The Short Version
Friday, August 21, 2026 · givemetheshortversion.com
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Every weekday around 6:30am ET, readers get one email. It covers podcasts worth knowing about — each one boiled down to what was actually said: the argument, the takeaways, the calls if anyone made them. An hour of someone talking becomes a few minutes of you reading.

Below is this morning's sheet — the super-short version of each episode. Every entry links to the full summary: the argument, the reasoning, what has to be true for the person to be right, and the claims the speaker put on the record. The archive holds every past episode, searchable. Signing in needs no password — enter your email, it sends a code, you're in.

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Odd Lots

Jasmine Sun on What the AI Industry Got Wrong About the Public Backlash

Aug 21, 2026 · 52m · 2 min read

Jasmine Sun, reporting for her Substack after a road trip through data-center sites in Michigan and Wisconsin, argues the AI industry misjudged where public backlash would land: not on job-loss or x-risk fears, but on trust — communities don't believe hyperscalers' promises on jobs, taxes, or water use, and that distrust, not information gaps, drives roughly 70/30 opposition in polling regardless of whether a data center is nearby. No new investment calls, but the piece is a live risk map for buildout: deal terms have flipped from towns subsidizing hyperscalers (2023-24) to hyperscalers now expected to pay upfront, NDAs are being dropped as toxic, and small towns face real power asymmetries against companies like OpenAI and Oracle in fights like Saline, Michigan (population under 3,000, sued over zoning after its council voted no).

This is the super-short version — click for the full summary →