Twice as Popular as Taylor Swift

I'm going to use that, so I'm writing a new book. Did I tell you about this? I'm writing a book. Okay, good. I'm going to start a new project. I'm on SSRL, man. This is what you do. You write books, right? Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Cheap Talk. My name is Jeff Kaplow. And I'm an Associate Professor of Government here at Willingham Mary. Joining me today, as always, is my esteemed colleague, Marcus Holmes. Hey, Marcus, how are you? Jeff, I want to, well, first of all, I'm good. Thank you. I want to wish you a nice F-Doc. So today is the first day of class here at Willingham Mary. It's always a fun, fun day, excitement. People running around trying to find their classrooms. A little bit of trepidation, of course. If you're new to Willingham Mary, I'm sure it can be a little bit over one. We have a lot of construction going on on the campus at the moment. Jeff, I don't know if you noticed this. And signs. So the sign yesterday was kind of cute. Like towards like two-point hall or something like that. And it was pointed like right through a construction zone that you could not walk through. I'm like, this is very confusing for the students. Like how are they supposed to navigate all this? So if you're a student and you're listening to this next week or something like that, I hope you were able to find all your classrooms. And I hope your semester's off to a good start. How are you doing, Jeff? I'm doing well. First day of class for me is tomorrow. So I am one of these days. I'm going to come up with a plan. I got a full 24 hours before I'm teaching anything. So plenty of time. Plenty of time to pull that together. I'm sure it'll be great. I've been listening to Dolly Parton's greatest hits. We have the terrible loss yesterday of Dolly Parton, the country singer, actress, philanthropist, many things. And so I was trying to share with my kids. We're not like a big country music family. When it comes to like what's on usually. But yesterday we were playing some nine to five. What is your favorite Dolly Parton zone? I mean, so the funny thing when you like look into it is that Dolly Parton wrote about one billion songs. Right. Many of them were covered by others. And those versions are the ones that I know. Because again, I'm not like a big country music listener. But I like nine to five. That's the one that I associate with Dolly Parton. And was like something that I remember from as a kid listening to. How about you? What's your Dolly Parton greatest hits? It's a tough one. I like Joline, I think that's a good, that's a good solid tune. Did you ever go to Dollywood, the sort of? I've never been to Dollywood. Have you been to Dollywood? Yes, I was very young. So I don't remember much of it. But I recall it being a good time. I think we should, I bet people will like do like pilgrimages now, you know, to go. Yeah, yeah. I was telling my daughter in the car yesterday where I was talking about Dolly Parton. And you know, she wasn't really very familiar with Dolly Parton. I mentioned that Dolly Parton national treasure, not just for the music, right? But for the philanthropy and how much he's done to like raise people up in this country and around the world. And I mentioned that she has this charity that has sent books to, you know, thousands of kids. And then I was looking it up last night in the story. 330 million books have been sent to children in the US and a few other countries to help them learn to read. And three books just for kids zero to five. 330 million, which is crazy. That's a lot of books. And I felt bad. I dramatically, you know, underestimated the power of the imagination library, this charity that Dolly Parton started 30 years ago. So just one of the many, many things that Dolly Parton has given us. Yeah. Well, I was struck yesterday by a couple of things. So the first was the sort of a mound of coverage. Like, I guess in my mind, I had, I thought I would turn on CNN or the news at night. And, you know, there'd be like the normal news. And then like the last five minutes or so of the hour would be devoted to Dolly Parton, because Dolly Parton died. But instead it was actually like the whole hour. So if you turned on CNN at five o'clock and watched Jake Tapper, he actually wasn't in yesterday. It was a, it was a substitute. He's on vacation. But that hour was all about Dolly Parton. And so like that shows you, I think one, at least the news media, you know, how much they think Dolly Parton meant. But then the other thing was all of the sort of responses were coming from, you know, lots of different directions. So in other words, like in the polarized, you know, country that we live in, it's very common for, you know, somebody to die or whatever. And you get like the people who like that person politically have these, you know, the outpouring of respect and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then people on the other side, either don't say anything at all, or in some cases, you know, Donald Trump has done this. Like some cases actually denigrated the person who recently died, because they didn't like them publicly. But in this instance, you had Republicans, Democrats, you know, independents, socialists, anarchists, whoever, like everybody like Dolly Parton. And so it was, it, she might be like one of the celebrities that sort of had this kind of like universal, I mean, I'm sure not everybody loved her music, but, you know, it's hard not to like Dolly Parton. And I was, I was thinking about it. And what's interesting is, you know, because you pointed out the books and the philanthropy that she did. And she talked about herself, and some of the interviews that I was seeing on the news coverage last night, as being a political, and she doesn't really do politics, she doesn't talk about politics so a lot, or didn't when she was alive. But if you look at the charities and the causes that she supported, a lot of them were sort of political. So she had this sort of ability to kind of, you know, stand up for what she believed in, and donate to causes and help causes that she believed in without being viewed as a partisan. And I just think that's like so, that's so rare, you know, it's like these days, it's like if you support X, we immediately say, "Oh, yeah, they're Republican." If you support Y, like, "Oh, yeah, you do that because you're a Democrat." She somehow transcended all of that. And I think that's, that's really kind of remarkable. Yeah, and the New York Times has some data to back you up on this market, so that I think they famously, a few years ago, published an article, like, headline, "The one thing all Americans can agree on, Dolly Parton." And they have a, an article that kind of summarizes a recent poll in March 2026, this UMass-UGov poll, 70% of Americans expressed a favorable view of Ms. Parton, the highest percentage of approval for any person named in the poll, far above runners-up Barack Obama and Filotimir Zelensky. Only 5% of adults said they viewed Ms. Parton unfavorably. This is twice as popular as Taylor Swift, for example, which is a crazy thing. That is popular as Taylor Swift. Okay, that was, my brain can't handle that calculation. Like, how do you become twice as popular as Taylor Swift? No, I think that's right. I mean, and what's interesting is that was not, not just a domestic kind of phenomenon, right? She actually got an award in 2024 from the State Department. They gave her the Peace Through Music Award. And, you know, it was given to her because she's such a sort of icon in terms of America. But if you think about that from like a soft power, kind of cultural diplomacy perspective, which we've talked about in the podcast quite a bit, she was perfect. You know, she was perfect because nobody in Washington, precisely because she was a political. You know, she wasn't sort of representing the U.S. government when she did her stuff. She was just somebody that people like who happens to be an American. And because she was an American, people are looking at her and saying, you know, oh, geez, like I now have a more favorable, you know, government impression of America precisely because that's the type of place that would give rise to somebody like Dolly Parton. She also did it in such a way where she didn't have to persuade you to like her. You know, she was just a person who was viewed as very authentic. You felt like you could kind of trust her. She had this like weird kind of mix of Southern, Appalachia, working class, but also dressed, you know, incredibly well. And like, you know, like all of her, you know, makeup and stuff was like impeccable. You know, so she had this kind of authenticity that, frankly, a lot of public diplomacy or soft power or cultural diplomacy types of initiatives don't have precisely because you can see through it, you know, the State Department or whoever is trying to, you know, project a particular image. You know, when we sent jazz musicians over to the Soviet Union, for example, during the Cold War, it was sort of like, or the Eastern block. It was like, okay, I see what the United States is doing. That's fine. You know, it's great, but it's sort of, it's manufactured and it's a little bit, you know, fake to a certain extent. But here, Golly Parton was just doing her thing. And that kind of shows the power of somebody who's just, you know, authentic being a really, you know, important kind of apparatus of soft power without even really trying. So I thought that was, that was pretty cool. Like it doesn't have to be propaganda if you're yourself and you're authentic. I think you become, you know, a good, a good cultural icon in the State Department. Recognize that. So there is a, Golly Parton has like an international relations kind of tie in, which I think is fascinating. We've seen comments come in from foreign leaders, particularly in Australia, UK, Canada, where the Imagination Library was active in sending, you know, English language books. That's why the Imagination Library is active in those countries. But sending English language books to kids in those countries. And so we've seen foreign leaders chime in. We've seen domestic leaders from both sides of the aisle from President Trump to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, making statements about how important the Department was. And part of it is, you know, how universal her story is. Right? This is kind of rags to riches, kinds of story, where she was born in a, you know, one room home with no running water, electricity, and, and became this, this global icon. And I think that that has, is the kind of thing that can cut through. Right? Like that's not a story that's, it embodies the American dream in a way, but it's not a story that's specific to America. And I think a lot of people around the world can see their own struggles in Dolly Parton's achievement and see hope in Dolly Parton's achievement. And so I think, I think part of her story makes this a, a global phenomenon. And in addition to her talent and her songs, right? And her, kind of, entertainment. print, but when you think about the kinds of things that take hold across the world, it's those stories I think have a universal appeal to. Yeah, and to support that, I saw that the Kingsguard and Buckingham Palace played nine to five. I mean, that's pretty cool, right? You don't associate the Kingsguard with sort of like pop culture or country music or anything like that, but that just shows how penetrating this was to everybody, you know, not just the United States, but also abroad. I thought that was pretty cool. That is pretty cool, but also when you think about people who are slaving away working for rich bosses, like pocketing all of their laborers, you know, the royal family comes up, right? What more rich bosses there than the folks who work for the royal family? I don't know, maybe that's pushing it too far. Maybe this would be a good time to say that our views don't necessarily represent those of William and Mary. Also, I'm just going to say it again that the views expressed on this podcast are solely our own and do not reflect the policies or positions of our employers. Since we do have a royal connection after all. That's right. Thanks, actually. Exactly. William and Mary. The other big news this week, oh, actually, you know what, we should do just a little bit of follow-up because we mentioned in the last episode of the podcast two things. I wanted to, there have been some news on both of them and I want to just follow up on that. So we talked last time about your favorite news story of the summer favorite, maybe it's the wrong word. The new story that you pulled out to talk about from the summer, which is the US cutting short some of its military exercises with South Korea. And there was another story that came out since the last podcast about the US Marines actually cancelling a amphibious training exercise with South Korea. It was a little confusion among our listeners. Oh, they didn't cut it short. They canceled it. This is a different training exercise just to clarify. That one, the Marines had identified months ago, they would not be able to persuade in because of the operational tempo associated with the Iran conflict. So here we have the broader story and actually one thing that I think does play into the thinking of US military decision makers when they're looking at exercises with countries like South Korea, which is that we do not have a lot of excess capacity in our military at this point. We have people on very long deployments, we are straining our resources in terms of like spare parts for aircraft and the ability to maintain long deployments. And so all the logistics chains, all of this stuff is being is under pressure because of the sustained conflict in Iran. And that it makes it easier to say, you know what, maybe we can cut short this exercise in South Korea this year. And the Marines that already said to South Korea, we won't be participating in this exercise. We just can't support it right now because we're we're stretched to thin. So we shouldn't take that necessarily as a broader signal about US South Korean engagement, at least that particular exercise. I think the broader signal sent by cutting short the regularly scheduled, very important annual exercise that occurs with South Korea to, you know, send a deterrent signal to North Korea, that we can take as a broader international signal. What do you think? All right, Jeff. I want to just back up for one second and ask you, would I a question I get from students quite often? And maybe there are students listening to this podcast right now that have a similar question. How is it possible that the United States military is at all stretched thin to use the words that you you said, and I agree with those words empirically based on what we know, it does appear that we're stretched a little thin. Given the vast amounts of money that the United States spends on defense, if you look at the US budget, like what we spend in the US, a huge chunk of that that pie is on defense. And so I think most listeners or many listeners might think to themselves, well, surely if we spend that much money, you know, trillions and trillions of dollars on defense, we should be able to fight a war in the Middle East, that's not even actually much of a like a using US personnel that much because we don't have boots on the ground and so on and so forth. How is it possible that we are fighting a relatively limited war in the Middle East and then can't do other things like have marine exercises with software like just just walk me through how it's possible that we're stressed this thing given the vast amount of resources that we put towards defense. Well, I don't know. I think we could do the the military exercises. We're just prioritizing other things at the moment, right? So I don't think it's the case that when push cuts to shove, if China tried to invade Taiwan right now, we decided we're going to come to Taiwan's aid, I think we can, right? Like I think we have that capability. And part of when we talk about like stretch then, what does stretch then really mean, we're already counting the munitions that we want to have available for an emergency like in that. So it's not as if we have no capability left. It's just we like it when there's a lot of slack in the system. We like it when there's a lot of spare parts for you after like we want to be able to support something that happens in the future that we have anticipated by having that excess capacity. So stretch then might mean a lack of excess capacity, which I granted is not how like we might normally use that term in day to day conversation. But I think that's how the military often uses that term. It's like they're already accounting for having, you know, this many troops deployed for this amount of time. And so when we extend that, you can still do it, but it can create pain points. So I think it's worth having a little more precision about what we really mean when we say the forces are stretched then. So one thing that's happening is that we have depleted munitions stockpiles. And this is a real problem. We, you know, bombed every possible target and then some in Iran, and including some things that weren't really targets. And so because of that, we are depleted in terms of our munitions and interceptors. And we've talked about this before on the podcast that those things are much harder to replenish than they are to use, right? It's because the production chain for those munitions and particularly for interceptors is long. And so it takes a while to replenish those stocks. We build the things so that we're able to use them. So we use them. So now we have to build more so that we can use them in the future if necessary. So that's part of what we mean when we say we're stretched then. Another way we're stretched a little thing is in terms of troop morale. And this is one is harder to quantify, but there have been kind of the big case in the news of the USS Abraham Lincoln that spent 270 days deployed in the Middle East, including more than 200 without a port call, which is longer than we'd like to go. And there were some reports about terrible conditions or poor troop morale or both on that vessel and that led to the firing of the editors of Stars and Stripes Magazine, the US military's magazines that talked about this story. So like it's clearly something the military is very sensitive about and doesn't want that to be the message. But like when you think about these extended deployments, they take a toll, right? Like and it's not that our troops can't handle an extended deployment. It's just that in relative peace time, we would prefer not to have to do that so that if we do need an extended deployment in wartime, we are able to handle that additional capacity. So again, like I don't think it's we can't do these other things. I think it's that we would prefer not to because we're trying to build up that capacity so that we could really fight a war if we needed to. The other follow-up I want to do is on the Saudi Arabia nuclear cooperation agreement. So we talked last time about how this was an agreement that the US had signed with Saudi Arabia that I think for non-proliferation people didn't meet the standard for restricting Saudi Arabia nuclear ambitions in the future basically agreed to let US firms help Saudi Arabia build up their nuclear capacity, their civilian nuclear capacity, without adequate safeguards at least in my view and the view of other non-proliferation types to prevent Saudi Arabia from using that technology for nuclear weapons in the future. And I said last time this had been kind of stalled because President Trump immediately after signing this thing said or truth or whatever that this would require Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel that has joined the Abraham Accords and also that they would not allow them to enrich uranium that that was wrong. So it seemed like things had kind of stalled out but then recently since our last podcast of the President, the executive branch submitted this agreement to Congress beginning the 90-day clock. Congress says 90 days to issue a joint resolution saying no to the agreement otherwise it becomes it comes into force. So despite President Trump's statements that this would not happen unless Saudi Arabia recognizes Israel it's happening. So it's kind of interesting and I guess this is one of those like you know does he really mean what he says? I guess we'll find out. Does he even know that it was transmitted to Congress? Did that happen automatically from someone else? It's not clear so we'll see but there is significant opposition to this agreement particularly among Democrats but also among some prominent Republicans because of its lack of safeguards against Saudi Arabia pursuing nuclear technology for weapons purposes. The big like glaring a mission here is it doesn't even require Saudi Arabia to join the IAA's most stringent inspection levels the additional protocol and it's like the kind of thing that we've been pushing Saudi Arabia to join for years and years and years and it's kind of weird to have an agreement that allows Saudi Arabia all this leeway at the same time we're attacking Iran for having done you know similar kinds of I don't know it's the cognitive dissonance of it is upsetting to me even though I'm worried about Saudi Arabia generally I'm even more worried about the President sending nature of this kind of an agreement and what it says about US non-proliferation policy into the future so it makes me sad that this has been submitted to Congress but there's a possibility we get a joint resolution but that seems fairly unlikely so this agreement may come into force. What is the likelihood that Saudi Arabia will actually join the Abraham Accords in your in your estimation? It was like less than 1% Yeah, I think it's very very low right and less like something dramatically changes How about you are you you think they're gonna be recognizing Israel anytime soon? If you're if you're at 1% I'll go 1.5 percent. I don't I don't really I don't really see it Trump there's something about Saudi Arabia with Trump I mean remember back in the in the Trump 1.0 administration. He they went he's that they touched that orb I'm sure that we We were learning with that orb was all about but there's there's something with that place that he and I'm not sure if it's his private You know sort of entrepreneurial instincts, you know, he's like promised there Once he do deals with them because they have a lot of oil money obviously. I'm not sure what it is But he he sort of gives them special treatment and many would argue like he shouldn't be giving a special treatment for a variety of reasons But he he seems to give the special treatment and I don't I don't really Know if there's been a great explanation for why that is but I I agree with you I think that this is probably likely to go through I don't think it's likely that Saudi Arabia was going to join the Abraham Accords And this is just another one of these examples of Trump's kind of getting Maybe fixated on an idea or has an idea in his head that he wants to pursue and he and he does it and then We're kind of left figuring out exactly why he did that thing, but Yeah chances of joining the Abraham Accords they say were yeah big news this week was Canada Jeff You know neither of us. I would I would say our international political economy scholars Which is to say we tend to not spend a lot of our time thinking about our studying tariffs Trade financial flows and stuff like that But this is a story that has gotten my attention and again a couple of students have reached out to me asking What's what's going on here? Like why is it? We seem to be in a you know Trump has had a rough relationship with Canada for a long time now and we don't we talked about that speech the Carnegie gave So it's not exactly shocking that we would be you know kind of in the middle of a trade war now But over the last 48 hours or so it seems to have like really kind of heated up in the in the rhetoric kind of on both sides It's getting a little little crazy So I just kind of wanted to bring it up and get your sense of maybe what's what's going on here? So for the listener You know the nice things in Canada have been in this sort of like trade dispute I think for the last year or so Maybe the last two years even, but it's kind of escalated in in the recent days as they sort of negotiate the the tariffs on particular items So the Trump administration said basically to to Canada We're going to put tariffs on a bunch of your goods. So steel, aluminum, automobiles, other other products And they've sort of not really given a great justification for why these tariffs are gonna gonna exist Trump has said things about you know the National security of fentanyl coming into the country. He's also made that argument with with Mexico He's also said that what you know what Canada does to us products is unfair So they put up their own trade barriers. So therefore we have to retaliate and You know Canada has kind of responded to this over over time as being you know sort of a reasonable party in the sense of like trying to Deescalate this right? So they're their first kind of reaction when these tariffs were were put on was to basically say all right Let's let's kind of calm things down here. Let's tone it down. Let's remove some of the retaliatory tariffs that we had originally put on and let's Negotiate with with DC like let's call up the negotiators and try to get some type of resolution and it seemed like for a while They were close to that. So they've been negotiating on these on these tariffs and it seemed like they're moving in the right Direction and they were very close to making a deal and then it all kind of fell apart So whatever the negotiations were just kind of like fill apart and When when asked about this Canada said well, the reason was is that the United States introduced new demands After Canada had already made concessions on a bunch of stuff So in other words, you know that United States was saying like okay We're gonna take those concessions that you just made. We're gonna pocket them We're gonna negotiate for a little while and then we're gonna go back and like try to get more out of you Based on the concessions that you already made so it's not just that though It wasn't just the last ask was it? I mean I got the sense that there was something about those last minute Demands that was particularly upsetting to Canada to Canadian negotiators I think what Karney said was they were in the in the final ask or that last round of negotiations It was you know sort of going wanting them to extract more concessions from Canada Which is which is fine you can do that but what the United States was asking for and providing a return was just viewed as Almost like insulting or was just too much right well see I think there's an element here of violating Canadian sovereignty maybe we can come back to that point because I think it's that it would there's Arguing over the amount of money that is at stake here in the and particularly goods that are at stake and then there's a broader You ought to do what we tell you generally and other spheres kind of an issue that I think is a breach too far for this Canadian Administration so keep going Marcus. We'll come back to that well That's exactly that's actually the point that I was gonna I was gonna make right so I think a part of what's happening here is a is a sort of Tariffs and trade story But the more interesting aspect to me is that it's it's also sort of like a trusting credibility kind of problem between the United States and Canada So Canada seems to me is saying like Even if we make concessions today We don't know that the United States isn't going to come back six months from now a year from now and demand something else Because what they're basically saying is like we're trying good faith to negotiate with you But you keep on sort of changing the terms and asking for more once we've already made the concessions that we thought Were the things that you wanted and the things that we thought would actually allow us to create a deal So it's like it's like they're getting kind of poked You know over and over and over again and they're getting to a point where they can't they can't take anymore because they don't know when the Poking's gonna stop right? It's like we're gonna we're gonna try to stop now But we can come back in six months and still get poked by the United States So Carney is saying you know that these these agreements that The Americans are negotiating like are not really agreements at all in a sense They're sort of like temporary measures to kind of suggest that we are You know on on we've come to consensus on a particular item or something like that But there's no sense in which that agreement is not just gonna be ripped up in and a new one demanded You know in the future so I think that the candidate fundamentally then doesn't trust the United States in these negotiations And doesn't see the United States as being credible in what it's actually saying and I think to the point you just made about Kennedy and sovereignty that kind of strikes at a much bigger kind of problem here that transcends you know trade It's more about the overall relationship Between the two countries so I think fundamentally like the calculation for Canada is is kind of changing Like if you think that a deal will settle the dispute and you're gonna that's gonna be an end to it Then you have an incentive to compromise But if you think that every sort of little mini deal you make or every concession that you make is just gonna produce another demand You know shortly down the road then you get much less incentive to compromise And I think that's why we're seeing Canada say we're sick of this We're not gonna we're not gonna play this game anymore. We're not gonna keep on compromising when you just come back asking for more and That suggests maybe that the long-term consequences of this is that Canada is realizing Maybe having economic dependence on the United States, which they do sort of fundamentally have it seems to me like they really do Have a lot of dependence on the United States economically Maybe we need to look elsewhere. Maybe we need to start building new trade relationships Maybe we need to build infrastructure. Maybe we need to you know sort of more turn more to Asia or Europe or whatever So so my sense Jeff is that this is a story that's sort of like locally kind of hot right now because the rhetoric back and forth and locally about tariffs But actually it's kind of says something about like the broader US-Canada relationship and it's not it's not great If you want you know sort of a good relationship with your your close ally supposedly and in neighbor I think that the pithy point I was making was that this is actually about kind of trust and credibility of the United States And Canada doesn't trust the United States and therefore this is not just about tariffs But about the broader kind of relationship between the two countries. I guess I sort of agree But I wouldn't use the word trust. I'd be much less willing to ascribe this to Trust and understanding and much more to a kind of rational calculus and for Canada Some of the demands that the US was making really implicate Canadian sovereignty and when Canada talks about that what they mean is like the the basket of things that Canada ought to be able to control for itself So we've had President Trump making statements since he came back into office about how Canada really ought to be More of a subsidiary to the United States right the 51st state that the US really ought to be in charge of this of this other country And Carney has made a big deal to in his messaging to Canadians right in his political messaging domestically That he will not allow this to happen right that Canada will never be the 51st state The Canada is its own country in on equal footing with the United States And that has been his line And I think there's a lot of domestic politics kind of wrapped up in that message not to mention like maybe a legitimate view of Canadian sovereignty Depending on how you think about that. So for Canada Like a big important point maybe more than the dollars and cents is that the US not be seen as controlling Canadian policy Particularly with regard to other countries So it appears that one of the demands that the US made at the end of these negotiations Was that Canada adopt US tariffs on imports from other countries Such that Canada could not act as like a backdoor way to get untaraged stuff into the United States So I think that there's a legitimate US concern that if it lowers tariff barriers for Canada And like this is assuming you think tariff barriers make sense And are like a reasonable use of policy and are legal All of which we haven't talked about and I think are up for some debate But anyway like if you're a US policymaker who's worried about stuff coming into the country untaraged And you're going to lower those barriers with Canada then you don't want a situation where Canada can import from elsewhere and be a backdoor of getting all this stuff into the United States from countries that had higher tariffs barriers. So as a result, the US asked Canada, told Canada that as a condition of this deal, they wanted them to create new barriers with their own trading partners so that they can not function as a backdoor like this. And Canada saw that as a violation of its sovereignty, or at least that's the message that are coming out with here. And I think that makes sense in the context of this overarching political messaging situation happening where the President Trump is often talking about Canada as a 51st state. And Canada has to go to green pains to push back on that messaging. And so to accept this kind of an agreement where the US is basically in control of Canadian foreign policy in a way is too much for Canada's stomach, not to mention the fact that Canada has engaged in a month's long effort to diversify trade partners because of US unreliability when it comes to trade. And so Canada has a number of trade deals in negotiation or at various stages and they don't want to sabotage those deals with this, you know, last minute US demand. And so I think that there are a number of reasons that Canada would want to push back on that story. There's another piece of this around French language requirements for some Canadian products which is like a really big deal in Canada domestically and it's something that would be kind of a third rail. If you're a Canadian leader, you wouldn't want to get anywhere close to those kinds of issues. That's another reason that Canada might want to push back on this beyond beyond the dollars and cents. Yeah. And then, you know, to your point about sovereignty, the other piece of this is that Trump did his favorite thing yesterday, which is to threaten to rename a body of water. So he said we're going to rename Lake Ontario to Lake of America. So both that and this is a terrible name for a lake. Well, we had the Gulf of Mexico, which became Gulf of America. And now we have Lake Ontario, which is going to become Lake of America or American Lake or I would prefer American Lake over Lake of America. Why not Lake Michigan? It's right there. It's next to Michigan. But that would mean we'll. Is that his name taken? Yeah. Anyway, I mean, what about where lakes appear? Like it's a superior lake. It's all the other lakes. Yeah. No, it's interesting for Trump, like the threat of renaming a body of water is like one of his, it's one of his goats use with our, with our neighbors and our allies. That could be your next book, renaming, renaming bodies of water. Don't tempt me. Don't at least an article. But I mean, the, the main, your, your overall point, I think is a go. But right. So this story is about sort of like the tactics and then negotiations and this and that. But it's also fundamentally about Canada's, you know, sort of sovereignty and not being kind of bullied or pushed around into, you know, policies that they don't want, that doesn't make, you know, rational sense for them, but makes a rational sense for the United States. I mean, I think you think if sovereignty from that kind of perspective, like taking away decision making autonomy and authority and that authority resting in Washington DC, as opposed to in Ontario, that's not good for Canada. And I get that. So I understand why this is a big, big story. We'll see it where this goes. It pains me as an American, by the way, that have this like fraught relationship. I have several Canadian friends and we've talked about, and I was a candidate last year and sort of people talking about how this just, it's not like dislike Americans, per se. But, you know, like in a lot of countries, they sort of dislike American foreign policy and they dislike what we're, some of the decisions our government is making. And it just kind of sours the relationship on a, you know, people to people level, which is sad. You know, it's like they are an ally. They are a neighbor. It's great to have, you know, sort of communication and transport between both sides and hopefully we get along. And so to see this, you know, even if it's, you know, just an economic issue, just an economic issue, I just think is a little sad. But what interests me most about this story, because I'm not an international political economy scholar, I focus more on security stuff, I think what we have here is a very interesting case in which some of the trade stuff is blending in and spilling over into the security domain. And it kind of ties into this overarching idea of weaponized interdependence and economic statecraft that we've sometimes talked about on this podcast where states use the tools of economic power to get what they want in a broader political range of issues. And so you have the US not just using its economic strength with Canada for economic ends, but also for these broader political ends, right? And, you know, the language that the Canadian leaders are using when they talk about this clash has the ring of security too. So Karne said, you're a war when you're attacked and we got attacked with reference to these negotiations, right? So it's not just, you know, at least in the rhetoric, this is not just an economic thing. This is a broader question of Canadian security in the world. And so I think that that's an interesting element to the story that that's the spilt potential spillover between economic relations and security relations. And, you know, I think we're likely to see if this trade dispute continues just a broader political split. Right now, I mean, there's already a political split obviously, but I think I think it could get worse. And right now, the economic pain is actually quite minimal considering the range of things that it could cover, right? So like, as a percentage of all imports and exports between these countries, not that many are affected by tariffs, but I expect that if this continues, we'll see like I just a broader political breakdown between these two countries that has impacts for NATO and other kind of security relationships around the world. And Jeff, you know, maybe next time we can talk about this in another context, which is it seems like the Iran conflict has moved more in some economic kind of like warfare space. So over the last, you know, a couple of weeks, it seems like the Trump administration has realized like militarily there's sort of hit the limits as to what's possible or at least what's reasonable and what's from their perspective and what's, you know, going to militarily get them what they want. And so they've turned more now towards economic warfare, sanctions, you know, freezing of assets, all that kind of thing. And so I don't think we're seeing in de-escalation in Iran, but rather like a movement from the military side of the conflict to a different domain where the fighting now is going to be economic. And that's like you're saying, like with Canada, very similar. We're not fighting a military war with Canada, but like security and economics are kind of intertwined there. And I think that's exactly what's happening with Iran as well. We'll see if that continues over the next week or so. Well, there's an interesting parallel there, right? And, you know, the one of the things that came up in press questioning of Canadian leaders is the question of tariffs on Canadian exports of energy, you know, oil and other energy resources into the United States, which the U.S. has left energy stuff alone. And Canada has not tried to use energy exports into the United States as leverage in these negotiations yet, whereas Iran, of course, like that is their point of leverage, right? That they're really manipulating. And it's kind of interesting to think about the parallels there and the worry, I think, from Canada's perspective that that might be a bridge too far, that that would like hasten the political break and lead to a level of retaliation that would be very costly for the Canadian economy. But when questioned about this, Canada's trade leadership said something like, look, we have a lot of cards. We don't have to play them all at once, right? That idea that this is always something that we can use in the future. And perhaps once you play this card, it becomes very difficult to do to move past that, right? So like, maybe this card is more valuable as something you can threaten to play in the future rather than as something you actually play. So it'll be interesting to watch this story going forward. Maybe we should leave it there, yes? You covered a lot of territories always, Jeff, bodies of water, cards, valley parton. Thanks for chatting with me. I think we can come up with something better than Lake of America. I invite our listeners to email us with some better suggestions for what we should rename Lake Ontario to. How about my suggestion? How about we rename it to nothing? We just keep it Lake Ontario. That's why we can see what the listeners think. That seems crazy by keeping it. We'd have to bridge all the maps, I guess, if we changed it. Email us. Let us know what you think Lake of America should really be called [email protected]. We would love to hear from you. Please subscribe to this podcast in your podcast player of choice, be it Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. That way you'll be notified when there's a new episode. Go to our online store at cheaptalk.shop and purchase the t-shirt. I'm sure we'll be coming up with a Lake of America shirt any minute now. It's definitely on my mind. Marcus, thanks so much for joining me today. Folks, we'll see you next time. Jeff, I don't know if you saw this. I was seeing about AI the other day and I saw this water marking thing. What's going on here? Is AI able to water markets tech so it knows when it has written something or knows when another LLM has written it? The only thing about this? That's a good question, Marcus. So the water marking, how does that? So it's like every other sentence starts with like a W or something like that and like they know. That's exactly how it works. You really saw it right to the heart of it. At a very simple level. Yeah. The AI companies, so Anthropic has been most open about this. But because of an EU regulation that doesn't make any sense, the AI companies are supposed to somehow be able to identify material that's generated with their tools by its own, by their own tools. We already have image water marking. So like for example, if you use Google's image AI tools to generate images, there is a water mark in there and it could be potentially identified. And they're trying to do that with text. So Anthropic has a new water marking scheme that I don't think has been rolled out yet. but will be. And because they claim they have no way of limiting this to Europeans, they're just going to rule it out all across the board. And the idea is that because like language that's generated by these models is probabilistically determined, you can, after the fact, feed the language in and kind of draw a map of what decisions were made by the model at particular times to use particular words. They will, this will allow them to feed in material that's been generated by Claude and allow the model to determine this is a Claude generated piece of text versus this is a not clause generated piece of text across some probabilistic distribution. So we can say like within some confidence interval, this is likely to have been AI generated. I don't like this, like even though I'm not a big fan of passing off text as human generated when it's AI generated, I think this is a bad system. What really annoys me about it most is the assumption underlying this that word choices are just a probabilistic distribution and you can switch out words without any change to the meaning of the language that you're producing so as to watermark the language. So it's not as if there's some like secret invisible symbol that's being placed in your language. That would be cool. That would be cool, but it would be hard. The words themselves are the watermark and so like Claude is basically saying anthropics is telling us like whether I use these two synonyms, it doesn't matter to the meaning, but that's never true, right? Like I mean, any good writer is going to agonize over the use of a particular word versus some other word that means almost the same thing, but not quite. And the fact that anthropic is just waving our hands and saying, well, we're going to choose a word based on this watermarking scheme not to provide you the user with the best language, the most accurate or precise language is troubling to me. So I think this is a bad scheme. But how does I still don't I still don't understand how the watermarking scheme works. Like how does they how do they so is it isn't anthropic telling Claude, if given the choice between a word that starts with G and a word that starts with F, choose G, like is it like along those types of lines or is it like we know 80% of the time it's going to choose the G word anyway. And so therefore we go back and feed this stuff into the detector or whatever, if 80% of the time we're getting G words that were pretty confident that it was AI producing it. And if that's true, why can't we have done this like without the watermarking scheme? Well, it's not nearly that ham fisted, you know, that like like here's a word that begins with a particular letter. Right. It's a much more subtle because there's a random generation of all these words, right? Suda random. The model is prefer some words over others, but basically like it's choosing between what's a word I saw used for this like jump and leap. Okay. For some sense, it might kind of randomly pick between those two because it treats them as equivalent, even though they're not quite right, but it treats them as equivalent. So what you can do then is you know that these words are kind of randomly generated. If you were just using a random number generator to generate your sentence, it would evenly split between these two words. But over a long enough piece of text, you can see, okay, it seems to prefer this particular word over this particular word. And because anthropic knows it's underlying distribution of words that it uses, and we don't. Right. But anthropic does. Then it can go back and say, hey, this is text that looks like text that we generated. And they can actually quantify that based on the particular word choice within the piece of text. So they can say, okay, this block of text and the longer the block of text, the easier it is to do that. So if you gave them a book that you said you wrote, but it had the particular distribution of word choices that anthropic knows come from its watermarking scheme, then it can give you a high confidence estimate that this is something that anthropic generated. Now, again, like the assumption here is that words are a random generation machine. But it's, but it's only used. So, so anthropic will be able to detect anthropic produced content. Chatchy PT will presumably be able to use the same process, detect Chatchy PT content. But Chatchy PT won't be able to detect anthropic content because it doesn't know unless they share data. It doesn't know the distribution of words that Claude is using. Is that right? And we won't know, at least not yet. There's no, there's no suggestion that this is imminent, that this is a user based tool that we could check student text to see whether anthropic Claude was used. This is more like we have this now in the text. And then in the future, if there were some global mechanism for trying to figure out what was disinformation or defamation in a core case or something, then you could somehow use this, this tool that is provided within these organizations to examine their own text. But there's, I, I, I think there's a lot of speculation about what's really driving this. So anthropic is saying this is a decision that they had to make because of EU code of practice on AI governance and responsibility. But there's a lot of speculation that this is something that the model generators want to do in order to mark texts that they are producing for future exclusion from training data. So there's something that AI companies really worry about is taking stuff that they produce, feeding it back into the model and using that to train future models. This is something called in the, in the literature called model collapse or AI in breeding. It's like, it's like incestuous. Yeah, exactly. Right. This is like, it's like mad cow disease for models. They talk about this feeding the model its own production. And the, the reason you don't want to do that is that we don't really understand, I think, what the potential risks of this are. But one idea is that this will reduce the variation of input such that you get much more homogenous output that is on the whole less effective. So one of the nice things about training these models on the entire internet is there's like a wide range of information out there. The more you train these models on synthetic data, data that they produce themselves, the more you narrow that distribution of the kinds of material that's out there to train on. And then the output you get is then much more narrow. And so you're less able to address new and interesting things in the world because you're just feeding it on the stuff that you're generating. So for the model makers for anthropic and open AI, this idea of being able to detect themselves their own material is really, really useful. I think maybe even more useful than complying with the EU code of practice. And so there's a suggestion that maybe this is like something they really want to do. And now they have an excuse to do it. But it's got a lot of pushback, right? Like people read this and they're like, well, I don't want to use cloud to write my turn paper because if what if the cloud makes some tool available and then professors can go back from previous years and fail students retroactively. And you know, now I'm in trouble. They're going to revoke my degree. And so, you know, I think people are up in arms about it for that reason. It'd be a horrible business decision. It seems to me for anthropic to release that detection tool. Because like, once that's out, nobody's going to want to use AI anymore for their stuff. Whether it's a horrible business decision to say they're watermarking our texts in the first place. That's true. But allegedly, they were forced to do that because of the European law. Allegedly. That's right. Although open AI also forced to do it has made no announcements like this as far as I know.