Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Fareed Zakaria:

The revolution we’re in right now is happening much faster. So think about the digital revolution. We have basically replaced the economy of atoms with an economy of bits and bytes.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Fareed Zakaria. He’s a long-time political commentator, an expert on both domestic and global politics. Zakaria has hosted CNN‘s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” since 2008 and writes a foreign affairs column for the Washington Post. Drawing on his deep knowledge of politics and history, Zakaria has written a new book called Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. In it, he explores a number of revolutionary periods and the people who made them from early Dutch inventors to French uprisers to American coal workers. We talk about the past and how it might help us make sense of our current revolutionary moment in politics and culture, from Trump to AI. And we cover a bit of pressing global news too. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now let’s get to your questions.

This question comes in an email from Michal who writes, “Can the 11th Circuit remove Judge Cannon on its own, in other words, without the special counsel’s request?”

So that’s a very interesting question. Of course, you’re referring to Judge Eileen Cannon, who has been the judge presiding over the Mar-a-Lago documents case, the criminal case against Donald Trump in federal court in Florida. She’s come under attack from a wide variety of experts and legal commentators for ruling unduly unfavorably in favor of Donald Trump on at least a couple of occasions, and has had her rulings reversed at least twice by the 11th Circuit. But can the 11th Circuit remove Judge Cannon on its own? The short answer to your question is no. I don’t see of a mechanism or a precedent for a Circuit Court of appeals without any action pending before it, without any appeal pending before it, request pending before it to just on its own constitute a panel to remove a sitting federal district court judge from a case.

So the odds of that happening here are pretty much zero. I will say however, it is not unprecedented for a Circuit Court of appeals while hearing an appeal with respect to a district court judge’s judgment, even without hearing or receiving a request for removal of the judge, disqualification of the judge, sometimes cannot on its own, as lawyers say sua sponte, reassigned the matter to a different judge. It’s rare, it’s unusual, people will criticize it, but it has happened.

For example, notably about a decade ago, there was a judge in the Southern District of New York, Judge Scheindlin, who had ruled in a matter relating to New York stop-and-frisk policy. She had ruled that it had violated various constitutional rights. So in that case, the city had moved in the district court to stay the remedy proposed an imposed by the judge. The stay was denied and so the city went to the Second Circuit to appeal the denial of the stay. And the Second Circuit, without being asked to by the parties, did a very unusual thing relating directly to your question.

The Second Circuit removed Judge Scheindlin and reassigned the case to a different judge. No party had asked for it. What was the Second Circuit’s reasoning? Well, apparently Judge Scheindlin during the pendency of the case before her had made some comments, had given some interviews to the press, including to the New Yorker, to the AP and the New York Law Journal, and the court decided on its own that Judge Scheindlin’s “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” So they decided on their own, given the state of affairs without any request by anyone in the case, to remove the judge.

So going back to your original question, I think they can’t do it on their own unless there’s something pending before them. If there is something pending before them, I guess it’s possible there’s a precedent for it. It still seems very unlikely that she would be removed and the case be reassigned without the request of the special counsel.

This question comes in an email from Paris who asks, “Preet, what do you make of the judge in Manhattan’s decision to start the trial on April 15th? And do you think it’ll go on April 15th?”

Well, the short answer to your question is I think it will. But just as a reminder to folks, you’ll recall that the trial was supposed to begin this week. Jury selection was slated to start on Monday, March 25th, and that all got thrown into turmoil when there was a controversy about the receipt and belated production according to the Trump lawyers of certain documents that had been in the possession of the Southern District of New York. Remember Michael Cohen, who is an important witness at the Manhattan DA’s trial who’s coming up, was also prosecuted separately with respect to some of these or most of these same facts by my former office, the Southern District of New York.

So Alvin Bragg’s office in due course last year requested a number of documents relating to Michael Cohen in that case and any facts that had been developed. Only a subset of what was requested was provided by the Southern district to the Manhattan DA, and that subset was provided to defense counsel for Donald Trump. Meanwhile, earlier this year in 2024, the Donald Trump team again sought some of these documents from the Southern district of New York, and this time there was a larger production that was made. There is a dispute about how voluminous those documents were. There’s a dispute about how many of them are relevant. The Manhattan DA’s office credibly says there are very few of them. It should not have resulted in an undue delay of trial, but they were arguably feeling a bit generous. And they said they would consent to an adjournment of 30 days, not the 90 days requested by Trump’s counsel.

Now a lot of legal experts and commentators have been arguing and debating and discussing back and forth who was to blame for this hiccup in the trial schedule. And the judge, Judge Merchan, made very, very clear that blame could not be laid at the feet of the Manhattan DA’s office. In fact, the judge, in the wake of arguments by Todd Blanche and other Trump lawyers who were literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office of misconduct, the judge had this to say, “You were literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct and you don’t have a single case citation to support that allegation that the US attorney’s office is under the DA’s control.” The judge, elsewhere in a fairly contentious proceeding, said the DA’s office “is not at fault for the late production of documents from the US attorney’s office. The court finds that the people have complied and continue to comply with their discovery obligations.”

So I think it’s just important as we’re all going to be focusing on and watching the trial very, very closely, watching every move made, every re counter move made, that the record is clear that on this score, at least the judge believes, and I think reasonably and understandably incredibly believes, that the Manhattan DA’s office has done the right thing, has not been dilatory, and has not violated its discovery obligations.

As the April 15th date, as Joyce Vance and I discussed on the CAFE Insider podcast this week, I think it’s very, very likely to go, but you sort of never know in situations like this. We all thought it was going to go on March 25th and then these documents appeared and that caused a hiccup, as I said, in the trial schedule.

One gambit that we had been discussing for a long time that I think is unlikely, but it’s a possibility, you never know because I think Trump is going to be compelled to try to throw one or more Hail Mary passes to get the trial delayed past the election. Remember, there are delays in all the other three trials that are very significant and will have the likely effect of pushing those trials, those other three trials past the election. There’s the whole Fani Willis romantic relationship sideshow in Georgia, there’s the slow-moving Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida, and then there’s the Supreme Court issue on absolute immunity being pressed by the Trump folks in the January 6th trial in Washington DC. So it’s reasonably predictable that the only trial that has a decent chance of going to trial and concluding before the election of 2024 is this one in Manhattan that we’ve been talking about.

And so if Donald Trump can figure out a way to push this trial, he may think he has an ability to save himself. And so that gambit that Joyce and I have been discussing and hypothesizing about is one in which Donald Trump decides on the eve of this trial, which is now, that he’s not satisfied with counsel, he doesn’t like the way Todd Blanche and the others have been defending him in court. He decides to fire them and then makes an application to the court for an adjournment of the trial because he needs counsel of his own choosing, he needs satisfactory counsel that he likes and can work with. And then in that scenario, there’s a bit of conundrum for the judge because there’s a tension between being played and being a victim of a gambit, a cynical gambit by the defendant versus a general principle that defendants are entitled to attorneys of their choice.

There may be other frivolous motions and attempts to appeal denials those motions that maybe I can’t foresee at this moment. The one thing I know will be true is that there will be an effort to move the trial past April. I still think based on everything I know right now that they won’t succeed and trial will proceed on tax day.

This is a question that came in an email from Sam. It’s a rather long but thoughtful question. “Hi, Preet. Two of the big themes of your pod are democracy and, especially recently, artificial intelligence. I’m interested in your thoughts on the relationship between the two. Your recent guest, Vinod Khosla, seems to tell a straightforward story about technological innovation. It’s good. And maybe I buy that in terms of GDP growth or standard of living, but it seems to me that many of the technological advancements of the past 30 years have strained our democratic system, perhaps to the point of breaking. You’ve spent a good deal of time around both government types and entrepreneurial types. So my question is, do you think that the private sector folks are focused enough on the downstream cultural and political impacts of AI? Do you find yourself sympathizing more with the Silicon Valley innovators or the government regulators? Sorry for the long question. Big fan and longtime listener. Best, Sam.”

I should point out for the audience in full disclosure that Sam is a friend and former colleague of ours. He used to be an editorial producer on the podcast. He’s now in his first year at NYU Law School. So Sam, thanks for your question and I do appreciate that for a while you were a big fan and longtime listener because you were an employee of the podcast. I’m glad you’re still listening. So that is a long and complicated question, which deserves a long and complicated and more thoughtful answer than I can provide in just a minute or two.

My overall view is, that I think is shared by a lot of people, is that the promise of AI is that great, great benefit societal changing benefit is in the offing. I think it can have a democratizing effect. I think it can have an income equalizing effect. It can also have a great effect and wonderful consequences for science and medicine and even climate. I have a story about that at the end of the show, but there is also considerable risk, some say existential risk. But what’s different about this technological advancement, at least to my mind and some of the others we’ve heard about in the past and have had to cope with in the past since the beginning of the industrial age, is that a lot of the people, not just people generally, not just lay people, not just politicians, but the very people who are responsible for devising, developing, creating, and distributing this technology, artificial intelligence, themselves, appreciate and articulate the concerns about the very technology that they proselytize about and even make money on.

That I don’t remember happening in the past. It didn’t happen with coal, didn’t happen with the internet, it hasn’t happened with other technology. The people who were actually the greatest advocates of the technology, not all, but many of the greatest advocates of the technology also seem to embrace the idea of government regulators so that we can all prosper and benefit without being at risk for the worst possible outcome from the use of this technology. So that gives me hope.

And so I don’t really sympathize more with one side or the other. What I do sympathize with is the interest that I think reasonable people both in government and in industry have in making sure that we can exploit the greatest benefits of AI in the way that makes sense, is consistent with our values, is consistent with our democracy, is consistent with our constitution, and is consistent with our long-term survival on the planet. AI can do a lot to assure that survival both scientifically, medically, and many other ways. And so as long as I think we continue this dialogue, which by the way an example of that with my former boss, Majority Leader Senator Schumer, who convened a fairly extraordinary summit in Washington some months ago, bringing the giants of AI and also the leading lawmakers to talk about the ways in which maybe the question you’re asking could be answered, that gives me a great amount of hope.

Obviously, some of the issues relating to democracy, we considered on our AI mini-series, AI on trial. And it’s my view as I stated in the series, that the law will play an important role in making sure that AI is consistent with democracy and consistent with our values and consistent with the law. Among the issues we raise in the mini-series, what impact will AI have on how we deal with criminal law issues, criminal justice issues, intellectual property issues, and probably most pressingly and perhaps most directly related to your question about democracy, what is the adverse impact and the danger of AI in our elections with respect to misinformation and deep fakes? And that’s why we covered that in one of the episodes of the mini-series. So like all things, but I think most pressingly with respect to this, people of good faith and good intentions who are reasonable and open-minded, both to technology and to regulation, have to work through these issues. And that’s a reason why we spend so much time talking about them on this show.

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Fareed Zakaria.

THE INTERVIEW

How do you know if you’re living in a revolution? Political commentator and author Fareed Zakaria joins me to discuss the revolutions of past and present. Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.

Fareed Zakaria:

Thanks, Preet. A real pleasure.

Preet Bharara:

So it’s another year, another book. This one I think very relevant and important and thoughtful as are all your books. But this one in particular, I should tell folks who’re listening, it’s called Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. Let me ask you first a writerly question. As compared to your prior books, was this harder or easier to write?

Fareed Zakaria:

This is much harder. This is probably the hardest book that I’ve written. I started about 10 years ago because I started to notice that politics was changing. There was something going on that I picked up on, the weirdness of the Tea Party movement, which was essentially trying to take over and transform the Republican Party. The fact that Obama’s approval ratings were not tracking with the economy, which was getting better and better and his approval ratings were just not move. The fact that you were finding in the Republican Party voices that were fundamentally hostile to kind of the old Reagan formula of free trade, open markets, pro-immigration, all that made me realize there’s something big going on. And then I started to notice the same thing happening in Europe, the rise of forces that ended up leading to Brexit.

And so I’d begun to work on it and I wanted to ask myself, “What are the previous periods in history when we’ve gone through these kind of tremendous political upheavals?” And it took me back 400 years in history and I had to learn really all about those periods. And so it was enormously valuable and educational, but it was really hard. It’s the thing that I’ve been working on for the last 10 years quietly in the back room while I’ve been doing the show, the column. Every time I had a moment, I’d be like, “I got to understand what happened in the second half of the French Revolution better.”

Preet Bharara:

So let’s talk about a definition. Revolutions. How do you conceive of them? What does it mean for your purposes in your book as compared to how we ordinarily think about them? I think you suggest that you’re using the word in the ordinary meaning, but explain what that meaning is.

Fareed Zakaria:

Sure. So I use the word in the kind of normal political sense as you say, but there’s an original scientific sense in which revolution means the earth revolves around the sun, the moon revolves around the earth, a fixed movement, an orbit where the body returns to its original position, implying a certain kind of regularity and a predictable path.

In politics, it took on the opposite meaning in some ways, a radical break with the past. And that’s the fundamental sense in which I mean revolution, which is that politics has taken a fundamental break from the past. What I try to ask myself is, why did that happen in the past? Why is it happening now? And the basic thesis of the book is that every time you have had enormous technological and economic revolutions breaks with the past, you almost always end up with two things that happen afterwards. One is you get a kind of identity revolution, which is people start to reconceive of who they are in these new circumstances, and then a political revolution because the politics has to reorder once you have that sense of identity changing. And I guess then the final point, there’s always a backlash. There’s always a group of people who feel so disoriented by all this that in a sense they say, “Stop the world. I want to get off.”

Preet Bharara:

Is it possible to know in real time that a revolution of the sort that you’re describing is happening? Or do you need the remove of decades or centuries to know that?

Fareed Zakaria:

I think that in general, it’s harder to be able to tell that you’re actually living through one, partly because they often happen slowly, particularly if they’re economic and technologically driven. In our case, and this is one of the unusual elements of the world we are living in now, it is all happening so fast that I think we can see it happening. So to give you a sense, the Industrial Revolution really takes, which I cover in great detail in the book, it takes 150 years at some level to work its way through. The revolution we’re in right now is happening much faster. So think about the digital revolution. We have basically replaced the economy of atoms with an economy of bits and bytes. Within a few decades, the number of people using and going online has grown so substantially so fast. I don’t remember the numbers, but it took X number of years for a billion people to be using Google, and it was a much shorter period when they started using Facebook. And then of course ChatGPT got up to a hundred million users within a few days after it was released.

So that’s the kind of acceleration. If you look at globalization, it took decades and decades for the economies of Europe largely to get globalized in the late 18th century and then in the early 19th century. Whereas in our case between 1980 and 2000, you had an explosion of globalization. So it’s all happening much faster. So I think we can say accurately that we are living in revolutionary times. We don’t have to wait. It’s pretty obvious.

Preet Bharara:

You chose fundamentally three revolutions, the Dutch Revolution, the French Revolution, and as you’ve already mentioned, the Industrial Revolution. So the Industrial Revolution, that’s not a country. Why two countries and then something completely different?

Fareed Zakaria:

Because the Industrial Revolution was so big, I call it the mother of all revolutions. I could have called it the English Economic Revolution because it really does begin in Britain, but it spreads very quickly to the United States among other places, but also to places like Germany. But in each case, what happens is there are these big technological changes that allow one country to thrust ahead because it navigates those changes well.

So in the case of the Dutch, it’s the revolutions of the 17th century, which involve the [inaudible 00:20:53] ships, which really begins the modern process of globalization. The Dutch are able to go out to places like Indonesia and conquer it and trade with it. There’s also a kind of series of revolutions that take place at home where they’re able to innovate both in terms of political structures and economic structures, creating the first stock market, the first joint stock company, the Dutch East India Company, which is the largest company in the world at the time. And they become the richest country in the world, and they become the technological leaders of the world,.

The French Revolution, we know famously it was an effort by a whole bunch of political elites to radically transform French politics, get rid of the French monarchy, create a completely new democratic system.

And the Industrial Revolution, as I say, starts in Britain, but spread so far so fast that it’s better thought of as an almost global phenomenon. Though really when I say global, I mean European, or Western because it includes America.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s go in chronological order and let’s learn some of the history that you had to relearn or teach yourself. The Netherlands, small country, remains a small country, although it’s disproportionately wealthy and has a high standard of living as you point out in the book. But going back to 1600, what are the qualities that caused historically a nation to be powerful and have global reach? These days we think of the United States, and we’ll talk about the United States in more detail in a little bit, but it’s not shocking or surprising that a country that is large, that has a big population and a growing population and an abundance of natural resources is both wealthy and also powerful globally. How do you explain Netherlands?

Fareed Zakaria:

It’s a fascinating story. So you are absolutely right. And before the rise of the Netherlands, mostly people had always thought that the great powers of the world, the richest countries of the world were the great land empires. So of course, the Indias and Chinas, the Ottoman Empire. But also in Europe, Spain, France, these were the large countries. They had lots of big agricultural production. They had large estates, thousands of acres of land, and the king could extract all those resources. And when they went abroad, the early stages of globalization, it’s the Spanish and the Portuguese who go and they conquer go vast territories.

The Dutch is almost the opposite model. They were this small decentralized province of the Habsburg Empire that had no natural resources, that had very little arable land. But what that does, it’s a classic case of the trust fund kid versus the scrapping hustler. The Dutch were the hustlers, they realized they had to innovate or die. The decentralization allowed for competition. It allowed for different models. It allowed them to find a way to invent almost a kind of agriculture that worked for them because they needed to reclaim the land. In reclaiming the land, they had to create sort of democratic economic structures where everybody shared in the wealth because nobody owned it. There was no great landlord or Earl or Duke.

So you had a kind of series of radical innovations that take place that end up being really successful. And by 1650, the Netherlands is really the first modern country. It is the richest country in Europe. It is the most urbanized country in Europe. It is using the most advanced technology in the world. The per capita income in Amsterdam is probably five times that of Paris by then, which had previously been thought always to be the richest city in Europe. So they’ve managed to break through precisely because they have no resources, they had to hustle. They were totally decentralized. And all of that ended up far from hurting them, helping them.

Preet Bharara:

Right. But I guess my question is there were other islands and small countries and other underdogs as well that didn’t learn to hustle. Was there something about that time or that circumstance or the DNA of the folks there that caused them uniquely to be able to hustle so successfully?

Fareed Zakaria:

Yeah, now you’re asking a very big question, which is the kind of ultimate like, “Why them?” So part of it is that they really were more decentralized than almost any other place. They really had no choice but to… For example, the lack of arable land, it’s very unusual how little arable land they had. So they had to work together to reclaim the land and find innovative ways to use water so that they could fertilize it. They really were pressed.

Now, was there something about them that made it possible? Well, they were also going through the Protestant Reformation at the time. They adopted it more quickly and became nonconformist, skeptical, questioning. All of that helps with a kind of scientific worldview and a scientific mindset. But at some level, you’re asking a question that’s very hard to answer, which is why them and was there something in their DNA. There were a lot of structural factors that helped. But you’re right. There’s probably something in the culture that is more egalitarian, more questioning, more disrespectful of hierarchy. We have some of those elements that you see in the Dutch case in the United States by the way, which is the same geographical decentralization, the same Protestant kind of questioning of authority.

So there do seem to be some of these features that make a difference, but in some ways, Preet, you’re asking the ultimate question, which is, “But why did they have that questioning attitude? Why did they embrace Protestantism while others didn’t?” And that gets to be a very hard question.

Preet Bharara:

The next book.

Fareed Zakaria:

Was there something in the culture? Well, it’s actually unanswerable because you’re asking was there something in the soil that made the Dutch somewhat different?

Preet Bharara:

Does it have something to do with the fact that when we say, “Let’s go Dutch,” everyone pays his own way?

Fareed Zakaria:

So that phrase actually comes from that period. It was the British were always somewhat scornful of the Dutch. One of the things that they used to say about the Dutch was that they were miserly and cheap and things like that. And so that’s where the phrase come from actually, or really the 17th century.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s turn to the French Revolution, which I do with some trepidation because in college, the class that I got the worst grade in, that I performed the least well in my entire four years was a class in my freshman year, literally called the French Revolution.

Fareed Zakaria:

Well, this is a chance to do over.

Preet Bharara:

To redeem myself. So maybe I didn’t learn a lot in the class, but my recollection is, is that the French Revolution actually failed. Why does that rate one of the three major revolutions in your book given its failure?

Fareed Zakaria:

Because it helps me make an essential point about revolutions, particularly today when we think about this kind of thing, which is that what the French Revolution was, unlike the Dutch Revolution, which was a kind of bottom up revolution where these economic and technological forces are the fundamental drivers modernizing the country and it’s skillfully navigated by political elites who accommodate themselves and accelerate these changes. The French Revolution is actually the opposite. It’s not a bottom up revolution, it’s a top down revolution. France was not particularly modern as a society. It was a large agricultural country, very feudal in its economic structures, vast land ownership, very little by way of the kind of innovation that I was talking about in the Dutch case.

But the political elite, because the French monarchy was so incredibly brutal and produced so much inequality, the French political elite, or at least a part of it, decide they’re going to change the society. They’re going to get rid of the monarchy, they’re going to get rid of the entire aristocratic system, they’re going to get rid of the church. And they radically remake society from the top down essentially by issuing decrees and dictates and then enforcing them brutally with the guillotines and all that stuff that we think of when we think of the French Revolution.

And as you say correctly, Preet, this part you got right, by any measure, it fails because by the end of it, the whole thing, the society has kind of gone through huge convulsions, violence. The revolution eats itself. Half of the people are pitted against the other. And then the whole thing collapses because Napoleon takes over and declares himself emperor. So a revolution that was meant to get rid of the monarchy ends up with an emperor.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting when you talked about tech revolutions and then we’re seeing one potentially that we’re in right now. Given that the technology is arguably invented by, developed by elites, how exactly is technology, in your mind, something that spurs a bottom-up revolution as opposed to a top-down revolution?

Fareed Zakaria:

Because of the usage. Because it changes the way in which people live, the way they work, the way in which we communicate with one another. There’s a wonderful essay that Marc Andreessen wrote where he talked about how software is eating the world. I think it probably helps you best understand the scope of the tech revolution because what he’s really saying is the world used to run on hardware. That was the most important thing. It was physical objects, trains, automobiles, washing machines, cars, whatever it is. What he’s saying is what’s now happened is on top of all that, there is now a layer of software that actually controls all those things so that what’s the most important thing about the car now is that it’s a computer on wheels and that really everything is being run by that computer. So think about a Tesla. Increasingly, the hardware becomes subordinate and what really matters is the software.

So we’ve created a digital economy. And what that means is think about what that means in terms of employment. You may need many fewer people to build software on wheels than you needed when you had an old internal combustion engine. You are able to update and radically accelerate pace of change because I mean, I own a Tesla, basically every few months you get a software update that radically modernizes the car and gives it all these new features, which normally you would’ve had to go into a shop, it would sit there for months while they would tinker with it and put in a new whatever. All of that now happens seamlessly through bits and bytes which control the atoms.

Preet Bharara:

Is technology advancement, generally speaking, in history, democratizing? I’m trying to think of examples of technological advance that are not democratic or don’t create more egalitarian structures. Are there any?

Fareed Zakaria:

I think in general you’re 100% right that they have a tendency, because what they tend to do is they tend to empower individuals, they tend break hierarchies. But it’s important to remember that centralized authority also knows how to use technology and also finds ways to co-opt it. So if you think about the radio, the radio is fundamentally democratizing because it’s suddenly gives people all over the country, all over the world access to this stuff that used to be very hard to access, this radio programs are all over the America that people were able to listen to. But it does also give political leaders a way of communicating one to many that is very powerful, was used by FDR to sell the New Deal, but was also used by the Soviet Union to enforce a kind of George Orwell big brother type propaganda messaging.

So what often happens with technology is it does have a fundamentally democratizing aspect because it empowers ordinary people, but it can also be co-opted to be used by dictatorships to use to enforce certain kinds of hierarchies. And that was true with the radio, that was true with television, and it’s true with the internet. You can see it with the Chinese government. But if I were to say net-net, has the internet opened up China more than it’s closed it down? I would say yes. If you can compare China today to Mao’s China, it is much more open. People have much greater information, autonomy, freedom than they had in those days. But it’s also true the Chinese Communist Party knows how to use the internet very effectively to keep tabs on everyone.

Preet Bharara:

One area of technology that was central to the success of the Industrial Revolution you say unblinkingly, is coal. You write, “coal unlocked human potential in hundreds of different ways.” And you have this fascinating chart, that maybe you can describe because we’re audio only and not visual, that tracks world GDP over the last 2,000 years. Describe, notwithstanding the issues we have with coal today and the damage that hit his wrought, what good came of the invention of coal powered machinery?

Fareed Zakaria:

So to begin with, to explain, it’s really not just about coal. The Industrial Revolution was at its heart an energy revolution. It was the ability to find a way to use energy that could drive machines to do work that human beings and animals used to do on a vastly bigger scale. So that the first steam engine, within a few years, is able to do the same amount of work per hour, I think I have this right, as 13,000 horses. So that just gives you a sense of what that engine could pull was what 13,000 horses would pull. So I may have number wrong, but you see what I mean. It was vastly more than was ever conceivable by using human power, human strength or the strength of horses or cows. That was really the core of the Industrial Revolution, was this energy revolution. And it begins with coal and it then goes to other things, obviously to oil.

Now, to understand why the Industrial Revolution was so transformative, you’re right, that one graph is the most powerful way of explaining it. So it’s per capita GDP, taking the whole world aggregated over 2,000 years. It is basically a straight line, meaning per capita GDP does not increase for 1,750 years of that. So it’s just a line that goes straight. And then suddenly around the 18th century, you start… Well, it’s actually around the 17th century, it’s too small in that graph to see, but you see slight uptick in Holland then in Britain.

But what really happens in the 18th century is you see all of a sudden that straight line becomes a mountain. It suddenly goes way up and very fast if you think about the grand sweep of things. So suddenly you go from, roughly speaking, India and China and Europe we’re at 300 or $400 per capita GDP, and that moves up to 3,000 or $4,000 per capita GDP in 200 years in certainly in the west, and then the east start catching up. So it’s this dramatic rise in living conditions.

You have to understand what it means. Preet, you and I have a connection to India where 20 years ago you could go into rural India and you would see this kind of poverty, where people were still living in backbreaking medieval poverty. And what this increase in per capita income represents is people able to eat two meals a day, their children not dying of malnutrition.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Fareed Zakaria after this.

You’ve described, and I think you mentioned earlier in the interview, that one of the features of revolution and its effect is backlash. Describe what you mean by that and what those examples are and how we might see that play out if we’re in a current period of revolution as well.

Fareed Zakaria:

It’s a great question, Preet, because in this respect, it really is a case of history repeating itself and a pattern that’s going to sound very familiar to your viewers. So you could even look at it in the Dutch case, the first case of kind of rapid modernization, rapid advancement of technology, of globalization, a change in identity. The Dutch begin to think of themselves differently because they now think of themselves as Protestant, as Dutch, not as part of the Habsburg Empire, as modern, not backward. And that propels them to essentially break free of the Spanish Empire.

But inevitably, what starts to happen is there is a backlash. There are a bunch of people represented by a party in the Dutch political system that say, “Wait a minute. We’re going way too fast. We’re changing the way that we have lived. We’re upending our old traditional forms of life, our family structures. We’re getting rid of the nobility and the aristocracy that have long been an important part of our lives. We’re accepting that Jews and Catholics and everybody are welcome. We’re tolerating all this heresy and dissent,” and they start to argue for a return back to the good old days. They start to argue, There’s ways for us to get back to the greatness that the Dutch had before all these changes took place.”

And so what happens with these backlashes, it’s always preying on the anxiety, on the confusion on the sense that everything is changing and always promising a return to an imagined golden age that we have left. And fast-forward to Trump, and what does he said? Make America great again. It’s the again part that, again, like it was.

Preet Bharara:

Now it’s make America great again again.

Fareed Zakaria:

Exactly. Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

What features of the disruption or the revolution account for whether or not that backlash is small, minor or large and sustained and undoing?

Fareed Zakaria:

Oh boy, that’s a great question. I think that probably two things. One is the skill of the politicians involved on the side who are, let’s call it pro-change, who are pro-liberal democracy, the progressives. The extent to which they are able to navigate this, which often means navigating it with giving a little, understanding that these changes are very disruptive, that people are uncomfortable with so much change so fast. And what you see in the case of the Dutch and the English is they kind navigate pretty skillfully. There’s a certain amount of compromise. They don’t move too far too fast. If they do, they dial it back. So that’s one piece of it.

And the second I think is just how radical the political changes are. The French Revolution, they try to get rid of the monarchy, the aristocracy, the Catholic church, which is the central social institution in most people’s lives. Capitalism. They’re trying to do it all-

Preet Bharara:

All at once.

Fareed Zakaria:

… in five years. And that was just too much.

Preet Bharara:

So in some ways, I mean, it sounds like you’re saying, in fact, when we think about revolutions, we think about quick lightning strikes that in some way definitionally revolution is impossible because it takes time and it takes incrementalism and socializing of the ideas associated with the revolution for it to be sustainable. Is that fair?

Fareed Zakaria:

That’s exactly right. The message that I think I tried to do it gently and by showing rather than telling is that if you look at the modern world, what I would say to liberals is, “Time is on your side, history is on your side, but don’t overdo it. Don’t push too far too fast. Don’t think that every nifty idea, every nifty progressive idea that you have has to be enacted and you have to shame everybody into using the right words and phrases and pronouns and all that.” Just remember, this is a lot for people to take in terms of the changes to their lives.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned the modern era. I want to talk about some things in the recent past. I think 2008 is still considered the recent past. You point out, this is a passage that struck me about the 2008 financial crisis. You write, “At first, much of the frustration from the 2008 financial crisis reinvigorated the left, kicking off the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, for example, and enhancing the appeal of politicians like Bernie Sanders through his 2016 presidential bid.” But then you also write, “Ultimately, however, it was right-wing populists that proved most alluring to those disaffected with globalization.” That strikes me as a very important observation. Can you explain why that is and what lessons that has for us?

Fareed Zakaria:

It’s something that I’ve really grappled with and thought a lot about and talked to a lot of people. It was in a conversation with Tony Blair that it clarified things for me. Basically what happens is when you have periods of economic change that produce a lot of anxiety, what people end up doing is they don’t move left economically as much as they move right culturally. Because for them, for most people, the thing they’re experiencing is that their world is going away.

Think about a steel town in Ohio. Okay, the company, the steel plant goes away. Most of the time the data shows people do find other jobs. Maybe they have to cobble together two jobs or something like that, but incomes have not gone down. But what has completely changed is the structure of their basic life. So all of a sudden, the bowling leagues that they used to go to because it was all tied to the steel, those have gone away. The Kiwanis Club that they used to go has gone away. The hardware store has gone away because of Home Depot. Other kinds of stores have gone away because of Amazon. People go to church less often because they don’t gather, they don’t work in the same place. There isn’t the same peer pressure. The movie theaters they used to go to has gone away because of Netflix.

So what’s happened is you’ve had a kind of collapse of community and a collapse of the traditional way of their life, and they look at that and they say, “I want my life back. And I wondered back when there was that company, when we all went to the same church.” And so in that circumstance, they start to be deeply suspicious of all this change. The change that they can see most obviously is people. “Okay, there are all these different people who’ve come in and they speak differently and they look different and they worship different gods. And there are all these elites in New York and LA and San Francisco, they’re benefiting from all these changes, but I’m screwed.” And that leaves you with a much greater sense of cultural reactionary attitudes. You can see why that then makes you for-prey to somebody who says, “I’m going to make your town great again. I’m going to bring back steel. I’m going to bring back religion. I’m going to bring back community.”

Preet Bharara:

I mean, I think this is super important, interesting, especially for what it means for our politics. Going back to the financial crisis of 2008, explain to an intellectual liberal why it might be that the people who become disaffected, as you describe, will be less upset about the loss on their 401(k) from the crisis than from the loss of their community and the perceived loss of their culture. That doesn’t compute for intellectuals on the left. Can you explain it to them even in simpler terms?

Fareed Zakaria:

Yeah. It’s something that I think the left doesn’t want to completely understand and accept because so much of the left’s history has been tied up with the idea of helping people gain economic independence, gain economic strength, and it’s been an incredibly admirable thing that the left has done. And I would argue they have been incredibly successful at it. But the result of that, and we see this very clearly when you look at historical survey data, is that as people have gained some measure of economic security, economics becomes less and less the determinant of their political ideology. So that if you looked in 1945, people defined themselves by how much money they made and how they made it. If you were blue collar and you made less money, you voted left. If you were white collar and you made more money, you would voted right.

But what happens is, remember 1950 in America per capita GDP adjusted for inflation is $15,000. So as you move up and you start to achieve that basic level of economic decent lifestyle, your political identity begins to get shaped more and more by what Ronald Engelhardt, this great social scientist who did all the survey work, calls post material values, values that are about your self-expression, about you being a woman, about you being a minority, about you being of a certain national origin, of you being gay or lesbian or whatever it is. Those values start to shape your political identity more.

And so come the 2008 crisis, yes, people lost economically enormously. But we are not Bangladesh. You don’t have mass starvation on the streets in America. People’s experience day-to-day was not of mass starvation. What it was was of the collapse of their communities. It was of the sense that their world had disappeared. I don’t think I have this in the book, but I think I have it in a column somewhere. Steve Bannon once said to me that he thought 2008 was the signal event for creating right wing populism around the world because it destroyed people’s communities and it gave them a sense that the elites were being bailed out, but they were not, and that the elites were somehow able to ride this process and they were not. So it created the anti-elitism, and it created the sense of despair that “my life is forever changed.”

Preet Bharara:

But I’m confused about that, because in 2008, we had the financial crisis. It was not a depression. We had an actual depression that began in 1929, the after effects of which was a fairly radical turn towards progressivism and the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt, which were largely embraced. Was there a nascent conservative right-wing populism, I’m sure there was, in the wake of the New deal, but that was put out quickly. How do you explain the discrepancy between what… It sounds like you’re describing after 2008 versus 1929.

Fareed Zakaria:

So during the Great Depression, Preet, remember what I was saying about per capita GDP, if US per capita GDP was $15,000 in 1950, it was probably 8,000 or $9,000 in 1930. And then you have 30% unemployment, which means millions of people are out of jobs, and they are then literally starving. You’ve seen those pictures of the soup kitchens. You have thousands and thousands of people committing suicide because they literally couldn’t feed themselves and their families.

And that’s really the story of the 20th century where economics was important enough in people’s lives that it shaped politics. And yes, there was a right-wing reaction during the Great Depression, Father Coughlin and lots of that stuff, a lot of anti-Semitism. But the economic move left was more important than the political move right. What’s happened with 2008 is it’s the opposite. There was an important economic move left. Bernie Sanders did gain a lot of traction, but the larger response was the Tea Party. And there’s a wonderful study of the Tea Party, by the way, by Theda Skocpol, a professor at Yale who points out that while the Tea Party claimed it was about economics, when you actually did the analysis and you talked to them and you looked at every survey, it was fundamentally about race, about immigration, about culture. Those were the things they were really upset about.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to give you one more year. We talked about 2008. We’ve talked about 1929. My recollection is in 1992, Bill Clinton ran for successfully the presidency on the slogan from Jim Carville, which is, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Was it really about the economy? Because it sounds like what you’re saying is often it’s more about culture. Was it a false promise of trying to fix the economy? In other words, given all the things that we’re talking about here and that we’ve just discussed, reinterpret the “It’s the economy, stupid” slogan from Clinton in 1992.

Fareed Zakaria:

Really interesting question. So I think the 1990s represent in some ways the last period of that age when economics was still the defining feature. So Clinton was right, but Clinton being a brilliant, intuitive political operator himself instinctively understood he had to do one other very important thing, which is he had to convince the public that he was not a left-wing hippie, pot smoking, draft dodging that hit on culture. He was actually at least at the center, if not the right. So what does he do? He does the Sister Souljah speech. He talks about welfare reform. He does all these things to signal, “I’m actually quite conservative.”

One of my favorite examples of others with Clinton is school uniforms. You may remember he made a big deal early in his presidency about how he was going to go. It was very important that they have school uniforms.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, my gosh.

Fareed Zakaria:

Now, the President of the United States has almost nothing to do with what kind of clothes people in public schools wear in the United States. Public education is a state issue. Of all things the Feds would be involved in, what you wear to school is not going to be one of them. But he understood what he was signaling to people symbolically is, “I am an old-fashioned bourgeois guy with old-fashioned values. I believe in school uniforms.” And that was Clinton’s genius. He could do the stuff, the economic stuff, but he always knew that he had to culturally cover the base. Tony Blair did the same thing. The two most successful left-wing politicians of the last 30 or 40 years both have this quality. They always reassured people culturally that they were in the center, even maybe a little bit right of sector.

Preet Bharara:

It sounds like you’re saying in part, at least in those years, in the ’90s, that the path to success if you were a progressive was to argue the economy, but shore up your cultural flank.

Fareed Zakaria:

Correct. Correct.

Preet Bharara:

Now, let’s move forward to the current day with 2024. Does Joe Biden take a page from that book a little bit from 2020 and again in 2024? And if not, given what we’ve been talking about and how polarized we are and how there’s this intersection or divergence between what we think about economically and what we think about culturally, what’s the winning strategy in 2024? That’s a lot of questions, so take your pick.

Fareed Zakaria:

No, but it’s actually one big question you’re asking, which is, how should the left handle things at this moment? I think Biden at some level instinctively comes to this from this similar kind of mixture in the sense that he’s an old fashioned traditional guy. He doesn’t read as super woke. You get the sense of him as your old Irish uncle who is pretty old-fashioned in his ways. He’s tried to do a lot on the economy. I think that what he’ll find is, yeah, the economy stuff is good, it’s important, but he’s spending way more money on rural parts of the country, on non-college educated workforces who are all basically Trump voters. And he’s hoping that because of the infrastructure bill and the Chips Act and the IRA, the fact that all the spending is going to go to those areas, they’re going to all turn into Democrats. So far, the polling shows that that is not at all happening. I would suspect it won’t for precisely the reason I’m saying, that these working class, non-college educated, more religious, more white voters are voting on cultural issues.

So the one thing I would say to Biden is, you have to engage on the cultural issues, and you have to show in the way that Clinton and Blair did that you are a moderate. So you’ve got to be tougher on immigration, on illegal immigration. You’ve got to show that you understand that this is… Because some of it is symbolic, some of it is the reality of some of these communities around the border.

But the most important thing is you got to show that you get it. You’ve got to show that you understand that there may be excesses in the woke agenda with law and order in cities. He has not done what Clinton did with the Sister Souljah thing. He hasn’t done what Tony Blair did. Blair gave a famous speech where he said, “I want to be tough on crime, and I want to be tough on the causes of crime.” It was a very clever formulation because what he was trying to say is, “I’m going to be a law and order guy. I’m going to fund the police, but I’m also going to try and address the underlying conditions that lead to homelessness, that lead to…”

So Biden, and I think the reason is, he has a lot of very powerful left-wing… The left-wing base in the Democratic Party is more powerful, partly because of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, and they’re scared of upsetting that base. And I think that my fear is-

Preet Bharara:

You need them to turn out. You need them to vote.

Fareed Zakaria:

You need them to turn out, you need them to be enthusiastic. So it’s a difficult dilemma. But my fear is, that because he’s so worried about that, he isn’t attending to this issue. Because remember the people you’re trying to get, you know this, you’re to get a few hundred thousand people in the center in about five states. And to me, the danger is you’re trying to shore up your base, but you won’t get those a hundred thousand people or 200,000 people.

Preet Bharara:

It’s impossible to have you freed on the show and not talk about some things that are going on in the world so quickly. Two issues. First, in the last number of days, we’ve seen a terrible terrorist attack in Moscow for which ISIS has taken responsibility. Can you speak to what that means for Russia, what it means for Putin and how it may affect any dynamic between the US and Russia and/or the war?

Fareed Zakaria:

So in some ways, this is blowback for the Russians, and Putin in particular, having pursued a pretty savage policy toward any kind of Muslim areas in the former of Soviet Union, in Russia and his brutal prosecution of the Civil War in support of Bashar al-Assad. People now forget, but Russia and Iran where the two great allies of Assad as he butchered 500,000 people, 5 million people were displaced. It was essentially a war between Assad and a bunch of ISIS-like groups. So it was a very challenging war to want to pick a side, and that’s one of the things I give Barack Obama credit for, is keeping the United States out of that mess. But Putin jumped in on Assad’s side, and this is almost certainly blowback for that. But if you think of the Chechen War, if you think of what the Russians have been doing in Dagestan and places like that, they have been brutal. And it doesn’t surprise me it’s still an enormous amount of Islamic kind of militancy that’s directed toward Moscow.

What does it do to him? Look, his bargain with his people has been, “I’m a strong man. You have no liberties, but I will keep you safe.” That surely is that we at least eroded a certain amount by this terror attack. It’s also pretty clear that he was so focused on Ukraine that he didn’t pay attention, he didn’t pay attention to US intelligence warnings because in a sense, he wanted to claim that the US was just trying to destabilize Russia and throw him off guard.

So I think it’s all doesn’t look good for him. On the other hand, he runs a very tight police state with extreme force, and the Russians unfortunately are used to this and in a way I don’t think it will lead to much more. I think that what you’re likely to see is an even more severe crackdown in Russia. He has been blaming it on the Ukrainians in a kind of indirect way. Probably that’ll work because Russians don’t have that much information other than state propaganda. And at the end of the day, people when they get attacked, they do tend to trust authority. Think us after 9/11. And for all those reasons, I think at the end of the day it doesn’t have the effect of dislodging him in the way that people might hope.

Preet Bharara:

Is it fair to say that the sanctions really didn’t have the desired effect?

Fareed Zakaria:

Yeah, I think that they are making the Russians pay a price. Some of them are I think very useful and necessary like the technology sanctions. But I think the sanctions got two things wrong. First, when you have an oil producing state, the world just needs the energy too much for it to get banned, for the bans to be enforced. So just to understand, the West and the United States are not trying to get anybody to not buy Russian oil because if that were to happen, oil would go to $200 a barrel. There would be a recession in the whole world, including the United States. Support for the Ukraine War would totally collapse.

So the Biden administration, understanding these forces, has tried to create a mechanism where the Russians can sell their oil, but they have to sell it cheaper. And they’ve been pretty successful. But you know what? The Russians make so much oil. They produce so much oil that that’s still hundreds of billions of dollars going into the Russian coffers. So if you can’t stop that, you can’t stop the Russian state’s access to resources.

The second thing I think they got wrong, we all got wrong at some level, is the global economy is so large and so interconnected now that unless you get 100% compliance or close to that, it doesn’t mean nearly as much as you think it does. So what we did is we got a thousand Western businesses to get out of Russia, to upend their operations and go. Guess what happened? Those thousand businesses were bought by Indian and Chinese and Turkish and Indonesian and South African businesses and a lot of Russian businesses and at fire sale prices. So it was a transfer of assets from the west to Russia and India and China. And the trade between Russia and China, Russia and India, Russia and Turkey is booming. All those countries produce lots of the stuff that the Russians need, including computer chips, including the highest level of technology.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, Russia is surviving without Starbucks.

Fareed Zakaria:

And guess what’s happened to Starbucks? A Russian group bought it. Every Starbucks outlet is still serving exactly the same coffee except it’s called Star Coffee, not Starbucks.

Preet Bharara:

One more thing obviously I need to ask you about, and it’s the Middle East. You wrote a column not that long ago entitled, Biden needs to tell Israel some difficult truths. Only he can do it. What are those truths and why only him?

Fareed Zakaria:

I think only him because he has a long and honorable and intelligent record of supporting Israel. He has always understood that Israel is deeply threatened by a ring of Arab states that have wanted to eliminate it from 1948 onwards. He’s been supportive of them through thick and thin. But what he needs them to understand now is that they are massively overreacting to the terror attack that they experienced, and was a horrible, vicious terror attack. But that doesn’t give you license to do anything. I mean, Russia just faced a terrible terror attack. We would not be okay if Putin just went crazy and started to bomb vast densely populated parts of places that he thought the terror came out of. There is still a question of how you respond.

I think the Israelis are making a terrible mistake. Rumsfeld had a rule or a line that he said during the Iraq war and during the War on Terror after 9/11. He didn’t follow it himself, but I think it’s exactly the right one. “Are our actions creating more terrorists than we are killing?” And I would ask Israelis to seriously ask themselves, “You have destroyed 60% of all building infrastructure in Gaza. You have dispossessed basically 2 million people from their homes often multiple times. By most estimates they’ve killed tens of thousands of civilians. Do you think that in order to get at 15,000 Hamas militants, 20,000 Hamas militants, have you gotten that balance right or have you created a generation of highly radicalized, enraged Palestinians, both in Gaza but also in the West Bank? And have you created radicalized Arabs around the region so much so that whatever temporary gains you’re getting from killing these few militants will in the long run be overwhelmed by that reality, that reality of radicalization?” And I think the answer is overwhelmingly that they’ve gotten the balance wrong.

The Biden administration, to be fair to it, has been counseling them to have taken a very different approach from day one. They never put any teeth to their recommendations, so every recommendation they made was politely listened to by Bibi Netanyahu and rejected. They told him, “Don’t do a big round invasion. Don’t do in the South what you did in the north.” It’s time after a time they would make these recommendations that the Israelis would listen, take the money, take the weapons, and not listen to the advice. I think Biden needs to- and it’s for two reasons. One, it’s because it is costing the United States enormously in international prestige and in terms of our credibility. And secondly, it’s terrible for Israel long term. Israel is putting itself in a situation where it’s difficult to imagine how they can find a Palestinian… If they’ve had difficulty finding a Palestinian partner to make peace before, they’re going to find it 10 times harder now.

Preet Bharara:

What do you make of the recent comments by Senator Schumer, who is my former boss and also the highest ranking elected official who is Jewish in the nation’s history?

Chuck Schumer:

I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take the precedence over the best interests of Israel. It has become clear to me the Netanyahu Coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7th. I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel at a time when so many Israelis have lost their confidence in the vision and direction of their government.

Fareed Zakaria:

I thought they were incredibly brave and I think that people don’t recognize the extent to which they really did come from the heart. I don’t think there’s a political calculation as much as people think there is. Look, you can make the case that he might’ve benefited. You can also very easily make the case that this was a very dangerous thing. He will lose a lot of his core support, a lot of his biggest donors. I don’t think it was a calculation based on that. I think it’s a calculation based on somebody who has historically been deeply supportive of Israel and worries a lot that it will not be able to survive as a Jewish democracy if it keeps going down this path.

I do think it was done in consultation with the Biden administration. And I think the Biden team worked happy that he made that speech because in a way he was saying what Biden was not yet ready to say, but I think it’s a mistake in that respect. I think Biden should say what he wants to say himself. Don’t be a ventriloquist. Don’t have Chuck Schumer say what you want to say. You are the President, you should say it.

Preet Bharara:

I think we should end on that note. Don’t be a ventriloquist. Maybe that’s the title of the episode. Fareed Zakaria, thanks again so much for being on the show. Congratulations on the book. Very important one, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. Thank you so much.

Fareed Zakaria:

Such a pleasure to be on with you, Preet. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Fareed Zakaria continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, we discuss what Democrats can learn from the backlash politics of the past.

Fareed Zakaria:

There is a tendency to believe in a kind of positive fatalism, which is, “History is on our side. We’re going to win. We don’t need to do anything.”

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

I want to end the show this week by talking a little bit more about artificial intelligence, which we’ve been talking a lot about between the recent AI mini-series we did on Stay Tuned to last week’s episode with Vinod Khosla and a bit today with Fareed Zakaria. As he said in today’s episode, we’re in the midst of a massive technology revolution that can of course be scary in a lot of ways, but part of what also makes it exciting is reading stories that show a whole new way that AI can impact something for the better, like the story I came across this week in the Washington Post about recycling. It chronicles the way that Bollegraaf, the world’s largest recycling plant manufacturer, is teaming up with a new startup called Greyparrot, which uses AI to sort waste.

Many of you probably know, sorting is one of the biggest issues hindering efficient recycling programs. And you also, like so many Americans, have probably experienced recycling confusion yourself. “Can this plastic bag get recycled? Is this carton plastic or paper? How clean does this jar have to be before I recycle it?” Because of a range of issues, sorting being a big one, only about 5% of plastic gets recycled in the US. Right now, waste sorting technology is relatively basic. And when materials can’t be sorted correctly, they all become trash, heading to landfills or incinerators. But as it turns out, artificial intelligence can do a much better job.

Greyparrot’s waste analyzing technology can more accurately identify all different kinds of plastic, paper, food waste, metals, and non-recyclable materials. According to the post, Greyparrot sorts waste into 70 different categories. That’s a lot more than the couple of bins you may have in your kitchen. Experts predict the collaboration between Bollegraaf and Greyparrot will hugely transform the recycling industry as they seek to retrofit thousands of waste facilities with this technology. Technology like this makes me hopeful about all the ways we can use these developments for good. It’s true that programs like ChatGPT get all the buzz, but how about an AI garbage sorting tool that could massively impact our environment and infrastructure? I think that’s pretty cool.

If there are instances of technology being used for good that you’re excited about, I’d love to hear about them. Email them to me at letters@cafe.com.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Fareed Zakaria.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @preetbharara with the hashtag #askpreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer was Tamara Sepper, the technical director was David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai. The audio producer is Nat Weiner. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Jake Kaplan, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.