The Dispatch Podcast - The AI Data Center Moral Panic

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Megan McArdle, and David French to discuss the political battle over data centers and Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada. The Agenda: —Data center u-turn —How data centers affect communities —National security implications —Misinformation about data centers —The U.S.-Canada trade war —Worth your time: Dolly Parton Show notes: —Megan McArdle’s podcast —Wall Street Journal’s AI op-ed —Fox News poll on data centers —Why’d You Come In Here —Dolly Parton's Johnny Carson song —The Wailin' Jennys—Light Of A Clear Blue Morning —Dolly’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listeners, I want to tell you about the competitive enterprise institutes How the World Works podcast featuring the dispatch's own Kevin Williamson. Each episode, Kevin sits down with a notable guest to discuss the jobs they've had, why work matters, and the role of work in our social lives. After all, work involves a lot more than the paychecks cashed. So listen to How the World Works, wherever you listen to podcasts, or visit c.i.org slash podcasts. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the nationwide political battle over data centers. Our voters concerns valid? Is this a moral panic? Why has the anti-Data Center campaign been so successful? And can America have a competitive economy without data centers? Then we turned to President Trump's trade war with Canada and what it means for the future of U.S. Canada relations. And finally, someone who was very much worth our time, the late Donald.

I'm joined today by the dispatch's editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg, dispatch contributor and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, and advisory opinions guest host and New York Times columnist David French. Let's dive right in. I want to start today with a discussion about the politics of data centers. We have seen over the past several weeks, but in particular over the past week, a spate of articles in virtually every publication, New York Times, Washington, Post. political elsewhere, noting the heightened battles, not even battles, heightened concern about data centers and how it's driving political debates and campaigns in some areas and states and districts that we would expect and probably some areas in states and campaigns that we wouldn't expect.

There's a political headline on an article late this week that reads, everyone is making a U-turn on data centers as public support creators. Jonah, I'm not sure it's everyone, but it feels pretty close if you're following this story lately. What's going on? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's all one thing. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there.

I think there's a lot of more generic anxiety about AI and whether people think they have agency is stopping the data centers. Stop the data centers, we'll stop AI. they may not even articulate that in their own minds that much, but I can't dismiss it as part of like the general groundswell thing. I think that in an era where the affordability stuff is real, anything that impinges on people's electricity rates is going to freak people out.

You know, there's just a bunch of those kinds of things that I think are real and they're legitimate. And politicians should do a better job of dealing with them. And then beyond that, though, I think it's a moral panic. I think it's one of these things. where, I mean, I wrote a comment about this, we've seen these time and time again where, I don't know, kids playing Dungeons and Dragons was going to lead to mass

suicides across the country, the comic book thing in the 1950s, the Alar stuff in the 1980s. There was one working itself up about fracking just 10, 15 years ago. And I think that's the most relevant one. That and the one that happened after Three Mile Island, which basically held up nuclear power in this country for one and a half, two generations.

Because I don't think, we can discount the idea that at least at the margins, there is something of a foreign op going on here. I don't think it's the primary thing. I think a lot of people come to this naturally, but this whole thing is overdetermined. And we know that Russia, I mean, it's been documented, reports on it. And we know, like, the UAE, to a certain extent, we're involved in trying to foment anti-fraking hysteria in the United States for all the obvious reasons. And I just don't think we can say, particularly at a moment where just yesterday they announced that they've uncovered a massive plot by China to hack virtually every instrumental government that,

oh, but the Chinese would never, through TikTok or something else, try to fuel an anti-data center thing the way they tried to fuel an anti-Israeli thing or anything else. I think you've got to put that in the equation. And so we can all argue about what percentage of each one of these factors is involved in what's going on here. the whole point of moral panics happen. They're like perfect storms. You need all these other conditions to come together. And then the sum is so much greater than the individual parts.

And the last thing I would say is I think it just simply demonstrates once again how so many of our politicians are just simply weather veins for the moods of the people. I mean, if Greg Abbott is turning on data center construction in 10,000, Texas. In November, he was saying that the $40 billion investment by Google was proof that Texas was the place to be and he's pulling all this tech stuff from California. And now he's saying these people have bought the deserve the backlash that they're getting and he's going to have a moratorium on this and a slowdown on that. Then you just know that he never meant any of that other stuff all this time, right? Because the environmental damage from SpaceX is probably a thousand times greater

than anything from these data centers. But SpaceX isn't part of a moral panic right now, but where the data centers are. Megan, what about that? It's not just Greg Abbott, who's shifted his views. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, a Democrat thought to have national ambitions,

potentially a 2028 candidate, was a little more than a year ago touting permitting reform and sort of thumping his chest about the ways in which he was making it easier for Pennsylvania to attrously. these kinds of investments. And he, too, has turned on a dime.

He's now making arguments against data centers. He's looking at restrictions. He's differing to localities. This is happening. I mean, those are two examples. They are far from the only two examples. Are they falling victim to this moral panic? Or are there serious and substantive reasons that one, like a Greg Abbott or Josh Shapiro,

would have learned more in the intervening, months and decided, you know what, this really isn't as good for my state as I thought it was. I think you have to call it a moral panic in part because the shift is so fast, right? Is the like a 30-point shift in the number of people who oppose having data centers built near them in a year? Nothing moves that fast because of facts on the ground except like wars. You know, you can get very big swings in popular opinion about people who, for example, try to invade your country. Understandably. But it's not like the data center is suddenly have become ADX worse.

So as it happens, by curious coincidence, I yesterday interviewed for my other podcast at The Post, Annie Masley, who has been doing Yeoman's work debunking a bunch of really crazy statistics that have been circulating about AI, that they warm the air by multiple degrees near them, which is insane, like violates basic physical laws, that they use more water than nearby communities,

which is not really true, and so on and so forth. And so we talked a lot about why this is happening. You left out that they vibrated or frequency that increases your cortisol levels. Oh, sorry. I missed that. I was not aware of that, Jonah. Tell me more. Anyway, I'm sorry, Megan. Go ahead. I'm interested in the vibrating.

You know, lots of people have to pay for that. Anyway, enough of the blue jokes. Off the rails, 10 minutes in. So I think the story that I drew out of that conversation, episode will be up next week, please listen, is that, first of all, you have a bunch of academics and journalists who have very good reason to fear AI personally. Even if it's good for the economy and good for the world,

it's probably going to be bad for them. And it's going to be bad for academics in the very narrow sense because they now have to deal with an epidemic of cheating. And then there's the broader sense in which mathematicians are having a kind of existential crisis right now because AI turns out to be really good at solving unsolved mathematical problems. And they're like, what are we even doing here if a machine can do it better?

Writers, similarly, I don't think that AI does what I do better than I do. I spy on it frequently trying to get it to write Megan McArdle columns and I fear the day when it puts out something that I wish I'd written. But I do think, right, there's a lot of competition for a lot of what journalists do. And we're having problems. You know, the Wall Street Journal was a big controversy over an executive who wrote an op-ed with AI

and they had to decide, like, what are we going to do about this? Because this is, you know, we haven't caught anyone doing it, but I'm sure someone has tried. I hope that our intrepid editors have caught it, but we're just going to see more and more of that. And I know that our slush pile where, you know, like the over-the-transom op-eds, we're just getting more kind of AI slush.

And then there are all of the people who've been worried about AI existential risk, have been worried about it as a political issue for a long time. And all of those people shape our ideas about what the world's like. These are our sense-making institutions, as I think Ross Doutha likes to call them. And so, first of all,

there's not like the natural check when people generate totally insane statistics, like this thing is causing the air to rise by four degrees a mile away, which would require far more energy than a data center puts out to be radiated in a very statistically improbable way. And then there's not the natural, like, well, is this true? Right.

I mean, like, my first smell test on that particular stat was, like, is the air much warmer around Iceland's aluminum smelters, which is, like, one of the most electricity-intensive? And the answer is no. Iceland has not become subtropical because of its aluminum smelters. So these things propagate, and the corrections don't propagate. And that's aided by the fact that, as we all unfortunately know, our industry is kind of collapsing,

which means we don't have as many scientific beat reporters around as we used to. We have people who are working on much shorter deadlines. They don't have as much time. They don't necessarily specialize the way that they would have when we had twice as many reporters employed in the United States. And then there's political angles about this, because, like, if you go in blue sky, they're very upset about AI.

And if you say that you used AI for anything, I got in big trouble. And in fact, thank you, Paul Jocko, for name-checking me in your editorial defending the AI op-ed. that's going to make me really popular. Just for saying, like, I use it for research and I use it to, like, bounce ideas off of and, like, check this with, like,

am I crazy here? Find me research, et cetera. You know, my AI literally has a standing instruction to not flatter me and tell me everything that's wrong and be brutal, because that's what I want out of it is something to, like, give me that second, third eye. I also get it from editors and smart people I talk to, but one more eye never hurts.

How My Wife is Like AI by Jonah Goldberg. This is also, yes, this is also a role that has been played with patience and love for 16 years by Peter Sutterman for me. And I thank you, honey, you've really done a yeoman's work. And so that cascade then runs into the fact that there are fake concerns like water usage, because AI uses very little water for what it does. And then there are real concerns, like, I don't like construction in my neighborhood. industrial buildings are ugly. This is going to compete with me for electricity.

Now, that's actually somewhat complicated because the fact that AI data center power usage is quite steady and also that they can move the things where it's not steady, like training runs where they're doing this very intensive training of models. Like, they can do that at 3 a.m. They don't care. They can do it off-season, right? They can not do it in August.

They can actually shape themselves to help actually offset rate hikes and actually make the fixed cost. of running the power grid, they can help amortize that and actually conceivably lower costs. And when you look at it, it doesn't look like there's any correlation between states where electricity prices have risen a lot and states that have a lot of data centers. But the general NIMBY concerns, the fact that generators, which a lot of them are using to basically keep themselves from tapping electricity and perhaps driving up your rates, those generators are noisy, so they're not really fun for other people to live around.

in Loudoun County, which has the most data centers in the country, there's now, you know, there's housing developments that bought, these people bought houses in beautiful rolling farmland, and now they live in an industrial park and they don't like it. And that's, all of that's understandable. And also the fact that, like, these fake facts that have spread and not been corrected with nearly the volume that the fake facts spread in the first place, they're really easy to cite on YouTube and TikTok,

and they might come with a prestigious media outlet headline on them. They'll flash that on the screen to show you, like, no, this is real. And so all of those things are cascading. And then they're being hit by political entrepreneurs who, frankly, don't have a lot of great issues. The Democrats don't want to, are like trying to stay out of the culture wars, because that's poison for them. Republicans are trying to stay out of explaining Donald Trump, because that's not going very well. And data centers are just an easy issue for you to capitalize on, right? There is a lot of community opposition. I think often from seniors who really don't care about local economic development

because they're not going to benefit from it. They're not worried about whether there are jobs or how the schools are or whether the schools are well-funded. They're worried about whether their view is still nice. And so they're likely to show up to these meetings to shut this stuff down. You capture all of that, and then it becomes news, and the cycle escalates even further, right?

And I think that's where we are right now. And sorry, that was a somewhat long-winded answer, but I think that that is the cycle that we're in where as opposition has grown, there's not a lot of interest in pushing back on some of the more outlandish things. As I say, I think AI existential risk with the hugging face break,

if you've read the report on the swarms of open AI agents who were behaving in really, really disturbing ways in an attempt to get out of their little sandbox environment where it was supposed to be safely contained, on their own. It was like caddy day at the Bushwood Academy. And the scariest thing is that it wasn't, just like one or two rogue agents, it was all of these agents that were in different

sandboxes that appear to have been cooperating with each other. And that's just quite scary. That's totally legit, right? Like, to be clear, I don't think that shutting down data centers in Loudoun County is going to stop it, right? First of all, there's China and second of all, there's, like, Nebraska. There's other places that you have a lot of open farmland and not nearly as many people to provide local opposition. I think one way or another, these data centers are probably to get built. But in the meantime, for politicians, it's gold. Because it doesn't cost you anything to shut down data centers,

except the tax revenue that you would have had. But that's a counterfactual. No one will actually miss it. It doesn't require you to raise taxes or spend money or anything. And so it's not surprising that politicians are leaping on this issue. David, one of the things I find most interesting when you dig into the polling. And I've spent now several days going back and trying to read it. read verbatim transcripts or watch videos from local town halls to get a real sense of what are

the arguments that people are making in opposition to the data centers. And one of the interesting things that I found is Jonah mentioned sort of a vague sense of concern about AI generally and a loss of agency and worries about jobs down the road, what have you. There's a Fox News poll out late July. And the Fox News polling unit for people who are familiar does terrific work. It is a top-notch, first-rate polling outfit. The polling is better than a lot of the rest of the stuff that you see on Fox News. To ask people, what are the main reasons for opposing data centers?

And contrary to, I think, what seems to be a jelling conventional wisdom, that it's about fears of AI and sort of undefined concerns about losing jobs in the future, there are very specific reasons that people are opposing these data centers. Environmental concerns was number one at face. 50% quality of life concerns, 14% economic offense at 11% and negative view of AI sort of broadly at just 11%. And when you sort of dig into this, so many of the things that you hear from people, I read a transcript of a town hall the other day where somebody made the argument that if you approve

this data center, the river that we all enjoy, just down the block will dry up. It will exist no more. And you hear increasingly those kinds of arguments. Is this a moral panic? Are people making decisions? Are politicians taking the stands they're taking based on a fundamental misunderstanding of these things? Or do people have legitimate reasons to want to oppose the building of these data centers? But whenever you get to sort of a wave of public opinion like this, sometimes you kind of have a chicken or egg problem.

Was it some learning of statistics that drove a large-scale explosion of anger? Or was it there was deep, deep, disquiet and people are sort of backfilling reasons for the disquiet? I have talked to quite a few people who oppose data centers, and very few people will say, well, I just generally don't like AI, and this is how I show it, which is, I think as you say it, and if it comes out of your mouth, it doesn't even sound right, you know, because, well, is my opposition to an AI data center in my county? Is that going to be something that stops chat GPT?

No. But I think that there is a very deep and pervasive background hostility to this industry. And in that situation, you're going to be a sponge for negative information about it, just in the same way that a partisan, say, is a sponge of negative information about, like, Hunter Biden. and knows nothing about, you know, Qadari payments or jets. And so you just become this sponge for every negative real, every negative fact. And then you can then turn around and tell everybody all of these negative facts that you've been just absorbing.

So I do think there's, as Megan and Jonah is saying, you know, the speed of this really does give off the whiff of a moral panic. But I also think if you put yourself in the shoes of people and, you know, 26, who were being asked about a giant data center project, and compare it, say, with my community in rural Kentucky, when in, I think it's 87, it was announced that a giant Toyota factory was coming. There was almost unrestrained jubilation. This was a small town. It wasn't very well-off financially. There weren't great job prospects. There's a small Baptist college where my dad taught in the middle of town, but most of the rest of the economy was tobacco farming, which was not making everyone rich. And you were going to have a factory. And immediately throughout my high school,

my classmates, it spread how much Toyota paid. And people were just elated, just elated. And a lot of your Toyota Camry's that you've driven or what's their minivan, the Sienna, they're made by my high school classmates who do a phenomenal job making those vehicles. And there was just jubilation. I mean, there were a few people, like a few holdouts that wouldn't sell their land and Toyota. had to bid it up and all of this stuff. But there was a lot of joy. Now, contrast it with a data center. Someone says, we want to build this data center.

Well, first thing about it is they don't give you very many jobs at all. So it's about 40 or 50, depending on the size of it. Some can be maybe in the very low 100s. Some are as low number of jobs, say 20. People don't really understand what they are. Everyone understands exactly what a car, factory is. They don't understand what, you know, say a server farm is. They don't understand how things work. I mean, I would say most of us, if we're going to sit down and try to explain exactly

how does the server farm, data center, et cetera, work in the world, the percentage even of journalists that could explain it to, you know, everyone's satisfaction would be kind of low. And so it's somewhat mysterious. So you have this kind of giant, humming, industrial price. And you know, everyone's satisfaction. that no one in the town works for that's behind a gate. And the benefit to you is, well, you know, hey, we might give some money to your local police department. And it all sounds like, I've seen about 15 Netflix action movies about, like, with thrumming facilities behind mysterious gates and shadowy tech billionaires.

It's an industry that is at its lowest point in public opinion, often for reasons entirely its own fault, the whole forced inevitability of all of it, which is a great phrase, which I've heard for the first time on an HBO comedy, but I thought, man, that's a great phrase. It's sort of this forced inevitability. We're coming. There's nothing you can do about it. Oh, and oh, by the way, it might take your job. And there's just nothing you can do about that either. And in exchange, there's some unexplained productivity gain or some unexplained level of wealth and prosperity that you're going to participate in some sort of unexplained way. But in the meantime, here's our chat bot to help talk to you about suicidal ideation. And it's also a rising when Silicon

Valley is completely stripped of any goodwill. You know, when Meadow and when Facebook was rising, that was the era, you go back and you watch, say, the first season of Silicon Valley, when everything is, you know, what was tech crunch, tech disrupt, whatever, and everything is, I'm making the world a better place by dot, dot, dot. I'm making the world a better place by dot, dot, dot, dot. And this is sort of like the mandatory phrase that you're using. And now it's like, I'm going to have 15x return of my investment by dot, dot, dot, dot. And it has transformed completely and been stripped of any sort of idealism at all. And so that's a terrible posture. You're running a mysterious business, whose reputation is in the toilet

that has rolled itself out in the worst way imaginable, building a facility in the community that is very hard to explain how, unlike a factory, it really does benefit the entire community. And then is that not going to make you a sponge for any negative information about that industry? So I tend to think that, yeah, both things are true,

but people are responding to the statistics and very susceptible to the misinformation because of the hostility. So the only thing I'd add, because I think we all agree on that part of it, the only thing I'd add, and then Megan, you can take it over. One thing I think we've left out is the degree to which basically, there's as much avatars as authors, but Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump have created a climate where there's just much more permission to say, well, the scientists are wrong,

medical experts are wrong to go with the sort of whack job influencers and take their word for it. So like there is kind of like an anti-vax vibe to some of this stuff that feeds into it. And just

it's part of the larger point about why people are receptive to these arguments. I just think that's part of it that's also. But then again, I had to do a deep dive on this whole cortisol thing. So like I'm more sensitive to it. So. You know, I think, though, that part of that is what I was describing, right?

Like, it's not that the suicidal ideation isn't real. It's true, right? Chatbots, people have had conversations with chatbots that seem to have tipped them into psychosis, although I do wonder whether they were already well on their way there before they got to that point. You know, people have committed suicide after chatting with their chatbot. But those stories are not, like, one of the things Annie Masley talks about, a lot is these contextless figures we get about AI, right? Where you hear it uses X gallons of water and you're like, oh my gosh, that sounds huge. And it turns out it's like one almond. Right.

Like those things are when you don't know what the comparable uses for the water are and what a normal industry would use, you think, wow, this must be huge. Or a golf course. And kind of similarly, like how many people are tipped into psychosis other than the seven people that the New York Times found? right? And how many people are tipped into psychosis by random household substances that we never think about as an existential danger to our futures, right? No one provides that context, right? You just get these scary, I have found five stories of people doing crazy stuff online. There is almost nothing in the world that you cannot find five stories about people doing crazy stuff with it, right? And I'm not saying it's not a problem. I'm saying I have no idea if it's a problem. No one has done any kind of rigorous study. And the history, and the history hysteria about it gets hyped. It's also a new problem. New problems freak people out. Yeah.

Absolutely. And I do understand that this is freaky, but like, you know, does the New York Times really know whether someone was already pretty well underway into a mental health crisis before they started trying? Like, that person will say no. But then, like, anyone who has dealt with someone who's having a serious mental health crisis knows that in the early stages, often they are also unaware that they are entering into a mental health crisis.

And I would say, like, look, the tax. revenue ain't nothing. Loudoun County is getting a really huge share of its tax revenues, and that funds parks and schools and all the other stuff. It means your property taxes are low. That is meaningful for communities

where they're really struggling to keep stuff open, because there's not a lot going on economically. And, like, I get that people would like it better if they also offered a thousand jobs, and that's totally fair. And then I think some of the concerns are like a layable, right?

really are ugly. I agree. Design them better, you know. Yeah, absolutely. I've been in Massachusetts near an old factory town that's filled with picturesque old factories. Couldn't we just stick some like Victorian cornices and plant some trees around the data centers? The noise is a real thing. Make it look like a forest. The electricity is a real thing. But like I, the really difficult stuff, I think the existential risk is a really scary thing. And we should worry about that. And I think, that the it's going to take all over jobs thing is quite overblown. There are other risks, like biosecurity risks that Bill Gates was just talking about, where like, is this going to help me make a deadly virus in my bathroom

so that I can turn from being a mass shooter to like a genocide error and potentially like kill all of humanity? I'm not saying that there are no risk and there's nothing worth worrying about. But I am saying that I think the media cycle does not do us any favors on this front, partly because it is new and it's hard to assess. but also because what's buzzy isn't necessarily what are the biggest issues.

Also, I mean, it's worth putting out. I mean, this conversation's guilty of it and I'm as guilty as anybody, but we've elided from data centers to AI. To AI. Right. And the problem is that the choice isn't whether we're going to have AI or not.

The choice is whether America is going to dominate AI or China is. And so once you make that decision, once you make that realization, you have to say, okay, well, since it's coming no matter what, do we want us in charge of it or do we want China in charge of it?

And if you want us in charge of it, you got to put a data center somewhere. And one of the fascinating things to me is how so many, I mean, like, we've talked about this in terms of people retreating to environmental arguments. You know, it's very similar to the three mile, post three mile island stuff.

It's similar to the fracking stuff. I also like the attempts to turn it into a class issue. So like David Hogg had this tweet, which he just got raled for. He's the young Democratic National Committee vice chair or something active. He's a young Democratic activist. And he's like to see them, I like to see these supporters of data centers allow one of these in one of their own rich communities rather than in poor neighborhoods or whatever.

And it's like, Loudoun County, I think people play games with it being the richest county in America. But it's definitely one of the richest counties in America. And it's just nonsense. And most powerful. Yeah. Loudoun County for people not in the D.C. area is a wealthy, semi-rural ex-urban county outside of D.C. in Virginia. And as Jonah points out, very, very wealthy. It's horse country.

Yeah. People like to claim that these counties in Northern Virginia are the richest counties in America because of the median household income. And that's true. Yeah. But part of the reason why that's the case is that it's the, you have all of these, like, Pentagon government contractors who have very, very. healthy upper middle class incomes.

But it's not, I mean, there are some very rich people, to be sure. But it's not rich, like, parts of, like, Silicon Valley or Fisher Island or Long Island are, right? It's that it's like super successful two-family income families. A lot of rich lawyers, that kind of thing. But it's, anyway, people play games. And so it's worth point out. So I got this, I said, Matt Iglesias kind of tongue in cheek, said, you know, where would be a great place to build data centers?

was DC declining housing market. Like, we could use the development. JL.G. should do. Janice Lewis-Georges are going to be our future mayor. She's the Democratic nominee. And that pretty much means she's already mayor. In the spiritual, if not the legal sense. And I was like, I would love to see this,

both as a techno-capitalist and as a journalist, I would love to watch our socialist mayor fighting with her coalition about data centers. But someone shy back, it was like, well, you wouldn't like it if they were going to build it in your neighborhood. It's like, actually, I live in the neighborhood in D.C. There's only one ward in D.C. that's zoned industrial. And it's Ward 5 where I live.

So, in fact, I am advocating for a data center to be put in my neighborhood. And possibly near me, although, like, in fairness, it would probably go on the other side of the train tracks. And I might have some distance from whatever downsides there were. But no, it should come to D.C. We have the opportunity. Do we have the will? All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast.

And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. David, what are the national security implications of this? Jonah mentioned that we're in this race with China to beat China in an AI race and AI development that's been going on for years, but is certainly, I think, intensifying right now. And you can't win that race unless you have the infrastructure to do these kinds of things. What are the national security implications here?

And is it the case that we could see a moral panic really retard our growth in this area that has not only national security implications, but global economy implications? Are those real concerns? Should we worry about that? I mean, the national security implications are immense here, just immense. We're in the middle of what a lot of people are thinking of could be a revolution in military affairs, a kind of transition in military technology and military tactics that you might say, the transition from longbows to muskets, or you know, you're really just moving into an entirely different realm of military technology, one that could, if not handled correctly, mean that adversaries could literally leapfrog us after the hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars we've spent on very big ticket, advanced, large-scale systems. Now, I think a lot of that is

overblown and could be overblown. Drone countermeasures are lagging behind drone development. That might not be the case in perpetuity. But I understand the concern. And I think in the Iran war, we have now known that that was a much less one-sided exchange than we were led to believe initially, certainly than we were led to believe initially, in large part because of Iran's ability to at least dip its toe in this next generation of warfare that is already dominating Russia and Ukraine. And AI is indispensable to all of this and will be indispensable to all of this, particularly when it comes to targeting, guiding and directing of drone swarms. I mean, the possibility penetrating into enemy electric grids, penetrating into enemy economic systems.

All of these things, AI is going to be incredibly important. We've already seen some reports from the front in Ukraine that Russia is now deploying AI autonomous AI drones. And, in that there is now a degree of autonomy in the battlefield, AI autonomy, that we've not seen. And so the national security implications are enormous. And then there's this other thing, and I was just thinking about this the other day, that with sort of a better leadership and a country less divided by and so fixed on hating each other, there would be a way in which the AI revolution combined with sort of the revival of the American space program would be able to be pitched to the American people as,

no, American dynamism still exists. American innovation. This is still a country that is capable of doing great things and being at the forefront of the leading revolutions and technology and industry. I mean, this is a moment of, again, with better leadership, that could be legitimately sold to the American people as a sign of a revival of American innovation

and the American spirit, with all the downsides acknowledged, with all of that. And lastly, that comes to Jonas' point about a foreign op. If you look at all of the advantages that will accrue to the United States of America, if we are and can manage intelligently,

I'll put that out there as well, can manage intelligently this AI revolution, why wouldn't our principal adversaries try to rip us to pieces over this? I'm so struck by that last point, David. This is what's ironic about this moral panic and about the spreading of, again, conceding that there are legitimate concerns about the proliferation of data centers and the locations locally and environmentally, all of those.

There are some legitimate concerns, but I think what we're seeing is this moral panic caused largely, built largely on conspiracy theorizing, claims that are not true and in some cases are easily debunk. And what's so ironic about it is you. have this industry, the AI industry that is powering the global economy, that, you know, the speculation is it's going to take over sort of the information environment from this point forever. And they're losing this battle, you know, to local cranks who are making up these arguments.

Where is the all-powerful AI industry in making these cases? There are towns, the one that you hear from people who defend the building of data centers like Quincy Washington where you've seen dramatic improvements in the tax. The tax rates are plummeting. They're building, you know, high schools worth tens of millions of dollars. There's a proliferation of other building in these areas. And you just don't hear much about that. Megan, why are we not hearing those kinds of stories?

And why is the AI industry as wealthy and powerful as it supposedly is, losing the PR battles so badly? I mean, I think part of the problem is that Silicon Valley has just historically been incredibly bad at politics. And I don't just mean Elon Musk's Trumpian adventures, which were just a mistake, I think, from a corporate perspective. I like, if you love what he was doing, like, I won't, I won't argue right now whether he should have supported Donald Trump. I think my views on that are pretty clear, but that companies have historically, outside of narrow niches where, like, it's just very clear that all of your people are on one team and there's just no points in doing anything but leaning into that, you know, like the whole earth catalog or whatever.

In general, people have tried to span the, as Michael Jordan famously once said, you know, Republicans by sneakers too. And, but what they have done is not the kind of team picking that companies ineptly decided to do, starting with, really with the Indiana RIFRA Act in 2015, where they all ganged up on Mike Pence and forced him to basically send it back to the

legislature for a rethink. They have not done the normal stuff very well, which is like showing up in Washington, knowing who your reps are, knowing what their issues are, doing some basic public relations work with the public to reassure them. Because

in a representative democracy, like they're stuff's going to happen, and you want to tell your story to them before the politicians start thinking about what might happen. And so instead, they were just kind of out of it, and in part that's because, like, this is an industry with a light footprint. You don't get a lot of OSHA violations other than carpal tunnel in your software firm. You don't have a lot of, like, polluting stuff until data centers and carbon emissions, right? It's just something that is not interacted with the state in the way that, like, the oil or the banking industry have. And that And then you get this cascade where in 2016, liberals decide that Facebook handed Trump the election, which was not even a little bit true.

But they became very convinced of it. And then they turn on Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley is like, oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. We're going to do some moderation of conservatives to make that not happen again. And then conservatives are like, are you kidding me? And they are like, okay, now we hate you too.

and then everyone hated them. And still, you know, like, we are just getting to the point where Silicon Valley is getting serious about having a political strategy for living in a democracy that does a lot of regulation. And I suspect that that's also true

at the community level, right? If you are, like, Toll Brothers and you build a lot of houses, guess what you have? You have a lot of expertise at negotiating the zoning boards and making the community happy about the development,

and dealing with all the local politicians, and you get really good at that. You have people who just do that and who, like, drive strategy at your firm because that will determine whether your firm is profitable or not. And in the data center business, you've got to have that.

And they hadn't really been very good at it because there is just this blind spot in Silicon Valley. Like, they're 3,000 miles away. What do they... They don't think about this stuff. They're above politics. in other than the abstract debating stuff

on their blogs level. And on the practical politics level, they're just, like, even now, people will come into Washington, they'll sit down with journalists, I'm in this group, and they will say, well, like, we're really worried about AI existential risk,

for example, but it could be any of half a dozen other things. And these are these issues, and we're like, okay, well, what do you want Washington to do? And they're like, well, we want Washington to fix this. And we're like, okay, telling Washington to fix something is not how politics happens. What specifically would you like them to do?

And they don't have an ask, right? And that's not how politics works in Washington. If you think there's a problem, you actually have to draft out a solution that you can hand to a politician because he's too busy. And if you just give him a big direction to fix some big problem, he will just be like, that really sounds important, but like call me when you have a plan. Or worse, they'll propose a solution that isn't a solution, right? they'll fix something that maybe doesn't need fixing because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the industry. Part of this is just that they have not historically needed to do this. A lot of the revenue

in Silicon Valley is B2B, not B2C. They just haven't needed to think about public relations nearly as much as they have in the last five years or the last 10 years. And they have been very slow starters at figuring it out. Before we move on to a not worth your time, it's very much worth our time. I do want to spend just a moment on the sort of resurrection of the U.S. Canada trade war, which escalated pretty dramatically over the past week. In late July, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney decided that he wanted to try to restart negotiations, to reach new understandings of the U.S. Canada trade relationship based on sort of having had some distance. from the hysteria of liberation day and some of the public spats before Canada decided to

quietly restart these talks apparently had pretty good talks with the White House for the better part of a month. At one point near the end of the negotiations, Donald Trump even put out of social media posts suggesting that there was a deal, that there were breakthroughs, that there was going to be this new relationship, and that it all blew up. And now you have the Canadian government saying, in effect, we can't do this. We're looking for other trade partners. We won't sign on to this deal. You have Donald Trump doing Donald Trump things. David, why did this happen again? And how significant is this? Well, I think there's a couple of things that happened here. One is, you know, as the reporting indicates, there's a lot of evidence that the U.S. tried to change the deal

at the very last minute in ways that were materially worse for Canada, such as roping Canada into American sanctions regimes. In other words, giving America some limited control over Canadian trade policy by changing American trade policy. There are reports that the U.S. was asking for or demanding the ability to essentially nullify the deal at any time that it wanted to nullify the deal. And the precise back and forth is disputed here. No question about it. But at the same time, that leads me to point two, which is right now in much of the world,

I think including Canada, there is more to be gained politically by defying Donald Trump than lost. And so the entire dynamic that Trump has been trying to achieve by walking into office his second term as the world's biggest bully has now completely reversed itself

to the point where when people might have in January, February, March, April, early in Trump's term, been a little bit coward by the fact that here he's back. He's allegedly riding this wave back into the office. He has a radical cabinet that,

how do we deal with this, has now sort of morphed into, oh, this guy doesn't know what he's doing. And his team is all over the place. And in many ways, he's a paper tiger. And in fact, in fact, I'm going to submit my own national leadership by defying this guy. And I think very few politicians have played that better than Carney. I mean, this is a guy who is unique, kind of in this very anti-incumbent Western world,

at riding pretty darn high in public approval. and heck he owes his entire term in office to backlash against Donald Trump, arguably. So I think the really truly significant element of this beyond whatever impact of trade war with Canada has on our own economy, which wouldn't be terribly significant all on its own, but we've got a lot of other headwinds. I think the real significance here is who fears Donald Trump. And is it now flipped to the point where defying the will of the United States of America is in the national interest of an awful lot of politicians? Yeah, Jonah, let me ask you about that. David is right. I mean, this is a very popular move for Carney to stand up to Donald Trump. There's a poll that suggests 76% of Canadians support his move, don't want him to do this. And that's across sort of ideological and political divides. However, it seems to me that this is the high.

mark for him on something like this because this failure to reach new accommodations, and I think you certainly understand why Canada didn't want to do this. I think it would have been bad on a number of levels for Canada to have agreed to some of the things that the United States was asking. But there will be, I would say, disproportionate economic effects on Canada and on Canada's economy. And at what point do those economic impacts catch up with the bold stand that Carney is taking and defying Donald Trump, if we start to see, you know, in a Canadian economy that's not doing great right now, additional challenges because of these trade things, could it be the case that the opposite lesson is the one that leaders across the world learn?

So I'll get to that question in just a second, but I first want to apologize to David in advance because I don't mean this as fighting words or an insult, but I think what he offered was actually a pretty robust defense of the Trump administration. insofar as as usual, David. As usual. I know. Jonah, you know how I am.

Like, I mean, like, and he might be right, right? And like, incompetence is always, particularly when Howard Lutnik is involved, that is always a defensible Occam's razor kind of place to go. But I'll just put it in, imagine you're a Canadian with no goodwill and you actually think that the Trump administration is more clever and more sinister than we're allowing for here.

Trump comes into office basically talking an Americanized version of the way Putin talks about Ukraine. It's not a real country. The border is this abstract line. Historically, it makes no sense to think of it as a different country. Really, we should all be the same. They should be part of us. And like, you know, what's the big deal? why do they so dislike this idea? Declares up all these tariffs on it, threatens all these things about, you know, annexing Canada and amidst all this talk about Greenland and all these kinds of things,

then it kind of subsides for a while while Trump goes on other adventures. Now in this, these negotiations, if the New York Times reporting in other places, which I have not seen actually a lot of pushback on the substantial asks that the administration made, what the administration wanted to do was essentially turn to the New Yorkerner,

Canada into America's Belarus or Kazakhstan or something like that in the sense that they would have to match our trade policies on every country that whatever our trade policies towards China, there's Vietnam, towards France, whatever, Canada would have to have the same level of tariffs. And there's a steelman defense of that, which is to prevent what they call what trade deflection, right? Where like if we have a 50% tariff on widgets, and Canada has a 5% tariff on it. Everyone will just send their widgets to Canada and then ship them, buy them from Canada instead of widget stand or whatever. But at the same time, they were saying that our streamers

have to be allowed to completely ignore the bilingual stuff in Canada, which we can all make fun of. I have no problem making fun of, but for Canadians it's a big friggin deal. It is like central to their identity. It is like the third rail of a lot of cultural politics.

in Canada. And we were just like, no, no, Canada should just be a market for our, our tech companies, our streaming platforms, as much as, as much as Montana or Delaware. Oh, and by the way, we can pull out of this at any time we want without any notification. So like, none of these deals are binding on us, but they're binding on you. Yeah. And we basically get to dictate all of your trade policies going forward. Like, who can blame the Canadians for thinking that this is not quite annexation, but it's kind of not close, not far from it either. And I just generally, given all the other rhetoric from the Trump administration, I'm not saying that like Trump's, this is part of some master plan or anything like that. But if you're a Canadian, I mean, you guys know

the national security argument is that you have to think of the worst case scenarios first. Yeah. And what they were asking of Canada was essentially to give up big chunks of their sovereignty so as to be incorporated into the U.S. economy into an into an effect Trump's industrial policies. And that's a much bigger deal than trade dispute. And there's a reason why Carney is talking like as if he's at war, right? He literally says, we were attacked. This is like a, because in his mind, and I think fairly.

Yeah. this was a fundamental assault on Canadian sovereignty. And it wasn't a threat to cross the border with tanks or anything like that. But like in economic terms, I defer to Megan. I'm sure we could come up with some scenarios that were even more draconian that the U.S. didn't call for, but not that much more. It would be unethical. We don't want to give them ideas.

That's right. That's fair. But all I'm saying is that, like, this is really tough for Canada. and they're going to suffer, and we've screwed them so royally. And look, you're talking to the guy who wrote a cover story for National Review about why we should bomb Canada.

I am not normally the one coming out to defend Canada, but what we've done here is so friggin dishonorable to Canada. And, you know, Trump talks about these trade deficits that we had with Canada, how they're ripping us off. And again, he doesn't understand trade deficits. He doesn't understand trade.

He doesn't understand any of these things. But the main reason why we had a trade deficit with Canada was because we were buying oil at below market prices from Canada. And that is a very difficult card for Carney to play because Alberta is having a referendum on secession. And you don't want to say, hey, we need to boycott selling oil to the United States.

But Canada's our number one oil supplier. If Canada says, look, we have to go to the mattresses on this and cuts off sales of oil to the United States, that gets oil up to a buck 20. you know, $120 a barrel pretty quickly. Because that's going to be really hard for those refineries that take that oil, because it's weird, sludgy oil, to retrofit to some other oil that they could buy or get from someplace else.

And so, yeah, Canada has more to lose economically, but it also has sort of like the Iranians have more to lose economically. But their mindset is this is about survival. And so they're going to have a higher pain tolerance, too. and I don't think the Trump people have thought it through well. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes

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exclusive town halls with the founders and much, much more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Megan, you read the reporting coming out of the negotiations and why the negotiations cracked up, and I think David explained them very well. Some of the demands or alleged demands that the United States was making was that would basically bind Canada to do everything that we would do in our subsequent trade

negotiations with other places. They had to essentially become an appendage in U.S. trade relations, which would be problematic. And then the other thing is the Canadians were apparently pushing the United States just to make clear that any deal that we signed here, we would be bound by. And the terms would not be changed. And again, if the reporting is to be believed, and this is largely sourced to the Canadian side, the United States said, no, we can change the terms of the deal. we could blow up the deal anytime we want to, and we can change the individual terms anytime we want to. Now, if this had been reported in the Obama administration or the George W. Bush administration, I would be inclined to read reporting like that and think, no way, the United States didn't do that.

But in this context, the Trump administration, like, of course that's what we were saying. Like, why wouldn't we be saying that? And to Jonah's point, it is dishonorable. There is a sort of American arrogance about it that can. Canada couldn't kind of agree to, but I want to ask you about the economic impact. Our friend Scott Linsacom had a column yesterday in Bloomberg where he said, look, the terms of the deal and the economic impact of the deal isn't great for the United States, but it's not catastrophic. This isn't a huge deal in terms of the U.S. economy. What he worries about is what comes next, potential escalation either by the United States.

or by Canada or the implications for broader trade relations between the United States and all of these other trading partners that are now looking for other trading partners because they don't see the United States as reliable. Are you more worried about the immediate impact here or the longer term, the sort of broader implications? Yeah. I mean, like speaking of people who are naive about Washington, I think the Trump team is fond of doing really naive game theory about like, well, they need us more than we need them, which is true, really true. And then thinking, well, they have to capitulate, it's like, no, that's not how it works. People hate bullies.

In fact, there's like an evolutionary psych theory that I really like that says humans have been self-domesticating. Basically, instead of being an ape tribe with a big alpha who just lords it over all the other guys, the beta guys just got together and we're like, nope, you're too much of a bully, you're dead. thank you weapons, tools, great invention. And so we really have a strong instinct against bullying. We don't like it. And that means the democratic politics of this

are that if you exercise that, like, I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further. Often you're going to get a rejection. That was a Darth Vader reference, Steve. Yes. Sorry, for those who are young enough to have watched the only Star Wars. But so I think the bigger danger, look, it's not great, like, as Scott says, this is not great.

But it's worse for Canada than it is for us, and that has historically been true of, like, trading deals. When trade suffers, Canada, just in general, trade is still surprisingly in this global age of container ships, still very much. It just always makes sense to trade with people local to you over people farther away. unless those people are really, really, really productive or really, really good at making something because the shipping costs kind of eat a lot of the benefits of the trade. But we still do a lot of trade with other people who aren't Canada. We still do a lot of trade with Canada. And we would hopefully like to do trade with them again at some point in the future

because it is mutually beneficial. Gains from trades guys, they're real. And I think that this does, it's just made us look crazy and unreliable. And even when Trump is gone, you know, You know, with Biden and I have very many quarrels with the Biden administration, but with Biden, there was, you know, this feeling that, like, we could be like, I don't know, guys. It's sort of the AOC, woke one was crazy moment.

I don't know what we were thinking. But we love all of our allies. We're going to be a reliable trading partner. And people would just be like, well, that was weird. Didn't know that America was going to have a psychotic break. Glad we've got that medicated and under control. But now that we've done it twice, there's a real danger that people, that people just don't see us as a reliable partner in the way they did.

I think it's not just a danger. It's a fact. It's a fact in economics. It's a fact in foreign policy. And it's a fact that you have previous allies who are now primed to defy us for their own political gain and benefit. And I think that it's not like this is lost forever.

We can rebuild it, but it's going to take a decade or two to get our mojo back as a trusted partner. And trust is really valuable. It's valuable in the economy. It's valuable in foreign policy. To have to be a predictable partner who people feel like they can rely on,

you get lots of goodies from that. They're willing to trade with you on better terms. They're willing to demand fewer, like, costly guarantees in order to do it because they know that you're basically a reliable partner. And we have thrown that away for basically no reason. Just, I think in part, because Trump is losing

in Iran, he hasn't fixed inflation, and now, you know, the bond market's getting a little sketchy. And by the way, this is not going to reassure the bond market, which is already now demanding more of a premium for our debt. We just sent them another signal that, hey, guys, I don't know, it's Looney Tunes territory, so you should price accordingly. But it's just, it's not great. It's just really, really, really not great.

And I think that Trump thought, well, if I could really, screw Canada, I'd get a win. And it's like, no, no, no, look, you did not. You yet again did not get a win. And I will also say that, like, just to back up David's point, I was in Canada in 2025. And it was really striking because Canadians are not super into national identity. And often their national identity

kind of centers a bit around not being American. I once asked someone why the road signs in Toronto were so small. This is no longer the case, but they used to be the case. the exit signs were really small. And she actually said to me, well, we wouldn't want those big, vulgar American signs. I was like, you mean the kinds of highway signs

you can read? Because I kept missing my exit, because the lettering was so small. But they don't, like, fly the Canadian flag all that much. They're not, it's not like America in that regard. And, boy, the Canadian flags

were everywhere. Yeah. Everywhere. And they were all obviously new. And we asked people we were in Nova Scotia and we're like, is that new? And they were like, oh, yeah, we just put those up, like, screw him. So people who were not, it's also like rural Nova Scotia.

It's not super political place. They were really mad. They were nice to us as American tourists. But like, that is a cost. Activating that, it doesn't go way fast. Yeah, yeah. And it's weird. I keep thinking every time Canada's in the news

and Trump versus Canada's in the news, I keep thinking that Trump must think that there's this very strong, potent and significant anti-Canada political constituency here in the United States that he's appealing to. Like, what is he doing? Like, nobody cares. Why are you doing this? He talks about Canada. That deep-seated, seething, anti-Canadian rage. Iran, yes.

It's so, it's so freaking bizarre and so Trumpy. It's funny. Back when I used to beat up on Canada all the time, because the history of Canadian anti-Americanism is very old, right? And it's like... I mean, they're literally the people, many of them, who left America during the Revolutionary War. For sure.

Yeah. Because they thought we were lunatics to separate from the British Empire. Their origin story is rejecting us, right? And we did then invade them, in fairness. Yeah, we did. Twice. Yeah. Mess with the bull, get the horns.

But I used to say, you know, the Canadian anti-Americanism reminded me of the great Cornell Harvard rivalry that everyone at Cornell knows about it and nobody at Harvard does. Right? I mean, like, like, the thing is, it's like, we just don't spend a lot of time thinking about Canada.

We just think there's those nice people. And, you know, and they say, eh, too much. And a few other things, right? But the Keynes think about us a lot. And now they, I think, justifiably, finally have a reason to be really, really, really pissed off at us. But Steve, I think you're right.

Trump seems to think that, and it's weird because he thinks that we don't, care about North Korea because he's got a good relationship with Kim Jong-un. Right. But it's basically Canadians and Iranians are our great existential foes. And like, no one, what are you talking about? And don't forget the Danes, those pernicious Danes. No, I'm sorry, our northern enemies, they're terrifying ice guns and their polar bear legions.

we will not and Bob and Doug McKenzie take off, eh? That's right. They're maple syrup rivers. We will not tolerate this threat on our northern border. And there is no better,

I mean, just to your point about national identity, you know, Putin tries to essentially absorb Ukraine into Russia. I mean, don't think of him as trying to recreate the Soviet Union, which he thinks was a mistake. He's trying to recreate something

much more like the Russian Empire. And so, but now Ukrainian national identity is forged an adamantium. Right. And what are we doing with Canada? We are forging a Canadian national identity, one that reaffirms,

they can be particularly powerful because it reaffirms, as Jonas said, the origin story. One thing that was really interesting to me, I was visiting Newfoundland, I believe, in Nova Scotia, I believe I was visiting where they have the Canadian Naval Museum in Nova Scotia.

And I'm a sucker for military museums. And I'm walking in, And like the first half of the museum is the triumph over the United States of America in the War of 1812. And that was, you know, the chronicles of the battles and the engagements and the American troops fleeing south. And like, wait. How do it? Wait. You know, it was for American as a kind of a weird experience.

But yeah, this is reaffirming origin story stuff here. We are forging greater Canadian independence, greater Canadian national identity. and if you are a national leader with any sort of foresight at all, you can also enlist your people in a crusade that will require some sacrifice, and you will get people to sacrifice together. And that's the way democracies endure pain is by rallying public support.

The way totalitarians endure pain is by suppressing the people, like in Iran. And over time, over the very long run, the way democracy's endure pain, because it's rooted into the social contract, can be more enduring, can be more courageous, and less brittle than the way authoritarian regimes endure pain.

Yeah. Jonah, I think there's a great future not worth your time in your Harvard Cornell analogy, lopsided rivalries where the one side doesn't even know that the other side is rival. Remember, there was, I had a former, colleague at the Weekly Standard who talked about his like years long deep-seated mutual hatred with

you and I asked you about it at one point and you said what no no idea that this even existed that's a good one of the best what are the best sort of unknown or lopsided rivalries before we go I do want to spend a moment on someone who was very much worth our time and that is Dolly Parton who passed away earlier this week after a brief battle with cancer. And I will say, so I've been a Dolly Parton fan. I would say I'm not a Dolly Parton super fan, but I've been a fan of her music for years. I've seen her in person before. But it's really been, you know, in a sea of otherwise bad news, kind of an uplifting

few days after her passing to see how many different kinds of people she inspired. and they come from all over the political spectrum and what have you. So I just thought I would ask each of our panelists for a moment's thought, either on Dolly Parton, on her passing, on her music, or on what she's meant to the country. And David, you shared a state with her for a while spending some time living in Tennessee. Were you a Dolly mega fan? So not musically.

I'm not a country music mega fan by any stretch, as much time as I spent in Tennessee. In fact, I was in Nashville. I'm in Nashville right now teaching, and it was in Nashville when she passed. And it kind of hit here in parts of the state, almost like an emotional atom bomb. And it wasn't because of Jolene,

as wonderful as that song is, or Code of Many Colors, or you name some of these legendary songs. And it wasn't because of her talent, although her talent was indispensable to her becoming what she became. It was because of her love. for people. You know, in Nashville, we're a little bit distant from East Tennessee and, you know, Severeville and Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg and that whole area where she came from. But if you want to talk about somebody who became famous and never left anybody behind, you know,

and when there was wildfires that swept through East Tennessee, like she supported families by the dozens and dozens and dozens until they could get their feedback. under them. She built hospitals. She built up a lot of the economic infrastructure of the entire region. I mean, Dollywood is one of the best places to take kids. Like, I mean, honestly, just go to Hollywood. It's magical. It's really wonderful. And that kind of kindness and goodness, which was, by the way, unconditional. That's what's really important about it. Her imagination library of providing books to kids. All you had to do is sign up. Just sign up. And you know, just sign up. you're going to get a book a month for years.

And it was, you know, and the selections were so thoughtful. And so this is how you get to a point where it feels like the impossibility of impossibilities where you have the DSA putting out a statement honoring Dolly and Donald Trump, where you have like a thruple living in a Brooklyn polycule weeping along with a grandma

and a rural Southern Baptist church, right? All of these people are emotionally affected. Why? because honestly, almost alone amongst major public figures, there was a sense that she loved you. And that sounds like a strong word, but everything she did was, she was so spontaneously generous.

And it wasn't just the generosity of the pocketbook or the wallet. It was also the generosity of spirit. One of the things you'll find is, this was one of the few days that Twitter was actually wonderful to be on. It was wonderful to be on Twitter the day she passed because what you began to see was testimonials from people who'd like defeated her

in contest for Grammys or Oscars or whatever and she would write the most kind note or people who were up and coming who are in very different musical genres that she supported and helped. I'm not saying she was perfect, you know. It'll take some time before she's Saint-Dolly or whatever. but as far as public figures who took all of their charm,

all of their talent, all of that fame, and without ever providing a sense that she had transcended her background, she embraced her background, and she embraced the people who are part of it. And I just don't know of an equivalent public figure, to be honest. And so, you know, I was just saying this to somebody. It wasn't just who she was.

It wasn't just what she did. It was also, especially near the end of the life, It was when she was doing it. In a time of extraordinary polarization, extraordinary hatred, there just aren't that many lights. And so I think that's why it hit far more, as wonderful as Jolene or I Will Always Love You

or all of the other songs are. That was it. That's why it hit people so hard. Megan, were you a fan of her music? I was, and I was privileged to see her once. I was not like a super fan. I live with like an audio file and I'm very mindful

that when you say you're a super fan you were expected to be able to not just name every song they've ever written but which your favorite like recording was like but and I actually want to I want to plug one of her underrated songs which is why'd you come in here looking like that? Love that song.

I don't need like I just it's such a good song like when I'm feeling a little blue I will put that song on and I feel immediately better and I think that that was actually Dali's magic, right? She just made you feel a little better. I mean, some of the great anecdotes

that have been circulating, Siskel and Iber both got to interview her and both said, separately, that they had this weird experience of, like, grace. She was unflappable, she was fiercely ambitious. She knew what she wanted and she went after it. She was grateful for it when she got it.

She gave it back. She didn't seem to have a ton of, I mean, for somebody who dressed in rhinestones and a blonde wig, she actually didn't seem to have a ton of vanity. She knew what she was doing. She didn't need anyone to tell her how great she was. She didn't need to like, she just seemed like she had so much joy in all of it. And so much joy in the world. And in an era when stars are often tempted to, like, posture by kind of heightening our partisan divides

or our culture war issues or whatever, she somehow managed to diffuse them. Like her comment on Black Lives Matter was like, of course Black Lives Matter. Do we think just like only our little white asses mattered? And like she just managed to somehow not make it a partisan thing, which I don't know how anyone did in that benighted year of 2020. And that was magical.

And I wish we had more figures like that in the world because we need them. Jonah. Yeah, so obviously it wasn't a super fan. I don't know about the misprint in the liner notes of, you know, her fifth album or any of that kind of stuff. But I think everybody else, I just liked Dolly Parton. And I think what's funny is when you think about it, I've been watching a lot of these clips too. And what's, we're so used to thinking irony is a elite highfalutin concept that when it's hiding in plain sight and delivered sincerely, we kind of miss it. and think it's something else.

And one of the amazing things about Dolly Parton is that she was just in on the joke about herself and said she was. I mean, I watch all these interviews, and she's just like, of course I'm wearing a wig and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and like, you watch her, Dolly Parton's top 10 pet peeves on Letterman

where she was asked to read them. And, like, she's like annoyed by emcees who say, and here they are, Dolly Parton or where she said, does, you know, or another one of her piece was people never talk about how I have a nice ass to, right?

I mean, she was just like in on it. And, in one of her last messages, and one of her last video messages, she made a joke about her boobs. Yeah. And she,

like, and when she's, and she, she just took, she took Barbara Walters to town by just sort of like leaning into, like, Walters cat asking all these kind of questions.

She was like, look, I know who I am. She's like, I don't mind dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb and I'm not blonde. And, but she did it in this downhome country way where she wasn't saying, ha, ha, I'm getting over on people. She was inviting people in to participate in the schick. And that earns you an incredible amount of goodwill from people.

Totally. Because there was just never anything, like, she was authentic and honest about the fakery in a way that made you want to just forgive all the fakery and like listen to actual let her actual talent come through. And if you haven't watched the clip, we can put in the show notes. She wrote a song about being on the Johnny Carson show. Oh, that's fantastic. Which is just amazing. And she's just honest about it. It's like, I owe a big chunk of my career to you, so I wrote this song for you, whatever. And Carson almost starts crying. And then he's like, look, the one thing I want is like, I better not hear you sing this on another thing where you've

just changed my name to John, you know, to Philman or, or Merv Griffin or whatever. She managed to like, when she let everyone in to what the enterprise was and what the irony was, in a way that wasn't creating ironic distance with anybody. It was actually making people part of it. And that's just a real talent. If we're going to share songs, I would encourage people to watch the, after the performance of after the gold rush on the Tonight Show. with Amy Lou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, it is literally one of the most beautiful things

you will ever hear in your life. Just incredible. Oh, man, I didn't know that existed. Thank you, David. Yes. Sincerely. I would make a suggestion for her most underappreciated song or one of her most underappreciated songs

and it's light of a clear blue morning, which is an extraordinary song when she performs it. There's another group, a three woman, largely a cappella group, not acapella, of a tremendous harmony called the Wayland Jennings, and they do a phenomenal version of the song. We'll put those in the show notes as well. I saw her live at a,

what was then sort of an obscure bluegrass festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, called Merlefest. I went down there with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and you camp on, it was actually like a sewage treatment plant, and you walk down this big hill and you go, and it's a ton of bluegrass people. She was easily the biggest name. People play on small stages.

Really terrific festival. We haven't been in years. But she was the headliner. She was the big show. And she played that night. And it was, I mean, just to watch her on stage, in part for the reasons, Jonah that you mentioned, because all of those dollyisms and all of that sort of self-mockery,

self-deprecation that she's become famous for, she did that on stage to just tremendous effect. She had the entire audience eating out of her hands. And I think the fact that she was such a big name at a relatively small festival at the time gave her sort of additional power. But she played through several songs. She got the audience really going. A lot of her, you know, popular songs, the upbeat songs. And then there was a point in the show where she decided she was going to slow it down as, you know, live musicians, live performance is often due.

And she slowed it down and played, as I recall, a series. of some of her more thoughtful, personal, emotional, evocative songs. And she was, and the audience, you know, she had the audience. You know, the people who were, you know, yelling and singing loudly two minutes earlier were all just sort of enraptured by what she was doing then. People were teary-eyed as she was singing about her upbringing. And she's up on stage and she's singing, we were pretty close.

My wife and I were pretty close to the stage. And she's singing. And it's a. moment you can see like the people next to you are are feeling it and it's emotional and all of a sudden as she's in the middle of this and it's just i think it might have just been her and her guitar silent everywhere she's singing and she does as sort of like oh blah blah and you're in the audience like what what is this and she the i guess it wasn't just her because the band kept playing she runs off to the side of the stage and gets a big

drink of water and comes back on the mood that she had created is of course totally ruined and she said i think i done swallow the bug and then says we got to try that one again and you know at this point the audience is just laugh convulsing with laughter as she's doing this and she has you know several other things she says that are funny but the most incredible thing about it was she interrupted the moment because of this bug that she had swallowed. But then she was able to recreate that moment after everybody had been laughing within a few chords of restarting that song. And it just, I don't know that I've ever seen anybody with that kind of power over an audience

to be able to sort of transition from fun to serious to funny to emotional. She was a tremendous, tremendous talent. We'll leave you with something that she wrote in Dolly, My Life and Other Unfinished Business, a book that she published in 1994, talking about her critics, she said, They think I'm simple-minded because I seem to be happy.

Why shouldn't I be happy? I have everything I've ever wanted and more. Maybe I am simple-minded. Maybe that's the key. Simple. Dolly, pardon. I think we'll all miss her. Thank you all for joining panel.

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