Return to Transcripts main page

Fareed Zakaria GPS

Interview With Ezra Klein; Interview With Stanford University's Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson; Interview With Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Anne Applebaum. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired July 28, 2024 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:56]

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.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, after last Sunday's political earthquake --

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: A stunning decision.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: President Biden abruptly ended his candidacy.

ZAKARIA: The Democratic Party has a new presumptive nominee for president, and today marks just 100 days until the election. "The New York Times'" Ezra Klein will join me to talk about the Kamala candidacy and what we know and don't know about Vice President Harris.

Also, two great historians. First, Niall Ferguson on Donald Trump's Republican Party and the state of the conservative movement worldwide. Then Anne Applebaum an autocracy on the rise all over the world. Why does the world seem so vulnerable to it today?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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

It's too early to write up the legacy of Joe Biden. He has six more months in his presidency and in these volatile times, much could happen. But it seems worth looking back at what we now know will be a one-term presidency and asking, what will define it in history?

To me, the signature aspect of Biden's presidency has been his big break from decades of economic policy. For almost half a century the federal government has refrained from any transformative, long-term investments in the American economy. Even the large COVID payments were for consumption, not for investment. In fact, that defining fiscal policies of our times have been tax cuts.

President Reagan, Bush and Trump all enacted large tax cuts that broadly benefited the rich. The result has been an America that can be characterized by private opulence and public decay. $100 million homes in a country where the roads are scarred by potholes and children die at higher rates than any other country in the industrialized world. These tax cuts, by the way, along with spending on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are responsible for much of America's enormous federal debt.

Biden changed this narrative. He used the resources of the federal government to make large investments in infrastructure, childcare, manufacturing, and energy. These investments will not pay off anytime soon. Many of them have just begun. But the U.S. is now undergoing the largest upgrade of its transportation infrastructure since the 1950s, with more than 56,000 projects already launched.

It is seeing a boom in manufacturing investment and employment that reverses a decades long trend. Green energy is booming and for the year that it was in effect Biden's expanded child tax credit helped reduce child poverty in America by 46 percent. Moving a staggering 3.4 million children out of poverty in one year. The credit expired after a year and congressional Republicans refused to renew it.

Biden's measures helped trigger the strongest post-COVID recovery of any major economy. The U.S. has produced over 15 million jobs. The most ever for any president in one term. The unemployment rate stayed under 4 percent for over two years. That's the longest since the 1960s. Black labor force participation rates are now higher than of whites for the first time ever on a sustained basis, and so on.

It's true that inflation surged and while the pandemic played a role so did an excessive infusion of cash into the economy for which Biden must be held responsible.

[10:05:02]

There are aspects of his policies that I disagree with. But overall as former treasury secretary Larry Summers told Bloomberg TV the record is remarkable. Summers added, "I don't think any administration has so outperformed the economic forecasts on the day that it came into office."

Biden gets almost no credit for this economic revival. Some of that is the lingering effect of inflation and the persisting crisis of affordability in areas like health care, housing, and higher education. But much of it, as I have long argued, is that we live in an age of cultural politics. The issue on which Republicans have been attacking him mostly is not the economy, but the border.

On that Biden was vulnerable because he had pandered too long to his left-wing allowing the system to collapse under the weight of millions of migrants arriving at the border and demanding the protections that come from seeking asylum. He finally adjusted. But by then, Donald Trump had forbidden any Republican cooperation to alleviate the crisis.

The other area where Biden has made his mark is foreign policy. He has addressed the challenges presented by the return of Russia and a rising China, but done it not through solo actions or one-shot deals. The administration has strengthened America's alliance system, bolstering NATO and adding two new members to it, Sweden and Finland. Similarly in the Indo-Pacific, it has built new structures of cooperation and deterrence with Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, and others.

All in all, it has handled the world well enough that surveys suggest that most countries rate the United States and Joe Biden much more favorably than they did under Donald Trump.

The final legacy of Biden is that he has returned the presidency to an office of sanity, decency, and dignity, ushering out the dangerous demagoguery and anti-democratic rhetoric and behavior that preceded him. But for that legacy to endure and for Biden's term not to simply be a moment in time, he needed to ensure that the United States actually closes the chapter on Donald Trump and to help make this more likely, he made the painful decision not to run for the presidency, which will also earn him a special place in the history books.

Joe Biden has felt that he has been underestimated all his life. Judging by his tenure in the White House, he's right.

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

Has there been a crazier month in American politics? A month ago, President Biden's disastrous debate. Two weekends ago, an attempt on former president Trump's life. Last Sunday an announcement by President Biden that he is leaving the presidential race. Then literally overnight, the Wilmington, Delaware, offices of his reelection campaign were transformed into Kamala Harris headquarters.

Within days, the vice president had rallied staff and supporters, raised record funds and handily won the commitment of enough delegates to secure the nomination. But subbing in Harris for Biden is a risky proposition. With just 100 days left until the election, can she pull it off?

Joining me now is "The New York Times" opinion columnist, Ezra Klein. He has been writing with uncommon acuity about the campaign for months, and in February was one of the earliest voices calling for Biden to step aside.

Welcome, Ezra.

EZRA KLEIN, OPINION COLUMNIST, NEW YORK TIMES: Thank you. Good to be here.

ZAKARIA: So you did ask in February for Biden to step aside, but you also called for a very specific thing which was an open Democratic primary that would -- or kind of mini primary that would lead to an open convention at which, you know, may the best person become the nominee? That second part hasn't happened. How important do you think that was? And what do you think about the very rapid coronation of Kamala Harris?

KLEIN: Well, in February, there was a lot of time and there's not a lot of time now. What I said then, too, was it you -- if you were thinking, if you wanted to argue, as I did then, that the risk of running Biden was too high, that you had to be comfortable with Harris becoming the nominee because she was always overwhelmingly the most likely alternative nominee. She is the sitting vice president.

By the time Biden did step aside, you were looking at weeks between there and the convention and a couple of things that happened in between those periods.

[10:10:02]

One, was the truth is, for all of the agita in the party about Kamala Harris behind closed doors that there was a whole lot before a week ago, she was flawless functionally since the debate. She had been in a very tricky position of both backing Biden absolutely, while showing that she could do the job, that she had to step into his shoes and she was an extremely good surrogate and she's just very good at holding the party together and making people feel comfortable by her.

So by the time Biden did step aside and endorse her opinions inside the party had changed, which led to a very rapid coalescing around her.

ZAKARIA: So what do you think of the -- there is going to be a Republican line of attack that this was a kind of, you know, an inside job, Democratic elites didn't allow Democratic primary voters' views to be heard. Do you think that'll stick? Will that be effective?

KLEIN: I think that line of attack is very funny. I think Republicans are flailing pretty badly right now. I was surprised that they were not more ready for this. I think that you could see this coming as of a couple of weeks ago. At the convention, there should have been, if they were a party that was hedging bets, a lot more talk about Kamala Harris. They should have probably been ready with ads. This is not hard blocking and tackling to see what was coming down the pike here.

The idea that the Democratic Party is not respecting the will of its voters, its voters in July of 2023, a plurality did not want Joe Biden to run again. I mean, that was one of the things I was talking about in those initial essays. Democratic primary voters like all voters felt Joe Biden was too old to be an effective president in a second term and have said that repeatedly for a very long time.

It was Democratic elites who are very slow to coming to this conclusion. They sort of supported Biden in running unopposed and not doing interviews and not doing debates. That's not a coverup. His team thought he was stronger than he was that's why they accepted and negotiated for the early June debate. But I mean, if you are looking at Democratic polling right now, if you are following Democrats on social media, the outpouring of like actual passion and enthusiasm for Harris is far beyond what the top levels of the Democratic Party were expecting.

I mean, I can tell you for a fact that really a week ago, I mean, you know, the Sunday morning that Biden end up dropping out later that day on, Democrats are still very worried about Kamala Harris, still very worried if she could step into his shoes, still very worried about how she played in the Midwest. That last one is still an open question for them. But in terms of how the party is feeling, because that's an attack aimed at the Democratic Party's base, the party has a kind of enthusiasm and verb, and a vibe shift that I don't think I've ever seen the structure of political sentiment change with this rapidity, within 48 hours in my entire career as a journalist.

ZAKARIA: So what do you make of the race right now? Because it's still very close and, you know, surprising to me is even after the debate, it really moved a point to point and a half, which tells you that at the end of the day there's, I don't know, 45 percent on each side and a little bit of play in the middle there. So do you -- for reading the tea leaves, do you see anything that's changed?

KLEIN: Look, the polling, when we talk about 45-45, this is not a national race, right? I mean, as you know better than anyone, this is a race that's going to be decided in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania, potentially she might expand the maps on to Arizona, to Georgia, to North Carolina, right? That's where this race is going to happen. And so far Biden has been a little bit further down in the battleground states than he is nationally.

That has looked very similar in polling of Harris. Again, like I want to see how that looks from the next two weeks. But Harris is now going to have a series of opportunities to introduce herself to the public as a function of timing or a strategic question of timing. The fact that the shift in the Democratic Party happened after the Republican convention, after they had sort of taken that opportunity and used what they had on Joe Biden and not her.

It puts Democrats in a very advantageous position. They're going to be people to have this whole convention introducing her and where they want to go to the entire country with the entire lineup of national Democrats behind her, Obama, Biden, Clinton, et cetera. And that's going to be significant. The question is, what foot she puts forward, who does she want to be? What is the version of Kamala Harris she wants people to know?

And where does she break with what has been coming before her? In terms of what it's going to reshape the race, I think that's really the core set of questions.

ZAKARIA: Well, stay with us because next on GPS, we're going to ask Ezra Klein exactly that question, just who is Kamala Harris and what kind of president would she be, right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:19:02]

ZAKARIA: Kamala Harris had an entire high-profile, high-stakes career before she became Joe Biden's running mate and then vice president. She was the district attorney of San Francisco, then the attorney general of California, than a U.S. senator from that state. But there is nevertheless a sense of mystery surrounding some of her policy positions. Back with me now is Ezra Klein of "The New York Times'" "Ezra Klein

Show."

Ezra, when I say there's a mystery, there's a sense in which people -- some people think, well, look, she's a California senator. She is San Francisco liberal. On the other hand, she made her name as a very tough prosecutor, tough on crime, all that kind of thing. Do you have a sense as to who is the real Kamala Harris?

KLEIN: I never know exactly who the real of any of us are, right? We change over time, but I'm a Californian. I've lived a good amount of my life in San Francisco, too, so I know the politics of that place.

[10:20:02]

The profile she had in California was moderate black law-and-order Democrat. She gets international politics, and there are huge expectations on her, probably more than she could bear at that exact moment. So she runs in 2020. There's a real push to have her run. But she's running at a time when the Democratic Party absolutely does not want a law-and-order Democrat, right? This is post-Ferguson, post- Black Lives Matter.

There is a huge amount of movement behind criminal justice reform. A huge amount of movement behind attacking and I think correctly, right, on a policy level the ways in which the justice system has been discriminatory. So she sort of abandons that persona, but runs anyway, but never quite finds another one. She has big moments in the campaign, but they don't again speak to who she is at the core.

She kind of slices into Joe Biden on busing but doesn't really have a different position on busing. She kind of gets in trouble endorsing Medicare for all then sort of triangulating around it. The thing is now I think one thing is that she simply matured as a national political figure. Being in the spotlight for that long will change you. She has spent a lot of time at Munich Security Conferences.

She'd been part of the Biden administration but also she now speaks on behalf of the Democratic Party. The work she was doing in the 2020 Democratic primary to factionally differentiate herself from Bernie Sanders, from Joe Biden, from Pete Buttigieg, from Amy Klobuchar, from Cory Booker. She doesn't have to do that work. She is now the standard bearer. The content of the Democratic Party can be shaped and altered by her, but she also doesn't have to sort of weave around it. She can simply pick what she likes best and emphasize that.

ZAKARIA: Except that the Republicans are going to use the clips from that primary campaign, right? She embraced Bernie Sander's Medicare for all. Will that stick you think?

KLEIN: That -- to the extent that she has an ideological problem, it's not that she has to find a new answer to who she is. But that the Biden ministration's record, and Democrats don't always like to admit this, is not popular. So she needs answers I think on both how to sell the Biden administration's record better than Biden himself has been able to do. I think some of that will be there in her communication skills.

But there are actual difficulties there, particularly I think around inflation and immigration. And then she's going to need the question of, well what would she do first? My suspicion from how she's running right now is the first defense is going to be Roe and abortion, right? If she had the trifecta that she will restore the protections of Roe, the place where she really found her footing in the administration was around that, and as much as Donald Trump will try to make this election about immigration, she's going to try to make it about Dobbs.

But there's also the question of her as an economic messenger and people do vote heavily on the economy, on their own personal situation around affordability. And that I think is the biggest weakness for her. The Biden administration has really suffered from inflation, from an affordability crisis that has been building for a long time behind inflation, and housing and elder care and childcare.

And she's going to need an answer and a policy set for why people should believe that a future with Harris is going to be more affordable than the past has been in their experience with Joe Biden.

ZAKARIA: So I will always have the view that there is a majority of Americans who will vote against Trump. You know, if you think about it, 2016, he loses the popular vote, wins, you know, narrowly gets the electoral college. In 2018, he loses the House. In 2020, he loses both the popular vote and the electoral college. In 2022, his candidates do terribly and the party does badly. Is that -- you know, it's a very small majority that's anti-Trump and that's why, you know, there is this vulnerability.

Do you think that that's right or -- because his poll numbers now seem better than the story I just told.

KLEIN: I do not take a lot of comfort from the theory that gets called like the anti-MAGA majority theory. It's not that it's not there, but it's just that majorities don't matter that much. So Donald Trump does lose by seven million votes in 2020, he's gotten more popular since then. I mean, there's no doubt about it. We have never seen Donald Trump running ahead in national polls.

Now maybe we've gotten better at polling his supporters because he has often had polling errors that were made him look weaker than he really was. But we've never seen a polling this strong. He in certain ways has gotten worse and improved as a candidate.

I will say I think the big mistake Donald Trump made was picking J.D. Vance. I think that there has been an opportunity for him to reboot some of his image, whether I think he has changed notwithstanding, and picking some like Doug Burgum for more inflation focused campaign, even Marco Rubio, I think would've been helpful for him. But in picking J.D. Vance, he has somebody who both in terms of policy but much more importantly I think here in terms of style, aesthetics, demeanor, the things he's actually said doubles down for people on the part of Donald Trump that scares them, right?

J.D. Vance has said he would have backed in important way Donald Trump's, you know, lies and effort to challenge the 2020 election.

[10:25:02]

He's called for a national abortion ban. And he just radiates a sort of rage and contempt for liberals and people sort of outside the Donald Trump tent that I think turns a lot of people off. So that I think has made Trump a little bit more vulnerable than he would have been if he ran a different race. But I don't think Democrats should underestimate Trump. They've lost to Donald Trump before. They need to take seriously the possibility it could happen again.

And I think the fact that they take it so seriously is why the party did such an extraordinary thing in mobilizing internally to convince Joe Biden to step aside.

ZAKARIA: Ezra, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

KLEIN: Thank you, my friend.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, a deeper look at the GOP and its popular shift under Donald Trump. What will the likes of Ronald Reagan think of today's Republican Party. Will explore with Niall Ferguson.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:30:15]

ZAKARIA: In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan built a Republican Party based largely on values of free trade, small government, and an interventionist foreign policy. As I watched the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this month, I wondered what happened to that party now led by Donald Trump.

To discuss what has changed and what's next I spoke with Niall Ferguson. He is a historian and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. This June he was knighted by King Charles.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Sir Niall Ferguson, pleasure to have you on.

NIALL FERGUSON, SENIOR FELLOW, STANFORD UNIVERSITY'S HOOVER INSTITUTION: Lord Zakaria as you should be.

ZAKARIA: What happened to the party of Reagan, free trade, free markets, very benign attitude towards immigration? Is that gone?

FERGUSON: I think it got back to its roots. One has to remember that the Republican Party was a protectionist party for most of its history. In the 19th century, that was one of the differentiating things compared with the Democrats in the south who were for free trade.

Republicans only really reconciled themselves to free trade after World War II. And they only became full believers in globalization as in free trade, free capital movements and free population movements after the Cold War was ended.

And you can see that extraordinary convergence that happens between Democrats and Republicans, at least the elites of those parties, in favor of globalization in the 1990s and the early 2000s. But that's over and it's over for very good political reason.

ZAKARIA: So, in a sense the Republican Party is now a kind of reaction against all these -- the conservative movement in a way.

FERGUSON: I think so. I mean, to me the puzzling thing when I first started working in the United States, which was back in 2002, was that the -- it wasn't already a protectionist party. I can remember going around asking it at the time of the midterms, where are the protectionist candidates? Because there ought to be some given what's happening.

Since China joined the World Trade Organization, which was 2001, it was after that that you had this tremendous decline in manufacturing jobs in the American heartland. Plus, you had the population rising, rising, foreign born share of the population rapidly rising towards its previous peak, which was back in the late 19th century.

And I kept asking myself, why is there no backlash against globalization on the right or on the left? And it finally came much later than I expected and in the unlikely form of Donald J. Trump.

ZAKARIA: Donald Trump in an interesting moment in that Bloomberg interview, talks about William McKinley. And McKinley, of course, is a return to that Republican tradition of protectionism, high tariffs, all that kind of thing.

FERGUSON: Everybody who wants to dismiss Donald Trump as all ego, no substance, should read that interview that he gave -- that was published just a couple of days after the assassination attempt against him because he sets out quite clearly his political theory. It's a protectionist one. He argues that tariffs are a good thing as a source of revenue and as a negotiating tool with trading partners.

He's very clear that he sees currency wars as the way in which Asian countries, not only China, but before that Japan, have been able to compete successfully against American manufacturing. And so, it's a quite sophisticated argument and it shows that Trump is more connected than people realize to that 19th century tradition.

He explicitly says, I see myself as being like President William McKinley. And I think the tariff of 1890 is what I'm all about.

Now, this is definitely not the Donald Trump of social media. This is a quite serious attempt to recast Republicanism in its 19th century form.

So, nobody should underestimate that Donald Trump has a serious ideological vision of a conservatism, Republicanism rooted in the 19th century tradition. And I think it's quite an appealing kind of Republicanism for a substantial number of voters, particularly in the heartland state. ZAKARIA: And in picking J.D. Vance, it seems that Trump has consolidated the transformation of the Republican Party into a kind of populist party.

FERGUSON: I think that happened because Vance was so obviously not the establishment pick.

[10:35:01]

The Republican establishment, which still clings on to some influence over the party, wanted him to pick Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota. And Trump effectively said, no, no, no. You guys really don't call the shots anymore. I'm going to go with the person who converted to MAGA, to Trumpism.

And that's true because Vance, the man who wrote "Hillbilly Elegy," was not a Trumpist.

ZAKARIA: Yes, yes.

FERGUSON: He became one and that's the significance of his appointment. The significance may also be that it makes it easier for Kamala Harris to win this election because J.D. Vance's views on a whole range of issues present a much better target than Donald Trump because Trump is not really a social conservative. Whereas, J.D. Vance has become a quite militant one on issues, particularly abortion, but also on women's rights more generally, that are gray issues for Democrats to mobilize their base on.

ZAKARIA: Niall Ferguson, always a pleasure.

FERGUSON: Thank you, Fareed. Lord Fareed.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, democracies are staring down a new kind of autocrat and losing ground. That's what Anne Applebaum says when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:40:55]

ZAKARIA: One message the Democrats are pushing in this election is that their party stands between democracy and autocracy. Wherever you stand on that claim, autocracy is gaining ground around the world. But are democracies reckoning fully with this new breed of autocrats?

Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer prize winning author and a staff writer at "The Atlantic." Her important new book is "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World." Welcome, Anne.

In this fascinating book, you point out that the dictators of today look very different from the ones we used to think of. You know, the kind of tin-pot single military ruler who runs his country with an iron fist and, you know, kind of bankrupts it. Describe the new autocrats.

ANNE APPLEBAUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Well, the new autocrats are not tin-pot. They are mostly billionaires and they rarely rule alone. They -- they've created networks so that the state-owned companies and one dictatorship do business with the state-owned companies in the next.

The militaries cooperate. They sell one another surveillance technology. They share other kinds of technology. They share tactics for defeating their political oppositions. They operate much more like -- it's not exactly an alliance because they aren't aligned ideologically. But as I said, a network, a kind of community of interest.

ZAKARIA: They're not ideologically similar because you're talking about Chinese communist, Putin, the Iranian mullahs, right? What do they have in common?

APPLEBAUM: No, no. No, no. No, they're not -- there's no -- there's no ideological links, so don't think of it as an alliance. And I would argue that this is very much not the new Cold War.

They're linked by rather ties of interests. Sometimes financial interests. They share interests in carrying out the same kinds of repression. And of course, the other thing that links them is their interest in us. And by us, I mean you and me and a lot of the people watching the show.

They're very interested in the language of liberalism, the language of the rule of law, the language of rights, the language of freedom. They see that language -- they hear it coming from their own oppositions. They hear it coming from us and they're trying now very hard to push back on it, to discredit it. Whether it's through their own actions, whether it's through avoiding sanctions, or whether it's through -- whether it's through -- new kind of information warfare. They have that in common.

ZAKARIA: You said they're not an alliance but they do -- they have been cooperating more recently. And if you look at this recent report, a fascinating report, important report of two Russian bombers and two Chinese bombers that were acting in concert near Alaska. This was picked up by NORAD. First time the Russian and Chinese militaries have actually cooperated. It does -- it is beginning to feel like they are inching towards some kind of an alliance.

APPLEBAUM: Yes. As I said, I doubt it will be a formal alliance and I doubt they'll be aligned in everything. But it doesn't surprise me at all. You know, increasingly, you know, Russia and China cooperate in the economic realm.

Russia is now very dependent on China in a way that it wasn't a decade ago. The Chinese have been supplying components and parts to the Russian defense industry going around sanctions. I know the United States is now looking at secondary sanctions in ways of pushing back against that but they see themselves as -- as I said, not maybe having the same goals but having the same enemies. And one of those enemies is the U.S. But as I said, I think the -- I think it's better described more broadly as this set of ideas and rules that they feel hamper them and constrain their power.

ZAKARIA: So that's about the autocrats abroad. But you talk about autocrats at home as equally dangerous.

[10:45:01]

And you're thinking of people like Viktor Orban, the Polish right, and Donald Trump. What's the common thread there?

APPLEBAUM: Well, the common thread is shared tactics. You know, what do they have in common? They have a common belief that they shouldn't be hampered by the rule of law. And I would argue, yes, that Donald Trump, who's somebody who -- whose whole business career was tied in with and moved in and out of his relationships with foreign autocrats, foreign business people. They bought -- they bought apartments. They bought condominiums in his -- in his properties.

But he also sees himself as someone who would like to rule without constraint, without rules. And he has said as much himself. He describes his admiration for Xi Jinping, who he thinks is very strong. He has talked repeatedly about his admiration for Putin. You know, he sees those kinds of leaders as people he admires.

ZAKARIA: Now, you know, there are going to be people who say, look, Trump is a narcissist, but you're exaggerating. You know, there are all these businessmen in America who have come out and recently supporting him. Everyone from Elon Musk to many of the finance billionaires. What would you say to them? What are they missing?

APPLEBAUM: I would say that even just the name Elon Musk -- I mean, I think there is a -- there is a group of businesspeople in the United States who also hope to draw -- to create a system closer to that of the autocratic world. They would also like to operate with fewer constraints. And they would also like to have the kind of relationship to power that business people have in Russia or China, or elsewhere in the autocratic world.

Whereby people who are close to the leader or to the ruling party have special deals and special arrangements and are taken into consideration in special ways. And sometimes make their money off of those arrangements. And you can begin to see in the United States that there are people, there are companies who are looking in that direction and seeing things that they like about it. So, I'm not surprised at all.

ZAKARIA: Fascinating book. Thank you, Anne Applebaum, as always.

APPLEBAUM: Thank you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:51:53]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. It seems every day another tech company rolls out some new A.I. feature. In June, Apple announced it was embedding A.I. into Macs, iPads and iPhones. This will enable users to create custom emojis, find a photo by describing it, and communicate with Siri more easily. Google recently introduced A.I. Overviews to produce a concise answer to a search query rather than just a list of links.

There really are endless ways A.I. could make our lives easier but the massive expansion of A.I. has a hidden cost. It uses massive amounts of energy. Everyone knows that when machines do task for humans, they use energy.

If you ride an elevator instead of walking up the stairs, that takes electricity. A farmer who uses a combine harvester instead of picking crops by hand has to burn fuel. But people seem to forget this obvious fact when it comes to labor saving devices of a less tangible kind, consider A.I. image generation tools. You type a prompt and it produces an image something that would take much more time and effort for a human artist. But off at some data-center computer chips are chugging away to create that image, consuming electricity in the process.

One study found that generating four of the images you just saw takes as much electricity as fully charging your smartphone. Producing texts like ChatGPT takes less energy than producing images, but consider the scale. Last year, researchers said ChatGPT was receiving hundreds of millions of queries daily. Filling all those requests consumed enough electricity to power 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. households for an entire day. Google's new A.I. summaries are thought to use 10 to 30 times the energy of a normal search.

A.I. drinks up energy because it's essentially an electronic brain. You may be surprised to learn that the human brain, despite its small size, consumes 20 percent of a person's energy load. Tech companies' voracious appetite for more energy is already putting strain on the grid. One utility reported bidding wars over data center sites with ready access to power.

Wells Fargo estimates that A.I. will use less than one percent of all U.S. power this year but projects that could grow by more than tenfold by 2030. Earlier this year, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, said this to Bloomberg.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SAM ALTMAN, CEO, OPENAI: We still don't appreciate the energy needs of this technology.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: He went on to say, we need a breakthrough in clean energy because AI's appetite is at a scale that no one is really planning for. Indeed, Altman is so concerned that he has gotten heavily involved in several clean energy startups attempting to make just such a breakthrough. On the bright side, A.I. can actually be a useful tool for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

[10:55:04]

A.I. can quickly digest and analyze reams of data. So, it is already designing more efficient transportation routes, greener manufacturing processes, more sustainable farming practices, even reducing the carbon footprint of data centers.

A 2021 study by the Boston Consulting Group argued that if companies deployed existing A.I. technologies across the board they could slash their emissions by an eye-popping five to 10 percent. Easier said than done but there's certainly a big opportunity.

Even more enticing are the technological breakthroughs that A.I. could unlock. Scientists are using A.I. to try to develop better solar panels, longer-lasting batteries, new ways to capture carbon. And perhaps bring nuclear fusion closer to reality. In fact, the most pressing challenge that artificial intelligence could help with is figuring out how to generate enough clean energy to allow for its own expansion into all other spheres of human life.

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)