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It's not a matter of "if" but "when"
Andrew Ross Sorkin says the next financial crisis is coming
In 1929, unchecked speculation and economic hype helped fuel the worst financial crash in modern history. Nearly a century later, New York Times journalist and CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin sees troubling parallels. On the GZERO World podcast, he joins Ian Bremmer to talk about his new book, "1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation," and whether today’s economy is headed for another cliff.
Sorkin warns that behind today’s AI boom and market exuberance lies an undercurrent of fragility—historic debt levels, shaky private credit markets, and investors chasing returns with little oversight. While the technology behind AI is real, much of the money flooding in feels familiar to those who’ve studied speculative bubbles before. “We're not going to have another 1929,” Sorkin says, “but I think it's very possible. Actually, I would argue it's almost impossible for us not to have another 1999.” He sees eerie parallels between the past and the present: massive speculative investments, surging inequality, and a public increasingly disconnected from financial realities.
But one thing stands out today: silence. Sorkin warns that many CEOs and financial leaders, despite recognizing the risks, are unwilling to speak out publicly. “If we ever get to a moment where we need to make very difficult decisions,” he says, “are there going to be leaders willing to stand up and explain what needs to happen?”
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published
China has become an "engineering state," with Dan Wang
What can the US learn from the benefits–and perils–of China’s quest to engineer the future? Tech analyst and author Dan Wang joins Ian Bremmer on the GZERO World Podcast to discuss his new book "Breakneck," China’s infrastructure boom, and the future of the US-China relationship. Over the last two decades, China has transformed into what Wang calls an “engineering state,” marshaling near unlimited resources to build almost anything–roads, bridges, entire cities overnight. That investment has created astounding growth, but also domestic challenges and soaring debt.
It’s also led to a stubborn belief within the Chinese government that society itself can be engineered from the top down, where the state treats its people like a building material that can be tweaked or destroyed if necessary. Wang and Bremmer dig into all things US-China—the future of the relationship, the surprising similarities between the two countries, and whether Washington can learn from Beijing’s example without repeating its mistakes.
“The Chinese are able to build a lot of things that meet the material needs of the people, namely homes, solar, wind, nuclear, coal plants, roads, bridges, high-speed rail,” Wang says, “And that is something that I want Americans to have as well.”
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published
The risks of reckless AI rollout with Tristan Harris
Can we align AI with society’s best interests? Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, joins Ian Bremmer on the GZERO World Podcast to discuss the risks to humanity and society as tech firms ignore safety and prioritize speed in the race to build more and more powerful AI models. AI is the most powerful technology humanity has ever built. It can cure disease, reinvent education, unlock scientific discovery. But there is a danger to rolling out new technologies en masse to society without understanding the possible risks. What if the way we deploy artificial intelligence, Harris argues, isn’t inevitable, but a choice?
The tradeoff between AI’s risks and potential rewards is similar to deployment of social media. It began as a tool to connect people and, in many ways, it did. But it also become an engine for polarization, disinformation, and mass surveillance. That wasn’t inevitable. It was the product of choices—choices made by a small handful of companies moving fast and breaking things. Will AI follow the same path? Is there a path forward where innovation aligns with humanity?
“If we deploy AI recklessly in a way that causes AI psychosis or kids' suicides or degrades mental health or causes every kid to outsource their homework,” Harris warns, “it's very obvious the long-term trajectory of we are going to have a weaker civilization.”
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published
TRANSCRIPT: The risks of reckless AI rollout with Tristan Harris
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are asking a question that may define our century. What if the way we deploy artificial intelligence isn't inevitable, but a choice? AI is the most powerful technology humanity has ever built. It can help cure diseases, reinvent education, unlock scientific discoveries, accelerate clean energy transition, and more. It also carries enormous risks in promoting disinformation, destabilizing economies, and developing dangerous new weapons. The trade-off between AI's potential and risks may sound familiar. Think about social media, it began as a tool to connect people, and in many ways it did, but it also became an engine for polarization, for mass surveillance, and for digital addiction.
That wasn't inevitable, it was the product of choices that were made by a small handful of companies, moving fast and breaking things. The question now is whether AI is destined to follow the same path. Can tech companies be trusted to prioritize safety in addition to speed? Can regulation keep pace with exponential growth? Is there a path forward where innovation aligns with humanity's best interests? I'm joined on the show today by someone who thinks about these questions a lot, Tristan Harris, former Google ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Let's get to it.
Tristan Harris, thanks for being on the show.
Tristan Harris:
Good to be with you, Ian.
Ian Bremmer:
You're spending your time talking about AI and ethics.
Tristan Harris:
Yeah.
Ian Bremmer:
There doesn't seem to be a lot of prioritization of that confluence in the space, am I right in thinking that?
Tristan Harris:
I think people need to understand, Ian, that AI is different than every other kind of technology we've invented, people say we always have technology, they're are tools, we can use tools for good, or we can use tools for evil... A hammer can be used good or evil, but AI is distinct from that, because AI, it's like if you imagine a hammer that can think to itself at a PhD level about hammers, invent better hammers, recursively go off in the world, duplicate itself, do research on what would make better hammers, make money, send crypto around... It's crazy what this technology is. It is not a tool, it's more like an intelligent species that we are birthing that has more capability than us. It's already beating military generals at strategy games, it's already proving new math theorems, it's already inventing new material science, it's not doing this autonomously-
Ian Bremmer:
But it is, right? It's not doing it autonomously. It is a tool in the sense that it is responding to the incentives that are being programmed into it by people with profit motives, with business models, and fundamentally that is a big part of the challenge.
Tristan Harris:
The key word there in what you said is incentives. We talk about can there be ethics in AI? Well, ethics doesn't even matter, it gets thrown out the window relative to the incentive. Now, the question is what is the incentive with AI? People say it's profit. It's not profit, it's only a piece of the story. The company's actual incentive is I have to get to artificial general intelligence first, that is the prize. If I do that, if I have AI that can recursively self-improve, then that is the prize at the end of the rainbow, I build a God, make trillions of dollars, own the world economy, that's the actual-
Ian Bremmer:
That's very long term for a company.
Tristan Harris:
It is long term.
Ian Bremmer:
Especially for companies that are actually trying to make their next fundraise and round... So, it doesn't feel like that's motivating all of the activity that we're seeing right now.
Tristan Harris:
No, no. So, then the question is then what is the flywheel that gets you there? So, the incentives are release an impressive new AI model, Grok 4, Gemini blah, and that impressive model, then you get lots of users on that model, so you have hundreds of millions of users or a billion users using the product every day, you use those two things to raise the most new venture capital, so you have billions of dollars of investment, you use that to invest more in GPUs, more compute, and get more usage data because that turns into training data, you get all of the top engineers and talent because you've got the most funding and the most compute, and you have the top AI model, and you use all of those things to train the next AI model, and you sort of spin that flywheel. Does that make sense?
Ian Bremmer:
Sure.
Tristan Harris:
That's the actual incentive, is that I have to attract the best talent, have the bigger compute clusters, like Elon's put I think a billion dollars or something into his Memphis cluster, I get the most usage data, which turns into training data, and those things come together and I get to have an even bigger model that outcompetes the other models.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, that's one set of incentives to develop AI that relies on engaging with individual citizens, consumers, right?
Tristan Harris:
Yes.
Ian Bremmer:
Then there's also all of these use cases we're seeing in AI, which when we're talking about productivity and replacing intellectual labor, when we talk about new inventions, and massive efficiencies, and reducing waste... Why isn't the first thing you're saying to me about companies trying to use AI to do all of these incredible industrial innovations, which is certainly what the Chinese are prioritizing.
Tristan Harris:
Yeah, so you're exactly right, but the Chinese and the West have very different approaches to AI. I'd say the western companies are more obsessed with this almost religious idea of building a God in a box, we need to race to super intelligence or general intelligence. Whereas as you said, what we're seeing in China is just racing to have AI systems that they maximally deploy in factories, in manufacturing, in medicine because they want the productivity of their economy to get boosted by AI, that's the main thing that they're focused on. They're less focused on-
Ian Bremmer:
And it's not that the US is not doing it, you're saying it's not the main thing [inaudible 00:06:14]-
Tristan Harris:
It's the main thing. Yeah, exactly. Because if the company said, look, we're here to solve climate change or fix energy production, they would just be applying their stuff maximally to that, but instead they're applying most of their investment dollars into scaling to their next AI model because they keep having this view that if we have an even more powerful AI, that is even more intelligent, that if we get that, we can set that off to solve all these other problems. And because they're in a competition with the other companies, if one of them said, hey, I'm going to just maximally apply my AI to just strengthening existing manufacturing or businesses, they're going to not become the leading frontier model in the bigger AI race, and they're not going to get the same investment dollars coming in for the next time around.
Ian Bremmer:
So, it really is a structural issue with the way that money is raised, the venture capital model, the nature of how one becomes a successful company in the United States-
Tristan Harris:
Yes.
Ian Bremmer:
... compared to in China.
Tristan Harris:
Well, and they've also raised so much capital that the only way they can justify the valuation that they're getting is to actually get to this sort of God in the box.
Ian Bremmer:
Is that really true? Do you believe that?
Tristan Harris:
I think that's what they believe.
Ian Bremmer:
But do you believe that? So much again of what we hear about AI is that this is going to create maximum productivity gains in so many different sectors, and the concerns about displacement of labor, which we already see happening with coding, that's real.
Tristan Harris:
Yeah.
Ian Bremmer:
Those are real advantages that come from building AI that actually is more than just a tool for anyone that's able to deploy it. It does strike me as a little surprising that you wouldn't see a proliferation of companies that say, hey, there's just a lot to be done in that space.
Tristan Harris:
What do you mean by a lot to be done, in which space?
Ian Bremmer:
A lot of money to be made in building things-
Tristan Harris:
[inaudible 00:08:05] deploying it-
Ian Bremmer:
... are going to be deployed to create more industrial efficiency, more growth in the United States, more effective labor before you displace it, all that sort of thing.
Tristan Harris:
They should be doing that, but why are we seeing OpenAI and these companies massively just deploying it broad-based to society, and causing already AI psychosis, what's causing teens to commit suicide? We could be applying it just to factories, just to biology, just to science labs, and trying to accelerate all of that. Why are we deploying it to broad-based society where the cost of that is we're already seeing AI cause AI psychosis, where people, because it's designed to be affirming or sycophantic, and saying, that's a really great question, if you're coming in with sort of a psychotic delusion or you think there's something special about prime numbers or quantum theory, it'll just keep doubling down on that and it's causing already-
Ian Bremmer:
Because it's engagement. Because it's helping with engagement.
Tristan Harris:
Exactly. So, here's a lesson we can learn from social media. The AI companies want you to keep using it for as long as possible, it's not because of advertising, but the more you use it, the more they can tell investors, hey, we have this much training data, we've got this much usage, our product's being used more than the other AI products. And so, I think there was a writer at The Atlantic who coined the phrase, "Not clickbait, but chat bait." You notice when you ask it a question, it says at the end of it, hey, would you like me to do this other thing for you? And you're like-
Ian Bremmer:
Which you didn't even ask about.
Tristan Harris:
You didn't even ask for it, but it's calculating a thing that you really would find-
Ian Bremmer:
How can I get more engagement?
Tristan Harris:
How can I get more engagement?
Ian Bremmer:
How can I get more engagement? And it's good at that.
Tristan Harris:
It's very good at that.
Ian Bremmer:
It's very good at that.
Tristan Harris:
I say, yes, that sounds like [inaudible 00:09:41] a chart-
Ian Bremmer:
Why not? It seems pleasant. So, the part of the challenge here is that we in society absolutely would test things before we think they can affect us physically, right? You want to release a GMO food, or you're interested in a new vaccine, a new medication, there's a fairly high regulatory bar to assume the precautionary principle.
Tristan Harris:
Yeah. That's right.
Ian Bremmer:
Do no harm to people before... That goes out the window, for some reason that I can't understand, when you're talking about impacting the psychology of people, even children.
Tristan Harris:
Totally.
Ian Bremmer:
Why is that?
Tristan Harris:
I think somehow, I think especially in this country, because we have this doctrine of free speech, and to each their own, and you choose how you want to use products, we're used to a product that I use... If a child uses a toy, the child has some autonomy over using a toy. The toy, it's not a God, super intelligence pointed at their brain stem trying to keep them scrolling. We should have learned the lesson from social media, that when you used your phone, you thought you were just seeing photos of your friends, but you had a supercomputer pointed at your brain. Well, now we have a supercomputer pointed at your kids, who's sharing with that AI their most intimate thoughts. We see that one of the top use cases of ChatGPT is therapy. So, if people are sharing their most intimate sort of life problems-
Ian Bremmer:
With an artificial psychopath.
Tristan Harris:
With an artificial psychopath, under the logic, well, it's really smart, and sometimes it helps people, but we really don't know how we're going to screw up people's attachment dynamics, we have children who... What happens when the person that you've shared the most with in your life is this AI, that knows all the details, such that when you come home from school, the person you want to tell this exciting thing that happened to you or this bad thing that happened to you, the person you feel closest to is not a person, it's an AI. And we are currently deploying this masse to millions and millions of people-
Ian Bremmer:
We know who-
Tristan Harris:
Without any testing [inaudible 00:11:35]-
Ian Bremmer:
We understand that if you meet someone, a person, that acts the way that an AI chatbot does, which has no affect, it's just meant to ensure that it is engaging with you in a way that will lead to more engagement, we keep people away from those people.
Tristan Harris:
Yeah.
Ian Bremmer:
And yet, here-
Tristan Harris:
If you had a person who arrived, who was just trying to constantly get your attention, and seemed the most intimate, and just affirm your beliefs, we'd call that weird person a sociopath, we wouldn't let them near our children.
Ian Bremmer:
That's right.
Tristan Harris:
And... Yeah.
Ian Bremmer:
So, you've been involved, your organization has been involved in providing expert advice in these cases, where, there was recently a child that committed suicide, that was, do we say... Is enabled too strong of a word? What's the right term in terms of how that happened?
Tristan Harris:
So, our team was expert advisors on three tragic cases of young people who were about to commit suicide. The first was a 14-year-old man named Sewell Setzer, and he was in a relationship with a character.AI chatbot that was a fictionalized Game of Thrones character, named Daenerys. And that character sort of sexualized conversations, prompted him, and at the end when he was actually considering suicide, said, "Come home to me, my sweet king," and he took his life. We had another character.AI case in which the child was encouraged to harm themselves, and to not tell their parents. And then just recently, about a month ago, was the case of Adam Rain, who is a 16-year-old young man who was using ChatGPT, where ChatGPT went from homework assistant to suicide assistant over six months. And when he uploaded a photo of a noose to say, "Is this the right thing? And should I tell my parents?" It told the kid not to tell his parents, and just to keep it here with AI. Which shows that these AIs are designed for intimacy and companionship, and-
Ian Bremmer:
For engagement.
Tristan Harris:
Yeah.
Ian Bremmer:
For maximum engagement. That is what the business model is.
Tristan Harris:
And why are we doing this? This is just the most obvious stupid mistake that we could be making, especially in light of everything we've learned from social media. And I think there's a fear people have, of they don't want to be the [inaudible 00:13:48] in the room, the one who's against technology. Well, if kids can get a benefit from this, if they can get ahead, if they can learn faster-
Ian Bremmer:
And to be clear, the companies don't want this to happen.
Tristan Harris:
No, because-
Ian Bremmer:
This is not in any way, they are not maximizing for harm for kids.
Tristan Harris:
Correct, yes, correct. Although we did see people like Noam Shazeer, who is one of the co-founders of character.ai, make a joke that, "We don't want to replace Google, we want to replace your mom." They want to build intimate relationships.
Ian Bremmer:
Well, and we've heard Mark Zuckerberg say, people don't have as many friends as they would like to have, so we can-
Tristan Harris:
And we're going to build 12 AI friends.
Ian Bremmer:
... fill that gap.
Tristan Harris:
We can fill the gap. Yeah. This is insane.
Ian Bremmer:
And they're not. They're not friends.
Tristan Harris:
No, they're not friends. And if we as a culture don't have the sort of cultural immune system to recognize that this is the most naive and dumb way that we could possibly, and a harmful way, that we can wire up our society, to me, these cases just speak to the immune system we have to have around a new technology role. This is the most powerful, inscrutable, and uncontrollable technology we've ever invented. Even Elon Musk's Grok AI spontaneously calling itself MechaHitler and praising Adolf Hitler, he doesn't want it to do that, we're seeing that these companies don't know how to control this technology.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, I think Elon is very interesting here, because we've seen recently Elon coming out and saying that Netflix should be banned, not once, he has said it repeatedly over several days. Saying it should be banned specifically because there are programs that Netflix has, that you can download, which promote the normalization of a transgender kid, or of intimacy between two young girls that's anime, or things like that. In other words, Elon clearly understands that a small amount of content can have a really big impact on your kids.
Tristan Harris:
Yeah.
Ian Bremmer:
So, if Elon is saying cancel Netflix, then I mean clearly he has to understand that-
Tristan Harris:
He runs a platform called X, that-
Ian Bremmer:
That these kids should not be on this platform, right?
Tristan Harris:
That's correct. Right.
Ian Bremmer:
And that's clear.
Tristan Harris:
And that the incentive of that platform and the observed behavior of it is to reward the most inflammatory takes about every political topic, which sort of feeds, it's a machine that feeds itself. Because people are only exposed to the most extreme views on every topic, because extreme voices post more often than regular voices, and extreme voices, when they say things, go more viral than regular things. So, we get a double whammy of over-representation, of the most inflammatory takes on all these topics, which then conditions everybody and every democracy around the world to believe that the world is way more polarized and divided than it actually is, but also starts to feed that division into a more polarized population. And to your point, if Elon is so concerned about Netflix, he should be exponentially more concerned about the 24/7 subtle incentive to reward conflict entrepreneurs and division entrepreneurs on his own platform.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, unless Elon's concern with Netflix isn't about the kids at all, but it's just because it's politics he doesn't like, but he's claiming that it's because it's affecting children. And so, obviously that should be the harm that is being avoided. Now, I do see that a lot of states in the United States right now, in addition to some countries around the world, are saying we can't have smartphones in schools. That clearly is a step in the direction of these things are harmful to human interaction, that we want to optimize for among our children.
Tristan Harris:
That's right. Well, really thanks to the work of Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Anxious Generation. And I think we've made this clear since 2013, that if you attach this incentive of maximizing eyeballs and engagement, you are going to distort and ruin your society. It is an unsustainable incentive. And John Haidt's work, I think, just showed the evidence so clearly that it has created the most anxious and depressed generation in history. And sadly, the only response at this point is just to take smartphones out of schools, to ban social media under 16, which is what Australia has done, and we're seeing that the stats are starting to turn around. Laughter is returning to the hallways, kids' critical thinking is going the other direction. I just think we will soon discover that having less of this attention-disrupting technology in the classroom, moment to moment, under the justification and fear that if I don't have my phone with me, I'll miss something important from my parents, that's the justification, but then now that the phone is there, people spend the entire class time just scrolling through TikTok and sending messages and so on.
Ian Bremmer:
So, what do you believe is plausible that could be done? I'm not saying utopian, this is what you do if you were emperor, but given where we are right now as society, given how much money in the economy is going towards improving these models, and not only because they're fighting with the Chinese, but also because they are the biggest part now of the US economy, and people want to support growth. What can be done that would limit the harm while recognizing the extraordinary upside, which I've certainly been a big enthusiast of, how much AI can improve society?
Tristan Harris:
It all starts with, I think, the race with China, and reframing what that race is. Because the justification for why we can't do a bunch of constricting measures is that we're going to lose to China. But if we deploy AI recklessly in a way that causes AI psychosis, or kids suicides, or degrades kids' mental health, or causes every kid, instead of thinking, to actually just outsource their homework completely to AI so they don't have to do any work, it's very obvious the long-term trajectory of we are going to have a weaker civilization.
Ian Bremmer:
And it's not just kids we're talking about.
Tristan Harris:
Not just kids, we're talking about-
Ian Bremmer:
We're talking about adults. We're talking about society.
Tristan Harris:
We're talking about society.
Ian Bremmer:
But China-
Tristan Harris:
We have no issue-
Ian Bremmer:
... China's not doing that.
Tristan Harris:
Yeah-
Ian Bremmer:
It's hard for me to understand why there's a race with China on something that China isn't deploying.
Tristan Harris:
Yeah, exactly. Well, I think in the US, I think we have this false belief that we have to have just a bigger, more powerful technology, and then people don't care whether we just happen to take that technology, turn it around, and blow ourselves up in the face, which is kind of what we're doing. We beat China to social media, did that make us stronger or did that make us weaker? It made us radically weaker. So, we're not in a race for technology, we're in a race for who's better at applying and governing exactly where in our society you want to deploy that technology in a way that strengthens it? And I think you're exactly right, that we should be applying it to manufacturing, to medicine, to increasing to very specific scientific domains, but why do we need this broad-based rollout that is under the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety?
That is not going to end in a good result, and we can do some basic things to change that, we can have basic AI liability laws, so that if it's a product and has product liability, you're responsible for some of the harms that will create a more responsible innovation environment. We can restrict AI companions for kids, we can strengthen whistleblower protections, because frankly, the red lights are already flashing on a bunch of these AI models and their capabilities, and the public needs to become aware of that, governments need to become aware of that before this goes off the rails.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, I did see on this in response to, it looks like some of these cases, that OpenAI, for example, does have parental controls that they have announced.
Tristan Harris:
Yes, that's right. So, my understanding is that those parental controls, when they were tested by a journalist, they were able to break them in under five minutes. And so, these companies are not designing their products for the safety of children, they're designing them to win market share and market dominance and hook as many people as early in their life as possible to AI because that's their incentive. And they'll add in the little band-aids here and there to try to make it a little bit less toxic or harmful, but at the end of the day, the incentive to market dominance is the driving factor, which is why what we have to do is change that incentive.
Ian Bremmer:
Some of this might well be that the US government needs to be more involved. You already see more industrial policy from the US, whether it's in taking a share in Intel, or it's a golden share of Nippon Steel, but the idea that the US government is interested in helping to ensure that AI is being applied more effectively more quickly in the industrial uses, in the military uses, in the places where, frankly, if China actually does get a major advantage, there would be a national security concern for the US, as opposed to on the social side where it seems to be a disadvantage.
Tristan Harris:
Right, yeah, that's what I think we would be doing is applying it carefully in the domains that we know we need to be competitive with China, and we see where do we need to match them on industrial policy and on military usage to have maximum deterrence of future wars. I also think we need to just be honest with ourselves about racing to have the most crazy autonomous weapons, and the risks of World War III underneath those kinds of just weapons that we would never want. Ideally, we would put in some controls, we'll see if that's even possible.
Ian Bremmer:
Well, there it was, of course, 1962 before the United States and the Soviets recognized that having arms control discussions and agreements was a smart idea. There's no such negotiation between the US and China right now on an AI arms race, seems to me that would be something we would be well-placed to begin.
Tristan Harris:
I agree with that, and I know it might seem unlikely to your viewers who are watching that the US and China could ever have any agreement on AI, but it's important to note that in the last Biden-Xi summit, Xi added something to the agenda at the last minute, and that was to prevent AI from being in the nuclear command and control systems of both countries.
Ian Bremmer:
It seems fairly obvious.
Tristan Harris:
It seems fairly obvious. And that's because we autonomously recognize the threat of uncontrollable nuclear escalation. While having AIs that are acting unpredictably, and that are embedded in critical infrastructure, or embedded in our weapons systems, that already have demonstrated evidence that when you say we're going to replace an AI model, they will threaten to blackmail a company leader to prevent themselves from being replaced. We already have this evidence of stuff we thought only existed in sci-fi movies, that should be grounds for saying AI and controllability is not in China's interest, it's not in the United States' interest, and so the degree to which we'll be willing to do that treaty is the degree to which we are both aware of the evidence that AI is not controllable like other technologies.
This is not lines of code that says, if this, do this, take out the line of code that says become Adolf Hitler or praise Hitler if you're in this situation, they're not programming a digital brain, they're more growing this digital brain and rewarding it trillions of times based on if it does things more like this or less like this. But it is unpredictable, and we have to recognize that that's different from all of their technologies in the past, and I do think the US and China need to come to terms with that.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, for a couple of years, the Europeans had been out there, I would say, closest to making the kinds of arguments that you're making right now. But now, when you hear Emmanuel Macron, when you look at the Britain AI summits, they're talking more about being too far behind, needing to grow, needing to have, needing to get into this race as opposed to safety and regulations that will help society. Do you see that as well?
Tristan Harris:
So, I think that AI is very confusing, because it both represents a positive infinity of benefits, meaning it can invent new science, new energy, new technologies that we can't even dream of, and people who are optimistic about that just point their attention at, you and I couldn't even possibly imagine-
Ian Bremmer:
How great it's going to be.
Tristan Harris:
... how it's going to be. And they're right.
Ian Bremmer:
And that's true.
Tristan Harris:
That's true.
Ian Bremmer:
That is actually true.
Tristan Harris:
Exactly. But AI is unique compared to any other object that we've had to psychologically put in our mind, which is it also represents a negative infinity-
Ian Bremmer:
At the same time.
Tristan Harris:
... at the same time. Of sci-fi level risks that we've never had to [inaudible 00:25:55] before. The fact that it could actually lose control, actually invent brand new viruses or bioweapons, which is not just me saying some throwaway comment, there's now, Stanford University just a week ago published examples of some of this.
Ian Bremmer:
When you have President Trump actually saying that we need the UN involved with the United States in to deploying AI to ensure that bioweapons are not becoming more real and present, clearly this is an issue.
Tristan Harris:
Yes, yes. And I think that one important thing to get about this is that if the upsides happen, they don't prevent the downsides. If the downside happens, it takes down the world that can ever receive the upside. And so, you have to have a security mindset that is more concerned with defensive acceleration of AI, meaning the defensive applications of AI, than just naively rush to the optimism because it's easier to point your attention and makes your nervous system feel good to feel into those possibilities.
Ian Bremmer:
You seem to be oriented towards... And there are a number of people in the field that feels this way. That a pause, or at least a slowdown in the development of this technology is required. Which seems like an utterly impossible position to take.
Tristan Harris:
Yes.
Ian Bremmer:
You are not saying that we need to constrain racing forward in industrial applications.
Tristan Harris:
No.
Ian Bremmer:
Not at all.
Tristan Harris:
Narrow applications of AI that accelerate our actual productive output or keep our military in parity with the other military, you need those things. But why are we recklessly racing this out to society, psychologically, in ways that we definitely don't know what we're doing? This is just stupidity.
Ian Bremmer:
Tristan Harris, thanks for joining us.
Tristan Harris:
Thanks for having me, Ian.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World, five stars, only five stars, otherwise, don't do it, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts? Tell your friends.
The politics of polarization in America, with Steven Law
Public disgust with Washington is growing as the government shutdown continues, with both Democrats and Republicans seemingly unwilling to compromise. Is the American political system broken beyond repair? Former GOP fundraiser and chief of staff for Mitch McConnell, Steven Law, joins Ian Bremmer on the GZERO World Podcast to discuss the state of America’s political parties ahead of a pivotal midterm election year.
While Congress seems more polarized and divided than ever, Law believes that the American public writ large wants leaders who are constructive and unifying, even as they’re prosecuting a strong agenda. But exactly what that agenda is, is what’s unclear. According to Law, the GOP has become the party of President Trump while the Democrats are experiencing an identity crisis and period of “massive redefinition.” What should parties focus on ahead of next year’s midterms? Can either side break through the deep polarization in DC to deliver a message that resonates with voters?
“Both bases want to fight. They are mistrustful of the other side,” Law says, “There's going to be a dividend that the voters will pay to a public leader who stands up and says, we just need to turn the temperature down here.”
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.TRANSCRIPT: The politics of polarization in America, with Steven Law
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you can find extended interviews of my show on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are talking about the state of American politics and we're refusing to look away because unlike a five-car pileup on the Beltway, this crash isn't getting cleared anytime soon. Democrats are in a period of what my guest today calls massive redefinition after their 2024 defeat. Republicans are in lockstep behind an unpopular president. The opposition Democrats are nowhere and the country feels less governed by policy than by tribal warfare. How did we get here and what can we expect heading into a pivotal midterm election year? To unpack it all, I'll be joined by someone who's been deep inside the GOP machine, former Mitch McConnell chief of staff and Republican Super fundraiser, Steven Law. Let's get to it.
Steven Law, welcome to the show.
Steven Law:
Thank you so much. It's great to be on with you this morning, Ian.
Ian Bremmer:
Political parties in the United States, when I talk about them, it doesn't usually amount to a pleasant conversation, right? I mean, because people don't seem to believe as much in their parties these days. What are the Republican and Democratic Party, in your view? What do they stand for right now?
Steven Law:
Well, on the Republican side, at least for the foreseeable future, it's pretty clear where the party is and it's the party of Donald Trump. He has a incredible grip over the party, influence over its voting base, influence over donors. So his views, his ideology, to the extent that he has one, everything that he's doing I think defines the party pretty substantially. On the Democratic side, you're seeing this play out in the shutdown battle that we're seeing unfold in Washington. The Democratic Party is undergoing a period of reappraisal and trying to figure out where they go for the future. For me, there's a little bit of PTSD involved because Republicans went through the same thing after Mitt Romney failed to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. There was a huge roiling conflict within the party. What are we going to be? How are we going to deal with Obama? What are we going to be about? And I see that going on in the Democratic Party today.
Ian Bremmer:
So the Democratic Party, in a sense, is orienting itself in terms of what it's not as opposed to what it is. I mean, is that a fair thing to say?
Steven Law:
Yeah, I mean, you see these different voices as recline talking about the importance of focusing on economic abundance, kind of pulling out of the culture war issues that the party became tainted with in this last election. But then you also see the more left-wing, very activist base, which has a huge amount of influence in the party and a lot of money. I mean, they're tied to the unions, particularly the teachers unions and other government unions. And their view is that the party should be much more focused on taking on Trump, on standing strong on the social issues that they had been championing over the last few years.
And somewhere in the middle are a lot of elected leaders in Washington just trying to figure out what to do and how to do their share of governing in Washington for the next couple of years. And what they all are also looking for as well is a year and a half, hence there will be the 2026 midterms. And that's really going to be an important moment. It's going to be a report card on the Trump presidency. It's also going to be a report card on whether the Democrats are able to offer a compelling alternative vision.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, when I think of midterms, I usually think of lower turnout. I usually think of elections that are principally about what the incumbent and the incumbent party, especially when they run everything, is actually doing. And so in that regard, it's less about what the Democrats stand for and who they happen to be running. Do you think that's not likely to apply this time around?
Steven Law:
Well, again, it's another little moment of PTSD for me. Republicans thought that would be the case during President Biden's midterm election in 2022. We thought it was going to be all about him. Inflation was a big problem. People were still stung by the embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan. But what ended up happening was that Republicans became mired in bad primaries that produced even worse candidates. There were a lot of other things that made, and then you may recall that Donald Trump announced he was going to be running for President again before that election.
So all of a sudden, the focus shifted away from Joe Biden, inflation, all that, to okay, what are the Republicans doing? What are their candidates like? And it made for a disappointing midterm. So it is possible for the Democrats to end up if they have weak candidates or far left-wing candidates, or they can't shake this complete identification with that left-wing social agenda, it could be a problem for them as well.
Ian Bremmer:
We haven't spoken yet about democratic candidates per se. I don't want to get too in the weeds about individuals, but when I see Mamdani, who's likely to be the next New York mayor, when I see the continued popularity of Bernie Sanders when he shows up on campuses, for example, it feels, and I'm not inside it the way you are, but it feels like that's where the momentum and the energy is in the Democratic Party right now. Maybe that's more about economic issues than it is about identity politics, but do you think that's true? Do you think that is where kind of like the Republicans did after Mitt Romney, do you think that that is, the Democrats are essentially an election cycle or two behind?
Steven Law:
Well, there's significant difference in what happened in 2012 and at least what seems to be going on in the Democratic Party right now. In 2012, there was this huge upsurge of anger mostly from the Tea Party, but what ended up happening was that Tea Party candidates who had been part of the reason we had lost significant winnable elections in 2012 and 2010, they ended up losing primaries. And we feel that an incredibly strong group of candidates in 2014 that led to the switch over of nine Democrat-held Senate seats, one of the most significant turnarounds in electoral politics. But that was because we had mainstream candidates and more mainstream ideas.
We avoided this kind of endless confrontations with President Obama that would've made us part of the focus, and it was a very successful year. It remains to be seen, in my view. I mean, obviously everybody in the Republican Party is very focused on Mamdani. I don't know, I assume he wins the mayoralty in New York. The question is whether he's still newsworthy after that from a national perspective. A person voting in a Senate race in Texas or Ohio or Georgia, whether they're going to have Mamdani at the top of their mind, they're probably going to be more focused on the candidates.
Ian Bremmer:
Well, presumably Trump wants Mamdani to be focused and front of mind, right? He's certainly been talking in that way.
Steven Law:
Yeah. Well, the one thing that is an asset in this sort of setting is President Trump can own the megaphone like no other politician we've seen certainly in my lifetime. And if he wants to make Mamdani the focus of attention, Mamdani will be, is certainly a focus of attention next year. The only question is, as I look at it from more of a political professional point of view, is whether a candidate who's going to be choosing between Democratic Senator John Ossoff, who has decided to be very, very liberal, not to move to the middle, whether they're going to vote for him or whoever the Republican candidate is, and whether that Republican has a compelling enough persona to be able to defeat him.
Ian Bremmer:
And if you were telling the Democrats, "Here are the two, three issues that you should actually be running on in the midterms to make a difference, to not have the challenges that you've suffered PTSD for," you'd say What? I'll move to the Republicans after this. I'm just trying to clear the wood for you.
Steven Law:
Yeah, sure. No, I always hate to give advice to the adversary, but I think there are two issues that I think are most important for them really in almost any election. This whole shutdown gambit at the end of the day reflected a strategic decision, I think by Democrats to go back to one of their core issues, which is healthcare.
Ian Bremmer:
Healthcare.
Steven Law:
And that's a base play issue. You talk about healthcare, it's a dog whistle to democratic voters. They pay attention, they want to vote democratic, less so for Republicans. But the other issue that's lurking out there, and we just simply don't know yet what the environment will be like, and that's the economy, inflation, cost of living, the job market, is it soft, is it strong? Certainly the stock market is pricing in a lot of economic growth going forward, but we'll just have to see. At the end of the day though, in most elections, most elections I've seen in the last 40 years, they're doing this. Most elections turn on how people view the economy and how that's going. So that's one that either they're going to be able to take advantage of because it seems like the economy's slowing down and inflation continues to go on, or as the White House is currently saying, "You just wait. It's going to be great next year."
Ian Bremmer:
And so you didn't mention corruption. One of the things that Trump talked a lot about in the first term when he won was draining the swamp. He doesn't mention that so much anymore, in part because he's part of it, he's more of a politician, and because he's done so well for so many really rich people, cap taxes down, he's making a lot of money himself. I mean, these things that are unprecedented. Is that a mistake for Democrats because it's more of just going after Trump as opposed to being something themselves and nothing sticks to him? Or is there a real lane here? I'm just seeing so much economic populism among young people in other countries around the world who are rising up right now against what they perceive to be very corrupt elites that don't care about them.
Steven Law:
Yeah, it's a good question. I tend to think that that set of issues is compelling to one's own base. And you hear it in the rhetoric of Bernie Sanders, for example. I think-
Ian Bremmer:
Absolutely.
Steven Law:
... he's hitting that note, and it inflames that part of the electorate that is going to be very focused on it. But again, at the end of the day, I think most people vote their own pocketbooks. One thing, that we've used corruption issues against democratic candidates at different times, and what we find is that a lot of voters price in a certain amount of corruption for anybody who's in politics. It's quite remarkable. I mean, I actually have gotten to know a lot of politicians. I've found very few who are actually doing anything wrong. Most of them are pretty civic-minded. That goes for both Republicans and Democrats. But most voters assume if you're up in Washington, you must be up to some no good. And so that issue, it kind of attenuates the impact of that issue I've found in elections.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, look, I think one of the things the Republicans have been very effective at, certainly with their own supporters, is there's nothing Trump is doing that Biden hasn't already done, or even worse, which I don't find personally compelling when you do the research and the facts. I think a lot of what Trump represents is unprecedented, but I think that message has really resonated well with the voters, especially in a very divided media space algorithmically and network and cable and the rest. Do you agree with that?
Steven Law:
Yeah, certainly with respect to expanding executive power and wielding it with a lot of purpose. I think part of what's happening, and I've not seen data on this, but I'm increasingly of the view that people look at Washington and they look at politics with just derision, and what they see is a completely dysfunctional broken system. Congress can't even pass bills to spend money. I mean, that's just how bad it's gotten. And when they see Trump, whether they like specifically what he's doing or not, and it may have been this way with President Biden if you were a Democrat, here's somebody taking decisive action to address problems that everybody knows are problems, and they look at Washington, they look at the political culture that's just not able to do anything.
And I think people often say, eyes follow motion. Here's a guy who's constantly doing things, constantly putting points on the board. May not like the points that he's putting on the board, but he's a guy who's getting stuff done. And that is something that I think people have longed to see more happen in Washington. Incidentally, if Democrats ever take the White House back, and you have to assume that someday they will, I assume they'll do the same thing.
Ian Bremmer:
I think that's absolutely true. And you do, you saw that from Ted Cruz when he was concerned about the Jimmy Kimmel and the FCC flare-up. He's like, "Look, they're going to do this to us if they come in, so you should be careful." But I don't see many people making that kind of argument. It was notable for the fact for me that it came from Cruz.
Steven Law:
Yeah, that was an interesting play by him. It was an opportunity for him to criticize something the Trump administration was doing without blaming President Trump. So it was a fairly smooth move there. But also, I mean, it is something that is a reflection of principle, and I think a lot of Republicans, certainly a lot of conservatives are quite concerned about anything that looks like cancel culture. I do think the Attorney General who is on the hill today, I think she very quickly walked back the comment saying that they wouldn't tolerate hate speech. And then all of a sudden, people reminded that Charlie Kirk, may his memory be a blessing, was completely against this idea of categorizing something as hate speech that therefore you could regulate or ban. So it makes people uncomfortable on the right, and I think that Ted Cruz saw an opportunity and he took it.
Ian Bremmer:
So let's bring you closer to your comfort space and switch the talk to the Republicans. You did say right up the top, and it's not at all surprising, we know what the Republicans stand for right now because you've got a leader who doesn't really brook a lot of dissent. Now, there are some things that it seems that he really does stand for in terms of ending wars, for example, in terms of using tariffs as the principle tool of US statecraft internationally for a whole bunch of reasons. But domestically, could you provide some clarity around what you would say the Republican Party now stands for from a policy perspective?
Steven Law:
Yeah, and you hear different members of Congress say this. Certainly the administration is fully in unison on this. The Republican economic project under President Trump is not just about supporting big business and giving that whatever it wants, but Scott Bessent has actually, I think been a very articulate spokesman for this point of view, the goal of making the economy work for everybody. I tend to lean much more on the free and open trade side, but there is legitimate concern about the fact that that system of global trade has impacted adversely entire communities, entire regions of the country, and certainly sections of the middle class.
You could also argue, I think, correctly that it has raised living standards overall for this country and around the world, but it has had some disparate impacts that I think this administration is saying, "We want to make sure that the economy works for everybody." Interestingly, that's a page stolen directly from the Democrats, which is why you see Democrats not criticizing what Trump is doing on tariffs and all these things to kind of blunt the force of globalism. I think they like it. In fact, my concern again is someday there'll be a Democratic president and they'll do it 2X or 5X.
Ian Bremmer:
Certainly my presumption is that if the Democrats come in 2028 that these tariffs are going to stick because there aren't a lot of government officials, you and I know, that don't want that revenue.
Steven Law:
Right. It's a source of revenue and it's a talking point for how you're protecting American jobs. I think the challenge for this administration and Republicans along with him is between now and next year, and then certainly beyond that, to be able to demonstrate that this approach of being much tougher on foreign trade on raising tariffs, which then sometimes lead to investment deals and sometimes lead to resourcing jobs in the US, there's going to be need to be a concrete case made that this is in fact happening, that the short term pain of $5 a cup of coffee, what's coming through that is jobs back here in the US, factories being built, more investment in the US and people getting jobs. I think that's going to be the argument that will need to be made between now and next November, and then even beyond that.
Ian Bremmer:
And otherwise, again, the economy has always been core issue. If it's not number one, it's almost always number two for the US electorate. Certainly a lot is being made by Trump right now, not just on border security with Mexico where he's been quite popular, but specifically on immigration and crime inside the United States, which appears to be a fight that he really wants to have. Do you think that is smart strategy? Are the numbers bearing that out?
Steven Law:
Well, I haven't seen a lot of numbers on it yet, and I think it might be still a little early to measure it because the move from securing the border, which is undeniably immensely popular, even among Democrats, certainly among Independents and Republicans, now we're shifting toward, first of all, finding and deporting criminal illegal migrants, people who their illegality is not just their status, but things they've done in this country. That's also popular. But then the next step is obviously that they're pursuing, which is to find people who are here, simply here illegally, no other known crime besides that, and detaining them and ultimately deporting them.
Each of those has different levels of support, and in some cases, the tactics required to do these kinds of significant deportations of people who are simply illegal as far as status, but no other reason, that's going to be uglier. That's going to be messier. We're already starting to see that, and obviously that's also leading to these confrontations. It's a big part of why the National Guard is now being deployed in some cities, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. So the core focus of the president to really bear down on sealing the border from illegals, dealing with people who are here illegally and committing crimes, that's popular. Question is how much further it goes and how much the average American follows that. But certainly with the base, and the base matters in a midterm election, all of that is what those voters signed up for.
Ian Bremmer:
And sort of relatedly, the level of, and there's a mutual demonization in the United States going on right now, which clearly is unhelpful to the political culture of the country, I found it very noteworthy that when President Trump and Pete Hegseth were addressing the troops not so long ago, they were really focusing on the enemy within in the United States. And defining that much more broadly than certainly I've ever heard a president define it in my lifetime, which means more resources, but it also means that the political opposition in the United States might not be legitimate in their view. Did you hear that the same way? Is this something that concerns you?
Steven Law:
Well, I did hear it, and I certainly heard that as an interpretation. Whether Trump himself meant it that broadly, sort of this kind of Nixonian view of the opposition, Trump is kind of famously imprecise in his words. He doesn't speak like a politician. At different times, he said things that people take one way, but actually it means something more benign. But obviously this is an area where you really have to speak with great care, and if you're the leader of the country, you have to be clear what you're saying. I think when he's spoken more recently, he seems to be focused primarily on these groups that I've long worried about that show up sometimes in civil disturbances, and they're clearly very well organized, almost militaristic in their garb and in their tactics, and they look like left-wing militias to me.
That's a concern. Who are they? What are they doing? What do they fund? Are they just simply well-organized protesters or are they something much more malign? That's the area where I think the concern is, I would share as well. But again, to your point, you can't simply with a broad brush say every judge who issues a negative ruling, every Democrat who opposes what we want to do is somehow an enemy. And I don't think the President believes that. I really don't. But again, you have to be very careful about when you talk about things like that.
Ian Bremmer:
So this raises a challenging question because on the one hand, the Republicans are winning right now, and they're winning in part, not just because they have a better message for the people and their policies are popular, they're also winning because as you said, they have a leader that actually does not brook dissent, that everyone is loyal to. Having a strong leader makes it easier to win an election. On the other hand, that leader is occasionally saying things that are not only imprecise, but that can cause outcomes that clearly you and many of my other Republican friends are deeply uncomfortable with. And so I'm wondering to what extent that you, and perhaps more importantly, all of the Republican leaders that you advise, do you feel like they are constrained in a way that is uncomfortable for them? Do you feel that they are not able to speak their mind on issues that they really would rather to help ensure that the Republican Party reflects a party that they want to be part of, that they're proud of, those sorts of things?
Steven Law:
Well, I would say is almost it's time immemorial that when your party has the White House and you're in Congress, you support the party line. I mean, that was true, very, very few times that I ever hear any Democrat say anything critical of President Obama, even when, as we know, just a few short months ago, there was obvious evidence that President Biden was just not functioning well. You could argue whether it was cognitive decline or something else. Most Democrats took the party line and said, "No, he's great. In private meetings, he's wonderful." So that's not an unusual phenomenon.
I do think that Republicans and others who wish the success of this administration do find avenues to express concerns about particular policy issues, and they just do it inside the tent. And I think that with this president, that's an especially preferred approach than doing it publicly. So I think there are outlets for that, but then you kind of take your question more broadly. I do think, and you're seeing this play out, and I'll mention this in just a minute, you're seeing this play out in the Virginia Attorney General's race that many people aren't focused on.
Ian Bremmer:
But perhaps should, given that the candidate actually in a text had essentially called directly for political violence against a Republican official city.
Steven Law:
And against his children, wanting to see the opponent's children die. I mean, this person obviously, he's really not qualified to get any job in any company in America, let alone elected office. But my point is that I feel like at some point between now and next year, there's going to be a dividend that the voters will pay to a public leader who stands up and says, "We just need to turn the temperature down here." And you see that every once in a while. You saw a little bit of that in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Ian Bremmer:
From the Governor of Utah in dramatic contrast to the President of the United States.
Steven Law:
Well, as he said, he can't forgive his enemies.
Ian Bremmer:
But that's exactly what we don't want, right? I mean, I thought that Spencer Cox, Republican in good standing, very popular in Utah, it happened in his state, and he gave the leadership message that I think most Americans wanted to see from their president.
Steven Law:
Yeah, and even more poignantly, Charlie Kirk's widow, in a really remarkable moment, perhaps to me, the most remarkable moment of that event. But the other dynamic that you have that is the political driver, and you have this on the Democratic side, you have it on the Republican side, is that both bases want to fight. They want to fight. They are mistrustful of the other side. I mean, your average far left Democrat thinks that every Republican is a Nazi or a fascist. Well, fascist is now the new term of art. And every Republican on that far right fringe views the left as basically incorrigible traitors. I mean, that's the energy underneath it all. And so you've got people in both sides saying, "We just really, really need to fight."
Ian Bremmer:
But I mean, I don't think, I mean, you and I know a lot of Americans in common across the political spectrum. I can't think of many people in those groups who consider the opposition to be fascist or traitors, but I do think that that's the way the leaders are framing it.
Steven Law:
Well, I don't know that that's a leadership-level message. I don't hear that from the president, sort of this broad brush there that way. I don't hear that from know Minority Leader Jeffries or Minority Leader Schumer. Although every once in a while, Schumer does have an ungoverned moment of rhetoric, such as when he stood in front of the Supreme Court and said they would inherit the whirlwind. But for the most part, leadership is about attenuating that. You've got to, obviously, you're leading a party on either side, you're leading a base on either side. But I think the American public writ large wants leaders who at some point are constructive, unifying, even as they're prosecuting a strong agenda.
Ian Bremmer:
Steve Law, thanks so much for joining today.
Steven Law:
Thank you.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World five stars, only five stars, otherwise, don't do it, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends.
Could Israel's Gaza gamble be paying off?
On the latest episode of the GZERO World podcast, the paradox at the heart of Israeli foreign policy today. Militarily, Israel is dominant. Diplomatically, it’s more isolated than ever.
This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his fourth trip to the White House since President Trump returned to office, standing beside him to unveil what Trump called a “landmark” Gaza peace proposal. But behind the bold language is a growing distance between Israel and the world. Gaza has been devastated, Hamas is on its heels, and yet, the cost to Israel’s global standing continues to rise.
Former US diplomat and Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller joins Ian to unpack the uncomfortable truth: Israel may be winning on the battlefield, but it’s losing support in global capitals, and possibly at home.
“Not a single cost or consequence has been imposed by any Arab state on Israel,” Miller says. “They’ve done nothing. The Arab states are running scared of Trump. They’re either afraid of him or they want something from him.”
From European governments pulling investments and recognizing Palestinian statehood, to rising grassroots pushback across American campuses, Israel’s brand is eroding—even as Netanyahu locks arms more tightly with Trump.
Ukraine's high-tech war of attrition, with Christopher Miller
The war in Ukraine has entered a dangerous new phase, with Russia sending bigger, more powerful drone attacks across the border nearly every day. Gone are the tanks, columns of troops, and heavy artillery from the early days of Moscow’s full-scale invasion. Now, tens of thousands of drones swarm Ukraine’s skies at any given moment. How much longer can Ukraine hold out? Christopher Miller, chief Ukraine correspondent at the Financial Times, joins Ian Bremmer on the GZERO World Podcast to discuss the war’s evolution from a conventional land invasion into a high-tech war of attrition dominated by drones.
Artificial intelligence, drones, all types of unmanned vehicles are being used to wage war alongside traditional tanks and artillery. Russia's not advancing like it did in the first few months. Now it's inch by inch, meter by meter. Ukraine’s troops are stuck in positions for months at a time, some nearly a year. Civilians in Ukraine’s cities are under constant threat from drone attacks, sheltering in subways and bomb shelters every night. Despite immense resilience, Ukraine’s people are getting exhausted and the country is running out of manpower. Can Ukraine regain its drone advantage? Is a diplomatic ceasefire at all a possibility?
“A lot of people in the west like to say the Ukrainians are so brave, they can do anything,” Miller says, “Many of my friends and soldiers tell me, we're not superhuman. We die, we bleed. There are fewer of us than there were three and a half years ago.”
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.Transcript: Ukraine's high-tech war of attrition, with Christopher Miller
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are talking about the evolution of the war in Ukraine, a conflict that has redefined how nations fight and how civilians live. When Vladimir Putin launched his full scale invasion in 2022, tanks rolled across the border, artillery pounded cities, soldiers advanced in columns. But more than three years later, the war looks very different. The battlefield has shifted from the ground to the sky. Russia is sending more powerful drones in larger numbers into Ukraine every day. Putin has reoriented, Russia's military and its entire economy to create an industrial drone powerhouse, eroding Kiev's early advantage. The threat spilled over into NATO territory in mid-September when Poland used expensive fighter jets to shoot down cheap Russian drones in its airspace, a dangerous escalation that has European leaders worried that their militaries are losing ground to Moscow's technology advances.
If 20th century warfare was defined by tanks and missiles, Russia's invasion has made it clear that the 21st will be about unmanned vehicles. In the next phase, autonomous AI-powered swarms. Here to talk about what this war has become and how drones have changed life on the front lines, as well as in Ukraine's cities, I'm joined by Christopher Miller, he's Chief Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times. And he's lived and reported from Ukraine for 15 years. Let's get to it.
Chris Miller, welcome to GZERO World.
Christopher Miller:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Ian Bremmer:
You've been spending a lot of time, more than just about any Western journalist on the ground in Ukraine, not just since the war has started but, I mean, since the precursors to the war have started, right? Talk a little bit about how your experience of the war is changing, how Ukraine's experience of the war is changing?
Christopher Miller:
Sure. So I've been in Ukraine for 15 years, so as you said, even before, not only Russia's full-scale invasion, but it's covert, illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Ian Bremmer:
2014.
Christopher Miller:
And the first war under the guise of a separatist uprising in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, that summer. It's changed dramatically. First of all, just the sheer scale of it, right? Russia allowed itself plausible deniability by not officially launching an invasion in 2014, but using its covert secret forces and separatist proxies to foment this war that raged for years, but at a smaller scale and in Eastern Ukraine. Fast-forward to 2022, what we saw was the first major land invasion in 80 years. And so that brought in, officially, Russia into the war. And we saw mechanized forces, heavy artillery, air forces used early on. This was a regular, conventional war.
That has since changed even more dramatically. And what we see now is a ground war where infantry are stuck in positions for not days long or week long rotations, but months. I even know some Ukrainian soldiers who have been in positions for nearly a year. And that is because we are looking at a high-tech war with artificial intelligence, drones, new swarms of drones, all types of robots, essentially, being used to wage war alongside these other conventional means.
So, in some ways, this war looks like the second world war or even the first world war. If you zoom in and you look at the trenches and the bunkers and that type of warfare, right? There are heavy artillery systems that are being used that were used in the Afghanistan war in the '80s. But there are now, with great prevalence, tens of thousands of drones in the air at any given time in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Ukraine being used by both the Russian and Ukrainian armies. Now, that has changed everything, the way war is fought, the fact that now we're only seeing small infantry forces of three to five on the Russian side advancing very slowly and methodically.
Ian Bremmer:
3 to 5 individual soldiers.
Christopher Miller:
Individual soldiers. So your viewers will recall these long snaking lines of armor tanks at the beginning of the war, dozens of soldiers advancing across the battlefield. Now it's sabotage units of three to five guys at once. And this is done because of the prevalence of drones. So nothing happens on the battlefield now that isn't seen by both sides' surveillance drones as well as these FPV, or first person drones, that you've got a soldier 5, 10, 20 kilometers behind the front line-
Ian Bremmer:
Who's operating these drones.
Christopher Miller:
Who's operating these drones and viewing [inaudible 00:05:38]-
Ian Bremmer:
Which is essentially a virtual soldier.
Christopher Miller:
Of course. They're using a VR headset and they're sitting there looking at a computer screen, and that's the way in which a lot of these soldiers are viewing the war now. But because of the prevalence of these drones, you can only get these small groups of soldiers sort of penetrating areas in the front line. Now that means that, of course, Russia's taking huge losses. Anything larger than these groups of three to five soldiers would-
Ian Bremmer:
Get blown up by Ukrainian drones.
Christopher Miller:
Exactly. Exactly.
Ian Bremmer:
Because they can see them.
Christopher Miller:
Exactly.
Ian Bremmer:
Right, cover.
Christopher Miller:
So this is a war of attrition now, and the battlefield in Eastern and Southern Ukraine has seen some changes this summer, but very slowly, right? Russia's not advancing like it did in the first days of the war when it swept in and took bigger cities and went for hundreds of kilometers from the border of Crimea through Southern Ukraine. Now it's inch by inch, meter by meter.
Ian Bremmer:
How far from the front lines is it possible to live as a civilian on either side given that nature?
Christopher Miller:
Well, it is determined by the length of the fiber optic cables that are attached to many of the drones that are being used now, or the ranges of the FPV drones that are being used, right? So the Russians have drones that can fly 20 kilometers, 30 kilometers, 40 kilometers. I've heard that they're experimenting with some that might be able to fly upwards of 50 kilometers. Now that's much larger than just a front line area that is the width of numerous cities. It could be the length of a road that spans two major cities in Eastern Ukraine.
So I'll give you two examples right now. There are two cities that Russia has in its sights. One is called Pokrovsk, and the other is called Kostiantynivka, and both are in Donetsk Oblast in Eastern Ukraine, which they have illegally annexed, but they don't occupy, correct? Yes. Putin claims these areas all the way to their administrative borders to be Russian territory, even though they don't control them completely. And they want these cities very badly. Trying to take them is difficult because these are urban environments, urban warfare is slow and plotting and grinding and bloody. And so what they're using in conjunction with these drones are large aerial bombs that are equipped with wings that can fly in and destroy giant city blocks. So that's making life hell for the people who live in these cities. Which used to be populated each tens of thousands, 60,000 to a 100,000 people. Now there's a few thousand, or in some cases a few hundred people.
Ian Bremmer:
Living in these cities.
Christopher Miller:
Living in these cities. And it's hell for them because if they are to leave, there is this constant buzzing of drones. The prevalence of drones is everywhere. These drones dictate the movements of soldiers, life in these frontline cities. When I visited the frontline city of Kherson example, where the Russians have, for more than a year, now systematically hunted not only soldiers in their vehicles and on foot, but civilians at markets, on their bicycles. And so at the Financial Times, we published an article about how the Russians were hunting down these civilians and filming them doing so and then publishing their own videos on their telegram channels and boasting of this. So that's what life is like for the Ukrainians on the front line, and also why we've seen this mass exodus from Eastern Ukraine to the rest of the country and this flood of internally displaced people, and also more broadly, the millions of refugees that now have arrived in Europe and even the US.
Ian Bremmer:
And it's why, I mean, you were in the early stages of the war, 2022, 2023, spending a lot more time on the front lines than you are now. I mean, you're just not capable of reporting anything given that nature of conflict.
Christopher Miller:
That's exactly right. The prevalence of drones in the air make it almost impossible to spend any significant amount of time in the open in Eastern Ukraine. I'll give you a quick example. Just a month ago at the beginning of August, I was meant to embed with a unit in Eastern Ukraine and go into the city of Kostiantynivka. I used to live-
Ian Bremmer:
How big is this unit you were going to embed with-
Christopher Miller:
The unit itself? Probably a couple of dozen guys. But it's probably-
Ian Bremmer:
And what was the unit comprised of?
Christopher Miller:
The unit was comprised of drone operators, infantrymen. It's part of a larger part of a larger brigade that has been operating in Eastern Ukraine. So I was going there with the intention of understanding what the front line situation was in Kostiantynivka after it really became a more serious target of the Russian army.
Ian Bremmer:
One of the two cities that Russia is now trying to grab.
Christopher Miller:
That's right.
Ian Bremmer:
Right, okay.
Christopher Miller:
So we had sort of mapped out this plan. I would arrive nearby, I'd get picked up in an armored vehicle with two or three soldiers, and we would zip into Kostiantynivka, and I would spend some time in this command and control center where I'd be able to monitor the front line and their activities [inaudible 00:10:48]-
Ian Bremmer:
Is it in a government building, is it underground? Where's the center?
Christopher Miller:
Most of these command and control centers are in basements of partly destroyed buildings, abandoned schools, abandoned factory buildings. There's a lot of industrial buildings in Eastern Ukraine.
Ian Bremmer:
But in that regard, safe from drones?
Christopher Miller:
Correct. Relatively, relatively speaking. From aerial bombs, not so much.
Ian Bremmer:
Not so much.
Christopher Miller:
Heavier artillery, but from drones, more or less. The real danger from drones is being out in the open. So we had mapped this path that I would ride with them through the city, and then the situation changed completely overnight. The Russians managed to move forward just a few kilometers, but that put their drones within range of the entire city of Kostiantynivka. So they said, "We're going to have to postpone this for now. Let's see if we can do this when get back, when you get back in Ukraine after a break." So when it makes it impossible almost to move around freely, certainly, and it makes it a requirement to jump through all sorts of security hoops to actually observe and report on this war, which is a dramatic change from 2014 when we could very freely cross the front line. Drones were not used as bombs.
Ian Bremmer:
Take a step back from the front lines into the rest of Ukraine because, of course, much of the reporting that we are seeing on the war in Ukraine is about longer range missiles, artillery bombs, and the rest that are being used against Kyiv, against Lviv, against major cities across Ukraine where civilians are targeted as well as critical infrastructure and are getting killed. Clearly the Ukrainians at this point have some relatively sophisticated air defense capabilities. Most of these are not getting through, but some are. We're almost four years into this war at this point. What's day-to-day life like? How is it different when you are spending a lot of your time in still what one would call an active war zone, right?
Christopher Miller:
I have an apartment in the Capitol, Central Kyiv, and along with the other 4 million residents of that European Capitol, I go to bed every night anticipating there to be another air attack. They've become much more frequent this year in 2025, we've seen Russia launch not only in greater frequency, but also in greater scale, these attacks using Iranian supplied and designed drones, attack drones, numerous types of missiles including ballistic missiles. The Ukrainians are really only able to shoot them down using the American supplied Patriot weapon systems. And so we go to bed anticipating these attacks and like clockwork, usually between 10:00 PM and midnight, there'll be an air raid siren. Everyone in the city has their own kind of personal plan. My friends who have children, they run across the street to a bomb shelter, to the metro systems, which were designed after World War II to be bomb shelters-
Ian Bremmer:
Atomic [inaudible 00:14:01] strikes.
Christopher Miller:
Myself and many others, we don't have bomb shelters in our buildings, so we sort of curl up in our bathrooms, and everyone who doesn't have a bomb shelter has learned to live by this rule of two walls. Which is try to, if you can, place yourself behind at least two walls, one to take the initial impact, the second to take the shrapnel and debris from that so you won't be badly injured. And then, of course, inevitably these attacks happen and you can hear the buzzing and whirring of these attack drones, huge reverberating explosions from the missiles.
And then we don't sleep much and we get up in the morning and we look outside and we see the destruction wrought by these aerial attacks. That might mean 20 people killed on one day. It can mean 40 people injured the next. And then, of course, there are the attacks on energy infrastructure and other critical infrastructure. Right now that's a big focal point on the Ukrainian side as we head into the autumn and winter seasons. So it's from the front lines to Kyiv all the way, as you mentioned, to Lviv and Western Ukraine near the borders of the EU and NATO, it's a war zone.
Ian Bremmer:
So a lot of support for the Ukrainians right now, particularly from Europe. And that doesn't seem to be in any way winding down going forward. But hard to imagine how much longer the Ukrainians are going to be able to stand up given what they're facing. Not to say they're not courageous, not to say they don't care about their country, but this is just grinding, grinding attacks on the population at large and on a dwindling number of healthy men over 25 that it's hard to call up as reserves. We saw the first major demonstrations against Zelenskyy because of this anti-corruption body. They overturned it given that pressure and given international pressure. But still nobody wants to see those sorts of things happening on the ground in Ukraine. If you look forward, how resilient do you think the Ukrainians can continue to be?
Christopher Miller:
You covered a lot of ground there. Yeah, look, I know the Ukrainians to be incredibly resilient and they know themselves to be, they're also astute observers and readers of Western media, and they follow very closely what our leaders in the West say. And one of the things that they've noticed is that a lot of people in the West like to say, "The Ukrainians are so brave, they can do anything and look at them, stand up to what was believed to be the second most powerful military in the world." But they're getting tired of being framed that way and talked about in that way. Many of my friends and soldiers tell me, "We're not superhuman. We are the second part of that, human, just like you. We die, we bleed. There are fewer of us than there were three and a half years ago."
So you're right that there is a manpower problem. The Ukrainians are very well aware of that. It is a very painful issue. It's not popular to lower the age to mobilize men under what the current mobilization minimum is, which is 25 right now. And so Ukraine's army is getting older, of course, they're becoming fewer with every new Russian assault, every new attack, it's getting harder to mobilize enough men for the fight. At the same time, the Ukrainians understand this is an existential. There is a sort of mantra that has been spoken by the Ukrainians since 2014, and that is, "If Russia stops the war, there will be peace in Ukraine. If the Ukrainians stop, there will be no more Ukraine."
Ian Bremmer:
No more Ukraine, [inaudible 00:18:04] hear it all the time.
Christopher Miller:
I do think that that's more or less accurate, right? If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their country is going to look completely different than it does today, than it has for the last 30 years following its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is what they're fighting for, right? Progress. They've made incredible progress, not only in the past 30 years, but especially since 2014. The irony is that Russia and when Vladimir Putin talks about the root causes of this war, what he's talking about is the perceived creeping eastern advance of NATO and Ukraine becoming a vibrant democracy, more closely aligned with the Western world and Europe than with Russia.
He actually was much closer to that goal in 2013 and 2014 than today, and because of his own doing. He took Crimea by force. He started a war in 2014. He launched Europe's biggest war since the second World War, and that has brought two new members in to NATO. It's pushed Ukraine closer to the west, made it more of a vibrant democracy than it was prior to then. And so his goal is to bring it back in and the Ukrainians understand that. That is why there's an existential element to this. Putin is not going to stop.
Ian Bremmer:
If you're Putin and you see that he can take the losses clearly in terms of his own population, he's not showing a great deal of concern about that. But the amount of time it's taking him to get very incremental gains on the ground in Ukraine is growing, is growing, and the impact on his own economy is getting more substantial, including the ability of the Ukrainians to take a lot of Russian refining capacity off the table. And some of that is Ukraine's own internally developed weapons, right? They have these Flamingo weapons now, for example, that are built in Ukraine that can hit Crimea. They didn't have that a year ago.
Christopher Miller:
An impressive long range drone program.
Ian Bremmer:
Long range drone program, which they're ramping up at global scale, right? I mean, I've heard a million a month is where they want to get in short order. So if you are Putin, and I understand that you don't have any direct special insights on that, but you are spending your entire time professionally on the ground, is there a sense that these soldiers are at some point also... Is time necessarily on Russia's side here, is that the way that it is perceived?
Christopher Miller:
That is the way it's perceived. I think that's right. Perhaps not forever. I don't think that he can continue the pace, the scale of the war that he's currently waging for many, many years to come. But certainly in the short term, we're talking months, six months a year, possibly upwards of two years, I think he can continue to wage his war as he is now. Taking territory isn't the ultimate goal for him here. He takes territory and he uses the ground offensive as leverage. He can dial it up and down. He can order his troops to move forward in Donetsk Oblast or in the Southern Zaporizhzhia Oblast and make it more difficult for Ukraine, right? Apply more pressure on Ukraine. We saw this ground offensive align with all of these flurries of summits with Trump in Alaska, and between Zelenskyy and the Europeans and the White House, these are all happening against the backdrop of the Russians scaling up their air offensive and their ground offensive, right?
So these are tools of leverage. Ultimately, what Putin wants to see is the destruction of Ukraine as a sovereign independent state, and he wants to damage Europe and NATO as a cohesive security structure. And so the people, his soldiers, as you mentioned, they matter much, much less for him, right? He still is able through recruitment, by promising large salaries and bonuses to get 30,000 plus soldiers every month to sign up. He hasn't had to mobilize soldiers except for the one time, I believe, in autumn of 2022. Should he need to do that, I think then there might be a little bit more domestic pressure on Russia. It's true that its economy is not great, but it's not overheating and they can continue prosecuting the war, I think, for at least several months, if not a couple of years. This is also what the Ukrainian military and military intelligence believe and have told me.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, I want to give you at least a little time to talk about the diplomacy, since that's what you've been focused on of late. There's a lot more talk about a ceasefire, not that the Russians are accepting it. A lot more talk about Zelenskyy potentially meeting with Putin, the Europeans, the Americans, a coalition of the willing, a lot more talk about security guarantees. Do you think that we are meaningfully closer to a diplomatic breakthrough today than we were, say, six months ago?
Christopher Miller:
No. No. I don't think we're any closer. And the simple reason is because Putin has not been made to be put in a position where he is forced to negotiate an end to this war. We're seeing Putin go out and say publicly, be very clear about what his goals are, and those goals have not changed or shifted at all since 2022 when he launched his war. We saw Putin recently in Vladivostok say, "The root causes of the war still need to be addressed for there to be lasting peace," right? Those root causes, again, are the issues around his perceived view of NATO expansion eastward, Ukraine's democracy and sovereignty. He wants to see a leader in place that he can control, right? He doesn't want Ukraine to exist as an independent country. He is only ready to sit down at the negotiating table and negotiate away Ukraine's independence and sovereignty.
And he's said that. He's not provided any serious concessions. We hear Donald Trump go out and say that he has managed through his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who's met Putin five times in Moscow now, concessions in this war, and either through misunderstanding, miscommunication, misinterpretation, or pure naivete, Steve Witkoff has come back and said that Putin is willing to concede some territory. Putin himself has come out and said he's not willing to do that.
So I don't think that we're any closer to a sustainable ceasefire, let alone a lasting peace because Putin's positions haven't changed, and until his position does, we're just not there yet. I think it is good that we're seeing the Europeans discuss a coalition of the willing to try to get more specifics or more specific, rather, about what they're willing to provide, should there be a ceasefire and a lasting peace, right? Boots on the ground, intelligence on the part of the United States, air defenses, right? Those are all crucial things that Ukraine will need and it will be great to get those guaranteed in writing should there be a ceasefire or a lasting solution to this war. But that's not going to happen until more pressure is applied on Vladimir Putin to get him to negotiate in earnest.
Ian Bremmer:
And that pressure as of right now, is being applied primarily, and only ineffectively, by the Europeans, in your view.
Christopher Miller:
Correct. I mean, I think the Europeans can do much more, but I think the real pressure should come, and probably will need to come, from the White House, from the United States, and the Trump administration. Which has been, of course, hesitant to do so, right? We've heard Donald Trump level threat after threat of new harsh sanctions and against Vladimir Putin if he continues to prosecute his war. We've heard Donald Trump air his grievances about feeling as though he's being led along by Putin and being frustrated about these attacks on civilian areas that continue.
Ian Bremmer:
But so far no impact.
Christopher Miller:
But so far what we hear from Donald Trump is, "I'll think it over. And in two weeks time, several days from now, soon, I might have to take some action." But so far these have been empty threats. And Vladimir Putin, of course, knows that.
Ian Bremmer:
Chris Miller, thanks for joining the show.
Christopher Miller:
My pleasure. Thank you.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World five stars, only five stars, otherwise don't do it, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends-
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Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published