh, that person who lives 20 miles out in the middle of nowhere in a train that you can't get through and it's rocky, maybe that is the only solution. And if that's the case, that's great. And I am so glad they're going to have it. Uh but uh I do think we can't just say that's enough. Now, we need to be smart about it. Uh, because in the 2021, it wasn't the first time that we saw dollars going out to build in unserved or underserved areas. Uh going back to the stimulus years and years ago when I was in the House of Representatives. In 2009. Yeah, right, right, you got it. So you go back to projects back then, uh, and there was money put toward the development, uh deployment of and build out to unserved and underserved areas. Uh, there was a project in Colorado called EagleNet. Uh, I led house hearings and investigations on this. Uh, and EagleNet aspired to provide those areas that didn't have it with high-speed quality uh internet services. Some of the first connections they made were to public facilities in Denver, uh, Cherry Creek School System, the Denver Museum of Natural History, hardly unserved or underserved areas. And then they went out and they duplicated existing services on providers that were already doing work in the eastern plains of Colorado. You know, in the Eastern Plains, again, yes, it's difficult to put infrastructure in, but it's not as tough as it is in the mountains where you're going through actual granite uh to try to get things to places. So let's make sure that we're doing this policy right, not competing with the private sector where the private sector is doing it. Uh and when they're doing it, let's make sure that they have options and alternatives. So, Leo, yes. Uh in-ground infrastructure, yes, because that's that's you know, uh all types of technologies will benefit this economy. But maybe there's some use cases that it just makes sense to have that. And and we're certainly uh certainly grateful that those opportunities exist.

SPEAKER_01

Aaron Powell One of the areas you've been active, and it's one of the most controversial aspects of telecom policy, which unless you're steeped in telecom policy, you're unaware of.

SPEAKER_00

But there's so many, everybody wants to be steeped. I mean, there's not a person out there's like, you know, I wish I was steeped in telecom policy. They're they're excited for this. Well, get ready because we're talking about spectrum.

SPEAKER_01

All right. So the budget bill, the one big beautiful bill back from July 2025. Right. This bill restored the FCC's Spectrum Auction Authority. Um, it ordered a pipeline of 800 megahertz of licensed spectrum. The cable industry has a different view on spectrum often than the wireless industry and even the satellite industry, right? There's a lot of stakeholders, and this is a scarce resource, right? We're talking about the airwaves. No one's making more of it. So there's always an opportunity cost with a policy decision that the government makes. Now, there are some who really like spectrum auctions, right? They like what the wireless industry proposes, which is we need to find, you know, contiguous bands of spectrum, clean, exclusive, licensed access to wireless carriers, and we auction it. And for many years, you know, particularly, you know, I worked in Republican telecom policy. There's like an innate, you know, sympathy to auctions, right? Because if you're a market-oriented person, you say, well, the government puts it out and companies can bid on it. And maybe just like the chip situation, right? Whoever's willing to spend the most must have the best use case, or, or that is what the market says is the best use case. Now, the government's generally been in favor of not always auctioning, right? So the Wi-Fi spectrum that your members rely on, that a lot of tech companies rely on for VR headsets, et cetera, that is not auctioned. This is what we call unlicensed. Anyone can use it, and you have to accept some level of interference. So maybe if you're in an apartment complex, sometimes there's too many people using it at the same time. But that's just part of it. And Bluetooth as well. So, you know, the wireless industry argues we need more license spectrum. We're falling behind China. And members of Congress like the revenue that comes in. So, you know, you're again a former Republican senator, right? So you're having these conversations maybe with members of Congress who are worried that China has more licensed mid band spectrum than us. They like the revenue that comes in, they like the market signal. How do you, you know, maybe address, or if you disagree with those premises, how do you approach those conversations?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, but well, there's a reason why China likes licensed spectrum. There's a reason why China does. China likes it because they can control it, they can put their thumb on the scale, they it it removes the innovation economy, it removes permissionless innovation, and they get to control the hardware ecosystem. And where do they excel? They excel in making the hardware that runs the routers on all of these things. And we're trying to fix a lot of that here in the United States right now. And so you you can see why China wants to do it. Command and control, they get to decide who says it, who does it, and how to do it. That's not who we are. Uh I I've likened sort of our need for spectrum as optionality. Uh look, we have which I think John Thune may have turned uh termed uh coined the term optionality. Uh I think I think you know we've got we've got licensed spectrum, which we support. Uh, we've got shared spectrum, which we support, and we have unlicensed spectrum, which we support. And so uh if you look at how we're getting our information, all three of those pillars are incredibly important for our spectrum policy. Uh but just give you some numbers. Uh there's a a CATS study out there uh that we can we can share, we can give you to it. Yeah. And it basically said that if you were to give uh 500 megahertz of unlicensed spectrum uh in in the 7 gigahertz for for why high for Wi-Fi 7 purposes, 7 gigahertz and Wi-Fi 7, two different things. But if you give 500 megahertz of it to uh Wi-Fi 7, over I think the next couple of years, by 2030, uh you'll create uh 2030, 2032, you'll create 1.2 million jobs in that year alone. That's unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi 7. 1.2 million jobs in a single year. If you were to give 400 megahertz to licensed spectrum for that, so you had an auction for 400 megahertz, uh, it would create basically about 400,000 jobs a year. So you can see the difference in jobs that it would create, licensed versus unlicensed. Yes, a unlicensed auction, excuse me, yes, a licensed auction is gonna generate money. Uh it's gonna generate instant money, right? Uh here's a billion dollars or whatever it's going to generate. Uh we've seen some recent auctions that didn't generate as much money early on as they had hoped that it would. It's a very that this is why it's so difficult in this nuanced area to say that, hey, don't auction this off because we actually think the economic benefit is going to be greater than it would if you got the instant gratification of taking the money through a licensed auction right now. Uh just like those jobs, 1.2 million versus 400,000. Uh we know that between 2023 and 2027, Wi-Fi uh has and will generate uh about $9 trillion in economic impact. But that's no auction generating that. That is unlicensed spectrum being used for permissionless innovation through Wi Fi, which requires unlicensed spectrum. American people they think that Wi Fi and the internet are synon they the same thing, synonymous. Uh when you go into a restaurant, you don't ask for your do you have your internet connection, you ask for the Wi Fi password, right? Do you guys have Wi Fi? Do you guys have Wi Fi? And so in order to keep that going, we need unlicensed spectrum. We can have shared spectrum for things like CBRS, and that's working. And yes, there is a need for licensed spectrum. We support that. But let's get it right. Let's be smart and let's not just go for the instant buck because it is going to hurt us economically, hurt opportunity, and it is going to possibly create latency issues and congestion issues if we don't get it right.

SPEAKER_01

So how do you square, you look at the wireless guys, right? They will argue that their technologies create a lot of jobs and economic value. And they will say that they're running out of spectrum and that they need more spectrum and there's going to be congestion on the wireless networks, right? You you you both the cable companies and the wireless companies are kind of speaking the same language to policymakers. Right. What is the uh what is the response that you often get when when maybe you're talking to a lawmaker and they say, well, you know, you want to keep up with China, they want to keep up with China, you know, you're gonna create jobs, they're gonna create jobs, you're running out of spectrum, they're running out of spectrum. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

How how do they respond to the I I think look, I mean, just they understand on China. Uh, why is China trying to uh tilt the playing field toward their system, which is which is licensed only? There's this thing called uh the WRC27 coming up in Shanghai, where they're gonna set standards going forward on things like uh, you know, six gigahertz band and what it can be used for in terms of licensed or unlicensed spectrum. They want licensed spectrum because if they do it, their devices will dominate the market. And then when their devices dominate the market, they can put Huawei in every household. Uh and so, like a chicken in every pot, they want Huawei in every house. Uh, and that is not good for the American consumer or American national or economic security. And so enough is enough. Let's put an end to that. That's why we need to have our own system, our own rules. Uh, President Trump got it right when he said, let's use six gigahertz for unlicensed spectrum. We have an opportunity to go into lower seven to alleviate any congestion issues, uh, to drive economic opportunity. Uh, that in and of itself would create trillions of dollars in new economic opportunity and millions of jobs uh flowing from it. So, to policymakers, I think we lay it out from a national security concern. We say let's follow American best interests, not China's best interests. Uh, and we also talk about uh just the the common sense of, you know, I use this analogy. Sometimes, you know, if you ever put on your winter coat, you know, you've gone through a hot summer uh and uh, you know, it gets a little chilly in the fall, you put on a winter coat for the first time and you reach into your pocket and you find a $20 bill. And you know, you find a $20 bill, it just makes you feel rich. It's like, man, I didn't know I had $20 and you feel good about it. So you got a little bit of lighter step that day because you found money in your pocket that you didn't know you had. That's spectrum. The American people have money in their pockets that they don't know they have because they own spectrum. And if if you didn't have that $20 in your pocket, you you wouldn't know it's there. But once you find it, you know the value of it. And so we can't remove the $20 from the American people's pocket because it's theirs. They should have it. And let's figure out how to make them feel good about it, using in a way uh that matters and creates more jobs. And that's really the story that we try to tell. The other way to describe it is our public beach. Um, you know, I I think spectrum is like our public beach. The American people have it, uh, it belongs to the people. And if you block that beach off, people are going to be awful ticked off. And that's what happens when you start licensing only. All of a sudden, they can't reach the public beach that they thought they had. That's Wi-Fi, that's unlicensed opportunities. Uh, and I think that's what we have to balance our public policy to reflect.

SPEAKER_01

Getting back to this dynamic of AI causing a price increase and then impacting your industry, and this is a very different situation, but somewhat related. So as you've mentioned, your networks are fiber rich. The new builds are almost exclusively fiber, and then cable often operates on a hybrid coax cable and fiber network, and then sometimes it's you know, fiber to a node, and then whatever. Yeah, it's it's complicated.

SPEAKER_00

All good stuff that everybody should learn.

SPEAKER_01

Here's the thing is that uh people who vandalize networks in search of copper often don't know are they vandalizing a legacy telephone landline, which is copper rich, or are they vandalizing a fiber line in hope of finding fiber? So what I'm getting at is there is this issue that your association has talked about a lot of copper theft. And I to be very clear, I am not at all suggesting that AI companies are buying stolen copper. I'm not suggesting that at all. What I am suggesting, which is, and some companies have argued, is that because copper, like memory chips, plays an important role in AI, copper is at record highs, right? $13,000 a ton in early 2026. That's a record. And copper has thermal conductivity, electrical conductivity. It's used in transformers, power delivery, et cetera. It's very important for AI because AI is power hungry. So if the price is going up, even if OpenAI is not ever going to buy stolen copper, there is a market for it, right? There's scrapyards, there's resellers. You know, in doing research for this show, people melt it down, they ship it to India and China, and then it's effectively automatically laundered, right? At that point, once it's melted down, you don't know that it came off of ATT line, right? So your members, even though they're not super reliant on copper necessarily, are feeling it because, again, the thief is not checking is this a landline or is this a fiber line? So can you, you know, given you talked about, right? You have CEOs on your board, so you hear directly from the business side, not just the policy side. How is copper theft impacting your industry?

SPEAKER_00

Well, it it's huge. And it's it's us, it's the it's the cell phone companies, it's the data centers. I mean, you name it, it's it's a big, big crisis. Uh, over 18,000 incidents a year uh where network destruction has occurred, costing uh billions and billions of dollars. And that gets put back on the backs of consumers to pay for the rebuild or the fix of this. Uh great example in the Northeast, just a couple of years ago, uh, somebody tried to have actually video of the guy doing it and trying to get away, cutting a line, trying to steal it in Philadelphia right before the Eagles Super Bowl, uh, which took out uh, you know, a couple hours uh of service uh to Philadelphia right before the Super Bowl. Uh and obviously that that was you know, imagine if you're sitting in Philadelphia, what happens right before that? Oh, that's like exactly right. So so but even more life and death consequences occur like it's happened in California where a 911 call center is taken out because somebody uh cuts a line or or destroys the network trying to steal it. I I I've said before that just like a stock car, there's very few stock parts left in a stock car. There's very little cable left in cable. Uh and so uh these are fiber, this is glass, right? Uh for the most part, that that just doesn't have copper in it anymore. These systems don't. And so but thieves see high prices, like you said, they go take it, uh, they show up at the the the the salvage yard for scrap, or they melt it down, they do something else, uh, and or or it's just glass and it has no value, and then they just dump it somewhere. Uh and so we have to have put solutions in place because we can't afford to have a 911 center or a hospital taken out. We can't afford to have a military base, as has happened before, taken down because they can't communicate as a result of one of these attacks. So as as we rely more and more on AI, as connected systems matter more and more, as um, you know, people want content delivered, uh, people are building economies around this, you know, removing, uh cutting, uh uh hacking, tack attacking one of these lines uh is is very consequential. So how do we d address it, right? That's kind of what we're working right now. We've got a great coalition that involves the cell phone companies, that involves uh uh law enforcement networks around the country to uh develop uh standards. It's interesting that if you attack a federal network, there's penalties against that. But if you attack at the federal level, if you attack a private network, uh we don't have federal standards that say, hey, this is uh this is a big issue. So you know, trying to fix that, overcome that, create a federal standard. We've got legislation in Congress right now uh that would create that federal uh federal crime, that federal offense to address this. Trying to make sure that these cases are prosecuted, that they're not just uh overlooked, uh, that people are actually held accountable for their actions. Those are a few of the things that we can do uh to make sure that we stop this network destruction, this network vandalism.

SPEAKER_01

Very briefly, I want to turn to a topic that's a bit different than the infrastructure issue, but it's part of what makes your association what it is, is that you also represent programmers, right? So you're not just not just the infrastructure owners and operators. And in some of the writing that you've done on AI, you know, you guys are bullish on AI, right? You see it as a demand driver for your networks. Um, you of course have the issues that we're seeing with copy, or sorry, with copper and uh with memory chips. Um, but there's also this issue of copyright. And uh this has been very controversial in AI policy, right? There are many who say that it's just wrong, right? For the fact that these AI companies essentially gobbled up the entire corpus of human creativity, whether copyrighted or not, and are now selling products that benefited from that training without compensating the owners of that content. And there are some cases of licensing, but that is really the exception, not the rule. Um, there are others who say we just can't afford, as a country that is in an AI race with China, to go to every copyright holder. You know, maybe you wrote one blog post, maybe you're Disney, right? Those are two different situations, but we can't go to every single copyright holder and say, can I have permission to train on your data? Because China's not going to do it, so we have to do it. And if we get bogged down in copyright, we lose the race to AI. You know, given that your association is very bullish on AI, you're very optimistic about it, you've written about it as a strategic imperative for the United States, but yet you also have these programmers that spend a lot of money that believe in strong IP protections, right? What do you say when maybe you're sitting across the table from a member of Congress or you're talking to the AI companies? What do you say to that argument of we just can't afford to have companies bogged down in the complexities of copyright licensing? We just have to let them do it and we're gonna call it fair use. And that's that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Look, we we we have to get this right because if if there's no incentive for people to create, they won't create and systems won't learn. And so we have to find this balance uh that recognizes people's investment. Look, our programmers put nearly $600 billion uh into uh investments in the content that they generate. Uh and that's a remarkable amount of money. And so, you know, we've developed at uh the Internet Television Association a plan called Core AI. Uh, core AI stands for six basic pillars, everything from investment in the infrastructure that we've talked about to protecting IP. That's why we need to make sure that we have a national standard when it comes to protecting intellectual property so that people are able to continue making billions of dollars in investment in content uh without worrying about what's gonna happen to the return on that investment. We need to continue research and development on this. We need to continue working with the states to get this right. We need to continue to make sure we have a workforce that's trained to take advantage of this, and we need to understand the impact that's gonna happen to uh the American worker and make sure the American workers are brought along with this so that they succeed. You know, this goes back to some of the writings that, you know, Henry Kissinger was doing in the Atlantic uh, you know, in 2017-2018 timeframe, uh, and then followed on with Eric Schmidt and some of his later uh, you know, last years, he was still talking about how do we make sure that this is right for the American worker, American consumer, and uh the developers of this content so that they don't just get uh uh robbed of this uh without their their rights being protected. We are excited about what artificial intelligence can mean for the consumer. Um, you know, if you are sitting at the house, the last thing you want to have happen is your internet to go down. AI can fix that, address that. It can get a truck, if a truck roll is necessary, it can get a truck rolling before you even know you have an internet problem. And to get it fixed, when you make that phone call, somebody's calling, if it gets to that point, odds are they already know what's going on because of artificial intelligence. If you're at home and you've got 20, 30 devices that are connected, AI is going to help make sure that the speeds are right. So if you're using, if you're gaming, it's gonna make sure that that's prioritized. Your refrigerator doesn't need to make the order uh for milk uh right at that point. And this can all help make sure that it's doing this uh at the at the right speed, the right time. And so AI is gonna save people a lot of anguish, heartache, and headache when it comes to this and make repairs before people even needed to know they were made. But we got to get it right. Core AI does that. Copyright IP, we have to get that right, or billions of dollars of investment will be for naught and they'll be lost and they won't come back.

SPEAKER_01

You were a U.S. senator at a very exciting time in politics, right? You were dealing with Senate majorities and elections and a couple Supreme Court justices. Exactly. The changing of the the Republican Party, you know, the rise of Trump. And um, you know, now you are in a very different job. And I imagine that it's interesting to go back to your former colleagues that you used to talk about like how are we going to confirm a Supreme Court justice, how are we gonna do this? And now you're like, hey man, DRAM. Yeah, right, right. Are they like, what happened to you?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, no, they are. They are. Half of them like, I didn't, I didn't know you could use those words. But we've learned. Uh, so that's good. Look, it's funny you know, and it's fun to the kids. I think, you know, I talked to I talked about six gigahertz a lot. I talk about seven gigahertz a lot. You know, little did I know that at some point I was making a joke, and that's why my kids were laughing at me when I was on the phone and said, hey, we got to get this 6-7 policy right. And, you know, my wife's rolling her eyes and the kids are laughing at me, and I had no clue what was going on. Uh and uh so, you know, the the senators, the the house members, the FCC staffers that I talked to today, all very interested in it. And I think they know that I worked on this, right? They know that uh I spent time on the Energy and Commerce Committee developing this, they knew that I was fighting for rural areas, uh, they knew that uh, you know, I I did a lot on spectrum and around spectrum. Uh American innovation and competitiveness was core to what I tried to accomplish. And I think when when when I go into an office, they see somebody who really wants this country to excel. Uh, and that's the message that we get to talk about. And you know, whether it's six, seven uh gigahertz or whether it is uh you know, the the the programmers uh and content and IP, you know, we could have conversations about it. And I I think a lot of them are now jealous that I don't have to talk about raising money or elections or what happens. So I think there's a little bit of that where they're like, man, uh that that's that that'd be nice. Yeah, life on the outside looks good. Well, if your impression is scheduled, they want to know about my schedule too. And I know I gotta control my schedule now.

SPEAKER_01

That's probably the biggest point that they're and I'm grateful that you made time for me. You know, if if your impression of the cable industry is Larry the cable guy, or like cable video, or maybe, you know, years ago an unfortunate customer service call, I think our conversation certainly gives people an idea of all the issues you're dealing with. Uh you're you're in a lot of different areas, and uh, it's certainly not um the legacy industry that uh that maybe people had before. Um, you know, last question, you know, if you're trying to give people an impression of what cable is, like what do you want to leave people with?

SPEAKER_00

Cable is connectivity. Uh cable is the heart of connecting families, businesses, culture. It tells our story, it carries our story, and it's going to allow for U.S. uh opportunity, U.S. innovation, and and U.S. leadership. Uh, it really is economic and national security all in one.

SPEAKER_01

You've been very generous with your time. I know you're busy. Thank you so much for joining.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_01

My guest has been former U.S. Senator for Colorado, Corey Gardner, now CEO of NCTA, the Internet and Television Association. Find this podcast, an Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. It is produced by Vulgate Media and sponsored by Digital Progress Institute. Please leave us a review. It will help others find the show. Otherwise, we'll catch you next time.