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Fareed Zakaria GPS
Key Countries Moving Away from America; The Path to Peace in the Middle East. Israel Readies For Gaza City Takeover; Interview CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta; Interview With Author Derek Thompson. Aired 10-11a ET
Aired September 07, 2025 - 10:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[10:00:47]
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, Xi, Putin and Kim side by side in solidarity, united in their autocracy and opposition to the West. It was a stunning image from Wednesday's celebration in Beijing, marking 80 years since Japan's World War II surrender.
What does this new world order look like? I'll give you my take and we'll talk to Anne Applebaum about it all.
Also, as some European nations prepare to recognize a Palestinian state later this month, is Israel making such a state impossible? I'll discuss with experts with very different views on the subject.
Finally, a school bells ring, signaling the start of a new academic year. Students are looking forward to using the latest version of ChatGPT to write their essays and do their problem sets. What can be done to ensure this generation actually learns how to think and write?
Derek Thompson has an answer.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."
Look at the pictures that dominated this week's world news. They're vivid illustrations of the failure of Donald Trump's foreign policy.
The images that captured most attention were of China's massive military parade and of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un striding together.
Those were to be expected, a reminder that the West faces a determined set of adversaries who see it as their mission to destroy the Western led international order. What was surprising were the images from the days before, when the Shanghai Cooperation Organization hosted leaders from India, Turkey, Vietnam and Egypt, among others.
All these regional powers were generally considered closer to Washington than Beijing. But a toxic combination of tariffs, hostile rhetoric, and ideological demands is moving many of the world's pivotal states away from America and towards China. It may be the greatest own goal in modern foreign policy.
Consider the BRICS, a grouping of countries originally meant to represent the big emerging markets of the future, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, with several other members now, too. At prior meetings, three of the core countries, Brazil, India and South Africa, would generally resist the Russian and Chinese effort to turn the organization into an anti-American grouping.
For decades, Washington has been building ties with these three countries, each a leader in its region, to ensure that as they grew in size and stature, they would be favorably inclined towards the United States.
But Donald Trump has treated these three pivotal states to some of his most vicious rhetoric and aggressive policies. He unleashed the highest tariff rate in the world against India. He punished Brazil with equally high tariffs and levied sanctions and visa bans against Brazilian officials. South Africa faces 30 percent tariffs, a total cut off of foreign aid and potential sanctions against government officials.
The governments and people in these countries are outraged at their treatment. India used to be overwhelmingly pro-American. Now it is rapidly shifting to a deep suspicion of Washington. In Brazil, President Lula's sagging poll numbers have risen as he stands up to Trump's bullying. In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa gained stature when he politely responded to Trump's Oval Office hectoring.
It's worth remembering that other countries have nationalist sentiment, too. There's no strategic rationale for these policy reversals.
[10:05:02]
Trump is punishing Brazil because that country's independent courts are holding accountable Trump's ideological soulmate, Jair Bolsonaro, for his efforts to reject the results of free and fair elections.
South Africa faces Trump's ire because of a land reform law that is an attempt to address some of the vast disparities in landholding and wealth caused by decades and decades of apartheid.
These reasons have nothing to do with restoring America's manufacturing base or reducing trade deficits. The U.S. actually runs a trade surplus with Brazil.
While Washington has been alienating these countries, China has been courting them. It has outlined a plan with Brazil for a transformative railway network connecting its Atlantic coast to Peru's Pacific one. Xi managed to get Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit China for the first time in seven years. China has courted South Africa with trade and aid, and public sentiment in that country has moved to be quite favorably inclined towards Beijing.
We're often told not to worry, that Trump likes to talk tough just to get the best deal. But his policies now are producing real pain and misery on the ground. People losing their jobs, many being pushed back into poverty. That's why, even if these deals are renegotiated and things settle on less brutal terms, the memories will linger. Countries will always know that Washington could treat them as it has, and they will want to hedge their bets and keep strong ties with China and Russia, just in case.
American foreign policy these days is a collection of the random slights, insults, and ideological obsessions of one man. In general, Trump likes smaller countries he can bully or ideological soul mates who cozy up to him. He doesn't enjoy dealing with large, messy democracies with their own internal dynamics, pride and nationalism.
Thus, America under Donald Trump has befriended a strange collection of strongmen in El Salvador, Hungary, Pakistan and the Gulf monarchies. It is meanwhile at odds with the democracies of India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Canada and most of Europe.
Does this make any sense?
Watching this week's antics and incensed Trump grumbled on social media that China, Russia and North Korea were conspiring against the United States. But if you consider the effects of his policies, it might be more accurate to wonder why the president himself seems to be undermining U.S. interests and values over these past months.
Go to CNN.com/Fareed for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.
I just gave you my take on this week's events in China. I wanted to bring in Anne Applebaum to hear hers. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, a staff writer for "The Atlantic," and she has been warning for years about this very alliance of autocracies and their growing diplomatic and financial ties. Her most recent book, "Autocracy Inc.," has just been released in paperback.
Anne, welcome. So, as I say, you've been talking about this alliance. When you watched those pictures of Kim, of Xi and of Putin, what strikes you as what keeps them together? Because there is fundamentally the shared opposition to a Western led world and American power, right? Is there more to it?
ANNE APPLEBAUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: No, I think that's exactly the point. These are powers that have very different ideologies. Nationalist, communist, theocratic in the case of Iran, which is sometimes part of this group. What unites them is their dislike of us. And by us, I mean the democratic world, the language of rule of law, the language of transparency, the language of accountability. Because of course, that's the language of their own internal oppositions.
And China and Russia in particular, but the rest as well, have been working for many years to delegitimize that language, to get the idea of human rights, for example, out of international documents, international institutions, and instead promote an idea that, using the word sovereignty, which, by the way, is a word that the Trump administration also uses, by which they mean you can't -- no one can criticize us. And we get to decide what happens inside our own countries. And also if we feel like invading other countries, nobody can object.
ZAKARIA: Right. And, you know, again, to me, the surprise was to see the Indias, the Egypts, the Turkeys, Indonesia sent very high level representatives. It does feel like all of these countries are in some way or the other, you know, dismayed by America and the -- what they had thought of was a reliable America has gone.
[10:10:11]
APPLEBAUM: So America was a predictable power. It was -- it stood for long-term investment. It stood for a set of rules and institutions which if you liked them or didn't like them at least they were predictable. And now the United States is seen as unpredictable, and the president is whimsical. He might change his mind at any minute. It's very dangerous to go and see him in the Oval Office, because he might attack you.
I know, I know, foreign leaders who've avoided going for that reason. And so the idea that if you want stability and you want security, then it looks to a lot of countries that are not necessarily autocracies themselves, it looks like maybe you need a good relationship with Russia and China. And it's also a form of hedging. If the United States falls through.
ZAKARIA: Right.
APPLEBAUM: Well, then we're going to need some other friends.
ZAKARIA: Right. And, you know, you talk about the -- you know, the way I see it is there's this geopolitical balancing against American power, but there's also an ideological balancing against democracy, the rule of law and things like that. Do you think, you know, are we -- are we returning to almost a Cold War like situation where there are countries now that are increasingly standing in opposition to, you know, liberal democratic values, international rules of law, things like that?
APPLEBAUM: Yes, although it's a little -- it's even more tricky than the Cold War because the opponents of liberal democracy are also inside liberal democracies. And there is a clear alignment between the German far right, the American far right, the British far right, and sometimes with Russians and some with others in the autocratic world. And they are also seeking to undermine liberal democracy.
So it's not as straightforward. It's not like there's one bloc of democrats versus one bloc of autocrats. It's actually a more complicated picture.
ZAKARIA: And the right wing populists in one country support those in others. So I look at Trump and, you know, what is his anger with South Africa? It's about the treatment of white farmers. Or you look at what he's doing in Poland, where he's reaching in and celebrating and fetting the president of Poland, who is a titular figure, doesn't have that much political power because he's a right wing ally. Right?
APPLEBAUM: But you can see that in other countries as well. I mean, there's favoritism shown to Nigel Farage. Favoritism shown to the AfD. That's more by J.D. Vance.
ZAKARIA: Bolsonaro in Brazil. Right.
APPLEBAUM: Bolsonaro in Brazil is actually almost an extreme case because you have the U.S. actually sanctioning Brazil, because Brazil has its own political system and its own rule of law and its punished -- its equivalent of January the 6th, an uprising to overthrow the election. The Brazilians have continued to punish the people responsible for it. And the Trump administration is now angry at Brazil for doing that.
ZAKARIA: How does -- how do Poles react to the president, in effect, picking a side in an -- in a domestic political debate?
APPLEBAUM: I mean, that would depend which kind of which side of the political spectrum you're on. I mean, I think that's true in almost every country. You know, that effect of a U.S. intervention in a democratic country is really further polarization because it makes -- you know, it makes -- it just divides people more deeply.
ZAKARIA: That's a very important point that it's more complicated than the Cold War because the enemies of liberal democracy are now both outside and within.
APPLEBAUM: Yes. But I should also say that people who admire and want liberal democracy are also on the other side. There is an Iranian opposition. There is a Russian opposition. There's even a Chinese opposition. And they also have relationships with one another. And they are also interested in changing their own governments or in changing -- so it's not as if they're, you know, even Russia is a -- is a clear picture either.
ZAKARIA: That's a nice uplifting note to end on.
Anne Applebaum, thank you so much. The book "Autocracy, Inc." is in paperback. Everything you write, it's fantastic.
Next on GPS, an end to the war in Gaza has never seemed further away. How did we get here? And can we get out? I'll explore with two experts next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:18:47]
ZAKARIA: There's been some talk from both Israel and Hamas of a comprehensive peace deal to end the war in Gaza. But at the moment, peace has never looked farther away. The Israeli army is readying a full scale invasion of Gaza City, and
right wing voices in Israel are calling for increasingly extreme steps. The Israeli finance minister this week called for an annexation of most of the West Bank, telling reporters, "The main goal is to remove once and for all this idea of a Palestinian state."
Joining me now to talk about what all this means is Rob Malley, a longtime U.S. negotiator between the two sides. He's the co-author of a new book, "Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel-Palestine. And Dan Senor is a political adviser, analyst, and author, and host of an excellent podcast.
Rob, your book is fascinating because what you say in it is that you think looking back, the entire premise, the narrative that we were all moving toward a two-state solution was fundamentally wrong.
ROBERT Malley, OBAMA ADMIN. WHITE HOUSE MIDDLE EAST COORDINATOR: And I think the onus now would be on those who claim otherwise. It's been 30 years, perhaps more if you go back historically, of attempts to have a hard partition between Israelis and Palestinians.
[10:20:06]
And what Hussein Agha and I argue in the book is that, that was an illusion It was an illusion, a delusion to some extent. It was a lie that is still being bandied around today in order to feel good about doing something, saying something. But realities on the ground have moved so far away from that goal that I think it's time to be honest with ourselves.
ZAKARIA: And to put it bluntly, whose fault is it?
MALLEY: You know, we could spend a lot of time, but we argue in the book is that it was never the natural landing place for either Israelis or Palestinians. Neither one of them came up with the idea of partition. Neither one of them came up with the idea of two states. Deep down, what the Palestinians really want and their view is for justice, redemption, they want -- they want to erase what happened in 1948. That's what they real aspiration, they yearning it. And that's fundamentally not compatible with a Jewish state.
And what the Israelis deep down want, they want full security. They want full safety. They don't want to see another people there that could in any way potentially present a threat. Some of them want all of the land. And that's fundamentally not compatible with a Palestinian, a sovereign, genuine Palestinian state.
So neither one of them really wanted to go there. And ultimately it was up to the United States and there the failure, I think, is unmistakable. Administration after administration, including those that I worked for and I worked for several, claimed that it was a priority and did nothing to make it happen.
ZAKARIA: So what does that leave you? You know, it's -- do you end up just saying what's going to happen? Because on the ground you do have these five million people who are on lands governed by Israel. MALLEY: So that's why Hussein and I entitled the book "Tomorrow is
Yesterday" because what we're going to see tomorrow is very much what we've seen in the past. There's nothing new. We're going to see the status quo. We're going to see breakdowns. We're going to see worsening of the status quo. And then there's going to be attempts to think up other ideas. Some of them are going to be morally repellent, at least to me. Annexation, ethnic cleansing, trying to get rid of one side or the other.
And then hopefully, as happened in the past, some Israelis and Palestinians will come together and try to think courageously, creatively of an outcome in which they could coexist, even if it's short of full peace. But some form of coexistence, because it's time we get our heads out of the sand. The two-state solution as we conceived it, a real two-state solution, is not going to happen. The two people are going to have to coexist. You just said it.
It means there's going to have to be more creativity and the straitjacket of the two-state solution has prevented so many people about thinking of different ways of coexisting.
ZAKARIA: So, Dan, you come at this in some senses from -- politically from a very different place. But I suspect that some of this resonates for you because I'm guessing you'd think the two-state solution is also on its deathbed.
DAN SENOR, CO-AUTHOR, "THE GENIUS OF ISRAEL": I'm not as pessimistic as Rob, so that's where I part ways with him. I didn't expect this to be the conversation. I think we should have a little bit more humility about what's possible and what's not possible, and just ask the question. If we want to bring the temperature down between Israelis and Palestinians, whether they can get to a two-state solution or not, the one sure thing we know we could do is try to create the conditions where that could possibly be possible someday.
And even along the way, it will improve the situation if the conditions are -- if both sides feel that they have some semblance of a home, they can live with some semblance of security and safety. And I think right now operating in a world in which the Palestinians are coming to believe that they're going to get a state while Hamas is holding hostages, while Hamas has arms, and while Hamas says it will do October 7th over and over and over again, is the opposite of creating the conditions where you can bring the temperature down.
And I think that is the folly, the catastrophe of what you're watching play out right now with all these European countries rallying later this month at the U.N. to recognize a Palestinian state.
ZAKARIA: Stay with that. When we come back, I'm going to ask, what does that mean for Israel's invasion, planned invasion of Gaza City, when we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:28:28]
ZAKARIA: And we are back with Rob Malley and Dan Senor.
So, Rob, when you listen to Dan, and I think the Israeli perspective here would be, look, if Hamas were to surrender, if they were to return the hostages, we can then move on. But right now we can't. And there are lots of people who think Bibi Netanyahu is just prolonging this war to stay in power and such. But there is a large constituency in Israel that feels that something has to change.
We're not going to go back to the same old dynamic, you know, between Hamas and Israel. And so we need to do something. Is that reasonable? Is the -- you know, where does this invasion of Gaza City leave things?
MALLEY: So first, I'd say I'm not a military expert. And I don't know how Israel should have dealt with and should deal with the issues that whatever it faces in Gaza. I do know what it should not do. And what we've seen so far has been a pattern of indiscriminate killing, of transferring population targeting, killing of health workers, you know, killing -- destroying mosques, schools, education centers. That -- there's no military doctrine I think that can justify that.
There's no justification for it. And it's why an increasing number of organizations around the world are calling it a genocide. So that's where we can't go. And the notion that Israel now has to defeat Hamas, I'm not even sure what that means. At the end of the day, the constituency in Gaza that's going to be strongest, no matter how long this war lasts, is almost certainly going to be Hamas. So that concept is a recipe for endless war.
I don't agree fully with what Dan said about where we go in the future. I do agree that you need to find a way to lower the temperature. I think ultimately you need -- you need to find a way for all Israelis and Palestinians to have equal rights, regardless of one state, two states, three states. But it's not -- that's not going to happen if you have a generation of Palestinians, which you already have, who have suffered the most atrocious form of warfare. If now Israel continues that, who knows where this leads?
So again, I'm not going to say what Israel should do. I think the war needs to end now. But certainly, if they -- if they try to go into Gaza, it's going to be just sort of more of what we've seen.
ZAKARIA: So, a lot of people who I think supported Israel on October 7th, supported a lot of the war, do feel like what -- you know, it feels like it's just going on and on. It's not really a war anymore. You have one of the world's most powerful armies against what looked like women and children. You know, the occasional militant hidden amongst them, no question.
What is the strategic purpose at this point? And, you know, where does it lead you?
DAN SENOR, CO-AUTHOR, "THE GENIUS OF ISRAEL": I just -- I'll answer that. I just want to come back to one thing Rob said. The talk of genocide, which is a term that has been grossly manipulated over the last few months, to me, the single question, if you want to know which party is responsible for genocide or attempted genocide just ask this simple question, if Israel were to drop its arms today, period, full stop, there would be no Israel. All Israelis would be wiped out.
If Hamas were to drop its arms today, there would be no Palestinian civilian human catastrophe that Rob is worried about, the Palestinian civilians being collateral damage. That's just the reality. So, ask yourself that question. Israel dropped its arms, it's wiped out. That's -- that's the answer to the question as to who's -- attempting a genocide.
As it relates to Gaza City, look, I think there are two things going on. One, Israel has stayed out of Gaza City. It is a Hamas stronghold. There's a reason why there's -- a number of reasons it stayed out of Gaza City, one of which is it's expected -- it's understood that that's where a lot of the hostages are.
But there's increasingly a view among these Israeli leadership, mostly the political leadership, that unless Gaza City is taken, sort of like the Berlin or the Moscow for Hamas, that Hamas will climb out of the rubble in any postwar situation and live to fight another day and that's just unacceptable. If you -- if Israel really wants to crush Hamas, it has to take Gaza City.
ZAKARIA: My sense is -- correct me if I'm wrong about all this international criticism that Israel is getting. The Israeli view, particularly on the right, is who cares? We are going to win and then they'll have to deal with us.
SENOR: I have been frustrated by the Israeli attitude and what I think is at times incompetence in dealing with what I feel like the walls are closing in internationally and Israel's ham-handed way of telling it's story and explaining its position.
I think there's a sense that, as you said, Israel win, this will pass. Israel's popularity plummets whenever Israel is fighting wars. We saw that in the second Lebanon war in 2006. We saw that in the first Lebanon war in the early 80s. It always happens. And then Israel rebounds.
Israel will get through this and it will rebound. Two years is different from a -- the 2014 Gaza war. Yes. This is -- this is -- we're in a different arena now and I just -- I will say to both of you when you say there's no strategic reason for Israel to go into Gaza City -- again, I think --
(CROSSTALK)
ZAKARIA: -- Israel's own generals --
(CROSSTALK)
SENOR: I know there's -- there's --
(CROSSTALK)
ZAKARIA: -- former prime minister -- (CROSSTALK)
SENOR: There are disagreements, I mean, within the Israeli security. There are disagreements in Israeli security establishment about a whole range of geopolitical issues. So, I just think the majority of Israelis, even though they want a hostage deal, they want the war to end.
If you ask the majority of Israel -- Israelis, what will it mean for the end of the war if Hamas is still in power and able to pose a threat to Israel again? And that's a much different question. And that is why, when there was a vote in the Knesset not long ago, just a couple of months ago, about saying no to a future Palestinian state, period, full stop, Israeli political leaders from right to left voted for that.
Benny Gantz voted for it. Yair Lapid -- these are leaders of the opposition. They voted for this. And I think that is reflective of the consensus in Israel. Israel is a real country that has real threats and it has to -- its view is it has got to eliminate those threats.
ZAKARIA: And I assume that a Palestinian looking at the situation feels somewhat similar.
MALLEY: I mean, it is a real question to ask. You know, if you say, how could -- how could Israel not have responded to what happened on October 7th? You asked the question earlier, how Palestinians not going to respond to what they've endured, whatever you want to call it? That's what's really frightening about the current situation which is there is a generation of Palestinians who are going to grow up with nothing to lose.
The only memory is going to be either of, you know, in Gaza, the blockade, or what's happening now, the West Bank we haven't spoken about, but things are really going in the wrong direction, too. I don't see how what you set out at the goal at the beginning, Dan, which is to create the conditions where the two peoples could live together again. How do you do that when the memory of what just happened is going to be so stark?
[10:35:03]
The memory of October 7th is not going to go away either. But let's not forget a generation of Palestinians have lost mothers, brothers, sons, daughters. What are they going to do?
ZAKARIA: All right. We got to unfortunately close on that. I do have to say, whatever you think on the subject, it's a very rich and interesting book. Thank you both.
SENOR: Thank you.
ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I will talk to Sanjay Gupta about RFK Jr. and the damage that is being done to American medicine.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [10:40:09]
ZAKARIA: More than one-fifth of American adults suffer from chronic pain. For decades, modern medicine has tried to address this with opioids and other interventions that often don't work. Or, in the case of opioids, actually make the problem worse.
In his new book, "It Doesn't Have to Hurt," Dr. Sanjay Gupta gets to the root of chronic pain. He's a neurosurgeon and CNN's chief medical correspondent. He joins me now. Always a pleasure.
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Such an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.
ZAKARIA: So, to me, the most fascinating part about the general way you think about this is you point out that Americans are 4 percent of the world's population and consume, what, 90 percent of the world's opioids?
GUPTA: That's right. Some of the things like Vicodin and Percocet, the numbers have changed a bit, but there was a point where we were taking 90 percent of those medications. We were also performing a lot of surgery.
And to give you context, I found this fascinating, 1.2 million spinal operations, most of those done for pain. And to give you context, Great Britain performed 50,000. They're about a quarter of our population. But even if you do that math, we're still five to 10 times greater in terms of invasive procedures and invasive medications.
ZAKARIA: What does this tell you about pain? Is it something that we actually have much greater ability to bear or not bear it based on the culture, the expectations, the system?
GUPTA: I think -- look, we're all humans, so we all have the same physiology, similar pain tolerance overall across societies. I think this gets to cultural expectations. And this idea that I really struggled with a bit in the book, but expectations and experience are inextricably linked.
If you think something is going to hurt, it's probably going to hurt no matter what. And if you think it's not going to hurt, or if you don't need pain meds or procedure, then you can do almost anything within reason to the human body and you really don't need those medications, which I found really interesting.
ZAKARIA: So, it's really -- I mean, so there's a very powerful sense in which the pain is in your head.
GUPTA: Yes and -- yes is the answer. And the reason I hesitate is because I get criticized for saying this, as have other people. You're just saying it's in my head. You're saying I'm making it up. I'm malingering. It's not -- it's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that the brain is the ultimate decider of whether or not you have pain. There are these receptors in your periphery that will send signals to the brain, and the brain is then trying to make sense of it, and it's trying to make sense of the insult that you've just experienced.
But also, are you depressed? Do you have anxiety? Is there an adverse childhood experience? Did you experience something like this in the past, and if so, what happened at that point?
All these things sort of get co-mingled then the brain has to make a decision as to how much this hurts, if at all.
ZAKARIA: Since I have you, I got to ask you about what's going on in the news. To me, the interesting question is not, is Robert Kennedy stripping the CDC of some of its most important experts and politicizing it? It seems obvious he's doing that.
But is there a kernel of truth or maybe a more than a kernel of truth to his critique when he says, and he lays out in an op-ed in "The Wall Street Journal" that, you know, the CDC started as an infectious disease fighting outfit. It then grew. It has taken on all these other functions -- roles as mission creep. It can't do a lot of the things it used to do very well, because it has lost some of that flexibility. It doesn't know what it's mission is.
You know, Michael Lewis talked about this, about the CDC kind of observing COVID rather than really asking itself, is it meant to fight it? So, is there a value -- is there a kernel of truth, and is there a value to what he's doing?
GUPTA: Look, I don't think there's a lot of value to the way that he's approaching it even if there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying. Look, CDC started off as a malaria control organization, and this is in the 1940s. I think it was called the Center for Communicable Diseases at that point.
I think as happened in many places around the world chronic diseases became the primary driver of illness and death. So, the idea that you would pivot to say, hey, look, we've got to talk about cardiac disease, we got to talk about cancer, diabetes, and even dementia, that became under the purview of the CDC.
Where, I think, he has a point is that that just sort of happened. And still, the Centers for Disease Control, they add, and Prevention at some point. But I don't think the mission was as clear. And I think we probably had a hard time with this during COVID because the focus on infectious diseases wasn't as great as it once was.
So yes, we have to be talking about these other things, Fareed. I mean, you know, the -- if you look at cardiac disease, it is still the biggest killer in this country. What organization is going to oversee that? And, you know, the irony, I think, with RFK is that he talks about MAHA, Making America Healthy Again.
[10:45:02]
And I think everyone agrees with that. And they agree that the United States is not very healthy. But how is he going to do it? So far, if you look objectively, measurably at what he's done, it has been a focus on seed oils and food dyes. How is that getting us to where we need to be? I mean, I think it's very concerning and I don't want to be hyperbolic about this, but, you know, I'm a doctor. And I think that our health care system has been really damaged by what has happened over the last year, really damaged.
We've lost brain talent. People are going to other countries. The United States is not viewed as sort of that leader in health care, I think, in many places around the world. And I think we're going to feel that impact for a long time to come.
ZAKARIA: Sanjay Gupta, the book is really fascinating. And I have not finished it but I strongly recommend it to everyone. Thank you.
GUPTA: Such a pleasure, Fareed. Thank you.
ZAKARIA: Sanjay also has a new documentary on pain. It's called "DR. GUPTA REPORTS, IT DOESN'T HAVE TO HURT." And you can watch it right here on CNN tonight at 9 p.m. eastern.
Next on GPS. A.I. is changing the way students learn and the way they present their results to professors. My next guest says it poses an existential threat to education.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:51:00]
ZAKARIA: Summer break is over, sadly, and educators around the world have an ever-worsening headache to deal with, A.I. It's changing the way students learn and poses a potential crisis for schools and universities. I spoke about it with Derek Thompson. He is the co- author of the bestselling book "Abundance" and has an eponymous Substack.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ZAKARIA: So, one of the ways A.I. is changing the world that we can see right now, we don't have to predict and is disturbing is one you dealt with in a recent podcast of yours. You can tell that college papers and exams and almost any kind of work that is being given to college students, increasingly is pretty good. The problem is, it's not clear it's been written by them. It seems to be written by A.I.
You know, how to think about -- this seems like if education is at the basis of, you know, of an advanced economy, and at the heart of education, you have essentially widespread cheating, which is the only way to describe it, what do we do?
DEREK THOMPSON, HOST, "PLAIN ENGLISH" PODCAST: Look, this is an existential crisis right now, I think, for many schools. We have a very particular way of assessing learned intelligence in high school and college. That's the written take home essay. And if ChatGPT is good at anything, it's very, very good at writing an a minus take home essay in practically everything, right? If you want to write a review of a Fareed Zakaria book, a review of "Abundance," a history of the Habsburg Empire, the answer to some mathematical test or challenge, A.I. is quite good at doing all these things. And that makes it very difficult, I think, not only for teachers to understand what students are learning, but also for employers to understand what does GPA even mean these days if the 4.0 that I'm looking at on your transcripts might simply be an assessment of your ability to cheat, not your ability to learn?
So, one thing that schools are thinking about right now is moving from written assessments of intelligence to oral assessments of intelligence, right? My wife just finished her PhD in clinical psychology. And at the end of your PhD, you defend your dissertation. You don't just turn in the paper, you defend it to professors.
And I wonder if you're going to see many, many schools, high schools, colleges, universities move toward this style of defending your ideas, not just turning in a written assessment, because A.I. can fake the written assessment. It cannot fake your defense of those ideas in front of the classroom.
ZAKARIA: And you could imagine also the old blue books where you'd write. I mean, that's how I, you know, went through most of college. Can -- the problem, of course, is professors right now, I think, like the system because the work comes in well, they can give everyone an A minus. This puts a huge burden on the examiners. Can A.I. be used to help with the examining?
I mean, presumably I can listen to these defenses, could read even the handwriting in the blue books, and help the professors so that rather than helping the students cheat, it helps the professors outsmart the cheaters.
THOMPSON: We're already seeing many teachers using A.I. to structure their curricula, decide what to teach, work out certain administrative functions. I think in one Gallup study, it was revealed that something like 50 to 60 percent of teachers surveyed by Gallup say they use generative A.I., and the majority of those say that it saves them up to six weeks of work a year. I mean, that's a six-week holiday given to you by ChatGPT.
So, there's a way, I think, to be optimistic about this from the standpoint of some teachers, right? They're finding ways to use this technology. But I really do think that it's going to be difficult to replace take home tests without changing the way that teachers value the assessment of intelligence.
Right now, we lean on the written exam for a lot, right? It is the staple of how we tend to assess whether you've learned anything from your history class, your English class.
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I think it will take a while. It might be a little bit of a painful adjustment period for us to sort of go back to, you know, BCE, ancient Greece, where you really did have people standing up and defending their knowledge rather than, you know, inscribing it on a piece of papyrus.
I do think this is going to be a bit of a painful adjustment period. But my hope is that we can come out the other side with something superior. A lot of the work that people do in a white-collar economy is akin to talking, defending, not just writing a memo. But then in the meeting saying, this is why my memo is right. So, there's a way in which maybe this transition from a written to oral based education could actually help us in the long run.
ZAKARIA: So, the killer subjects to major in in the future, according to Derek Thompson, will be rhetoric and elocution. Derek Thompson, pleasure to have you on.
THOMPSON: Don't forget theater.
ZAKARIA: Theater. Pleasure to have you on. We'll have you on again soon. Thank you.
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ZAKARIA: Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.
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