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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Major Escalations in Russia-Ukraine War; U.S. Economy Under Trump. Interview With Urban Ocean Lab Co-Founder Ayana Elizabeth Johnson; Interview With Former Google CEO And Executive Chair Eric Schmidt. Aired 10-11a

Aired November 24, 2024 - 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, major escalations on both sides of the war in Ukraine. President Biden authorizes Kyiv to use American long range weapons inside Russia and Moscow steps up its air attacks and loosens its policy for using nuclear weapons.

I'll talk to Ukraine's former foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, about where the war goes from here.

Then former Treasury secretary Larry Summers joins me to discuss the Trump economic team and its policies.

Also clean energy is the leading source of new electricity capacity in America.

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT-ELECT: We will drill, baby, drill.

ZAKARIA: Will Donald Trump reverse this green tech revolution?

TRUMP: Frack, frack, fracking. Drill, drill, drill.

ZAKARIA: Or is it here to stay?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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

Of Donald Trump's recent announcements, the one that intrigues, even excites me the most, is the establishment of DOGE, the misnamed Department of Government Efficiency. Misnamed because it is really a non-governmental advisory body that will work with the White House, not any kind of department inside government.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be in charge of DOGE, are both brilliant and the federal government has clearly become too expansive and its writ too cumbersome. There are over 180,000 pages of federal regulations. Surely it's worth taking a closer look at them and retiring many.

Observers have pointed out that the duo's efforts will be much harder to achieve than they imagine. Washington may be quite inefficient, but most of what it does is write checks with great efficiency. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment insurance and other mandatory programs make up around 60 percent of the federal budget. Donald Trump has often said he would protect most of the spending.

Next is the Department of Defense at over $800 billion, which has generally been considered untouchable for political reasons, though it is probably the department that most desperately needs to be streamlined. America has four different air forces. The Air Force itself, the Army's air force, the Navy's air force, and that of the Marines.

After the Pentagon comes interest on the debt, also untouchable, which is almost as large as the Pentagon's budget. What is now left is about 15 percent of the federal budget which includes certain veterans' benefits, agricultural subsidies, spending on roads and highways, et cetera.

To achieve the $2 trillion spending cuts that Musk has often talked about, he would need to eliminate all of the spending and all of the Pentagon spending, and then he'd still have work to do. But I do support the impulse to reform, and not just because I think it will force greater scrutiny and efficiency to government, which needs it, the duo will also force the country, and especially the Republican Party, to confront a reality that it has danced around for decades.

The modern Republican Party was forged in opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's new deal. Ever since the 1930s, the party's strongest ideologues have promised to repeal the new deal and dismantle the architecture of the federal government that was largely constructed by FDR. But they never did.

The first Republican president to occupy the White House after FDR and Truman was Dwight Eisenhower who largely accepted Roosevelt's legacy. Next in 1968 came Richard Nixon, who actually expanded it, establishing new agencies like the EPA, and proposing a version of universal health care, believe it or not.

All this infuriated conservatives who kept urging rollback. Ronald Reagan came to political prominence in a nationally televised speech he made on Barry Goldwater's behalf against a growing government and deeply skeptical of farm subsidies and programs like Medicare and Social Security, warning of socialism that would doom the American republic to a future of tyranny and unfreedom.

[10:05:20]

But of course during his two terms in office, Reagan never seriously tried to repeal Social Security or Medicare. In fact, federal debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP grew under Reagan. It's worth noting that the only president to balance the budget since 1969 was Bill Clinton.

Ramaswamy and Musk have both taken to posting a clip of economist Milton Friedman on their social media, in which he argues for a very limited role for the federal government. Ironically, this role would not seem to envision any support for things like EVs and civilian space programs, which have helped create the bulk of Elon Musk's fortune.

But what decades of public policy seem to have revealed is that Friedman's vision has little support in the U.S. We are where we are because the American public has voted for Republican levels of taxation and Democratic levels of spending, which leaves a gap that can only be filled by borrowing.

There's a strong argument that the U.S. debt is on an unsustainable path, especially when you consider the rising costs that will come as more and more baby boomers retire. But slashing federal spending dramatically will almost certainly cause an economic downturn. Recall Europe's experiment with austerity in the 2010s.

The central lesson of macroeconomic policy in recent decades has been that government spending now constitutes a large enough part of the economy that cutting it drastically can lead to a downward spiral of reduced consumer spending and declining confidence. Your expenditure is my income. The U.S. federal government is smaller than much of the industrialized world in terms of spending as a percentage of GDP.

It still desperately needs reform and streamlining, but conservatives have long argued that it needs to be much, much smaller. In fact a good part of the rage that has built up among parts of the Republican base over decades has been centered on the notion that party leaders have promised repeal again and again, but never delivered.

With DOGE, we may finally get an effort to actually deliver on the central Republican promise of the last 70 years, and we will find out what America thinks of it.

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

On Sunday, President Biden finally gave Kyiv the green light to use long range American weapons against targets inside Russia. The approval came after months of ever more impassioned pleas from President Zelenskyy and other officials. Ukraine lost no time in using these weapons to strike deep into enemy territory.

After Biden's decision, Vladimir Putin updated Russia's nuclear doctrine, warning that Russia could respond with nuclear weapons to any attack by a non-nuclear state that is backed by a nuclear power.

Joining me now is Dmytro Kuleba. He was until recently Ukraine's Foreign Minister.

Dmytro, welcome. How worried are you that Russia is going to now start using more intercontinental ballistic missiles, more firepower as a way to up the ante as a kind of punishment to Ukraine for striking into its territory?

DMYTRO KULEBA, FORMER UKRAINIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: Well, I will not conceal that people in Ukraine are nervous about this latest strike and the announcements by Putin that other strikes with intercontinental missiles will follow. But at the same time, I recall autumn of 2022 when we experienced the first combined missile and drone attacks on our cities. And I can compare those feelings.

In the end, two years, two and a half years after we are used to live with this. So in a nutshell, will this Putin's new strike break Ukraine down? No. Will it create kind of internal pressure and people will be -- will be terrified for some time? Yes. But we will live through that.

[10:10:03]

ZAKARIA: So tell me, there must be nervousness in Kyiv around the new Trump administration. However one wants to look at it, it does feel like there's a risk that Trump will pressure Ukraine to take a deal that is more favorable to Russia. He doesn't seem to particularly have much affection for Ukraine. He did try to blackmail Zelenskyy and it didn't work. The people around him, like his son, J.D. Vance, have said pretty nasty things about Ukraine. All this must cause a fair amount of worry in Ukraine, right?

KULEBA: The question that you just posed could be easily asked back in 2016. You remember that when President Trump took the office for the first time, everyone was talking about the big deal with Russia. And Ukraine was anxious about the prospect of being traded off as a part of a broader arrangement between Trump and Putin. But it never worked out. And there was no big deal.

And it ended up with Trump imposing sanctions on the most important personal gas project for President Putin, Nord Stream 2, with selling Javelins, the weapons to Ukraine and other stuff. So we are not wearing rosy glasses, but we remember history.

ZAKARIA: But before -- I mean, if I can just press you on that, before in 2016, you did not have the phone call, the effort to get Ukraine to investigate Biden, the failure of that effort, the impeachment that took place around that, the souring of the views of people like Don Jr. and, of course, J.D. Vance, who is the vice president, who has outlined a peace plan that is essentially Putin's peace plan.

KULEBA: Yes, I mean, the situation is not exactly identical. But what I know for certain is that, first, Zelenskyy will not lean under pressure. Second, Ukraine will not agree to any quick solution. Third, because this solution will be done at its expense. So I do not expect any quick ending of the war or the ceasefire. And third, most importantly, I would like to remind everyone that the key to peace lies in Moscow, not in Kyiv.

ZAKARIA: You know what people say about an eventual deal, that the deal that is there to be had is that Russia will essentially keep the parts of Ukraine it has conquered, which is about 18 percent to 20 percent including Crimea, and that Ukraine will, in return, get some kind of security guarantee from NATO, perhaps a membership, perhaps a security guarantee on the road to membership. Is that fundamental structure acceptable to Ukraine?

KULEBA: Again, Fareed, with utmost respect, I think we should not start the conversation with what Ukraine is ready to accept. We should put full responsibility on the side that launched this war and first structure the approach or the plan in a way that will make Russia stop the war.

So, based on what I heard, if I turn the question and ask the same question to Russia, will Putin accept that his de facto control over occupied territories will not be legally recognized? I doubt he will accept that. Second, he has been very consistent in arguing that he will not accept membership of Ukraine in NATO. And third, he even recently said that even if there is a pause in the war, this pause should not be used to arm Ukraine and to make it stronger.

So, if I ask the same question you asked to me, if I ask it -- if I address it to Putin, these are the challenges that I see in answering it and in accepting the proposal that some are alluding to.

ZAKARIA: Dmytro Kuleba, pleasure to have you on.

Next on GPS, I will talk to the man who warned of the last inflation crisis about how the next one could happen under Donald Trump, when he come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:19:06]

ZAKARIA: In January of 2021, when a newly inaugurated President Joe Biden announced his stimulus plan to help Americans cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a prominent voice of dissent. Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, who warned that too much federal spending would boost inflation. But Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law in March of 2021, and within months inflation took off, peaking at 9 percent in June of 2022, up from 1.4 percent in January of 2021.

It wasn't entirely Biden's fault but anger over inflation is one reason Kamala Harris is believed to have lost the election to Donald Trump. So perhaps Trump's transition team ought to listen to Summers, who is now warning that Trump's proposed economic agenda could cause an inflation shock that would outstrip anything we've seen in recent years.

[10:20:03]

Joining me now to discuss all this is Larry Summers.

First, let me ask you, Larry, there are people sympathetic to Trump who may or may not be in part of the administration in the future who have been vociferously arguing that the kind of analysis you're making is all wrong because look at the stock market, look at the stock market after Trump's election. It's booming. Clearly everybody thinks that America is going to do very well. The dollar is strong. What do you make of market signals after the election?

LARRY SUMMERS, FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY: Markets go up, markets go down. Their record in predicting inflations isn't very good. I think it's much better to just look at the facts and the policies, and I don't know what's going to happen and it's a very complicated process but if they were literally implemented, I have little doubt that the Trump program is a far larger stimulus to inflation than anything that President Biden enacted.

ZAKARIA: So give us the outlines of why you think the Trump program is so -- it could cause so much inflation. What are the key components that you worry about?

SUMMERS: Inflation like anything else, Fareed, in economics is determined by demand and supply. On the demand side, it's off to the races in the Trump program. They're going to substantially bloat the budget deficit by enacting and continuing all the tax cuts and a lot of new ones, by abandoning the independence of the Fed and pushing it to pursue looser policies, and, of course very importantly, by trashing the dollar and hoping for a lower dollar.

All of that is on the demand side. That's probably larger or as large as anything that President Biden did. But what's really different about the Trump program is the supply shock that it administers to the American economy. Across-the-board tariffs and massive tariffs on Chinese goods mean that everything we import, everything that competes with, things that we import, everything that uses an input and imported good is going to be jacked up in prices.

And these are tariffs not just going up a bit. These are far larger increases than President Trump imposed in the first term. The other important part of the Trump program is the crackdown and the contemplated deportation of substantial numbers of workers. The reason why inflation settled down to the extent that it has is that we went from a labor shortage economy to a labor balance economy, but if you start deporting millions of workers, which is what the president keeps talking about, that's going to create labor shortages and labor shortages, particularly in industries that are sensitive like agriculture, which determines food prices, like new home construction, which has a lot to do with house prices.

So supply side, big upward shock. Demand side, massive stimulus collision. The result is going to be higher prices and an inflation dynamic, and that's going to permeate into the psychology.

ZAKARIA: So tell me also, do you worry that this is going to be an administration where, you know, favored businesses do well, businesses that are not favored don't? I noticed, you know, Elon Musk's stock price, the Tesla stock price, has gone up 40 percent since Trump got elected. Nothing economically has changed about Tesla. The assumption is that he will get some kind of favorable deal or what?

SUMMERS: I think you get to a really crucial issue on what you might call rules based market economy versus a deals based market economy. You know, if you look in the United States, our stock market valuations for a given company or a given flow of cash are higher than they are almost any other place in the world. And that's because people rely on our legal system, they rely on the rule of law, the security of property rights, the enforcement of contracts, and if we start doing all kinds of special ad hoc deals for and against companies, we're going to put that at risk, and so I very much hope that's not a direction that the new administration seeks to pursue.

I think we probably have had in the past too much interference in the specific rules of capitalism and I hope that's something that we will avoid going forward.

[10:25:11]

ZAKARIA: Larry Summers, always good to talk to you.

SUMMERS: Thanks.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, what will Trump's second term mean for climate change? Will America and the world go back on many of the areas they have moved forward? I'll ask an expert.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: The U.N. just wrapped up its annual climate conference called COP29. Looming over the discussions were the expected changes in U.S. policy that would come when Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office. Remember last time Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement? So, will Trump halt progress on climate again? Or is the clean tech revolution now too far along even for him to stop?

Joining me now is the marine biologist, Ayana Johnson. She is the co- founder of the think tank Urban Ocean Lab and the author of a recent bestseller, "What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures." Welcome.

AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON, CO-FOUNDER, URBAN OCEAN LAB: Thanks for having me.

ZAKARIA: So, tell me what -- when you look at it, what does Trump's victory mean for climate change for -- particularly these kind of global conferences. They seem -- for them the prospects look bleak, right?

JOHNSON: Yes. I mean, everyone at the COP29 conference was watching for the results from Maricopa County, Arizona, right? Like, it's this wild world we live in where these swing states determine not just U.S. climate policy but influence the global landscape.

Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement before, as you mentioned, and we can expect him to try to honor his word, to do the same thing this time.

ZAKARIA: But what does that mean? Because it seems like, you know, this is the -- these countries sign up to these pledges. They're very long term in the future.

JOHNSON: Yes. ZAKARIA: Many of them have no plan for actually doing what they're claiming to do. It feels --

JOHNSON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: It feels a little bit performative where, you know, the Germans are still burning coal. It feels like, OK, it's symbolically bad, but is it actually bad?

JOHNSON: Ironically, the country that does have really good plans is China. They make their five-year plans and they meet those goals that they set. A lot of countries have plans. One of the biggest challenges is supporting developing countries with the financing to do this clean energy transition.

So, it looks like all the other countries are going to stay in even if the U.S. leaves. And it just means we all have a lot more work to do on the local level if the federal government is going to abandon its responsibility to keep Americans safe from climate impacts.

ZAKARIA: And how much -- we now have an experiment because we tried -- that was what was tried in Trump one.

JOHNSON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: How much governments, state governments do?

JOHNSON: A lot, thankfully. I mean, this is the work that we do at Urban Ocean Lab supporting coastal city governments in adapting to impacts of climate change that are specific to this ocean climate interface. Thinking about infrastructure, thinking about how to deal with sea level rise, offshore renewable energy, climate driven relocation.

ZAKARIA: So, that's so much -- can I just --

JOHNSON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: The stuff you just talked about seems to me so smart because some part -- global climate change has already happened. Sea levels are rising. You have to adapt to it.

JOHNSON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Do you think the Trump administration would be hostile to that? Because it's not saying, you know, we're going to turn back climate change. Saying, it's here, we're trying to figure out how to deal with it.

JOHNSON: Most of them are on record saying that the climate crisis isn't real. So, it's not like we're arguing about what to do about it. We're arguing over whether it even exists, which is a horrible place to be in, right?

ZAKARIA: So, they wouldn't even be interested in an adaptation? JOHNSON: Not from anything that they have said, right? If we look at who has been nominated for the Department of Energy, for the EPA, these are people who are like climate crisis, what crisis?

People like Lee Zeldin who's nominated to head EPA, who has one of the worst ratings possible from the League of Conservation Voters at 14 percent. My glimmer of hope, I will say, is that clean air and clean water pulls very well across the political spectrum. All Americans want that so if we can reframe this as an issue of reining in pollution as opposed to greenhouse gases, which people are sort of bored talking about, then I think we have a chance.

And a lot of the really incredible legislation passed by the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act, 85 percent of the benefits of that have gone to deep red Republican districts. All these hundreds of thousands of new clean energy jobs in manufacturing, battery plants, electric vehicles, they don't want to lose those jobs. Even though none of them voted for it, there is this possibility that it has been so beneficial economically that the clean energy transition will just continue. It's just a matter of how quickly. And this really is a race against the clock.

ZAKARIA: Are there any places, from your point of view, that it's possible to be optimistic about -- with the Trump administration? I mean, he did talk about trees, for example.

JOHNSON: I'm certainly not looking to the White House -- to Trump for leadership on climate. I'm thinking very much about what cities can do, what states can do. That's where a lot of the implementation of climate solutions happens anyway. From green buildings to public transit to protecting and restoring ecosystems.

But if we look to the 100 plus regulations the last Trump administration rolled back for environmental protections, for those clean air and clean water protections, I would just expect more of the same.

[10:35:07]

One of the things that Trump has been very consistent on, on the campaign trail, has been his desire to eliminate tax credits for electric vehicles on day one. So, if anyone watching wants to buy an electric vehicle or install solar panels or get an induction stove, get those while the tax credits are still there through the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act, but I think a lot of this remains to be seen.

ZAKARIA: Ayana, pleasure to have you on.

JOHNSON: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: The book is "What If We Get It Right?" Next on GPS, the promise and perils of artificial intelligence. I will talk to the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [10:40:26]

ZAKARIA: Last month, NVIDIA, the maker of computer chips specialized for artificial intelligence, claimed its place as the world's most valuable company. This week, it reported an astounding 94 percent increase in revenue from last year.

The A.I. revolution is most certainly upon us. But is the world prepared for the scale and speed at which it will advance? And are there enough safeguards against the dangers that it poses?

Former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt has co-authored a new book on the very topic titled "Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit." His co-authors are the illustrious late diplomat Henry Kissinger and the former Microsoft executive Craig Mundie. I should note I'm a senior adviser for Eric's philanthropic ventures. Pleasure to have you on.

ERIC SCHMIDT, CO-AUTHOR, "GENESIS: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, HOPE, AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT": Great to be back.

ZAKARIA: So, for you, you've been writing about A.I. and studying it very closely for a while now. You write in the book that -- we're going to get to the point where the A.I. will start writing its own code and setting its own objectives. That sounds scary. Explain what you mean. And is it scary?

SCHMIDT: It's very scary and it goes something like this. Today, programmers are using roughly these systems for half of their coding. Most people think that eventually most programs will be written by the A.I. itself.

When the program can rewrite itself, which is called recursive self- improvement, it's going to gain much quicker than we can evolve as humans. What's going to stop it? How do you contain it? How do you make sure it doesn't learn to lie, to deceive, to do terrible behaviors that we can't monitor?

ZAKARIA: And just to understand that, so will it -- when it does this recursive self-learning will it be doing it towards some objective, some broad objective we have given it? Or can it alter that objective itself?

SCHMIDT: Well, in the short term, humans control these things. So, everything you use today, some humans said, learn this, you know, go find this and so forth. At some point, if the system is organized around curiosity and to seek power and influence, it could begin to set its own objective functions. The technical term is objective functions. It's what it trains against.

So, you could have a situation where the system decides that the most important thing is to learn everything, and then begin to do things and lie about them, right? So, we couldn't monitor it.

There is a set of triggers. One is where it begins to learn on its own. Another is where the agents begin to talk into non-human languages so we can't see what they're doing. A third would be when the system says, hey, I want to make copies of myself, and it doesn't bother to ask the human for permission. These are trigger points.

I want to say, by the way, that everyone's always concerned about the killer robot in this because of all the movies. I'm much more concerned about bad humans, right, evil humans using this in nefarious ways.

In our book, we spend a lot of time talking about polymaths. Polymaths are incredibly important. You know, all about this. Einstein, so forth and so on. These systems will effectively put a polymath in the pocket of every person on the planet. We're not ready for that.

ZAKARIA: But that sounds good.

SCHMIDT: It depends on your view of good and evil, right? You and I are both optimists. We believe in essential human nature but we know that there are -- that there are evil.

And I also think that you're going to see a change in world order. We talk about this in the book at quite some length. As you know, Dr. Kissinger was the author of the world order ideas. And in a situation where all of this progress is driven by a democratic model that comes out of the United States and our allies, the U.K. mostly, and Chinese, which is not driven by a democracy, that fight is the fight for the ages. Because if the competition is for that ability whoever gets there first can apply it to even scale and stay even farther ahead. It's a real race.

ZAKARIA: You've said that the U.S. is ahead. By how much and how worried should we be that that could lead -- so far, it seems as though, you know, all the major research is coming out of the U.S.

SCHMIDT: Two years ago, I told you here that we had a two-year advantage against China. It looks like it's over. China has now released three models in the last month, and they all have the same opportunity and power that the American models. And I go, how did this happen, right?

[10:45:01]

We have all of these sanctions. We have all of these ways in which this incredible hardware that NVIDIA makes and others is not available to the Chinese. Well, we don't fully know but we do know that with enormous amount of money and the great talent in China which is very real, they are very close.

It's very different now than two years ago. But they're in the race and they're in the race of the most important technology that will ever be invented in our lifetimes because the arrival of a non-human intelligence with this kind of power under our control is very important.

Go through this scenario where China ultimately beats us and it reflects Chinese values, which are not democratic, and it inures to benefit the Chinese government, which is a monopoly as opposed to the democracies of the world.

ZAKARIA: Before I let you go, I have to ask you about -- you're a multi-billionaire technologist. There is another multi-billionaire technologist very close to the new White House, the new president.

What do you think of Elon Musk, his involvement in politics? Is it basically good? But does it worry you? How do you think about it?

SCHMIDT: It's too new to know. We've never seen this kind of a partnership. Elon is a truly brilliant man. If you look, he bought Twitter, lost a lot of money, used it to help get the president elected, made all the money back, and now has an influence that's far greater than any other technologist in history including people like Bill Gates and so forth.

We'll see how long it lasts. It's probably positive for technology, and it's certainly positive for Elon's businesses.

ZAKARIA: On that note, Eric Schmidt, always a pleasure.

SCHMIDT: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, some good news for the future of the economy and what it has to do with A.I. I'll explain when we return.

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[10:51:27]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. We know from the U.S. election that people feel gloomy about the American economy. Data about low unemployment and softening inflation doesn't seem to change the vibe. But here's a trend that you may not have heard about that offers real hope for the future.

Economic growth comes when either more people are working or each worker is becoming more productive, and productivity is finally surging after a long stretch in the doldrums. Essentially, if a worker built 100 cars one year and the next year 102 cars, productivity rose by 2 percent.

Nationally, productivity grew in the 1990s by an average of 2.3 percent a year. And in the 2000s by 2.8 percent. But in the 2010s, productivity fell to only 1.1 percent growth a year.

Two possible explanations, computers and the internet boosted productivity but could only go so far, and innovation dried up because there was a slump in entrepreneurship. Now, productivity seems to be getting back on track. It rose slightly during the pandemic, and since then has soared to 2.6 percent.

It's too soon to say whether we're in a long-term productivity boom. But so far, this rising productivity has helped America pull off the balancing act of bringing down inflation without causing a recession. Several forces may be driving productivity. Millions of people quit their jobs during the pandemic's great resignation and started new businesses. That entrepreneurial spirit injected dynamism into the economy.

Remote work has become widespread saving people time on commuting and giving employers a bigger pool of candidates to find the right hire. A tight labor market and high interest rates have forced companies to figure out how to do more with less.

Many people are also wondering if A.I. is part of the story. A.I. is still at an early stage of adoption so experts think it's probably not having a huge impact on the figures. That's actually good news because A.I. has unbelievable potential to accelerate productivity in the near future.

Companies are just beginning to show what A.I. can do. As "The New York Times" reports, banks want to streamline the time-consuming tasks of analysts and are experimenting with tools that digest mountains of data and draft complex legal documents. Farmers can use new A.I. enabled equipment to pinpoint weeds when spraying herbicides, cutting chemical use by around 70 to 90 percent, and improving crop yields.

Amazon is launching a tool that will save drivers time by highlighting the next package they should grab so they don't have to rummage around. Goldman Sachs thinks widespread adoption of A.I. could increase annual productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points for a decade.

A.I., as "The Economist" commentator Scott Galloway puts it, is like corporate Ozempic. He sees A.I. as a miracle drug for companies to slim down their workforce while at the same time creating jobs at new A.I. driven businesses.

It's also worth mentioning the potential benefits from actual Ozempic. Obesity tends to make people sicker, and sicker workers miss more work days. Sicker workers are less effective on the job and drop out of the workforce.

[10:55:03]

For these reasons, Goldman Sachs notes, obesity-related diseases dragged down GDP by about 1 percent. Ozempic could help people be healthier and boost the labor force and productivity in the process. By the way, A.I. is also starting to be used in health care to improve diagnoses and identify new drug candidates.

In my book, "Age of Revolutions," I wrote of two technological revolutions that are reshaping the world, information technology and biotechnology. Like any revolutions, they will be disruptive and scary. Some people will suffer negative consequences but the wave of innovation we are experiencing has the potential to create extraordinary productivity and usher in a new era of broad prosperity.

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

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