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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Interview with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired April 16, 2023 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:36]

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program. An exclusive interview with the Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen. Is inflation defeated? How likely is a recession? Will America's small banks survive? Are the sanctions against Russia really biting? I'll ask her all that and more.

Also, highly classified documents from the Pentagon leaked on the internet. Military plans in the Ukraine war have been revealed. Allies like South Korea and Israel are dismayed. We will tell you what you need to know about this burgeoning scandal with David Sanger and Mark Hertling.

Finally, America's immigration crisis from an angle rarely ever seen. CNN got exclusive access inside a harrowing trip from South America toward the United States on foot.

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: What's startling is the sheer number of children.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first here's my take. Last week, I argued against banning TikTok and in talking to people about the platform I came to see that the real concern most had was not about TikTok's Chinese ownership, but rather just how scarily addictive it and much of social media is. That is true and deeply worrying, and we should do something about it and soon.

TikTok is the dominant app in the U.S. today. It has about 150 million users here. The "Washington Post's" Drew Harwell nicely summarizes the data. In 2021 its Web site was visited more frequently than Google. Two-thirds of American teens use it with one in six saying they use it almost constantly.

It is also wiping the floor with the competition. Harwell quotes a Bernstein Research Report that found that between 2018 and 2021 the time Americans spent on the apps surged by 67 percent while hours on Facebook and YouTube grew by less than 10 percent.

What is it that TikTok does that is so distinctive? No one quite knows. Phillip Lawrence Spring, a research scientist at the Max Plank Institute for Human Development in Berlin told "The Guardian," it's embarrassing that we know so little about TikTok and its effects. Partly this is because TikTok is relatively new and partly because its algorithm is highly sophisticated. Instead of an image or a post chosen by a friend TikTok presents you with a stream of videos and gauges what you like to give you more of it, replacing the friction of deciding what to watch, the Bernstein researchers explain, with a sensory rush of bite-sized videos delivering endorphin hit after hit."

Most psychologists would characterize it as also delivering dopamine, the chemical secreted in the brain when we find something pleasurable, such as food, shelter or sex. Anything that connects us to others triggers this sense of pleasure because it's an evolutionary response. We survive better in groups than as individuals. Social media apps capitalize on this survival mechanism for their own profit.

And TikTok provides this dopamine hit, perhaps faster, better, and more pleasurably than any other app. The best way to understand how social media is affecting our brains is to go back to psychology 101. BF Skinner, one of the foundational scholars in the field, demonstrated how operant conditioning works by using a simple system of continual rewards for pigeons, teaching them how to fly in circles, guide missiles and even play ping pong.

The simplest version to watch is a dog trainer who will give the pet a stream of small treats to reward him or her for following directions.

[10:05:03]

Social media apps provide those small dopamine hits just as reliably.

Jonathan Haidt has become famous as a critic of social media. A distinguished social psychologist he teaches at NYU. Hyde argues that the rise of social media and its reward system is closely correlated with staggering declines in the mental health of teenagers. Around 2012, he argues, you begin to see all kinds of indications of declining mental health from self-reported feelings to hospitalizations, to attempted suicides.

He says it has happened in the United States, Britain, and several other countries with widespread use of social media. The rising anxiety, depression and attempted suicides among teenage girls is particularly frightening. And these numbers are getting worse by the year.

The timing makes sense when you consider that the early 2010s is when teens were trading in their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps. And that 2009 is when Facebook introduced the like and Twitter introduced the retweet feature that mimic the dark trainers' treats. So by 2012, the year Facebook bought Instagram and its user base exploded, a large number of teens were hooked. Haidt is working on a book on this topic and on his Substack, "After

Babel." He maintains an ongoing database of scholarly studies and commentary on these studies. I came away from it utterly convinced that he is right and that we need serious rules and laws surrounding this technology. He argues that the agent which social media companies can collect children's data without parental consent should be raised from 13 to 16. The initial discussions among lawmakers had chosen 16, he told me, but then social media company lobbyists were able to push it down to 13.

There could be federal laws requiring more notifications when the app has been used for too long, automatic turnoffs at night and more. For those worried about this kind of legislation bear in mind that social media companies are largely protected from lawsuits by an extremely generous provision in the law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They can reasonably be asked in return to make their products safer for their consumers.

The next technological leap is generative artificial intelligence. And once that is fully married to social media, those companies will have a superhuman capacity to create addiction machines of astonishing power that could hook us permanently, perhaps even rewire our brains with devastating consequences.

We should act now while we have the time and the attention span.

Go to CNN.com/fareed for link a to my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.

This week data showed that U.S. inflation had dropped to 5 percent on an annual basis, continuing a nine-month streak of declining inflation. But that number was still well above the 2 percent target, and this comes after the collapse of several regional banks, the fallout of which leads Fed economists to believe the economy will tip into a mild recession later this year.

Where is this all headed? I sat down on Friday for an exclusive interview with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Madam Secretary, thank you for joining us.

JANET YELLEN, TREASURY SECRETARY: Thank you for inviting me.

ZAKARIA: Let's talk about the American economy.

YELLEN: Sure.

ZAKARIA: The Federal Reserve has raised rates some ways at faster pace than almost, you know, ever before, and yet America remains at full employment. I mean, in general, the argument is the way you crush inflation is you raise interest rates, make it harder for people to borrow, which then causes the economy to slow down. Unemployment to rise. But unemployment really isn't rising. One of your predecessors, Larry Summers, says you're going to have to

get unemployment up to really break the back of inflation. Do you think that you're going to need to see substantially greater unemployment before inflation is conquered?

YELLEN: I think we probably need some easing of stress in the labor market to get inflation down. But that doesn't mean that we need to see unemployment rise significantly. I believe a strong labor market and bringing down inflation are compatible goals, and I think we're seeing that play out right now.

[10:10:00]

First of all, inflation is too high and President Biden and I feel this is a major primary problem that is afflicting American households and it's something that we need to deal with. The Fed has the primary role here. We're trying to do other things that we can to be supportive, but it is a problem, but it has come down significantly. It's been declining for a number of months. And we continue to create jobs at a remarkable pace. Over 230,000 jobs last month.

So the labor market remains very strong, but we're still seeing with a slowdown in the economy, something we expected in his natural given that the economy is operating at full employment near its capacity. We're seeing some easing of stresses in the labor market. Initial claims for unemployment insurance. You know they're not at levels, signaling distress, but they have risen somewhat.

Job openings have declined somewhat. Wage growth has -- still solid, but has moved down somewhat so and labor force participation has moved back up. It declined substantially when the pandemic struck.

ZAKARIA: But so you think you can achieve what people are calling this immaculate slowdown where you slow down the economy enough to cut inflation, but not so much that it throws a lot of people out of work?

YELLEN: That's right.

ZAKARIA: I mean, mostly economists have often viewed this as a tradeoff.

YELLEN: I think that is what people call the soft landing is possible. So I do think there's a path to bring down inflation while maintaining what I think all of us would regard as strong labor market. And the evidence that I'm seeing suggests we are on that path.

Now are there risks? Of course. I don't want to downplay the possibility that there are risks here, but I do think that's possible. There are many factors that have been pushing inflation up that have nothing to do with the tight labor market. Russia's war on Ukraine raised, these food and energy prices, the disruption from the pandemic, caused supply bottlenecks that led to outright shortages pushed up, for example, the prices of cars dramatically, new and used cars, because of shortages of semiconductors.

We're seeing those supply chain bottlenecks that boosted inflation. They're beginning to resolve. We had big shifts in the way people live. And low interest rates and housing prices rose a lot, now housing prices have essentially settled down. Rental prices of new rental units moved up a lot, but they have now settled down and they're falling, and that's an element of inflation that will continue to subside over time.

ZAKARIA: What effect do you think the SVB Bank and this sort of banking crisis if one calls it that has had? On this program Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, said he thought it had the effect of -- equivalent effect of the Federal Reserve raising rates, meaning that banks everywhere were now being careful, being cautious, not lending a lot of money and that therefore it was also going to slow the economy down and slow inflation down.

YELLEN: So I want to say we took rapid action to deal with the failure of two banks that had rather idiosyncratic of features that caused them to fail, wanting to make sure that Americans feel safe about their deposits. And what we've seen in the aftermath of those actions is that outflows from the banking system have stabilized and things have been calm. We're, of course, monitoring things carefully, but I think the actions that we've taken have stemmed the systemic threat that existed because of the failure of those banks.

[10:15:06]

Banks are likely to become somewhat more cautious in this environment. We already saw some tightening of lending standards in the banking system prior to that episode. And there may be some more to come and that does tend to lead to somewhat greater restriction and credit that could be a substitute for further pricing, further interest rate hikes that the Fed needs to make, but I'm not seeing anything at this time that is dramatic enough or significant enough in my view to significantly change the outlook.

So I think the outlook remains one for moderate growth and continued strong labor market with inflation coming down.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll be back with more of my interview with Secretary Yellen. We will talk about Russia sanctions and aid to Ukraine, and whether there will need to be more of both.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:20:22]

ZAKARIA: Finance ministers from around the world descended on Washington this week as they do every spring for annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF. They gathered at a worrying time for the world economy. The IMF said this week that it expects global growth to be slower than last year. Only 2.8 percent. One of the pressures weighing the world down, of course, is Russia's war with Ukraine.

More now of my exclusive interview with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: You must design of meetings, we're talking about the Russia sanctions, and I wanted to ask you when you look at them, what is the piece of evidence you could point to that conclusively demonstrates that they are actually working, and that Russia is being substantially deprived of revenues, that Putin is paying an economic price?

YELLEN: So we've had two objectives from the outset. One is to deprive Russia of revenue as you noted, and the second is to deny him access to the equipment that he needs to provision his military adequately to conduct this brutal war. On the revenue side, our price caps that we've put in place on Russian oil have lowered the revenues that Putin is receiving by roughly 40 percent over the last year.

He expected to have budget surpluses. He now has a very large budget deficits. In terms of equipment we know that we've had great success in depriving him of the equipment that he needs to conduct this war. This is due to our export controls and importantly, it's not just the United States acting alone, it's that we have strong coalition partners who were working together to put in place sanctions, export controls, and working jointly on enforcement.

Host over 9,000 pieces of heavy equipment on the battlefield and we see the Russians struggling to replace this, so we see on the battlefield Russia is now forced to resort to Iran and North Korea. to try to supply his military and we continue to take steps to make sure that vision of our sanctions isn't possible. But we think his military is really short of the equipment that they need to wage war.

ZAKARIA: Let me ask you about one of the costs or one of the prices of these sanctions. The way that the United States has used sanctions often in this case, in the case of the Iran nuclear deal, is to use the power of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. But that weaponization of the dollar has produced a reaction. This week, President Lula in Brazil said why are we all being forced to use the dollar?

Emmanuel Macron made reference to the dollar in that same way. The European Commission has talked about after Trump pulled out of the Iran sanctions, talked about creating an alternative to Swift, to the American dominated payment system.

Is there a danger that we will look back at all this -- you know these measures and said this was the moment that the dollar's hegemony and its status as a reserve currency began to falter?

YELLEN: So there is risk when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar that over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar. As you said. But this is an extremely important tool. We try to use judiciously and in circumstances especially when we have the support of our allies. It's not just the United States. It's a coalition of partners acting together to impose these sanctions.

So it is a very effective tool. Of course, it does create a desire on the part of China, of Russia, of Iran to find an alternative.

[10:25:08]

But the dollar is used as a global currency for reasons that are not easy for other countries to find an alternative with the same properties. The U.S. treasury market is the deepest and most liquid and safest asset. Dollars are widely used. It's -- we have very deep capital markets and rule of law that are essential in the currency that is going to be used globally for transactions, and we haven't seen any other country that has this basic infrastructure and institutional infrastructure that would enable its currency to serve the world like this.

ZAKARIA: Let me ask you one question about Ukraine, about rebuilding Ukraine, resupplying it. It's going to take a lot of money. There are some who say this money should be taken from Russia's frozen central bank reserves. Would you agree with that?

YELLEN: I think Russia should pay for the damage that it has done to Ukraine. So that's a responsibility that I think the global community expects Russia to bear. This is something we're discussing with our partners. But, you know, there are legal constraints on what we can do with frozen Russian assets. And we're discussing with our partners what might lie in the future, but I think that's the right thing to happen, that Russia should pay for the damages that it's caused.

ZAKARIA: Janet Yellen, a pleasure to have you on the program.

YELLEN: Thank you, Fareed.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the leak of American classified documents. What effect will it have for us relations around the world and on the battlefield in Ukraine?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:31:32]

ZAKARIA: The trove of classified documents leaked to social media that came to light last week has revealed information that the U.S. and its allies would rather have kept secret. Most notably that Ukraine's air defenses are weak and that Kiev is in desperate need of munitions.

The paper also says South Korea is worried that artillery shells it sells to America might end up on the Ukrainian battlefield. A breach of that country's policy not to supply ammunition to countries at war. They revealed that the U.S. may press Israel to provide weapons to Ukraine, which would be a change in Israeli policy as well. And there's undoubtedly information in the leaks that Russia can use against Ukraine.

So what will the military fallout be? And what effect is all this having on the United States' diplomatic relations? Joining me now is retired U.S. Army General Mark Hertling and David Sanger. General Hertling is a national security and military analyst for CNN. And David is a White House and national security correspondent for "The New York Times" and also a CNN contributor.

David, let me start with you and just set the -- you know, the big picture. What do these documents reveal? What do you -- what was the most striking things to you when you read it?

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: You know, as soon as I saw these leaks, Fareed, the first thing I was thinking was, you know, how does this compare with the famous leaks of the past? You know, the Pentagon papers or WikiLeaks or the Snowden revelations of just about 10 years ago. And the answer is that those were much bigger leaks but these are much more current.

They're very tactical. Some of the documents are 40 days old. They are from the end of February through say early march of this year. And so, some of them are very damaging because they tell the Russians what it is that the United States is worried about immediately.

So in the immediate tactical problems there is, as you suggested at the beginning, one document that makes it pretty clear that Ukraine is running out of ammunition for its air defenses and by a certain date in May may have none left. Well, that would be a big red flag out there for the Russians to know that their air force which they've kept pretty well grounded would be able to go up without fear of being shot down.

But there are other bigger issues that are there. The fact that we are listening in to the military officials around and some of the political officials around President Zelenskyy in Ukraine tells you we don't trust entirely what the Ukrainians are sharing with us. The fact that we have, as you suggested, gotten in deep to the South Korean National Security Council tells you that we want to know everything about their internal debate about whether or not they can ship ammunition to Ukraine.

They're one of the biggest producers of 155 millimeter rounds that Ukraine desperately needs for its artillery. Some of this is embarrassing to the U.S., Fareed, because President Yoon of South Korea is coming to the United States in just two or three weeks for a state visit, you know, and he's going to have to get past the fact that the United States was listening in on his government.

ZAKARIA: David, let me ask you about one reaction I had which was compared to the previous ones, WikiLeaks and things like that, it strikes me there's nothing terribly embarrassing here in the sense that there's no hypocrisy.

[10:35:07]

The U.S. is not caught doing something it was saying it wasn't doing. We know that they have been trying to pressure the Israelis. Even the South Korean issue. It's a little awkward, but it's clear the U.S. has been pressuring its allies to send arms to Ukraine.

So, while I'm sure that at a diplomatic level it's going to be very tough on the ambassadors in those areas and the, you know, assistant secretaries, it doesn't seem to me there's a big negative diplomatic fallout in place here.

SANGER: I think there isn't a long lasting one. You know, it reminded me, Fareed, a little bit of WikiLeaks in that regard. WikiLeaks came out about 13 years ago. We learned a lot about the vividness of it. We learned about the sharp elbows of diplomacy. We learned about the angst when they discovered that allies were lying to the United States. But by and large, as you say, there was no great revelation beyond an understanding of the detail.

And I think the longer term issue that it reveals is that while American officials love to say the Ukrainians are doing great, they're brave, they're out on the field, who could believe they could hold off the Russian so long, there is a deep concern. As General Milley has said publicly that we are headed towards stalemate here and that the United States does not see a path to victory for the Ukrainians.

And that raises the big question, how does this war end then? Does it end in a negotiation in which, despite what President Zelenskyy has said, he may have to agree to at least accede to an armistice or some kind of ceasefire in which the Russians are holding on to big chunks of his territory.

ZAKARIA: You've teed it up perfectly for me, David, because I'm going to put all those questions to Mark Hertling when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:41:04]

ZAKARIA: And we are back with retired U.S. Army General Mark Hertling and "The New York Times'" national security correspondent David Sanger.

Mark, you heard what David was saying about why this might be important because there was a lot of battlefield intelligence. So, as somebody who's been in the battlefield tell us how important these kind of things are? Were the Ukrainians being helped enormously by U.S. intelligence? Does this set them back because the Russians now know stuff? What's your reaction?

LT. GEN. MARK HERTLING (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: I don't believe it sets them back at all, Fareed. Truthfully, the things that were on the documents are pretty well known by most military on both sides.

The Ukrainian military knows where the Russian military are on a daily basis. I get an open source report showing exactly where all the battalion tactical groups are and their estimated strength. What this has done is showing the other side -- it's showing the Russian something that we have been assessing from our joint staff based on the intelligence we've been receiving. I don't think there's a whole lot of big surprises there.

In terms of the document you mentioned or David mentioned with the air defense equipment, most military folks understand how much ammunition Ukraine is going through. I don't think this is going to change any plans from the Ukrainian military.

I've always tried to put myself in the place of, what would I be doing if I were a Ukrainian general right now? I've got to do several things. First of all, an intelligence preparation of the Russian battlefield to find out what they're doing and where they're at and where I can attack.

Number two, incorporating all the bevy of new equipment he has received from both the U.S. and all of the NATO nations, and how to coordinate that into a combined arms operation. How do I move from the defense to the offense, which is going to be exceedingly difficult for the Ukrainian military? And most importantly, how do I maintain my supply and logistics lines wherever I attack, wherever I conduct the offensive?

I did disagree a little bit about the comment regarding Ukrainians' capability to advance. They will conduct --

ZAKARIA: Let's talk about that for a second, because it's not just these documents. We know that General Milley has felt that there is going to be a limit to the Ukrainian ability to recover territory, particularly once you get into the heart of the Donbas where the Russians have been since 2014 and, of course, Crimea. Do you think that that's true?

HERTLING: I think this year we will -- in my view, we will not see a war win by Ukraine. But I certainly believe the capability of the Ukrainian forces with new equipment, if they get their supplies straight, will have -- have them -- have the ability to regain territory in both the Donbas and in the southeast, and that's more than -- I wouldn't put Crimea in that category. I would talk about Zaporizhzhia and the other provinces in the southeast. So, the intent is to regain territory on an offensive. We're not --

ZAKARIA: And you think -- you think they could hold --

HERTLING: -- will win.

ZAKARIA: And you think they could hold for this year just fine? You don't think that the -- you know, what you're envisioning is the war going on all of this year, the fighting going on and into next year easily?

HERTLING: I think so unless we see a complete failure in the Russian military. The Russian military isn't going to calculate new operations based on any of these leaks. The reason they're not going to fly aircraft is they can't.

They have been failing to exceed the front line of their own troops and getting aircraft out there. They've been bombing from long distances. Some of that isn't -- is due to Ukrainian air defense artillery. But most of it is the fact that Russians' air force is just not capable.

[10:45:00] So, if they completely fail there could be much more advancing by the Ukrainian forces. But Ukraine going on the offense is much more difficult kind of proposition than what they've had in the first year of this conflict.

ZAKARIA: David, final thought on, you know, the circumstances of this leak as often with these other ones lead me to wonder why do so many people have access to so much classified material? And why is there so much classified material in the United States? The number of class -- of top secret documents is truly staggering.

SANGER: It is. And so, I think one of the long term consequences of this, Fareed, is going to be yet another rethink of our classification system. There have been complaints that too much is classified. And I think as you go through these documents, and I've been through many of them, you realize that many of them didn't need to be.

I mean, some of this comes from sensitive signals intelligence. A lot of it comes from things that people were reading in "The New York Times," "The Washington Post" or foreign newspapers, each and every day and they're all mixed together.

The second thing that you conclude from this is if you pull back dramatically from allowing this intelligence to flow, you run the risk of making again the error that led to 9/11. You'll recall that post 9/11, we said, why is all this intelligence siloed? Why did people in the defense department, at the FBI and others not know about the Saudi hijackers who were training in the U.S.? And that led to a big opening of the intelligence world so that more people would see the data.

And then you get an incident like this and the immediate instinct is to close down again. And we keep getting in this cycle. And the only way we're going to break out of it, Fareed, is if we begin to think hard about those things you really need to protect and those things that you really don't. Because if you protect everything, you're really protecting nothing.

ZAKARIA: Thank you both. And Mark Hertling points out most of his analysis is using open source data, which has been as far as I can tell as good as the government. So, on that note, Mark Hertling, David Sanger, thank you.

Next on GPS, the journey through one of the world's most dangerous migration routes chronicled by a CNN reporter. It is totally fascinating stuff. You will not want to miss this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:51:42]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. Tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific CNN will launch a new show called THE WHOLE STORY WITH ANDERSON COOPER. In its first installment correspondent Nick Paton Walsh travels through the Darien Gap. It is one of the world's most dangerous migration routes used by people trying to get to the United States from South America. This part of the journey takes them from Colombia into Panama. The crisis there has gotten so dire that just this week those two countries joined with the U.S. to launch a campaign cracking down on transit through this lawless jungle.

In this clip, we come to understand the sheer volume of people willing to make this difficult trek, nearly 90,000 people in the first three months of this year alone.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The stories here are many but there is only one goal, America. And the dream is just that a reverent of hope, of conviction that they will be the ones to make it over danger, disease, dehydration, deportation, about this number every day, every year, almost doubling.

The Darien Gap is the only land corridor from South America where entry is easier to its north, where it's not. There are no roads only 66 miles of treacherous jungle from Colombia to Panama and onwards north 3,000 miles to the U.S. border. We walked the entire route of the Darien Gap over five days in February to document the suffering endured by people milked for cash by cartels, unwanted by any country.

(On camera): Well, startling is the sheer number of children on this trek as it begins on a route sometimes adults don't even survive.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: And CNN's chief international security correspondent Nick Paton Walsh joins me now. Nick, welcome. It's a -- it's a fascinating documentary. It seems to illustrate a point a friend of mine always said that Donald Trump didn't understand which border the world needed to be built on. It was not Mexico's northern border with the United States. It was Mexico's southern border with Central America because that's where all the migrants are coming from.

Are the countries of Central America trying to do something to stop this flow? Is the U.S. asking them to? What's going on on that front?

WALSH: Yes. I mean, there's U.S. pressure to try and stop this flow of migrants, but it's not really an the interests of any of the countries, frankly, before Mexico even before the U.S. border with Mexico to really get in the way of this flow of people.

The numbers are just staggering. They could easily possibly at the same rate breach a million this year. And so, any country that chooses along that route to say, all right, we're going to stop the migrants here, if indeed they can is then going to be left with hundreds of thousands likely every year of migrants who just stay in that particular country, hoping perhaps a circumstance to change.

ZAKARIA: You also show how this is a big business. I mean, these cartels are big and sophisticated. And you are -- but you did this with the permission of a cartel embedded as it were. Why did the cartel let you do it?

WALSH: We don't know the full answer. My guess is possibly that this is something they perhaps wanted to parade.

[10:55:05]

They wanted people to see that this journey could be done. That to some degree the Colombian side of it where the cartels function was quite organized and fair to say it certainly was. There were porters taking people up towards the border.

ZAKARIA: Kind of marketing strategy, Nick.

WALSH: Yes. Indeed, possibly. Although, obviously, our role was to be sure we documented the suffering of people on that who are really being used by the cartel. The dreams that bring them to use that cartel -- quote -- unquote -- "service." Just wholesome needs to make a better life for their family. The cartel seize upon that often sell them a rosy, inaccurate picture of how easy or fast this trek will be, help them on their way initially, take a lot of money off them in every opportunity they possibly can, like, a $4.00 or $5.00 Gatorade up a mountain. Yes, it takes a lot of effort to get it out there but that's a lot of money for a lot of these migrants. And then in Panama. It's onwards and off you go, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Thanks, Nick. The whole story with Anderson Cooper premieres tonight, April 16th at 8:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific. Make sure to catch this one.

And thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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