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by Rod D. Martin and Eric Metaxas
July 10, 2026
My latest interview on The Eric Metaxas Show. Sign up NOW for the Eric’s YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!
We discuss:
My new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order: pre-order NOW!
Why the leftist AI companies want to scare us into regulation that entrenches their own market share and eliminates competition
Why restricting American AI could hand China global dominance
What data centers actually do, and why America needs them
The real risks — and enormous opportunities — of technological progress
It’s 14 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch and share!
Text of our full discussion after this:
Here’s our full discussion:
Eric Metaxas: Hey there, folks. Welcome to the program. Talking to Rod Martin today. You know, Rod Martin. His name is Rod Martin. Rod Martin, it’s always encouraging to have you on. Welcome back.
Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.
Eric Metaxas: Before we leap in to talking about, oh, I don’t know, AI or something like that, I want to mention to folks your book coming up. Ladies and gentlemen, you got to get this book. It is called Trump’s New World Re-Order. Trump’s New World Re-Order. You can preorder it at Amazon. Please do. Trump’s New World Re-Order. We’ll be talking about that in the weeks ahead.
But, Rod, this issue of AI, I find myself, when I get confused by something, I just tune it out. I figure I’ll get back to it at some point. But I’m confused. What can you tell us about what is happening right now? Because it seems to be, like it or not, a very hot topic.
Rod D. Martin: Well, before we get into that, let me just say briefly that the book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, is about the end of the New World Order, about the complete reordering of the world that we're seeing right now. And it starts from the premise that, no, Donald Trump is not just a chaos monster. He is actually following a very well-thought-out plan that is rooted in Reagan. And this is a story that people need to hear. They need to understand how all these different pieces fit together.
They need to see the whole board. And that’s what Trump’s New World Re-Order tries to do. So, yes, go to Amazon and order it. Eric Metaxas wrote the foreword, so it’s obviously good.
Eric Metaxas: But, no, that’s nothing. That’s nothing: Eric Metaxas decided he wanted to publish this book. We have a new publishing imprint called Odysseus Books. And this book is so important that I said I would like us to publish it. So we, Odysseus Books, which publishes my book, Revolution, we’ve published this book, Trump’s New World Re-Order. And it’s very, very encouraging because it really masterfully makes sense of the crazy stuff that’s happening. You explain, Rod Martin, in your inimitable way, you explain what Trump is actually doing.
And part of what makes it so difficult for us, you know, until you read the book is you think, I can’t make head or tail of it because Trump is constantly misdirecting on purpose. He’s constantly saying things and playing both sides and, you know, praising dictators or whatever he’s doing. If you don’t really understand him, it’s confusing, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. And that’s maybe not in every single case, but it’s a masterful reordering of the order of things in the world, the order of nations.
And you explain it so beautifully. So it’s Trump’s New World Re-Order. Be sure to order and perhaps reorder Trump’s New World Re-Order. Go to Amazon.com. Pre-sales are very important, folks. You will get the book, so you might as well get it now.
So let’s talk about AI.
AI Competition and the Push for Regulation
Rod D. Martin: AI is currently in the news because we have the leadership of Anthropic and OpenAI — that’s Claude and ChatGPT — we have those CEOs coming out and saying, “oh my gosh, our stuff is too dangerous! You’ve got to regulate us!”
Well, they don’t mean for themselves to be regulated. They mean for their competition to be driven out of the market.
They are facing serious competition from open source models in particular that run locally. I’ve got an open source model running on my laptop right now. I don’t pay one penny except the cost of the electricity to use that model, which, by the way, in case anybody wants to know, is Gemma 4 because I don’t use Chinese models like Qwen, DeepSeek, or Kimi.
Eric Metaxas: Okay, but let me ask you, because I do not use AI. Anybody who reads my book, Revolution, can tell AI was not used in the writing of that book.
Rod D. Martin: That’s true.
Eric Metaxas: It’s quirkily human, as I confess to being. So I know very little about this subject. I don’t use AI. So when you say open source models, whatever. So you’re saying that they’re these two mega companies that they don’t like the competition that’s out there, is what you’re saying.
Rod D. Martin: This is a naked conspiracy in restraint of trade. This is an attempt to make themselves collectively, not just one company like AT&T used to be, but an oligopoly of three favored American AI companies that the government would regulate like a public utility and would control pricing.
So these guys could charge monopoly pricing forever. They could raise prices anytime they could talk some Democrat regulator into letting them. And meanwhile, open source dies, competition dies, and actually all of the harms they’re predicting come from that lack of competition.
We had the Hugging Face incident a few weeks ago. So a frontier model hacks into Hugging Face’s system to get information it shouldn’t get. Okay, but every other model out there immediately adjusted to prevent exactly that sort of thing. If you have competition, these problems get solved really fast before they get too big. If you don’t have competition, they do whatever some evil Deep Stater and some evil CEO decide to do.
It’s basically Tony Fauci and Al Gore all over again. They are hurting us with fear for the purpose of shutting down their competitors. And that hurts America. That hurts the world.
Eric Metaxas: Okay. Now, from what little I follow this, I get the impression that there are people on the right who are divided on this issue.
Rod D. Martin: Yes.
Eric Metaxas: Are there people on the right who are calling for regulation?
Rod D. Martin: Absolutely. But notably, not the president. The president has been stunningly clear on this, just saying this is bunk. We’re in a race with China. We wouldn’t have restricted American aircraft development in 1926 because somebody might fly a plane into the Twin Towers that didn’t exist yet. We actually need to shoot ahead on aircraft development in 1926 because the Germans and the Japanese are.
That’s the situation here. And the president’s been very clear-minded on it.
But we do have a lot of people on the right who are really concerned about this. Some of them are very well-intentioned. Many of them have watched a little too much Terminator and The Matrix. And they really should have watched Star Trek. Because if they’d watched Star Trek, they would know that in that setup, you have competing AI models and the Federation AI, Commander Data, ultimately beats the evil enemy AI, the Borg.
That is how it has to work. Without competition, we’re toast in multiple dimensions. With competition, these dangers go away.
The AI Race with China
Eric Metaxas: Can you think of any names on the right that are promoting the idea that we need regulation?
Rod D. Martin: I can’t think of anybody I would want to name. Most of those people, I hope, will think better of it once they’ve thought about it. Maybe they should talk to Larry Kudlow or George Gilder: they get it.
But the bigger thing we’re seeing in that same vein is the conservative opposition to data centers, which we know is a Chinese op. Not that these people think that they’re doing China’s bidding, but China is spending a shocking amount of money to gin up opposition to data centers while they build a new one every 10 minutes or something.
Why? Well, you heard them yesterday. The CCP put out a release yesterday where they said, we don’t believe in these AI fears. That’s all fearmongering. We are having no part of that. We are racing ahead.
Okay, well, they’re just saying it to you plainly. If we restrict our ability to compete with the most important technology of our time, and yeah, there will be another new one tomorrow and another new one after that. But right now, this is the focus, just like nuclear weapons were the focus in the 1940s.
If we let our enemies race ahead, we will live as slaves.
What Data Centers Do
Eric Metaxas: What actually are data centers? In other words, I’m always amazed. You know, when we’re talking about computers, I always think of miniaturization. So it’s hard for me to fathom why data centers would need to be so big and need so much water and take up so much space. Can you shed any light on that?
Rod D. Martin: Absolutely. I mean, first and foremost, it’s just a building full of servers. And we use a shocking amount of data. If you’ve ever watched anything on Netflix, you’ve used a data center. If you’ve ever sent an email, you use a data center. If you have online banking, you’re using a data center.
We’ve been doing this for 40, 50 years. Actually, I talked to somebody just the other day who built a data center in 1965. The other thing that gets missed in this is that, no, they actually don’t use a lot of water.
All of the data centers in America combined use a tiny fraction of the water that we use just for golf courses. So that’s silly, but it’s sillier still. We have data centers in deserts. Why? Because water’s not the only way to cool them. You can either use water or you can use electricity.
Electricity gives you the ability to run really powerful air conditioning units, run those chillers, you can cool the servers, no problem. You’re like, well, but that’ll run up my power bill.
But no, it won’t. Because people like Donald Trump, people like Governor Abbott in Texas have said, if you’re going to build one of these and it’s going to put any needless restriction on the power grid, you got to build your own power plant. Okay. That’s exactly what they’re doing. And that’s why Unit 1 at Three Mile Island is coming back online to power a data center. Because when you do that, when you create those new power sources, that will generate more power than the data centers need.
That will feed back into the grid. Therefore, consumer electricity prices go down over time. So, this isn’t a water threat. This isn’t an electricity threat. This is more COVID and global warming fearmongering to herd us into submission to our foreign enemies. And we have to see it for what it is.
Government Power, Progress, and Real Risks
Eric Metaxas: So, what does the left say about these data centers that they’re so horrible? Why? In other words, why would anybody be opposed to this? I don’t quite get it.
Rod D. Martin: They’re all on board. You know, Bernie Sanders put out some stuff yesterday that’s, you know, typically mind-numbing. And, you know, this is all dangerous and we have to regulate it into the ground. And okay, sure. I remember the famine they predicted in the 1980s. I remember the extinction of 90 percent of the human population by 2000 because of the ice age we were promised when I was a kid. All of these fearmongering attacks on progress always have the same solution: more government control.
Look at the solution, and you know the heart of the person stating the problem. These guys aren’t interested in solving a problem. They’re interested in government power. So, it is appropriate that the leading light on the left attacking these things would be Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist.
Eric Metaxas: I believe Barack Obama has also been attacking them.
Rod D. Martin: Yes. He just started.
Eric Metaxas: Yes.
Rod D. Martin: Yeah. And that should tell you everything you need to know.
Eric Metaxas: Yeah. I’m afraid it would. If he speaks out on something, I know I’m probably against it, whatever he’s speaking out. I’m against his, wherever he’s coming from, I’m against it.
Rod D. Martin: Now, Eric, let me quickly say, and then I’ll hush, but it’s important to say that doesn’t mean that there are no downsides to any of this. That doesn’t mean there are no threats. There are threats from airplanes. It turns out that you can fly them into the Twin Towers. You know, there are threats from steel mills and coal plants. They industrialized the Western world, and made us wealthy, and improved everybody’s standard of living. But they also necessitated the Clean Air and the Clean Water Acts.
There is no question that there are problems that arise along the way. But you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath. This is an incredible productivity boost that is going to eliminate poverty on an incredible scale and also greatly enhance our military security. And our enemies really want us to not have either of those two things.
Eric Metaxas: Well, we’re going to leave it there. The book is Trump’s New World Re-Order. Folks, please pre-order a copy. Trump’s New World Re-Order. My guest has been Rod Martin. Rod, thank you so much.
Rod D. Martin: Thank you.
