Return to Transcripts main page

Fareed Zakaria GPS

Trump Halts U.S.-South Korea Joint Military Drills; How China Has Kept Up with America on A.I.; Why Wildfires are Ravaging So Much of the World. Interview With The Nature Conservancy Chief Scientist Katharine Hayhoe; Interview With Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Daron Acemoglu. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired August 23, 2026 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:25]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Today on the program, why did the United States cut short a military drill with a major Asian ally? Apparently to avoid offending the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. I'll dig into this strange decision with a top expert on Korean affairs.

Then we'll stay in Asia and zero in on China to look at that country's competition with the United States for global tech supremacy around A.I.. "The New Yorker's" Evan Osnos did a deep dive of reporting and has some important insights to share.

Also, how does climate change relate to the heat and the fires we've seen around the world this summer? Finally, a Nobel Prize winning economist on American democracy's decline.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

I went to see Christopher Nolan's new movie, "The Odyssey," to watch a summer blockbuster, and it more than delivered. I did not intend to comment on the various controversies around the movie, from the attacks that it is woke to the historical inaccuracies in it. For goodness sakes it's a nearly 3,000 year old yarn that is filled with gods and goddesses, one-eyed giants, and lots of magic.

But Ezra Klein's commentary on the movie did lead me to think about the broader issues the movie raises, which strike me as interesting and important. Klein argues that the critique of Nolan's "Odyssey" as woke because he casts a black actress to play Helen is trivial and superficial, but that the movie is liberal in a more profound sense. Nolan fundamentally inverts the morality of the ancient world, in which conquest and victory were celebrated unabashedly, and replaces it with the morality that is more nuanced. While Homer's Odysseus was constantly lauded for his clever guileful

ways, Nolan's Odysseus is haunted by the ravages of the war and by his own deceit that was at the center of the victory, the Trojan Horse.

Beginning with Christianity, the West gradually replaced the pagan ethic of naked conquest and domination, with one centered on universal human dignity, compassion and empathy. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," says the Gospel of Matthew. Words that no Homeric hero would ever utter.

Pre-Christian values are having a revival these days as the populist right often joined in by a new cadre of tech billionaires look back with admiration to an older world in which strength, domination and victory mattered more than empathy or equality.

For Donald Trump, winning is all that matters. Justifying all means. He uses the word incessantly. In a "60 Minutes" interview in 2018, when asked about his demeaning comments about Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, Trump said simply --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We won. It doesn't matter. We won.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: In a best-selling book, "Suicidal Empathy," Gad Saad, one of Elon Musk's favorites on X, argues that the West is declining because it cares too much about too many -- outsiders, minorities, even its foes. In fact, the greatest moral achievement of the West over the last two millennia, and especially since the enlightenment, has been the expansion of the circle of people who are considered fully human, having equal dignity and equal rights.

We've come to recognize the humanity of people once dismissed as slaves, serfs, and second class citizens, foreigners, women, racial minorities, people with differing sexual orientations. These ideas spread throughout the world because they are, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, self-evident.

[10:05:00]

This is one of the West's greatest achievements, not a decadent sickness. But there is a serious critique buried beneath the crude MAGA attacks. It is one that Nietzsche leveled, and it's being reprised by some of the tech bros today. Nietzsche worried that Christianity's egalitarian ideas made us less likely to be wildly ambitious, risk seeking, even reckless. Have we become so humane that we've lost the primal urges that made us heroic?

We should not romanticize civilizations built on blood, gore, and conquest simply because they produced heroes. But they built more than that. The pyramids, the Gothic cathedrals, the voyages of discovery, the industrial revolution emerged from societies animated by ambition, confidence and a willingness to sacrifice. They often came with hierarchy and a single minded focus on greatness.

Some of populism's appeal today lies less in specific policies than a promise to restore national greatness, to build, to achieve, to win. But must we choose between greatness and goodness? After all, Western nations in the 19th and 20th century were the most liberal societies in human history in their day, and they were hardly timid. They built railroads across continents, abolished slavery, industrialized the world, rebuilt Europe and Japan, landed men on the moon, built the atomic bomb and created the internet.

Think of America in the mid-20th century that created the modern welfare state, defeated fascism, built highways and airports, battled communism, and began to dismantle the legacy of slavery. These were civilizations of immense ambition. Liberals should not apologize for believing that every human being possesses equal dignity. The great liberal democracies of the 19th and 20th centuries managed to expand our moral universe while also expanding our physical universe.

The challenge is to recover that older liberal tradition. This spirit will sorely be needed as we build out what may be the most transformative technology ever, artificial intelligence, because we will need to make sure that not only is it awesome in its power, but also that it is rooted in a system of ethics and values that prizes human dignity and equality. Just those values that Christianity pioneered and the West enhanced so powerfully.

We don't need to go back to Homer, recovering the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt would be enough.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

Joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea drew to a close on Friday nearly a week ahead of schedule at the orders of Donald Trump. In a post on Truth Social last weekend, he wrote that he was scaling back the drills because they sent a signal that is, quote, "totally inappropriate and hostile," unquote, to North Korea. A country he wrote was, quote, "unthreatening and respectful," unquote.

The exercises, which have in the past involved tens of thousands of troops, are designed to test South Korea's response to a potential North Korean attack. The decision appeared to take South Korea by surprise.

Joining me now to discuss all of this is Victor Cha. He was a member of the last Republican president, George W. Bush's National Security Council from 2004 to 2007, where he was involved in negotiations with North Korea. He's also the co-author of an important book, "Korea: A New History of South and North."

Victor, welcome. First, give us a sense of how, you know, how this is being received in South Korea. They must be startled, to say the least.

VICTOR CHA, FORMER ASIAN AFFAIRS DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL: Yes, Fareed. They're definitely startled by it. But for the South Korean president who does have a good relationship with Trump, if what Trump is doing leads to a meeting between him and the North Korean leader, for the South Korean president, that's a good thing. He wants to see that. So it's a bit of a mixed bag.

ZAKARIA: And is there -- I mean, this is -- the symbolism of course is terrible. Is there a actual military price that gets paid here? Because my understanding is that these kind of military exercises do serve a useful purpose.

CHA: Yes, they do, Fareed. This exercise in August is the single largest annual military maneuver exercise that the U.S. and the South Korean militaries do together.

[10:10:08]

And if you don't do it, then the military doesn't have the same level of readiness, which affects deterrence on the Peninsula.

ZAKARIA: Give us a sense of what has happened in North Korea over the last few years. I mean, is there any softening in North Korea, either in terms of external policy, fewer missile tests internally? I mean, they -- I think they have still 100,000, 150,000, somewhere between those two numbers, political prisoners. So, I mean, is there any reason to be -- is there a thaw that you see that, you know, maybe this is directed toward?

CHA: It's an interesting question. I would say there are two things that have changed from the general situation with North Korea. The first, and probably the most significant, is this relationship that Kim Jong-un has created with Vladimir Putin. They are basically allies in the war in Ukraine. This is something that started in about 2022 and has really flourished. So that's a major, major development.

The second, with regard to any sort of softening, is that, as President Trump mentioned, Kim Jong-un has been relatively quiet in terms of nuclear tests and ICBM tests during President Trump's time in office in his second term. During the Biden administration, there was no diplomacy, and there were many, many North Korean provocations. And even in the first year of Trump's first term in office, there are many, many provocations.

So they have seemed to take their foot off the accelerator, if you will, when it comes to these weapons demonstrations, at least in the first year and a half or so of the second term.

ZAKARIA: And Trump seems to be looking for a deal. He mentioned that North Korea has 57 nuclear missiles, a kind of very specific number that I hadn't heard before. And that he's OK with essentially normalizing them as a nuclear weapon state with 57 nuclear missiles.

CHA: Yes. So it's very interesting that President Trump takes two different approaches to Iran and North Korea. In Iran he's very absolutist. They cannot have a nuclear weapon. But in the case of North Korea, he's demonstrated some flexibility. He's referred to North Korea as a nuclear power. He also calls for denuclearization in the end. But I think he's taking a much more pragmatic approach, which says, you know, I need to deal with the threat and I can't sort of wait for denuclearization to happen because that's not going to happen anytime soon.

ZAKARIA: Do you believe having negotiated with the North Koreans that you could imagine a significant deal where they were to agree to any kind of path, even to denuclearization?

CHA: It will not be easy, for sure, to try to negotiate denuclearization with North Korea. Having said that, there are a lot of immediate things that we could try to address, like trying to get them to stop producing more fissile material for nuclear weapons, trying to attenuate the relationship with Russia, and trying to ensure there is no nuclear accident or nuclear first use in the region as North Korea grows as a nuclear power.

So there's a lot of homework that could be done in initial negotiations that may not say denuclearization, but they are very important and tangible for U.S. national security.

ZAKARIA: Victor Cha, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

CHA: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, we will turn to China and its race with the U.S. for global A.I. supremacy. Who will win? Evan Osnos will tell us in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:18:20]

ZAKARIA: The struggle for global supremacy between the U.S. and China has reached new heights during Trump's second term, and nowhere is this more evident than in the race to lead the world in A.I.. While Silicon Valley remains dominant, last month, the Chinese startup Moonshot released an A.I. model that rivals those from Anthropic and OpenAI. A.I. has also been widely incorporated into everyday life in China, from robot cashiers to highly advanced surveillance systems.

So how has China managed such feats? I'm joined by Evan Osnos, staff writer at the "New Yorker," longtime China watcher who lived there for eight years.

Welcome, Evan. You went back and shed some light on this question that many people were wondering about, which is China spends maybe a 10th as much as the U.S. on data centers. It doesn't have the most advanced computer chips, and yet its best models seem very close to the best American models. Maybe six months away. How has it managed to do this?

EVAN OSNOS, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: Well, this has caught Americans by surprise a couple of times over the last couple of years. Remember there was, of course, the DeepSeek moment. This was the first time a Chinese model was demonstrating that kind of capability. And then most recently from a firm called Moonshot. And this is especially striking because they have less capital at their command. They also -- there are export controls, of course, on some of the most powerful chips in the world.

So, look, they have been accused by American A.I. makers of what's called distillation, of essentially unfairly copying American products. And at the same time, there is a recognition now across Silicon Valley and in Washington that China has been able to make much faster gains than we had expected.

[10:20:07]

And I think that's partly because of a kind of focus at the leadership level. They have been dedicated to this really for 10 years, and this 10-year period, Fareed, turns out to be decisive because they have been able to make much faster progress than the United States expected.

ZAKARIA: And, you know, they have -- what are the three things you need for A.I.? You need compute, that is chips, you need energy and you need human talent. And it seems to me that China has lots of human talent at the very highest levels in computer science. It clearly has much more energy. I think it has 10 times as much installed electricity as than the United States or some such number. What it didn't have was the most advanced computer chips.

What did they say about how they got around? Is it that they're managing to get it in because they imported via, you know, Southeast Asian countries and -- or is it that the indigenous chips are good enough to get them a long way?

OSNOS: It's a combination of both of those, but it is also a larger strategic shift. In some ways this is a story that started during the first Trump term. That was a period when you'll recall the first trade war was a real wakeup call in Beijing because they said to themselves, look, we are entering a period of greater strategic competition with the United States. We have to become more self-reliant.

We don't want to have to rely on them as much as we do now. There was a -- at the moment there was a kind of memorable contrast where the United States under Donald Trump the first time was setting aside what had been the first federal plan for A.I. and at the same time -- because it had been conceived under the Obama administration. But at the same time, China was adopting its first federal plan for A.I. and 10 years later, we see some of the fruits of that.

So, look, I think even if you set aside the hype, and China is very good at hype, we have to be clear-eyed about the progress they've made, or were going to be caught flat-footed.

ZAKARIA: Is it also possible that this whole idea of a race is kind of misconceived? Because we're going to have A.I., they're going to have A.I., the whole world is going to use A.I. for all kinds of things. I mean, if people often make the electricity analogy, it seems to me nobody really won the electricity race, even though Thomas Edison did start it and he built a company, General Electric, that did well.

But, I mean, the Soviet Union electrified is -- you know, what do you think of the idea of this as a race? And do the Chinese think of it as a race?

OSNOS: Yes. In some ways, the conversation in Silicon Valley is very different than the conversation you hear in places like Beijing and Shanghai. In Silicon Valley, there's a lot of talk about achieving artificial general intelligence or a decisive strategic advantage. The idea that there might be some day where we cross the tape and therefore the game is ours. In Beijing, they see it quite differently. They say what we're doing is trying to get it out into the economy already as diffused as possible.

And I saw it on the ground. Look, you can go to a Chinese car factory today and you'll see that they have made this shift towards robots much more decisively than we have in the United States. There's a lot of pros and cons to that. I'm not saying, Fareed, this is an unambiguous good, but it is giving them an economic advantage that we're wise to take seriously. That means their unit per production is lower. And that means then that they're more competitive around the world.

And that in some ways is the ball game, is not just in this U.S.-China race, as you say, but it's in developing countries. It's in Africa and Latin America and many other places to come.

ZAKARIA: Evan Osnos, always a pleasure to hear from you. Come back soon.

OSNOS: Thanks, Fareed. Glad to be with you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, this summer saw record heat and raging wildfires in many parts of the world. What role did climate change play? What can we do about it? I'll discuss with a climate scientist when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:28:35]

ZAKARIA: It has been an extraordinarily hot and fiery summer. Spain experienced its largest wildfire on record, while firefighters in France struggled to put out multiple massive fires. Scorching wildfires across Canada blanketed American cities in thick smoke, causing air pollution levels to spike.

And it wasn't just smoke from the north that affected the U.S.. Around 7.5 million acres have burned here already this fire season. That's more than 50 percent higher than the 10-year average. And then there is the heat. 2026 saw the hottest July on record globally since 1850.

Is this our new normal?

Joining me now is the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.

Katharine, when you hear all these statistics, particularly around fires, how should we think about what is causing this?

KATHARINE HAYHOE, CHIEF SCIENTIST, THE NATURE CONSERVANCY: We have always had wildfires and most of the wildfires we see in the lower 48 states these days are the result of accidental human ignition. But we have never had as hot, dry conditions as frequently before. So as climate change increases, the risk of fire weather drying out our soil and our vegetation, it's the difference between accidentally dropping a match into a pile of green wet wood when not much would happen, versus accidentally dropping that match into a pile of bone-dry kindling that's been baking in record high temperatures for weeks. That's the reason for the massive wildfires that we're seeing today across north America and Europe.

ZAKARIA: So, let me ask you about an influential piece in the Wall Street Journal by Bjorn Lomborg, who's an economist who has taken it upon himself to, in his -- in his view, debunk a bunch of the sort of myths around climate change. And he says that the total global burn that is the number of acres that have burned down has actually decreased globally. And that, for example, Canada had fewer fires this year than its average. You know, what do you make of that?

HAYHOE: Well, what he was doing there is he was doing something known as cherry picking, which is that you pick out only the numbers and information that justify your pre-existing opinion, and you completely ignore the context of those numbers. So for example, in that article that you're referring to, he stated that the Canadian wildfires were not so bad this year. Well, actually we're only in August and its already a top 10 year. They're quite bad and we still have a number of months to go.

He also cited the global numbers. But when you look at what's happening globally, you see that across North America and Europe, wildfires are increasing in intensity and frequency, driven by climate change.

What we are seeing is that in Africa and Southeast Asia, wildfire is decreasing because of changing agricultural practices. So, rather than burning grasslands and burning forests to create more agricultural area, more sustainable agricultural practices are actually reducing wildfire in some parts of the world, which is great. But at the same time, climate change is boosting it up.

ZAKARIA: So, one of the points he made that I was sort of surprised by was he said, air pollution deaths are declining. He cited a Lancet article on that. Is he -- is he correct?

HAYHOE: So, air pollution deaths occur from two main causes. The first cause is the burning of fossil fuels. And that is responsible for millions of deaths a year and that is not declining. But the second source of deaths from air pollution is indoor burning of brush and wood and things like that for cooking.

So, as cleaner cookstoves and more sustainable practices become more widespread in low income countries, that is thankfully reducing people's need to burn brush and wood indoors. So, that's a great direction that we're heading in. But at the same time, we see that air pollution from wildfire smoke and from burning fossil fuels continues to tick up. ZAKARIA: So the other kind of argument, not just him, but lots of people make, is that the effort it would take to reduce emissions and therefore have an effect on climate change is so expensive, and the payoff would be so small that it's really not worth it, that there's already so much baked into the atmosphere, literally and figuratively. And, you know, the efforts would be you'd be spending so much money decarbonizing the economy that it's not worth it. What do you think?

HAYHOE: Well, those are very common denial arguments. There's actually five flavors of climate denial. Number one, it's not real. Number two, it's not human caused. Number three, it's not so bad. Number four, we can't fix it. And number five, it's too late.

So, what you've just cited there is number four, we can't fix it. And that is a myth. We absolutely can fix it.

In fact, an Oxford study two years ago found that if the world transition to clean energy, we would save at least $12 trillion. And the faster we do it, the more money we'd save. And that's not even looking at the impacts of climate change, which just getting back to wildfire smoke alone totaled tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. and Canada alone.

There's no question that we can transition, and we must. And when you look at countries like China, they installed more clean energy last year than the entire rest of the world put together. The transition is happening. The question is, will it happen fast enough to protect us from the increasingly severe impacts of climate change?

ZAKARIA: Katharine Hayhoe, you always bring clarity to a complicated subject. Thank you.

HAYHOE: Thank you for having me.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the health of America's democracy is declining. What can be done about it? A Nobel Prize winning economist offers his ideas when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:39:27]

ZAKARIA: Ask the experts and they will tell you there is a clear trend. America's democracy is in decline. The Freedom House's latest report that scores countries on political rights and civil liberties gave the U.S. an 81 out of 100, the country's lowest score since that index began its current scoring system. The V-Dem Institute goes further this year, downgrading the U.S. from a liberal democracy to merely an electoral democracy.

[10:40:00]

Other indices deliver similar verdicts. So, what ails America? Nobel Prize winning economist Daron Acemoglu has a diagnosis and a prescription in his new book, "What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Welcome, Daron. So you won your Nobel Prize, really, for pointing out that the countries that have done the best over the last hundreds of years are countries that found a way to build strong, effective, legitimate institutions. And liberal democracies are really the kind of poster child for that kind of development.

Now, you're writing about what went wrong with your poster child. So if you were to sum it up, you know, what fundamentally has happened to liberal democracy that got you worried enough to write a book about it?

DARON ACEMOGLU, ECONOMICS PROFESSOR, MIT: Thank you, first of all, for having me on the program and for asking that question, which goes to the heart of it. Indeed, liberal democracy is a worthy subject to study because it has been so important for our achievements. Our social achievements are really remarkable.

I mean, if you think of, you know, where we come from our -- how our ancestors lived, the ability of forming such complex society that are peaceful, provide public services, and create the conditions for shared prosperity that is just amazing. And we really owe that to liberal ideas and liberal democracy.

And the reason why I'm writing about liberalisms crisis is because I think it is so important for our future as well. And unless we diagnose the problems, we're not going to be able to rebuild it. And the crisis, I think, is most visible if you look at people's views.

Americans have such low trust in bedrock democratic institutions. They think liberalism's agenda doesn't work. And some of its founding principles, shared prosperity, public services, and providing voice and self-government are all broken.

ZAKARIA: And you argue -- you know, I've written a book where I talked about how this was all the product of these revolutionary changes in technology and globalization. And it feels like your book is very compatible with that theory because --

ACEMOGLU: I am building on the shoulders of giants, indeed.

ZAKARIA: No, because you say that to you that the technological changes, the digitization of the economy have completely transformed society. And as a result, liberal democracy to many people seems like it has failed and it has failed with sins of omission and commission. So, tell us what are the omission and what are the commission?

ACEMOGLU: So, the sins of omission is that when globalization and especially digital technologies started complicating the building of shared prosperity, center-left parties were passive. They did not tackle the questions of the age which is, how can we make digital technologies work for everybody? They thought that this would just create better efficiency, and everybody somehow, ultimately, through perhaps a trickle down process, benefit from it.

Sins of commission came in the context of cultural politics, something that you have talked a lot about, which is that, you know, it led to what I call social engineering, a top-down agenda to create more homogeneous values. There's nothing wrong in a diverse society like the United States or the U.K. for cultural issues to be part of politics. They had to be.

But the way you approach them, I think, had to be more inclusive and more bottom up. And in the process, the sins of commission were really problematic because they sidelined community.

ZAKARIA: So, this is an important point because it's a live political issue. Now, what you're really saying is that the center-left, which became increasingly college dominated -- oriented with college graduates began to, if I may put it this way, look down on the -- on the -- on the non-college educated and to sort of force their cultural values on a society that was perhaps not ready for it, perhaps did not agree with it, right?

I mean, that is so much of the tension in the Democratic Party, even today between the so-called progressives and the mainstream. It's often on these cultural issues.

ACEMOGLU: One hundred percent. Although, I don't think the progressive versus mainstream divide really covers this because -- I think a lot of the focus there is about how moderate, how fast, how radical. But even the centrists are not really reaching to the working classes. They're not really becoming more grounded in community.

You know, it wasn't part of every liberal idea. But if you look at the practice of liberal democracy and liberalism, and if you go back to its founding ideas from several centuries before, you see that community plays a very important role. Why? First of all, self- government is critical for liberal ideas.

[10:45:01]

We cannot talk of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, but without giving people a way to actualize them. And how do you actualize them? By making local decisions. So, that was a key part of self-government and communities were very important.

ZAKARIA: Daron, pleasure. Terrific book.

ACEMOGLU: It's my pleasure, Fareed. It's fantastic to talk to you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, as you just heard, it's hard to get Americans to agree about anything these days, but most seem united in one thing their hatred of data centers. Why are people so vehemently opposed to them? I will explore next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:50:13]

ZAKARIA: Now, for the last look. In this year of bruising polarized elections, there is one issue on which most Americans seem to agree how much they hate data centers. Seventy-one percent of them, including 63 percent of Republicans, say they don't want a data center anywhere near them, according to Gallup. Everyone from Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon opposes their unchecked growth.

New York State Governor Kathy Hochul just issued the country's first statewide moratorium on building the largest data centers, known as hyperscale centers. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, a state which already has 335 data centers and at least 248 more planned, according to the Texas Tribune, is ordering an audit on all projects waiting to be connected to the grid.

Part of the data center backlash is about the sheer scale and speed of the build out. Artificial intelligence is powering the American economy and data centers power artificial intelligence. These facilities house the servers and advanced chips needed to train A.I. models and process all the questions thrown at chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT.

Many of these data centers are enormous. They all consume massive amounts of electricity, and they are increasingly planned in rural communities. And because of the exponential growth of A.I., we'll need more and more and more of them.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, projected A.I. capital spending by Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet will be 2.1 percent of GDP this year. That is more than the total U.S. railroad build out of the 1850s. The writer Derek Thompson calls the A.I. build out the biggest and fastest growing infrastructure project of our lifetimes.

But the effort is meeting vehement resistance on the ground. Local officials who backed data centers have received death threats. Some have faced recall votes. On the other side, people voicing their opposition in local planning meetings have been arrested for disorderly conduct.

Some of this vitriol might be explained by the fact that data centers are an unsightly physical manifestation of the wealth and power of big American tech companies in communities that often have been left behind. Social media feeds the outcry. People panic about these data centers draining water supply, taxing electricity grids, and filling the air with noise pollution. Some of these concerns are legitimate, and others are less so. And there are also benefits to these projects, mainly in the form of local tax revenue.

One county in Virginia hosts so many data centers that the area they're clustered around is nicknamed Data Center Alley. The county receives tax revenues from these projects equal to 45 percent of its entire operating budget.

The writer Jasmine Sun traveled to Michigan and Wisconsin, where some large data center projects are in the works. She writes that much of the anger she encountered from the residents there was based on mistrust that their local government would not act to protect their interests. As Sun reports, the residents of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, a village of about 27,000 people, still feel burned from when the Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn acquired land there in 2017, promising to manufacture flat screen TVs and create 13,000 jobs. Neither the flat screen factory nor most of the jobs materialized. The village ran up huge debt to buy land and build out highways to service the project. Sun reports residents were unaware of the details of the project because the local government kept the Foxconn negotiations shrouded in secrecy. Now Microsoft has acquired some of Foxconn's land to build a data center, and people are worried it will be the same debacle all over again.

What's astonishing about this moment is how different it feels from the tech boom of the 1990s, which was typified by a kind of heady optimism about the future. As Paul Krugman notes, there was a huge amount of tech spending then, too. The internet, it was thought, would democratize the world. Thirty years later, many associate technology with oligopolies polarized discourse and the erosion of democracy. What happened?

Well, in the intervening years, tech companies' wealth grew unchecked. They lobbied the government to leave social media unregulated. And the conversations on these platforms turned toxic, driving political polarization and paranoia. And the truth is, artificial intelligence is as scary as it is thrilling.

[10:55:01]

Don't take my word for it. Many of the major tech CEOs themselves have worried about scenarios in which humanity itself is destroyed by A.I. Perhaps, then, it's not shocking that Americans have heard those stories too and are in fact scared.

When facing fears and problems like these companies cannot reassure Americans that their larger interests will be taken care of. That is, after all, why government exists. Artificial intelligence is too important to hold back. But it is also too important not to monitor and in some way regulate, or else a crisis will erupt and then we will get panic and overregulation.

Thanks for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)