The AI Hate Wave: Why is the Graduating Class of 2026 Booing AI Speakers Off Stage?

The “AI hate wave” stops looking temporary

The episode opens on a blunt premise: this is no longer a passing anti-AI mood, but something that looks sustained and politically usable. The hosts point to Axios’s framing — if AI were running for office, it would be losing in a landslide — and stack up the data: only 18% of 14-to-29-year-olds feel hopeful about AI, and more than 70% of Americans think it’s advancing too quickly.

Two commencement speeches become a warning sign

What really sets them off is the viral footage of graduates booing AI references at commencement speeches. They cite real estate executive Gloria Caulfield getting drowned out at UCF after calling AI “the next industrial revolution,” then zero in on Eric Schmidt’s University of Arizona speech, which they describe as awkward, painful, and almost dystopian to watch.

Why this generation may distrust AI by default

Paul Roetzer starts thinking out loud about the class of 2026: these students basically entered college when ChatGPT arrived. His theory is simple and unsettling — if students spent three or four formative years being told AI is cheating, plagiarism, or something professors want nothing to do with, then of course many of them now instinctively see it as bad.

Schmidt tries the optimistic pitch — and gets booed harder

The hosts walk through Schmidt’s argument: computers connected people, democratized knowledge, and lifted many out of poverty, even as they also degraded the public square and rewarded outrage. Then he pivots to AI’s upside — solving cancer, doing enormous good — and according to Paul, the crowd gets even louder, which is the moment he realizes this may be a bigger problem than he expected.

Public opinion is now affecting real-world AI buildout

This is not just vibes. They note that a record number of data centers were canceled in Q1 2026 due to community resistance, while Morgan Stanley calls public pushback a “binding constraint” on investment and Jefferies says the setbacks are hurting investor confidence. Paul’s warning is that politicians will see the boos and immediately double down on fear-based messaging around job loss and data centers because now they know it works.

The hardest part: students may be booing their own future

Paul gets visibly conflicted here. He says graduates are absolutely justified in feeling fear and anxiety about AI, but the brutal reality is that “the tech isn’t going to stop,” and refusing to learn it won’t protect them — it’ll just make them less employable in an already hard job market.

The social pressure around AI may be bigger than people think

Mike adds a more human layer: not every student in those crowds is a hardcore AI hater, but if the boos are that intense, plenty of AI-curious students may keep quiet to avoid judgment from their peers. Paul says they see versions of this inside SmarterX too — employees worried about jobs, coworkers judged by friends for working in AI, and none of it resembling the tidy Silicon Valley “abundance” story.

No neat answer, just a real sense of weight

The episode ends without a clean solution, which is part of what makes it land. Both hosts admit they’re struggling with what this means — for jobs, for education, for politics, and for young people who may be rejecting a tool they’ll still be forced to work alongside.