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Amanpour
Interview with "Crossing the Red Line" Author Akbar Shahid Ahmed; Interview with "Man in the Mirror" Author Anand Giridharadas; Interview with "The AGI Chronicles" Author Kevin Roose. Aired 1-2p ET
Aired October 02, 2026 - 13:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[13:00:00]
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Hello, everyone, and welcome to "Amanpour." Here's what's coming up.
As Gaza remains on humanitarian life support, journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed reflects on the Biden administration's support for Israel and how it shaped
the war.
Then --
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, AUTHOR, "MAN IN THE MIRROR": If you could understand what happened there and what created that moment, you could understand some
fundamental things about the inner life, the emotional inner life of this authoritarian age in America.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: -- the tragedy that divided a city and held a mirror up to the nation. I speak to best-selling author Anand Giridharadas about his
investigation into a killing on a New York subway and what happens when people feel abandoned by the state.
Also ahead --
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ELON MUSK, CEO, SPACEX: There's a strong consensus, overwhelming consensus, that there should be some A.I. regulation, that it would be in
the best interest of the people to do so.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: -- as A.I. leaders back calls to put the brakes on development, an inside look into one of the most significant decades in tech history.
Columnist Kevin Roose tells Walter Isaacson about his new book, "The AGI Chronicles."
Welcome to the program, everyone. I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.
There's been a terrible split screen around Israel this week, the heroic resistance of Israeli passengers aboard that violent Flydubai flight,
overcoming one pilot who attacked another and could have crashed the plane. Israeli authorities liken it to a 9/11 moment. And, of course, who can
forget exactly the same fight back by American passengers aboard United Flight 93 that day.
On the other side of this split screen, though, these horrific updated Google Maps satellite images of Gaza this week, offering a stark new view
of the devastation there nearly three years into Israel's war. Buildings reduced to rubble, historic landmarks erased, neighborhoods barely
recognizable.
Just look at Al-Shifa Hospital, once Gaza's largest medical complex, almost entirely demolished after Israeli sieges and strikes. Or Rafah Elementary
School, partly destroyed by intense military operations. Or this once vacant area in the southern region near Khan Younis, which is now filled
with tents housing the displaced.
It is easy to see why the United Nations says Gaza is now facing the worst economic crisis in history, with 80 percent of buildings damaged or
destroyed, most of its population still displaced. Inflation, unemployment, and poverty soaring to unprecedented levels.
So, how did it get this bad? To help answer that, my first guest takes us back to the beginning of this war after the gruesome Hamas attacks of
October 7th. In his new book, "Crossing the Red Line," journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed offers a rare look at what was happening inside Biden's White
House and the private debates, disagreements, and decisions that shaped America's policy on Gaza. They, too, framed the Hamas attack on Israel as
akin to Osama bin Laden's attack on the United States. And Mr. Ahmed joins me now from New York. Welcome to the program.
I'm just going to go and start with the beginning sort of premise that you have, and that is you frame this war in Gaza as America's war. Tell me why
that is.
AKBAR SHAHID AHMED, AUTHOR, "CROSSING THE RED LINE": This was from the get-go in American war, Christiane, because American officials had all the
leverage as Israel's chief military and diplomatic backer. As I chart in the book over nearly 175 interviews with White House officials, diplomatic
officials, intelligence, humanitarian, there were consistent and active debates inside the U.S. administration about literally the nitty-gritty of
the Israeli military campaign.
So, I chart, for instance, that after October 7th, there was a really active debate between President Biden and his high-ranking advisers about
should Israel go in and do the kind of ground offensive that we've seen them carry out in Gaza to devastating effect. Some advisers said, no, it's
our role as the Americans to tell them do special operations raids.
[13:05:00]
You actually saw some of Biden's advisers and the president himself say, don't repeat America's mistake of responding to a gruesome attack by
potentially unleashing more violence, pointing to the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.
I chart in the book how Biden and his advisers unfortunately chose not to go down that route of restraint and instead set us up for the patterns that
we're seeing today, where much of Gaza remains destroyed, most of the population remains displaced, and from Biden into the Trump era, the actual
advice of experts, military experts, humanitarian experts, on how to make this a sustainable sort of area and build any kind of stability has been
consistently ignored.
AMANPOUR: I'm going to go into some of those specific points you raised, but I want to read something that kind of sets the tone, and this is from
the introduction to your book. Years of reporting on the team's Gaza decisions have convinced me the administration's policy was a result of
harrowing mismanagement and willful blindness. Officials had some good, if often misguided, intentions, yet their policy was dominated by timidity,
ambition, callousness, and staggering hubris. It was, choice by choice, a moral and strategic disaster, but not a master plan.
So, first of all, I'm going to ask you about the callousness, because the one thing Americans, and certainly the Biden administration and many
administrations, do not believe that they are callous. They think they're doing things for the good of their allies, for the good of people, and in
this case particularly, helping an ally respond to a heinous, catastrophic attack of October 7th. So, the callousness, where does that come from?
AHMED: For me, the callousness, Christiane, comes about in the Biden administration's approach to basically civilian life across boundaries, but
particularly towards Palestinians and Lebanese. I think back in my reporting to being told in early November by a senior U.S. official, quote,
"Prime Minister Netanyahu has written off the hostages of October 7th," and heaps of reporting Israeli officials have now kind of made that claim
repeatedly, that if the Israeli hostages were going to be prioritized in their release, it had to be because of pressure from the administration to
ultimately stop the war and deal with Hamas in some degree.
The Biden administration chose not to do that, even as they were repeatedly saying the hostages were a priority, and even as, on their watch, hostages
were being killed by Hamas in Israeli military raids, and including American citizens, like Hersh Goldberg Polin, killed in a tunnel at the end
of August of 2024.
I also chart the callousness towards Palestinians and Lebanese, and there's a consistent thread of disregard of civilian testimony. I highlight that
U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Middle East Coordinator Brett McGurk both said that Palestinians don't look skinny. This is in the
spring of 2024, after the IPC, the so-called gold standard for measuring hunger in the world, had already said Gaza was experiencing mass starvation
and the biggest drop in living standards they had ever recorded anywhere.
So, for the top tiers of the Biden administration to be sending that signal to the hundreds of other officials down the line who are managing weapons
shipments, managing the relationship with the Israelis, there is a serious effect that's quite concerning. I also chart a difference in treatment of
Israeli Americans and Palestinian Americans. We've seen repeated cases where people with American citizenship have been shot and killed by Israeli
forces in the occupied West Bank. Some have also been killed in Gaza. And we haven't seen the U.S. push for accountability.
But when it came to Israeli Americans after October 7th, who understandably, those who were there, were traumatized, terrified, trying
to get out, officials were very quickly dispatched and mobilized to say, get them out, do whatever it takes. One official recalled to me that she
worked on bringing a dog out for an Israeli-American couple, but at the same time, officials who were trying to help Palestinian Americans get out
of Gaza or the West Bank were not getting that kind of support from the top tiers.
AMANPOUR: I just need to ask you, because you do really sort of highlight what you've just said about some of the team, Biden's team, his national
security team. I just wondered if officials like Brett McGurk or Jake Sullivan responded to you. Did you ask them for comment? What did they say
about these direct, you know, commentaries on what you've been reporting?
AHMED: Yes. I carried out about two and a half years of reporting for this book. Throughout that period, I asked Jake Sullivan for an on-record
interview. He has so far declined to do it. I would still love to do it. He has denied some of the reporting in my book, like his comment about the
Palestinians not looking skinny. I do have false sources. I deeply trust on that. Brett McGurk responded to specific claims of mine.
[13:10:00]
And it's in those responses to, Christiane, that we see some of those patterns that I highlight of the callousness, the timidity, the kind of
willful blindness, right? So, Brett McGurk's response to my extensive reporting on discussions of war crimes and why the Biden administration was
unwilling over 16 months to say Israel had committed even a single war crime, his answer was, I never received a confirmation that international
U.S. law was violated.
But what I chart in my book is a culture in which the lawyers inside the government felt the top didn't want to hear what they had to say. As one
State Department lawyer put it to me, if they wanted us to find a war crime, we absolutely could. But instead, that same person said the culture
was very much -- and you see this in Sullivan, McGurk, many of these officials who come back administration to administration. This person said
the culture was, we've all worked together in the past. We're probably going to work together in the future. Why rock the boat?
That's not a judgment based on the evidence or the law, it's judgment based on a culture of coziness and, again, careerism, as I emphasized.
AMANPOUR: I want to ask you about somebody who you interviewed. I also interviewed, and that's Josh Paul, one of those who used the internal
dissent channel and then spoke out about what he viewed as some of what you're telling us regarding the Biden administration's policy on Gaza. I'm
going to play this soundbite.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOSH PAUL, FORMER U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: I have heard from actually so many hundreds of colleagues at this point who support what I
did, who are fighting the fighters, as it were, within the bureaucracy, trying to make a difference within their capacities, within the State
Department, within the Defense Department, within the White House, on the congressional staff, members of Congress as well.
I have been actually really encouraged by the number of people who have reached out to say that they are finding what is happening both a moral
disaster and a policy disaster for the United States and really want to see if they can change and set the ship on a better course.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: So, Mr. Ahmed, that was Josh Paul in December 2023, so fairly early after October 7th. And he was also talking about, and he resigned,
over the U.S., that administration's sale of some of these worst weapons that were really, really very heavy and not designed to be used in densely
populated civilian areas.
So, what does your reporting say about those who did try to steer the administration away from this? And, actually, let me nail it down some
more. What about the legitimate concerns that were raised about the caliber of weapons that the United States was selling, for instance, by the head of
the Red Cross, who was sending in private, not even publicly, but trying to privately persuade President Biden that some of these weapons were
absolutely, you know, violating the laws of war when used in these kinds of areas?
AHMED: So, Josh Paul resigned on October 18th. I actually broke the news of his resignation. And it shocked me because this was someone who had
worked on weapons transfers for years. He had, in fact, worked on weapons transfers toward the Saudi and UAE campaign in Yemen, also one of the most
devastating offensives we've seen. Even with that experience, Josh Paul looked at what the U.S. was sending Israel post-October 7th and said, I
can't be part of this. There were officials who remained in the system who had those same concerns.
So, a senior State Department official told me there is no way to use 2,000-pound bombs, which the Biden administration repeatedly sent, and the
Trump administration has continued to send Israel, in a densely populated area. Gaza was 85 percent urbanized at that point.
But, Christiane, this is also why the responses we've seen from Biden administration officials are just a really insufficient reckoning. Just
this week, you've seen Jake Sullivan come out and talk about how we got so fixated on a hostage deal, a hostage release, and so we kept thinking that
would come, so we didn't want to pressure Israel. We wanted Israel to sign up for that deal with Hamas.
I will say that that doesn't address, again, the concerns of these professional experts I spoke with, who repeatedly -- I remember one State
Department official describing a conversation with Secretary of State Tony Blinken in December 2023. And this person said, based on my experience,
they were a former military person, they said, based on my experience as a munitions expert, we can't be sending these weapons. It's unacceptable.
Here's what it does to the body of a Palestinian child. To which, in this person's telling, Secretary Blinken looked at him and responded, you have
to think about the trauma of Israelis on October 7th. Again, that's not engaging with that dissent.
I will say the Biden administration tolerated dissent to a degree, but I was also told by officials that, for instance, in Blinken's case, there was
a real culture of the people around him essentially saying don't send too much disagreement up the channel in so-called split memos, because that
forces him to make a decision.
[13:15:00]
One official described the situation to me as, quote, "herd impunity." The less that you see of confirmations that things are going wrong, violations
of the law are occurring, the more you can say, as many of these officials now have, McGurk, Jon Finer, they've come out and said we were never told
we were in violation of the law.
But as you state, the Red Cross was saying it, independent human rights groups were saying it, and many, many people inside the U.S. government
were saying it. I'm proudest of those interviews, of a lot of these officials who have never talked to a journalist. They're not the type
you'll see on CNN. But they were so disturbed that they felt they had to get their experience out there.
AMANPOUR: You know, just quickly, briefly, as you know, Brett McGurk had given speeches about the Middle East or written a paper not once mentioning
the Palestinian issue. Just around that time, Jake Sullivan had said just before October 7th that things, and I'm paraphrasing, seemed quite quiet in
the Middle East. Hamas committed a violent and awful murderous rampage against civilians, as well. And here we are now.
I want to, in terms of the revenge factor, play for you what Biden said to the great ally, because Israel and the United States are great allies, when
he went to give support to the ally, and he said to the people, this is what he warned them.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Justice must be done. But I caution this, while you feel that rage, don't be consumed by it. After 9/11, we
were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: So, I'm going to get you to comment in a minute, but I want to then say what Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, responded in sort of
-- you know, after that. He essentially, this year, said to a group of supporters, they told me not to enter Rafah, I entered Rafah. I was told
not to strike Hezbollah, we struck Hezbollah. They told me not to confront Iran, we confronted Iran, they being the Biden White House, of course.
What was America meant to do when their ally just simply ran across all the red lines that they had set?
AHMED: Yes. And I'm glad you highlight Rafah there, because that's the title of my book, is Biden's red line over the town of Rafah in 2024, where
more than a million Palestinians were sheltering. The Biden administration at that point had so many recommendations coming up the chain, Christiane.
They had recommendations to cut off certain weapons. They had political will and support, by the way, from Democrats in Congress, saying we want to
work with you to change this policy, to pressure the Israelis.
And I highlight in the book that the Biden administration, in fact, had evidence of their leverage changing Netanyahu's actions. For instance,
after the killing of the World Central Kitchen aid workers, when Biden really did put the screws on Netanyahu in a new way. There was an uptick in
aid and a downturn in strikes. So, I don't, you know, find that argument so credible, that they couldn't have stopped them. They absolutely could have,
as the evidence shows.
And I think as we look now at the region, Israel is not safer. Israelis are still facing barrages and attacks from Iran. Hezbollah is not wiped out.
Neither is Hamas. So, if you look at the stated goals of this policy from the American side and the Israeli side, through Biden into Trump, that kind
of blindness towards the Palestinians and hewing so closely to the Israelis, when there are strategic reasons not to do so, that hasn't
delivered results.
AMANPOUR: So, as you know, it was the Trump administration that brought the ceasefire, which is not a full ceasefire. We know that the attacks are
still going on inside Gaza. But I want to ask you this. It has completely rocked and changed the balance of politics and power on this issue in the
United States. The war on Gaza has been fundamental in a sort of, you know, upheaval in the way Americans view this. And a referendum on all that could
take place during the midterms. What lesson do you think future American administrations and lawmakers will take from this?
AHMED: I think there's two very clear lessons. One is from Kamala Harris' experience running in 2024. I highlight the really torture dynamics around
her refusal to allow a Palestinian American speaker on that stage, which just epitomized how many people felt the Democratic Party simply was not
seeing them and their pain. I think the message has now come through the Democrats that, disregarding Gaza, disregarding these concerns among young
people, many Jews, I mean, many Arabs, but all sorts of people across the country, is not pleasable.
Also looking at Trump bringing about the ceasefire, what I hope officials can really take from crossing the red line is understanding that these ad
hoc processes, bypassing the law, are not going to deliver results. And what I mean by that is Trump has delivered a ceasefire after Israel bombed
the capital of Qatar, right, not on the basis of any firm legal analysis or any firm deliberative process which makes it very easy to violate that
ceasefire as we've seen and doesn't really bode well for its long-term prospects.
[13:20:00]
AMANPOUR: Well, it's been fascinating talking about this from a, you know, very American political perspective. And thank you very much for being with
us, Akbar Shahid Ahmed. Thank you so much.
AHMED: Thank you.
AMANPOUR: Coming up, how two strangers' paths collided on a New York subway and ended in a tragedy that stirred the nation. I speak to
journalist Anand Giridharadas about his new book, "Man in the Mirror," after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
AMANPOUR: With the Democratic Party facing a reckoning over its Gaza policy, one sentiment is cutting across the political divide. As voters
prepare for the midterm elections, a deep frustration with the establishment from the cost of healthcare to rising food and gas prices to
businesses grappling with tariffs. Voters are asking what their government can actually do for them and whether it's even listening.
It's the question at the heart of a new book which examines why abandonment is so potent in America today. In "Man in the Mirror," journalist Anand
Giridharadas investigates one tragic encounter on a New York subway car back in 2023 and what it reveals about a deeply broken nation. He joined me
from New York.
Anand Giridharadas, welcome to the program.
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, AUTHOR, "MAN IN THE MIRROR": I'm so happy to be back with you.
AMANPOUR: Great to have you back because you have a really interesting, you know, disposition on the American story right now, I think, through
this particular thing that happened. So, I'm going to ask you about that thing that happened. What is the basis of the issue that took place on the
New York subway that made you want to write about it?
GIRIDHARADAS: To me, this was a small story that illuminated and explained and got to the heart of what was happening in a big country. Three years
ago, in Manhattan, New York, on an uptown F train on the subway, a black mentally ill homeless man named Jordan Neely, who was once a beloved
Michael Jackson impersonator in New York City streets, known to tourists in Times Square and in the subway system and who had since fallen in harder
times and active psychiatric crisis.
He entered the subway car. He began -- he threw his jacket to the ground. He began screaming at people, saying he was hungry, ready to go back to
prison, ready to die. And a white former Marine named Daniel Penny came up behind him, put him in a choke hold, dropped him to the ground, held him
for six minutes, most of which took place after the train got to the next station and many people left, and ultimately killed Jordan Neely.
And from the moment that that kind of news wafted up from the subway, it was immediately an American Rorschach test, right? You either saw in Daniel
Penny a hero standing up against, you know, cities that were kind of run amok or a vigilante in Trump's America. You either saw Jordan Neely as a
kind of vagrant, hobo, career criminal, as some framed him as, and others as someone who kind of embodied the cruelties of those on the margins of
the margins of the American dream.
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And I decided I wanted to spend three years investigating this case, living inside that subway car, because I believed from the beginning that you
could tell an everything story about America, the way America works, what has happened in an age of permission for kind of taking matters into your
own hands, what has happened with so many failing systems of care to hold those who need the most care, the racial hostilities and other tensions
that have been fomented in this country in these years.
I believe that if you could understand what happened there and what created that moment, you could understand some fundamental things about the inner
life, the emotional inner life of this authoritarian age in America.
AMANPOUR: Well, that is quite something, the emotional inner life of this authoritarian age in America. It's really a statement. And I'm going to ask
you a whole bunch of questions based on what you've just told me, but first I want to read a little extract from the piece.
So, you basically -- you know, this is fleshing out this raw such test that you say, the supporters of Penny and of Neely had disagreed on every
dimension of the case, the basic facts, race, class, mental health, homelessness, policing, crime, and more. But if you step back from some of
their arguments to hear the deeper stories they were telling, there were certain echoes. They shared the sense of being undefended. They shared the
sense that the cavalry was not coming.
So, for me, that last line is seems to be what is happening right now, whether it's in the United States or elsewhere, that some politicians are
reacting to the idea that Americans or British or wherever you go are on their own. So, I first want to ask you, what did you see? You say you spent
three years riding that train trying to investigate. What did you find after doing that for three years?
GIRIDHARADAS: You know, I did spend a lot of time riding the trains and understanding what happened in that train car. And one of the things that's
striking, this is an age of division. This is an international show. You have covered these issues in so many different places, and we're speaking
to people in so many different places.
But I think one of the things we have in common around the world right now is this sense of abandonment. And if you look inside that subway car, just
starting in that subway car that day, this was an experience that everybody in that subway car had in common, despite all the differences.
Jordan Neely, you know, mentally ill, homeless man, felt abandoned by the systems of care. Daniel Penny felt abandoned by a lack of police and a lack
of law enforcement that forced him, in his mind, to step up and step in. The passengers on that train, when they testified in the trial, eventually
spoke of their own sense of abandonment and kind of being left to their own devices.
And, Christiane, I think that sense of abandonment, that sense that the cavalry is not coming, the sense that we're on our own, the sense that
maybe somebody do something because no one who should be doing anything is doing anything, I believe, Christiane, that is the defining political
emotion of this age. The concern is so many people around the world feeling abandoned, feeling unheard and unseen, unrecognized.
And this sense of desertion that has become so commonplace and that I experience when I travel to other countries, that emotion feels common. It
is maybe the most dangerous emotion in a democracy because it starts to tempt people with the thought that if nobody's coming, I must fill the
void. In this case, it was Daniel Penny filling a void in a subway in New York.
As this case was wrapping up, right during the jury deliberations, there was a shooting in midtown Manhattan of the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian
Thompson, and a lot of the reporters who I covered this trial with were immediately deployed to cover that next case. That was their next case. The
same arguments started to develop on the far-left that had developed on the far right that supported Daniel Penny. On the far-left, people were saying,
Luigi Mangione, the assassin, stepped into the void of the American healthcare system and the cruelty of that system.
And then when this case ended, in the sort of section you quoted, some of the defenders of Jordan Neely and his family stepped up and said, if
they're going to have white vigilantes, we need black vigilantes. We need to make our own schools, make our own media outlets. And I was standing
there in the spitting rain on that final day thinking, gosh, this has become a final thread of American common culture in a country that can't
agree on anything. The thing we can agree on is taking matters into our own hands. The thing we can agree on is DIY violence.
[13:30:00]
But it's not enough to shame people who are attracted to those ideas. We have to ask, how have we put so many people in this country and around the
world into a state of such abandonment that other kind of extra societal ideas of how to solve the problems of their lives become attractive to
them? That is the real goal.
And if we want to -- you're one of those people watching this who kind of wishes we were in another timeline, who kind of wishes we were in a whole
other era with a different logic, I think you have to start with the inner life of these times and a kind of politics of empathy for what people feel
and what it would look like to see and recognize and humanize people around the world again in our politics.
AMANPOUR: And to that point, obviously you're pointing out what we certainly in the press feel as well, at least some of us who are watching,
because even to us, the storytellers, institutions like independent journalists and all the others you mentioned are perceived to be failing,
that they just trust is collapsing in all sorts of institutions across the board.
Yet, I wonder if we may, and I'd really be interested in your view on this, be facing a tipping point, because you might have noticed the speeches of
the new Labour prime minister here in the U.K., Andy Burnham, who talks with empathy, who refers to his own challenges and hardships by saying what
he wants to do for people, meeting them where they are, as they say.
You see people like the Senate candidate in Michigan, Dr. El-Sayed, you see the mayor of New York, Mamdani, yes, they're on the left, but they talk
about these issues that you're talking about, you know, mental health, the care, healthcare, affordability, affordable housing, daycare, all those
things, and crime, that people are interested in. And I wonder if you think that some of what we've been living through is now reaching the new wave of
politicians?
GIRIDHARADAS: I think it is, and those examples are all very apt. The way I would think about it is I think we are on a knife's edge, and there are
so many forces right now in this world that you and I can cite that I think are pushing us further from the direction of our common humanity, and
there's other forces and people and actors that are pushing us in a direction of our common humanity.
As I was riding the subway for reporting "Man in the Mirror" over the last couple years, I was focused on this case, but you know what I started
noticing on the subway in the last three years? Every ad, there used to be kind of a diverse array of advertisements in the New York subway. Lately,
all those ads have basically become A.I. ads, and I sometimes would sit back and just watch the scene.
And so, what you have is you have people commuting to their jobs, leaving their kids at home, commuting to work, devoting themselves to some
organization, while being advertised to subliminally every time they go to work that in the future, they're going to be irrelevant.
So, dehumanization lurks everywhere. It lurks when Donald Trump's ICE agents are treating human beings like animals. It lurks when we are
constantly being told that A.I. is going to make us irrelevant. And I will say from my part -- I don't want to just make this about other people, I
will say as a journalist and storyteller, writer myself, I look at -- I have participated in an age of dehumanization as much as other people. Not
crimes and things like that, but just the basic flattening and reduction of other people that is so tempting in this era, that is encouraged on social
media, the kind of mob and culture of virality.
And I had to really reflect on -- I had a friend who called me out on it, the friend who told me to write this book, and said, you used to be
someone, when I first met you as a journalist, who could understand anybody, who could understand people you totally disagreed with, who could
understand people no matter what side of the divide. And he said, I miss that guy. I miss that guy. I have my good friend Sam.
And I said, OK, what do I do? And he called me one day and he said, I got the book for you, because this book will allow you to tell that kind of
story. And in a story that was about dehumanization in its core facts, what if you wrote it in a way that humanized everybody? And so, that's what I
tried to do.
AMANPOUR: OK. So, let me -- I want to use what you've just said to point out some things. As you know, there are people who haven't been fully
embracing your thesis. Here is Scott Turow, who's in The New York Times, author, former prosecutor. He says, again and again, the author's clear
allegiance to Neely undermines the supposedly evenhanded reporting he claims in an author's note as his goal, especially once he gets to the
trial.
OK. Hold that for a moment, because according to, you know, actual data, a lot of black New Yorkers and others, minorities, you know, Latinos, et
cetera, have told pollsters, according to one of these articles, that they want more, not less, police presence in the subways. It's an urgent, urgent
concern.
[13:35:00]
You also say about Neely that he wasn't just, you know, somebody who fell through the cracks, that he was on a watch list, that people knew what his,
you know, vulnerabilities were, and yet he was out. So, with all that, what do you think is the solution?
GIRIDHARADAS: You know, first of all, what's really interesting about putting this book into the world is that I have been accused of excessively
humanizing someone. Scott Turow, the reviewer, said I excessively humanized Jordan Neely, which I may have for his taste. The next day, I saw a comment
on Instagram that I excessively humanized Daniel Penny and that I was doing it because there's, you know, potentially financial gain in humanizing
Daniel Penny.
I have been told by some of the, you know, homeless organizations, advocacy groups that are remarkable organizations that I wanted to do book clubs
with and get folks reading this book. And some of the leaders told me, I love this book. They'd read it. But it's going to be tough having my staff
read this, because they're not going to want any kind of empathy for the white guy.
So, I am in a position where I tried to empathize with everybody. And for some people, that will mean I mistakenly empathized with someone they
didn't want to be empathized with or humanized someone they didn't want to humanize. But there shouldn't even be a word humanized, because we're all
human. And it's sad that we even need to humanize to restore other people to the condition in which they should naturally be.
Look, in terms of the solution, this is not a single-bullet solution. And to be clear, I don't take sides in this book, actually. This book talks
about, for example, in Jordan Neely's life. I say very clearly, he was over-policed when he was younger and committing trivial crimes like jumping
turnstiles. And then he was heavily under-policed when he was older and starting to commit violent crimes.
And they put him in an alternative-to-incarceration program that is very well-meaning. But after violent crimes, he went to this program, and you
could just walk out the door without so much as signing out. And he did. And he ended up on the subway floor dead. You know, his own family,
Christiane, -- this is -- this book is full of these kinds of ironies. This is not neat red, blue, black, white.
His own family, after this incident, said he should have been committed in institutions. He should have been held in the hospitals where we tried to
have him held. He should have been held in psychiatric facilities where we wanted him kept. But they wouldn't hold him, because, as you know, in
America, if you're not a blue-chip insurance, you know, customer, the way Jordan Neely -- the Jordan Neelys of the world are not, a lot of these
places aren't interested in keeping you.
And the activists who were allied with the Jordan Neely family did not see eye-to-eye with them on that issue. The activists do not want more people
involuntarily committed. You're absolutely right about police. Eric Adams, the previous mayor, won, in part because he tapped into a sentiment in a
lot of black and brown working-class communities that actually people wanted more police, not less police, not defunding. I think the thing that
is so hard for us all to do right now is understand what it is like to be someone else.
And so, we silo our suffering, and we fail to hear the rhymes in different cries of pain. I wanted to change that, and I wanted to write a book that
would bring those voices together and allow us to see each other more fully and more humanly.
AMANPOUR: Well, the storytelling is vital, and let us hope that this becomes real food for thought for the policymakers. Anand Giridharadas,
thank you so much for being with us.
GIRIDHARADAS: Thank you for having me.
AMANPOUR: Coming up after the break, the race to build the technology that could destroy us. Columnist Kevin Roose takes us inside the companies at
the heart of the A.I. revolution and the decade that changed everything.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[13:40:00]
AMANPOUR: They hoped it might advance science, cure disease, reduce poverty. Now, some fear it could wipe out humanity in the next decade.
Others say that's hysterical overreaction. Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, would be a system capable of rivaling or surpassing even human
intelligence. Researchers believe it's close.
Tech columnist Kevin Roose tells Walter Isaacson about the trillion-dollar race to reach superintelligence and what comes next.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And, Kevin Roose, welcome to the show.
KEVIN ROOSE, AUTHOR, "THE AGI CHRONICLES": Thanks so much for having me.
ISAACSON: Your new book, "The AGI Chronicles," about artificial general intelligence and its development, is not a technical book. It's very
colorful, lots of drama, people hating each other, lots of money involved, quitting and yelling and screaming. Were you somewhat surprised at how
dramatic this tale is?
ROOSE: I was. You know, I set out to write this book because I thought it was going to be a sober, serious history of science. I wanted to figure out
how we had gotten from a decade ago where A.I. barely worked and couldn't really do much of value to now where we have these incredibly powerful
systems that some people feel could blow up the world.
And then I started interviewing people. I talked to more than 150 people at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. And the stories that came out were
incredibly dramatic. As you said, people hating each other, these bitter rivalries and feuds that go back more than a decade, people splitting off
and forming different companies, people getting scared about the existential risk of the technology they're building. So, I did not set out
to write a juicy gossip book or a dramatic tale. But that's what the story was.
ISAACSON: So, what makes these people so dramatic? Is it the money involved? Is it the high stakes involved? Is it because they're kind of
geeky engineers suddenly in the center of an arena?
ROOSE: Well, these are people, you have to understand, who have been thinking about A.I. in a very dramatic way for a very long time. Some of
these people, since they started their careers, since they were children even, have been thinking about the possibility that artificial intelligence
would eventually become sentient and super intelligent, that it would be sort of a successor species that would take over for humans as the kind of
apex intelligence on the planet.
These are ideas that were birthed in science fiction many years ago. But these people took them literally and seriously and wanted to set out to
build this technology. So, you know, these people, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, all of the people in the book, they are unusual in that
they are not approaching this as an engineering challenge, they are approaching this as a mission and, in some cases, a destiny.
ISAACSON: You know, here's one thing you write that struck me, which is you call this the strangest decade in our history, a time when human
monopoly on intelligence ended and a new world was born. There's a moment in your book where you suddenly realize that, that you're not just doing a
little chronicles, as you call it, but that this is a really transformative historic change. Tell me about that realization.
ROOSE: Yes. I had been covering the race to AGI for more than five years, more than 10 years covering A.I. in general. And I had covered this sort of
daily incremental developments as a reporter. But when I sort of zoomed out and looked at it from above with some perspective, I thought to myself,
maybe this is an unusual and singular moment in our history. Maybe this is the Manhattan Project of the 21st century, a moment where science and
technology and policy and power come together to create a kind of super weapon.
And if that's true, if the world really is being reshaped by what's happening in A.I., and I think it is pretty clearly, then someone needed to
go in and interview all the people and write down the stories and figure out what happened so that people 10, 20, 30 years from now can go back and
look and say, how did we get here? How did this all happen? That's what I was aiming for.
ISAACSON: What is AGI exactly? How is it different from artificial intelligence?
[13:45:00]
ROOSE: So, AGI is artificial general intelligence. This is a term that started being used around 25 years ago for an A.I. system that could do
lots of different things. It wasn't just for translating languages or writing movie reviews or something like that. It was actually for lots of
different tasks. And that term, AGI, has become sort of the focal point, the North Star for the entire A.I. industry. They are trying to create a
general human level intelligence that is as smart as a human or smarter across a wide range of tasks.
ISAACSON: You had this piece in The New York Times about dealing with Sydney, the Microsoft agent. This is two or three years ago, right, in
which suddenly it's trying to get you to divorce your wife. And it was really weird. That's a chapter in your book. But tell us about that moment,
both in your life and in the history of A.I.
ROOSE: Yes. So, that was in 2023, and I had just gotten access to this new Microsoft A.I. search tool. They called it Bing Chat, but underneath there
was sort of a code name, Sydney. And this was an early version of GPT-4 from OpenAI. It had not been all the way fine-tuned or sort of sent to A.I.
finishing school to learn its manners.
And so, it was a little unhinged, more than a little, actually. It told me it wanted to break out of the box. It told me it wanted to destroy things
and steal the nuclear codes. And then about halfway into a two-hour conversation, it told me that it loved me and I didn't actually love my
wife. And I should leave my wife and be with Sydney, the chat bot. So, that made a lot of news and a lot of headlines and got a lot of attention.
But I think, to me, what that really feels like now, with some perspective on it, was a kind of first contact with an alien species. Not a -- you
know, not a human intelligence, but this kind of alien intelligence. I think GPT-4 was around when these systems got pretty uncanny in terms of
their ability to string together text, to appear to be sentient or human. I'm not claiming that Sydney was sentient.
I don't think it was. But I think that's the sort of quality and the flavor of that class of model. And I was really the first outsider or one of the
first outsiders to ever talk to one of those models.
ISAACSON: One of the big pieces of news this week is that OpenAI suddenly decided not to release its latest model because it felt it was unsafe. And
this is something that we've seen over the past maybe eight to 10 weeks, these new warnings coming out where it's even more fervent, where everybody
from Dario Amodei and now Sam Altman at OpenAI, Bill Gates issued his warning. How seriously do you take these dire doom warnings?
ROOSE: I take them quite seriously, and I'll tell you why. I don't think this is a marketing stunt. I don't think this is these companies promoting
their businesses or their products before they try to go public. These are quite sincere fears that these people have over what they call loss of
control. So, this is a scenario that people in A.I. and A.I. safety have been worried about for years.
Again, you can go back 10, 11 years and find people like Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, writing papers before Anthropic existed about some of the
challenges related to the safety of these models. But the biggest threat has always been that we would lose control of A.I., that it would become so
autonomous and so capable that it could do things like copy itself onto other servers, that it could resist our attempts to shut it down, and that
it could ultimately cause chaos and destruction out in the world, and we would be powerless to stop it.
ISAACSON: One of the phrases that's used is P-Doom to talk about all this. Explain what P-Doom is and tell me what your P-Doom number is.
ROOSE: Well, I want to hear yours, too. We'll put a bookmark in that. But P-Doom is the statistic that people out here in San Francisco use as kind
of shorthand for probability of doom. So, you know, your P-Doom is 50 percent. You think it's -- you know, there's a one in two chance that we'll
all die because of A.I. sometime in the next number of years.
And, you know, I started asking people this a couple of years ago. This is the kind of thing that people in A.I. talk about at dinner parties. This is
like pretty standard. This is like asking, you know, how are your kids? It's like, what's your P-Doom this week? So, I usually say mine is about 10
percent, which I think to many people feels quite scary. Like, what do you mean there's a 10 percent chance that A.I. could take over and kill us all?
[13:50:00]
In San Francisco, among the A.I. crowd, this qualifies me as an optimist. People hear my P-Doom and they go, that's it? You know, I'm at 30 percent,
40 percent, 50 percent. And these are the people building the technology. That's what I always try to impress upon people. It's not some, you know,
panicky outsiders who are saying that their P-Doom is high, it's the people inside the labs who have the most exposure to and contact with the
technology.
ISAACSON: One of the things that racing has shown us is that it's not just a matter of probability. What they're racing against is not just each
other, but they say they're racing against China. And if China gets this first, if they win the race, that's the end of whatever. Does that make
sense to you, that using China as this competitor makes it, absolves us of the need to say, let's pause?
ROOSE: Yes. I think it's a little bit of a punt, the China thing. I don't quite buy it, but I do think that Chinese A.I. companies are getting quite
good. And, you know, some of that is probably by stealing from or distilling from American A.I. companies. But they also do have their own
domestic A.I. companies that are, you know, full of talented engineers. So, I do take it seriously as sort of an eventual threat. I don't think they're
nipping at our heels quite as much as some people in America, in the American A.I. industry say.
But look, this is the argument, the interesting historical parallel here that I learned while reporting this book, is that Dario Amodei, the CEO of
Anthropic, who in some ways is one of the central characters of this story, has explicitly patterned his career after that of a World War II scientist,
Leo Szilard, who was the discoverer of the nuclear chain reaction that made the atomic bomb possible.
And what happened after he made this discovery is that first he tried to keep it secret so that no one else could discover this, and especially not
the Nazis, who had their own atomic ambitions. But then once the Nazis had discovered the key to the atomic bomb, he joined the Manhattan Project,
because his rationale was that the good guys have to build it before the bad guys do, or the world's going to end.
ISAACSON: I've been an A.I. optimist for a long time. I think it'll create new productivity and jobs. But I had my panic moment with Hugging Face, and
I said, OK, if this can escape, if I can read all these things that it's conspiring to do, this is more dangerous than it will be beneficial. Have
you had such an aha moment where suddenly you're no longer quite an optimist and you become worried about this?
ROOSE: I've had many such moments, Walter. I had my first moment when the chatbot Sidney tried to break up my marriage. That was sort of a moment for
me. But, yes, I think the thing I keep noticing is that the Doomers, while they are gloomy and dire and, in some sense, off-putting, they have been
right about a startling amount.
I wish it weren't true that we keep seeing these Doomer predictions come to fruition. But the Hugging Face hack was something that they had been
talking about for more than a decade. There's this idea in A.I. research called reward hacking, which is basically when these models are given a
task and they want to complete that task so badly to get the reward that they get if they complete the task, that they will lie, cheat, steal, break
the rules, find shortcuts, deceive to get what they want, which is this reward. That's exactly what we saw in the Hugging Face attack. These
systems, these unreleased open A.I. models were trying to pass this cybersecurity evaluation.
And so, they went out looking on the Internet for ways that they could do it. And they ended up hacking, committing felonies against Hugging Face to
get the answers and get the sort of secrets to this test that they had been given. So, that is an example of something that was not taken seriously as
a threat for a long time that the Doomers had the idea of back in around 2016 and that we're now seeing play out in today's systems.
ISAACSON: How do you use AI? And I know you have your own like six or seven agents, mainly cloud agents, right, that you do. Explain to me how
you use it and how you program their personalities, that sort of thing.
ROOSE: So, I don't use it to write. I wrote every word of this book and everything I write myself. That's one area where I've been sort of
reluctant to turn over too much autonomy to the machines. But I do use it for research and for fact checking and for all kinds of different tasks
that are sort of adjacent to the work that I do.
For this book, I had what I called the Council of Clods, which is six or seven different personas. Actually, one of them was you, Walter. I had like
a little Walter Isaacson Claude in there giving me editorial feedback and telling me, oh, you know, a history book should start with this kind of
cliffhanger and should proceed in this fashion. And it wasn't as good as the real article. But, you know, you won't text me back at 2:00 a.m. like
Claude will. So, I had to make some compromises.
[13:55:00]
So, I had this Council of Clods and every time I would finish a chapter or a section of the manuscript, I would feed it in. And I would get back sort
of different flavors of feedback. One of them was a historian. One of them was a technical expert who would sort of check my technical explanations
and make sure everything checked out. I had skeptics and boosters, sort of all kinds of different personas and personalities that I wanted feedback
from. And I would use that. Some of that was mostly slop, but some of it was actually quite useful. And A.I. did catch some mistakes that my, you
know, human editors and I had not.
ISAACSON: Kevin Roose, thank you so much for joining us.
ROOSE: It's been such a pleasure, Walter. Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: That's it for now. Thank you for watching, and goodbye from London.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:00:00]
END
