Preet Bharara:

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

Ian Bremmer:

The Chinese have the potential to overtake economically, but not militarily, not in the near future. The technology clash is the most significant place that there is, I think, a real difficulty, and there, I do think we’re heading towards a cold war in technology, in advanced technology.

Preet Bharara:

Frequent listeners of this podcast will recognize that voice. It’s Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of Eurasia Group, a political risk and research consulting firm. He also leads GZERO Media, a company focused on providing engaging coverage of international affairs. Ian not only holds the record for most guest appearances on Stay Tuned, he’s also a prolific author, with 11 books to his name. His latest is The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – and Our Response – Will Change the World. It’s a deep dive on the pandemic, climate change, and the revolution in artificial intelligence. We discuss all that, plus the intensifying competition between the US and China, and why Bremmer believes that we should all be paying more attention to quantum computing. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Before we get to your questions, I just want to repeat what I said on the Cafe Insider with Joyce Vance, just how horrible it is that we have this shooting tragedy in Buffalo, New York, as we put it, not a shooting tragedy, but a racist massacre. If you missed the discussion that I had with Joyce Vance about the legal and political and social implications of that horrible event from last weekend, please make sure to listen to the sample that’s in the feed.

QUESTION AND ANSWER:

Preet Bharara:

Now, let’s get to your questions.

Preet Bharara:

So here’s a question I’ve been getting from a lot of people in the last week, and it relates to the five subpoenas that the January 6th committee issued to fellow members of Congress, including the Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy. The other four are representatives Scott Perry, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, and Mo Brooks. The question is, are we going to hear from them? My short answer is I don’t think so. In fact, I’m pretty certain not.

Preet Bharara:

Now, the first nonlegal question you ask yourself is, why wouldn’t they come and testify? They’ve been saying all along since January 6th that they did nothing wrong, that they are upstanding members of Congress. It’s also true that various members of Trump’s own family came in voluntarily. These five members of Congress were offered the opportunity to come in voluntarily. They refused and subpoenas were issued. Now at the end of the day, I think it’s not going to compel them to testify for reasons we’ll discuss in a moment.

Preet Bharara:

So why is it the case then that subpoenas were issued? Because I bet the chairman and the vice chair, Liz Cheney, probably don’t have high expectations of compliance either. So why are they doing it? It seems to me they’re not just addressing the current legal quandary and the immediacy of the investigative needs of the committee. They’re making a point. They’re creating a record. They’re doing this also for history and for posterity, and in their view, I imagine, the right thing to do is to get testimony from these people who are bound up with a lot of issues related to the big lie, and the planning, and financing, and other aspects of the January 6th insurrection.

Preet Bharara:

So whether or not at the end of the day they get the testimony, in their minds, the right thing to do was to seek it by all means lawful and appropriate. You’ll notice, by the way, that it’s a different tact from what Bob Mueller did, who when presented with the question with a ticking clock like we have now, also a ticking clock, of whether or not to try to compel the testimony of Donald Trump with respect to the special counsel’s investigation, he opted not to, and basically says in the report that part of the reason is we didn’t really need it because we had a lot of other information, and also indicates it would’ve been tied up in litigation and he didn’t want to be doing this matter forever.

Preet Bharara:

Now, the other point people will make is how unprecedented it is, and it’s true, outside of the context of the ethics committee for members of Congress to be subpoenaed by a panel of Congress itself. I’ll say what I’ve said many, many times on this show and on the Cafe Insider, and that is when you’re trying to judge the dramatic nature or the unprecedented nature of a particular action taken by some party in a controversy, you also have to ask what is the thing that is causing that unprecedented reaction. If that thing is also unprecedented and has never happened before and is very, very important and goes to the very heart of our democracy, then there’s a proportionality between the unprecedented action and the unprecedented thing that is provoking that action.

Preet Bharara:

Here, what is the action provoking all of this? What’s the whole reason for the 1/6 committee? Well, it’s the insurrection of 1/6, and the violence that was brought to bear on the Capitol itself, where people died and an election was sought to be overturned. I don’t know what could be more dramatic than that. Some will also say, “Well, to take such an extraordinary step, particularly when it’s probably futile, is you’re going to just invite retaliation and retribution and tit for tat behavior by the Republicans if and when they take over the Congress.”

Preet Bharara:

I side with the people who say, “That’s going to happen anyway,” and I don’t know that the Republicans follow precedent. They’re capable of doing extraordinary things. They have done extraordinary things. The ways that they have justified what happened on January 6th I think is fairly extraordinary. So I’m not very moved by the possibility of retaliation as a reason not to proceed aggressively.

Preet Bharara:

Another question arises, “So if they defy the subpoenas, what’s going to happen to them?” Well, we’ve seen with Steve Bannon and Steve Bannon alone that the 1/6 committee voted in favor of referral to the Department of Justice for contempt of Congress, and the Department of Justice, after some weeks, did charge Steve Bannon with contempt of Congress, but there are three other people who have been referred and not yet charged, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Preet Bharara:

Now, you have members of Congress who may be defiant of a subpoena, where there was no precedent in the law for compelling their testimony, which is one thing. Another thing is that given that it’s already close to the end of May, it takes time for the referral to be made, for the referral to be considered, Mark Meadows has been pending for some months now, and you’re going to get to a time where we’re close to an election, and I think Merrick Garland, generally speaking, and the department more specifically has guidelines about taking an action, specifically a criminal action, close in time to an election. All five of these men that have been subpoenaed will be on the ballot in November. So a combination of the lack of legal precedent, other arguments that may be made, and the timing suggests to me, whether you like it or not, that they will not be charged with contempt of Congress.

Preet Bharara:

All that leads me to address another question asked by Twitter user Kevin, “Under what legal theory can someone fight a congressional subpoena? If we have three co-equal branches, how does the judiciary get to decide?” Well, I’ll take the last question first. That’s the role of the judiciary. It is sometimes the case, and John Roberts spoke to this in an opinion in the last year, that the court doesn’t want to get involved when there’s a dispute between Congress and the executive branch. They’ll call it a political question, and they try not to get involved, and they say that there should be accommodation between the executive branch and the congressional branch, and they should work it out, but when that’s not possible, and it’s a question that needs to be resolved, that’s what the court does. That’s the job of the judiciary because it’s the only other co-equal branch of government and the one institution that has standing to address those questions.

Preet Bharara:

Now, if you’re referring to the theories under which the five members of Congress can fight the subpoena, then let’s address that. They will say and have said to the media and to the public that this is just a witch hunt, but a witch hunt is not a legal theory. A legal theory that they’ve actually espoused and advocated for is that the committee itself is illegitimate. It’s not comprised legitimately because it doesn’t have an equal number of Republicans, it has two, and also, that it doesn’t have any legislative function. There’s no legislative purpose to the committee.

Preet Bharara:

The problem with that is a committee need not have is its central purpose a legislative agenda, but some legislative agenda, and Liz Cheney, among others, has set forth all the reasons why the committee needs to do its research, needs to do its investigation to see what laws it might amend, including laws relating to a certification of electoral votes, including laws relating to the protection of the Capitol, and other things as well. In fact, courts have held that the committee, in connection with other disputes about documents and communications, have held that the committee’s work is legitimate and has an appropriate legislative purpose. So that’s going to fail.

Preet Bharara:

There’s also an argument that something in the constitution known as a speech or debate clause and, by the way, practice point, it’s not speech and debate clause, it’s a speech or debate clause, and the speech or debate clause specifically protects lawmakers from being questioned in venues outside of Congress. It doesn’t mean that members of Congress can’t be prosecuted if they engage in criminal activity, and it doesn’t seem to mean that their colleagues can’t ask for their testimony and be denied that on the basis of the speech or debate clause. Speech or debate clause is about being questioned outside of the body of Congress. I imagine there will be other legal theories as well.

Preet Bharara:

The point is not the correctness or the meritoriousness of a legal theory that they’re going to depend upon because I think a lot of this is politics. They’re in a game of running out the clock. They can fight it. Courts will take time to ponder and deliberate on the question, and by the time that all happens, there will, as I said, probably not have been an indictment for contempt of Congress and in the hopes of the next potential speaker of the house, Kevin McCarthy, that body will have changed hands and all of this will be shut down. So it’s not about the law. It’s about the clock.

Preet Bharara:

This last question comes in an email from Danny, “What do you make of the news that DOJ requested transcripts from the January 6th committee? Does this mean they’re building a case?” So this has been the focus of a lot of attention over the last day or two, and lots of people are asking the question. I don’t know quite what to make of it. I think it’s a good development. It’s not a bad development. I think the more evidence that is being sought by the Department of Justice, presumably in connection with trying to find out if higher up people should be held accountable for January 6th in the big lie, including people in Trump’s circle up to and including Trump itself, that’s all for the good, but I’m confused about it a little bit, and I’ve been trying to understand the timing of this.

Preet Bharara:

First of all, everyone is presuming that this request relates to a broader investigation of what happened on January 6th. I think that’s probably right, but I don’t know if that’s definitively the case. The second thing is I mentioned about timing. It’s perplexing to me. The January 6th committee has been operating for many months. They have gotten a lot of documents, they’ve gotten a lot of communications, and they’ve interviewed something like a thousand witnesses. I don’t understand what the triggering event was in recent days or weeks that caused the Department of Justice to now as opposed to some time ago deciding to ask for those transcripts.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, it’s not even 100% certain that Benny Thompson will provide the transcripts. There’s some suggestion, at least as of the time of this recording, that he may not be prepared to do that, and there’s no deal on which transcripts and on what timetable are going to be given to the Department of Justice.

Preet Bharara:

The other thing to bear in mind about this is, ordinarily, it’s the case. The standard operating procedure for prosecutors’ offices is if there’s going to be some other proceeding in which testimony is going to be gotten, the prosecutors always want to go first. This happens all the time, for example, in parallel proceedings where the Securities and Exchange Commission is bringing some kind of enforcement action based on the securities laws and the US attorney’s office, like the Southern District of New York, is also investigating criminal conduct based on the same facts. They have to be careful about the nature of their coordination, but usually hits the case that criminal prosecutors don’t want someone else interviewing their witnesses when they have to interview them also.

Preet Bharara:

In fact, even after securities enforcement action is brought and a criminal case is brought simultaneously, criminal prosecutors will often ask the court to stay discovery, meaning, “Let’s wait till the criminal case is resolved and concluded before the SEC does its work.” All of this is in an effort to avoid conflicting testimony, inconsistencies in testimony that can be exploited at the criminal trial. That didn’t happen here and it’s not happening here, and it’s unclear why, to the extent people think that all the Department of Justice has to do is collect these deposition transcripts, a thousand or so, and then cut and paste and put together a criminal case. It’s not that easy. I can’t imagine a situation in which the Justice Department, if it’s considering criminal charges against some people, based on the testimony of the thousand witnesses who have come before the committee, that they’re not going to want to also do their own interviews.

Preet Bharara:

Remember, the 1/6 committee is being comprehensive and thorough and has done admirable work, but their purpose is to bring transparency to the events of January 6th and the lead up and to provide a report to the public. They’re not trying to make out elements of a crime. Maybe they’ll do that incidentally, but the lawyers at the Justice Department, when they interview witnesses, presumably they’ll ask sharper, more focused questions, detailed questions that get to the purpose of determining whether or not there’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt that one or more people committed a crime. So even though all this work has been done, and even if they get access to all this work, they still have a lot of work of their own to do.

Preet Bharara:

As I mentioned, they have to contend with the issue of having people say different things when interviewed by the prosecutors than when interviewed by staff members of the Congress. So we’ll be following the story and maybe more things will leak out. It seems interesting to me also that people at the Justice Department seem to want this to come out, seem to want people to know that they’re acting in a broad and direct way with respect to people and events of January 6th, beyond the low level folks who have already been charged, but nothing’s imminent with respect to the Department of Justice if they’re only now just asking for those transcripts, in my view.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with my conversation with Ian Bremmer.

THE INTERVIEW:

Preet Bharara:

Ian Bremmer has long been one of the most trusted interpreters of global affairs in the 21st century. His new book, The Power of Crisis is about the most acute challenges facing the world in 2022 and what gives him hope for the future.

Preet Bharara: Welcome to the show.

Ian Bremmer:

Preet, so good to be back with you.

Preet Bharara:

I think this is your 37th appearance, something like that.

Ian Bremmer:

Something like that.

Preet Bharara:

We I like having you.

Ian Bremmer:

I like being on.

Preet Bharara:

More importantly, the listeners like hearing what you have to say, and you have a book, congratulations, a new book, your 11th book. You’re quite the man of letters, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

I’m getting old. That’s probably the issue.

Preet Bharara:

You don’t always act like it when we hang on.

Ian Bremmer:

No, I don’t at all act like it. It’s true.

Preet Bharara:

So it comes to some surprise to know that you’re the author of now 11 books. The latest is called The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – and Our Response – Will Change the World. So I found this book excellent. I think your analysis is always very good. There’s some things that I learned and some things I want to learn more about you in this conversation.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, cool. Thank you. That means a lot coming from you. It really does.

Preet Bharara:

Good.

Ian Bremmer:

I’m just kicking this whole thing off so I have no idea how people feel and you’re someone whose opinion matters to me in terms of-

Preet Bharara:

We’re recording. I should say just in case the world changes in 10 days, we’re recording this on what is today? May 9th?

Ian Bremmer:

It is. It’s Victory Day.

Preet Bharara:

Monday, May 9th.

Ian Bremmer:

Victory Day, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Victory Day, ironic. Before you get to the table of contents in the book, you say, I don’t know if this is a quote from something or this is something you made up at a cocktail party.

Ian Bremmer:

I made that up, if you’re talking about the dedication.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, the dedication it is.

Ian Bremmer:

I knew you were going to say that. I knew you were. Yeah, I made that up.

Preet Bharara:

“To a glass half full, that first half was tasty.” I don’t know what the hell that means, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, come on. I know you like that.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know. I don’t know if I like it. I don’t know what it means. Can you explain what that means?

Ian Bremmer:

Quote is, “To a glass half full,” because I do tend to see the world in ultimately hopeful ways. I see humanity in an ultimately hopeful way. I like people and I tend to presume the best of them until proven otherwise. I also find it extraordinary that we exist at all. So I’m a half full glass, half full kind of guy, and this is a helpful book, but, damn, that first half was tasty. We are the ones that have drank the first half.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, I see.

Ian Bremmer:

It’s true, right? I mean, if you think about all of these crises that I’m writing about in the book and the power of this crisis that we can use it to make the world better, we do have to recognize that we are the ones responsible for these crisis.

Preet Bharara:

The subtitle of your book is about three threats, and if I did my reading correctly, I want to list them, but then I want to talk about something preliminary to addressing those threats. One is global health emergencies. Two is transformative climate change. Three is the AI or artificial intelligence revolution. Have I fairly identified the three threats?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. I mean, I call the latter disruptive technologies, and AI is the most important, but yeah, you have very fairly identified the three.

Preet Bharara:

They’re not the three threats that maybe if I had been asked before I read the book that I necessarily would’ve identified. So that’s what makes the book interesting and different from some other people’s analysis, but before we get to that, you have a lengthy opening chapter that doesn’t directly talk about those three threats, but talks about collisions and the collision of politics in the United States, and we’ve talked about that a lot, and we talk about that a lot on the show, but something that I don’t think we talk enough about, you and I mention it sometimes, but the collision or the upcoming collision or the ongoing collision between the United States and China, the two most powerful countries in the world.

Preet Bharara:

You say in your book something that I found arresting, if I can use that adjective, you say the US-China relationship is getting worse, and while the United States is by far the most politically dysfunctional and divided of the world’s advanced democracies, China is by far the most cohesive and functional of the world’s major authoritarian regimes. Why is that important, and why are you so worried about this upcoming clash? One further point, you disagree with some people who say that we’re actually in a-

Ian Bremmer:

In a cold war, yeah

Preet Bharara:

… cold war with China-

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, we’re not.

Preet Bharara:

… but you think a cold war could be on the horizon. What’s the problem here?

Ian Bremmer:

Well, the problem is that these are the two most powerful countries in the world and, therefore, the relationship between them is the most important relationship geopolitically in the world, and it’s profoundly broken and the trajectory is poor. So I mean, this first chapter, it looks at two different things. It looks at the most powerful country in the world, the United States, which is this increasingly very politically dysfunctional place, and secondly, this most important geopolitical relationship and says, “Wow, it’s dysfunctional.” For this book to be hopeful, I have to recognize that we are not going to fix either of those two things in the foreseeable future, like in the next 10 years. I can tell you, I could write a book about here are all the things that would make the United States more functional, but I should recognize that none of them are likely to happen in the near term. So we’re not going to respond to global crisis if that’s what’s required.

Ian Bremmer:

Secondly, the US-China relationship, we’re not going to suddenly build a relationship of trust and harmony between the United States and China in the next five, 10 years. So for this book to be hopeful, it has to recognize the X anti-limitations, the constraints on what solutions might look like. I’m not prepared to write a book that has a whole bunch of potential solutions that make sense as an academic or as an intellectual but could never be put into practice. They have to be real solutions that we are either doing or are truly capable of doing. That’s why the first chapter’s so essential is it actually gives you the ground facts of here’s the realm of the plausible.

Preet Bharara:

Can we take a step back?

Ian Bremmer:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Allow me to ask a very dumb question. Can you explain how it is that communism has succeeded so well in China?

Ian Bremmer:

Well, number one, we’ve been led to believe that for wealthy countries, but we haven’t been led to believe that for poor countries. There isn’t understanding generally that a period of authoritarianism and state-directed investment can be very helpful in getting lower developed countries to become wealthier and grow in a relatively short space of time, and that’s the-

Preet Bharara:

So then what’s the arc there? So at what point does China then become a wealthy country that changes the analysis?

Ian Bremmer:

Well, two things. First is that the presumption is that as you develop a global middle class, that middle class demands more effective, more accountable political institutions, more of a voice. Their demands on government become much more complex, and that can only be resolved by more economic and political openness. That’s one point.

Ian Bremmer:

The second point is that China has extraordinary scale. So even as what is today a middle income economy, they’re not still a high income economy, but with 1.4 plus billion people that has driven extraordinary growth through urbanization and education and the exploitation of an extremely hardworking comparatively low cost labor force, that has gotten them to where they are today, almost 10% average growth over the course of the last half a century, right? I mean, that’s just never happened at scale on the planet before. Now, the big question is that, can that continue? One reason why it might is because technology increasingly empowers authoritarian regimes in a way that it really didn’t 20, 30 years ago.

Preet Bharara:

So it changes the equation in theory.

Ian Bremmer:

It does. I think it really does. I think a lot of the economic problems that are structural in China, higher in corporate indebtedness and big real estate and financial bubbles, other things, inefficiency in investment are clearly mitigated by the fact that Chinese surveillance capitalism is able to exploit a country where almost everyone is online. They have no presumption of privacy, and all of their data is on a small number of super apps that can be made into profit and can ensure political stability as well. So it really changes the ball game for how we think about the political and economic growth capacity of governments.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So I want to address-

Ian Bremmer:

So that wasn’t a stupid question at all.

Preet Bharara:

Well, thank you. Thank you. I want to talk about the middle class, this rising Chinese middle class. Based on something you said a minute ago, when populations rise and become mobile economically, and they gain some footing in that regard, and it’s happened in Western countries as well, I thought you said a minute ago what they end up demanding is greater accountability and more responsiveness from their governments. Is that going to happen here? One reason I asked the question is you make the point that the expansion of that middle class in China was so rapid that they are alive in that country, hundreds of millions of people who within their recent memory in their lifetimes, the Chinese government has done a lot of good for them.

Ian Bremmer:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

So what is their posture with respect to a repressive government?

Ian Bremmer:

Well, one, they’re very proud of Chinese accomplishments. I think that when the Chinese president talks about the China dream as being realizable in a way that a lot of Americans, when you and I were growing up, believed in the American dream and increasingly perhaps less so, I think that that has resonance in China precisely because of how far and how fast they’ve come over the last two generations. So I think that’s pretty clear.

Ian Bremmer:

I do think the global context also matters, the fact that China has outperformed their peers over that period of time and has been seen to catch up to a lot of countries in power and surpassed a lot of countries in the things that they can do, the space race, and the ability to develop 5G networks, for example, and high speed rail. They’re incredibly proud of high speed rail in China compared to what the United States can’t do. I mean, all of this kind of stuff, definitely the Chinese are proud of those things, but there’s also the fact that the Chinese government has this incredible ability to harness technological power, and that doesn’t just mean they can innovate, though that’s a part of it, but it also means that they can incent, motivate, and demotivate certain types of civilian behavior, and in a country where political stability is absolutely critical, that can matter enormously in the ability to continue to press forward economically without providing political openness.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think the Soviet Union had it played its cards differently? This is another dumb question or at least a basic question. Had the Soviet union played its cards differently. Could it have achieved what China achieved?

Ian Bremmer:

No.

Preet Bharara:

Why not?

Ian Bremmer:

Didn’t have the population. So as a consequence, it would be very hard pressed to develop that kind of human capital. Secondly, the system was not at all meritocratic in terms of its bureaucracy. China is. China really tries to identify incredibly talented people to rise up in the ranks of the communist party cadre. Russia does not. The Russian kleptocracy and the culture of we pretend to work-

Preet Bharara:

Right, but you’re undoing the premise of my question. So an answer might be then had Russia done things differently and not had a kleptocracy and tried to advance people of merit, they may have been further on the road to where China is?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, sure. Look, I think that the fact that Russia decided under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union, decided to engage in economic reform and political reform and decentralization simultaneously almost guaranteed that a political system that was politically divided along ethnographic and national basis was going to fall apart. So I mean, clearly, they could have done things. They made some very fundamental mistakes that made the Soviet collapse far more likely, but I do think that one billion people that are capable and willing to work extremely hard at low wages makes a huge difference in your ability to grow at global scale. The Russians ultimately were a country that was largely taking resources out of the ground, and the cyclicality in that, the boom and bus cycle in that is much more problematic in allowing your country to grow.

Preet Bharara:

What’s the level of corruption in China?

Ian Bremmer:

I think I would say the level of corruption is quite high, but is also low level.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I mean, I asked because that is the thing, and you made an indirect reference to it with respect to Russia, the Soviet Union, that alters the fate of the country and its success.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, keep in mind that the first really big thing that Xi Jinping did when he became president, and more importantly when he took over the Chinese communist party, was the anti-corruption campaign, which he started in the military and then he quickly advanced it throughout the higher ranks of the communist party. In his first five years, over one million investigations were opened and closed inside the Chinese communist party. It really made a difference. Anti-corruption mattered to him.

Preet Bharara:

You think it is believed that that was a good faith campaign?

Ian Bremmer:

No. It’s believed that that was both an intention to consolidate power and to remove corruption from the system. It served both purposes, simultaneously.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Well, it’s nice when you can do both of those things.

Ian Bremmer:

It is. It’s better for everybody.

Preet Bharara:

You write something interesting in your book where you say, “Yes, the US and its allies should work to protect the principles of democracy, the rule of law and human rights everywhere. That work starts at home, of course, though, it doesn’t end there,” and then you write this, “but China’s ascent can’t and should not be contained.” I get the can’t. Why should it not be contained?

Ian Bremmer:

Because I think the only thing worse for the United States than China succeeding is China failing. I mean, we benefit immensely from having a wealthy China that is capable of participating in a global economy. It drives a lot of growth. It drives a lot of investment. It makes it more possible to respond to global challenges as we have them. I mean, without Chinese investment, for example, in alternative energies, we would be way less capable of responding to climate change. I think that’s a really big deal. If you have eight billion people on the planet, you really don’t want 1.4 billion of them not to be able to participate in innovation, and China’s driving a lot of that. I think it’s important also.

Ian Bremmer:

So there’s that from a global perspective. Let’s leave aside just the idea that we’re all human beings and that matters more than what country we’re from, though, I firmly do believe that, but also, the fact that the United States and the Chinese economies are so interdependent, and that interdependence both creates more wealth, but also helps to ensure that we don’t go to war against each other. I think both of those things are really important.

Preet Bharara:

To the extent it’s possible for government officials in conjunction with business folks to chart a course towards greater interdependence or less interdependence with China, what’s the proper course?

Ian Bremmer:

I think the proper course is to identify and recognize those areas where interdependence truly undermines national security and development, and in those areas to consciously sanction, decouple, compete, you name it, but also to recognize that those are a relatively small percentage of all that we do together.

Preet Bharara:

So what are those? How would you identify them?

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I mean, from the United States perspective?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

I would say that areas of critical infrastructure, where we really don’t want the Chinese gaining access to all of our data, would be relevant. I would say areas of, I mean, if I think about Chinese 5G and Huawei and not wanting them to control smart grids in the United States, that seems like a no brainer. Advanced robotics strikes me as another. I mean, there are definitely areas of the global economy where from the American perspective we would want to ensure and ring fence those investments and those of our allies from China and, obviously, the direct military industrial complex. I don’t want the Chinese working with us on advanced drones. I don’t want Lockheed Martin selling their best stuff to the Chinese. That’s fairly obvious.

Ian Bremmer:

The Chinese will also have a list. It will be a different list with some overlap than the American list because their concerns and priorities are different. Example there, by the way, I understand why the Chinese would not want an American TikTok to have access to China and why for the Americans having the Chinese company have that investment doesn’t really matter because we have no problem with free speech. We do have a problem with it, but it’s not a demand of government censorship. The Chinese, for them, that is a fundamental issue that challenges political stability. So for them, it’s a national security issue. I think it is fine for our two countries to define our national interest differently.

Preet Bharara:

Why do you think it’s the case that the US basically tolerated the wholesale theft of intellectual property from American businesses for years? First of all, do you agree that that was true?

Ian Bremmer:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Why was that tolerated?

Ian Bremmer:

A couple of reasons. One is that a lot of US companies were making a lot of money with short-term perspectives because that’s the way shareholders’ interests are structured, and that’s the way a CEO that only is in their position for five years and makes incredible money is incented, but also because 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, even if China was ripping off your IP, they had relatively small companies that weren’t that capable of doing very much with it compared to today when the companies have scale and can destroy you if they take your IP. So scale also matters, and there’s a boiling frog analogy here. You’re used to working in a certain way and it worked for you before, so suddenly the water’s getting hotter and you’re not doing anything about it.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Ian Bremmer after this.

Preet Bharara:

You brought me back to my high school government studies by invoking Thucydides, which-

Ian Bremmer:

Wow.

Preet Bharara:

… I haven’t picked up Thucydides in a very long time, and you reminded me of something that political scientists call the Thucydides Trap, and you make a reference to Athens and Sparta maybe as prologues or analogs of the US and China. How inevitable is the clash?

Ian Bremmer:

I don’t think it’s inevitable at all, actually. I mean, there will be conflict, but the idea that a cold war between the United States and China is inevitable is I think silly. There are some people, by the way, including your and my friend, Neil Ferguson, who say publicly that we’re already in a cold war with each other. That’s just definably not true because there’s an enormous amount of business that goes on between the two countries and strong vested interests inside both countries that wish to see that not only persist but strengthen.

Ian Bremmer:

So I think that when you talk about Thucydides Trap, you usually talk about two countries that are similarly matched in terms of power, one becoming more powerful, one becoming less powerful. In the case of China and the United States, the Americans are the dominant military power, the Chinese have the potential to overtake economically, but not militarily, not in the near future. The technology clash is the most significant place that there is, I think, a real difficulty, and I do think we’re heading towards a cold war in technology, in advanced technology, but it’s not driving a cold war in the rest of the relationship. So no, I don’t think it’s inevitable all.

Preet Bharara:

So we’re going to get to the technology in just a minute. So you mentioned military power, economic power. Are those the main two areas of power? Is there such a thing as cultural power or ideological power or something else, and do those do those other kinds of power matter?

Ian Bremmer:

I think they do. So I would say technological power, military, economic, and cultural slash soft power would probably be the four areas that I would focus on. The United States clearly dominates in terms of soft power. The Chinese do not have much influence at all outside their country.

Preet Bharara:

They don’t seek it or do they?

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, they do seek it. I mean, you have, for example, these Confucius institutes that they’ve set up in different countries around the world that are trying to advance individuals and thoughts that are more aligned with China’s view of the world. I think the way that they pursue information and disinformation on social media implies they want more soft power. They are doing a better job spending money in ways that will benefit humanitarian issues. For example, the Chinese put more money into UN peacekeeping than any other country in the world. 10 years ago, no one would’ve presumed that would be the case. That’s a soft power issue, right? That’s where they want to be seen as good citizens, and that’s so different from after the Indonesia tsunami when the Americans had boots on the ground the next day and the Chinese did virtually nothing, and it really hurt them, frankly. So I do think they’re learning.

Preet Bharara:

So I want to get back to the three threats that we identified or that you identify and that I mentioned. It’s interesting to think about them in the following way, for me at least. You have global health emergencies, which is very real to people because we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic, and so it’s tangible, it’s concrete. You have transformative climate change as the second threat. That’s a little bit more real because it takes up a lot of time and attention and focus as it should, and governments are meeting about it, but it’s still not completely concrete because it’s a future thinking thing. Then you have disruptive technologies. That seems the hardest to put a finger on and to feel concretely. What’s your overview of what you mean by that, and how you get people to pay attention to this issue because it’s so ephemeral seeming?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. First of all, I’m really glad that you phrased it, you framed it that way because that’s exactly the way I thought about those three issues and the ordering, right? I mean, we’ve just been through this massive pandemic, it’s affected us for the last two plus years, it’s urgent, it’s immediate, and we can see exactly what we did right or wrong. Climate, we now finally get. We are addressing it. It’s been with us for a long time. We’ve been ignoring it for a long time. It’s this big and increasingly macro issue that affects everyone in the world. Then the disruptive technology piece, which is in many ways the most existential. It’s the most fast-moving, but it’s also the one that we are at least presently oriented towards fixing.

Preet Bharara:

Well, because nobody knows what it means a little bit. Take a minute and describe to me, you talk about many things like cyber. You talk about something that I definitely want to get into with you, quantum computing, that they’re just not top of mind, artificial intelligence, which is related to that. They’re just not top of mind for people. They’re phrases that you hear that smart people like yourself throw out and put in books. I don’t mean to minimize it, but explain to an average person why that’s potentially gigantic and, as you say, existential threat because otherwise, it just sounds like big tech words.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, one, if you want to start with just the humanity of it, is that when you and I were growing up, our personalities, functional and dysfunctional as they are, were defined and described by nature and nurture, by our genetics and by how we were raised, and suddenly, increasingly, it’s nature, nurture, and algorithm, and the brain thought processes of young people are increasingly being driven by all of this time they are spending in the context of the algorithms that are shaping them, which are literally changing human beings, changing who we are and how we are, how tribal we are, how oriented we are towards the economy, and what we buy, and who we want to engage with, and what kind of emotions we have, how anxious we are, and whether or not we’re going to be oriented towards conflict or harmony. So I’m fundamentally changing humanity. It’s being driven by AI algorithms that we don’t really understand and we don’t test before we actually inject them right into humanity.

Preet Bharara:

It still is very, and this is a function of the nature of the threat and the challenge, not your descriptive ability because with respect to the global health emergencies, there are metrics. People go to the hospital. There is a number of infections that gets reported. There’s a number of deaths that get reported, and mathical models can be set up. With climate change, we can talk about the degrees change in average temperature in the world. What are the metrics by which you can measure this kind of thing that you’re talking about?

Ian Bremmer:

The reason it’s hard is because the metrics tend to be indirect as opposed to direct. So they tend to be things like how many conspiracy theories are being believed, how fragmented, how polarized is society becoming politically as a consequence of these algorithms, what sort of connections you do and don’t have with other human beings, what kind of depression do you see, what kind of addictive behavior do you see. I mean, these are secondary implications that come from neuroplasticity, but they also are fundamental drive.

Ian Bremmer:

If you were to ask me why the US political institutions are eroding, what’s an issue that you and I are fundamentally consumed with, I think that there are three. One is growth and economic inequality. Second is race and cultural issues. Third is disruptive technologies and impact on society. I would argue that the third has the greatest impact, is happening the fastest, and we have the least capacity to respond to it. I also would argue, since you wanted to talk about quantum, that of all of the things that make me worried about World War III, the sudden advance of disruptive technologies is by far the greatest.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I mean, I want to quote from you again. You say in your book that, “Vladimir Putin once predicted that whoever masters AI first will rule the world.” Then you say, “The winner won’t be Russia, but he’s surely right.”

Ian Bremmer:

Won’t be Russia.

Preet Bharara:

Then you say, “The greatest risk that AI presents is the possibility that one country will develop an insurmountable lead in its development, an achievement that would allow a monopolistic control over the world order.” You got me scared now, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

I worry about that. I mean, think on the corporate side about how when Facebook dominates the social media space not only how so many people get their information from it, but how also Facebook is able to therefore identify every new startup in the space, provide them with access or not, promote them or not, understand how successful they are, and as a consequence, decide to kill them or buy them or promote them in a way that no other company could. In other words, they have this monopoly power not just over the space, but also over who else comes into the space. Now, apply that to a government. Apply that to the United States or China, and what would happen if one of those countries developed an insurmountable lead in core technology?

Preet Bharara:

Why would it be so bad? Not to be parochial, but why would it be so bad if it was United States that developed the insurmountable lead? Would they misuse it?

Ian Bremmer:

It might be fine. I mean, we would certainly like it more, and the question would be if, China were to know that and recognize it, would they feel compelled to make a preemptive strike against the United States to ensure that they still had the ability to develop or would they be okay with automatically being essentially stuck with a subservient global role?

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you a tangential question because it just came into my mind that I meant to ask you?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

With relation to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, some people predicted and talked quite a bit about the fact that even if it weren’t going this badly for Putin going this slowly for Russia, that what the Russians have an advantage in is some of what we’re talking about, right? Disruptive technology, and have the ability to launch massive cyber strikes even if their missiles are not hitting the mark against Ukraine, and unless I’m missing something, I haven’t really seen it. Do you have an explanation for that?

Ian Bremmer:

They clearly haven’t done it yet, at least not at scale and not outside Ukraine. I mean, the theory is that what they’ve done so far in Ukraine either has been small scale or that huge tech companies partnering with Ukraine have been able to identify and protect the Ukrainians from it, but what the Russians have not done, and I expect they will, is to turn back on their cyber criminal gangs and use them against Western assets. Remember, the last time that Biden and Putin met was a year ago in Geneva and it was Biden’s agenda, and this was right after the colonial pipeline hit, the cyber tech, and Biden told Putin, well, it wasn’t about Ukraine. The big issue was, “If you keep allowing these cyber attacks to happen, that’s a red line. We’re going to hit you back,” and the Russians cut them off. They cut them off.

Ian Bremmer:

I think that where we are today with the Russians effectively at war with NATO, there’s no way they’re going to keep those things shut off. They’re going to use them. They’re going to use disinformation against elections. They’re going to use espionage to a much greater degree. Russia’s asymmetric technological capabilities make the new cold war between Russia and NATO much more dangerous.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Let’s get back to this issue of artificial intelligence, which is very fascinating to me. So let’s assume a different scenario than the one I mentioned a minute ago, and that is China looks like it’s developing an instrumental bleed in the development of AI. What does the US do?

Ian Bremmer:

Well, so the one that I was most worried about in the near term was quantum and because-

Preet Bharara:

Can we define that?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. So the idea that quantum computing, which is one type of developing algorithmic prowess, super fast computers that are … There are a small number of American and Chinese companies that are leading the world right now in quantum, and if you get, and it’s already proven that quantum computing at relatively low levels of decision making work.

Preet Bharara:

To be clear, is there such a thing at this moment, because I’m ignorant of this, at this moment, is there such a thing as a quantum computer?

Ian Bremmer:

Yes, there are. There are quantum computers. Again, they’re pretty basic at this point in terms of what they can actually do. IBM, I think, has one of them that seems to be the most advanced in the United States so far. The problem is that most of the investment and most of the work, the research into quantum computing, which used to be done in the public sector is, by the way, most of the research in AI you do the work and you publish your findings immediately. So if someone else has done that advance, you’ll probably be six months behind them, but you’ll be able to take advantage of their advances. Quantum investments have all come in-house. In other words, they’re being done privately and the research is not being published.

Ian Bremmer:

So the companies that are involved increasingly do not have a good sense of how far they are ahead or behind other key companies. In China, we’re talking about companies that are fundamentally aligned with supported by the government. The view is that if you have a serious breakthrough in quantum computing, that would allow for the end of you could break any cryptographic effort so you would no longer be able to encrypt your systems and-

Preet Bharara:

Because there’d be so much computing power available.

Ian Bremmer:

That’s right, and that reality, if you were to find out that the Americans or the Chinese were suddenly either have made or were about to make an advance, a breakthrough, that meant that you would no longer have any ability to secure your data, not in the public sector, not in the private sector, not your most important national security secrets. The likelihood that that would force the country that was about to be on the short end of the stick to do anything possible, to prevent that breakthrough from occurring, including a preemptive technological military strike, I think would be quite significant.

Preet Bharara:

Why wouldn’t we conclude or predict that much like the nuclear arms race that the two leading powers like the United States and China would be parallel to each other and close in their advances such that no one gets an insurmountable lead but both are able to harness the enormous potentials of AI in quantum computing? Is that stability or not?

Ian Bremmer:

Mostly because it happens so much faster that a six-month lead, I mean, a five-year lead in nuclear weapons capabilities or an ICBM throw capacity of the warhead that’s on top of it or targeting accuracy doesn’t fundamentally change the nuclear balance between the Americans and the Soviets or the Americans and the Russians today. A six-month advantage in quantum is potentially an absolute game-changer where the country that comes in second never is able to catch up, and what that means is that the Americans and the Chinese have a very strong incentive to create guardrails well before we get there that would prevent such a breakout technology from occurring.

Ian Bremmer:

There are other AI technologies that have similar kinds of capability in that regard. Some talk about the ability to have artificial general intelligence that learns from itself. So once you first create that capacity, it’s a little bit ahead of you on the first computations and literally within days or moments. It’s suddenly vastly greater in capacity than anything you could do or even understand. You don’t want to be in a position where a technology like that is linked to national security in any way because it creates the Thucydides Trap, and it makes it exponentially harder to solve.

Preet Bharara:

Are you worried about robots?

Ian Bremmer:

I would be worried in this regard about lethal autonomous weapons in particular, the ability of, and I worry about that especially because we’re not just talking about governments, we’re also talking about small rogue states, we’re talking about non-state actors. I remember when there was that drone that got within, I think it was six meters of Angela Merkel when she was chancellor and took her photo. I mean, if that had been a bot with offensive capabilities, she’s dead.

Preet Bharara:

Can I say a terrible … So this was some years ago now, I mean, seven or eight years ago. I was speaking to a scholar out of Stanford who studied these things and we sat down and he scared the pants off of me talking about these possibilities, drone technology, which in some ways is very advanced, but in some ways is very simple because they’re small, lightweight, you can put a small payload in, there’s very little ability to defend against it in a free society, whether you’re the chancellor of Germany or an ordinary person.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll ask the question that we often asked after 9/11, which is a terrible question to ask and you don’t want to put ideas in people’s heads. How come we haven’t seen more of that violent and destructive conduct given how widespread the technology is? Do you have any thought on that?

Ian Bremmer:

I think because we’re not really there yet. I mean, it’s like why haven’t we seen ISIS engage in massive cyber attacks. Remember when they took Mosul in Iraq and they had access to almost a billion dollars of hard currency, and you’d think with that kind of investment they would’ve been able, if they wanted to, to invest in cyber and just bring down major corporations and governments and they didn’t even try. I think the best they did was they managed to falsify some websites, including mimic a Mercedes-Benz site and were able to grab a bunch of advertising revenue that they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten. They were shockingly incompetent at that.

Ian Bremmer:

I think the reason for it is just because they didn’t have access to the people that coded, and that’s going to change in relatively short order. We’re not 20 years away from that. We’re five or 10. I think when you talk about these disruptive destructive technologies like lethal autonomous weapons, we’re relatively close to smaller organizations that are less responsible and more diverse in their interests to have that capacity, and we need global governance on those issues before we get there.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Good luck with that, right?

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I mean, good luck with it, but it’s more likely after you’ve had your first crisis because then you respond to it. So that’s the whole point of the book is we have these obvious things that have either already happened or are happening and they are the only ways that you’re going to motivate the solutions we need. The fortunate thing is they’re there. We know they’re coming.

Preet Bharara:

So one of the other threats you talk about as we’ve mentioned is transformative climate change. You’ve been on the show before and have been a little bit more optimistic than some people about whether or not we’ve turned the corner. One of the reasons you seem a little bit sanguine is the US withdrew from the Paris climate accord under Trump and then Biden put us right back in. So some crisis was averted. You say in the book, “Climate policy is the single biggest difference between the Trump and Biden presidencies.” Some may quarrel with that, but it’s certainly a big difference in their two approaches. If Donald Trump comes back to the presidency, what does that do to your thinking about the future of climate change and abilities to halt it?

Ian Bremmer:

Doesn’t change it. It doesn’t change it. That’s why I’m more optimistic about climate is because remember, when we talked at the opening of this discussion about the fact that the US was still going to be politically as functional and US-China was still not going to have a trusted relationship, I think that we are doing so much more in response to climate change despite the fact that the US government at the federal level isn’t doing that much. Biden’s been very constrained in what he can get through Congress in terms of renewable relevant legislation.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, Joe Manchin is helping to ensure that, and yet, we see massive amount of investment around the world in solar power and in electric vehicles and batteries and infrastructure around smart grids, and it’s happening because banks understand that that’s the way the world is moving and they want to get ahead of it because they frequently have a longer timeframe. Pension funds have 10-year investment horizons, for example. So they’re saying, “We shouldn’t be investing in thermocol because we’re just not going to make any money out of it.”

Ian Bremmer:

Young people are making enormous demands from corporations and saying, “We won’t buy your products unless you’re willing to move to more responsibility and more sustainability in your products.” The Europeans, the largest unified market in the world are incredibly responsible and ahead of the curve in terms of investing in renewable energy, and the Russia crisis in Ukraine has only sped that up because the Europeans now want to get away from the export of fossil fuels from Russia into Europe.

Ian Bremmer:

So I mean, there are just so many reasons why we are seeing faster and faster investment and actual results in a move away from a fossil fuel driven energy world that is not being driven by the central governments of the US and Washington and China and Beijing.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t want to give people the wrong impression that you think everything is hunky dory. Obviously, it’s one of the three challenges and one of the three threats, and you spend a good amount of time in the book talking about something that other people also talk about, maybe not as much as some other aspects of the climate change challenge, but no matter what we do, even if we’re on a better track, as you predict in the book, we’re going to have hundreds of millions of people displaced, a refugee crisis, the likes of which we have never seen. How is that going to impact the world order?

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, massively. Of course, the fact that the pandemic and climate change and disruptive technologies and the Russia Ukraine crisis, all exacerbate inequality, all hurt low and middle income countries the most means that the 50 years of globalization that we’ve just had where you’ve created a bigger and bigger global middle class is going to be under much more pressure in the coming five, 10, 20 years. That’s a really big problem.

Ian Bremmer:

Another thing that makes me much more optimistic about our ability to ultimately respond effectively to climate change as a species is the fact that as a species, despite all the disinformation and all the politicization, all the fragmentation in the world, we have 195 countries that have gotten together and said, “You know what? Climate change is a problem. We’ve got 1.2 degrees centigrade of warming already. It’s happening because of humanity. It’s not happening cyclically because of nature.”

Ian Bremmer:

In other words, we have collectively identified the problem. We’ve identified the scenarios. We’re being driven by science. It’s fact-based, and that’s allowed us to understand what needs to happen to respond. Now, we’re not all willing to make the sacrifices and to pay the same amount and do what’s necessary to fix this, and that still creates a lot of inefficiency and will cause a lot more people to be displaced, but we are so much farther in responding as a species to the crisis of climate change than even the most optimistic would have expected 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago today. That’s extraordinary.

Ian Bremmer:

I think that that merits discussion. It doesn’t merit, in any way, a belief that this is not going to grow as a massive problem because so much of it is baked in over the last 50 years of all of the exploitation of natural resources and dumping carbon into the atmosphere, but my God, we have to recognize that we increasingly have the tools to respond here.

Preet Bharara:

This is a debate you and I have had previously on the issue of whether or not the proper messaging is that we should be screaming about it so that people don’t get complacent because the last thing you want people to think, “Well, Ian Bremmer thinks it’s all going to be fine or it’s not going to be as bad as people thought.” Let’s pat ourselves on the back when there are other people who say it is very, very, very premature to pat yourselves on the back. You said I think last time something that was interesting. Different people who have platforms have different roles, and you’re not the president of a country or the prime minister of a country yet, and that you feel that you can be more clear eyed about it, whereas you recognize that the responsibility of some others is to keep the pressure on, to continue to do more globally and in individual countries. Do you still believe that to be true?

Ian Bremmer:

Absolutely, but I also think that my role is not to be a cheerleader for this stuff. My role is to explain that we can do it and that we are doing it. We need to keep doing it. We need to do more. I’m not trying to say that this is done at all. The fact that half of the species on the planet are heading either extinct or heading into extinction, that’s a deeply concerning thing. 1.2 degrees of centigrade warming on a path to 2.5 where one billion Indians are experiencing massive heat stress over the past two months and the worst March and April in recorded history in India with high temperatures and massive humidity, I mean, tens of thousands of people surely already dead as a consequence and I’m sure many more to come, none of these things are easy things.

Ian Bremmer:

I’m simply saying that compared to where we were, where you had people saying we were going to see five degrees, six degrees of warming, and that the planet would be literally uninhabitable by humanity by 2100, it’s extraordinary how much we are capable of doing and we are doing, and you know why? Because we are responding to a real crisis. We are capable and we are doing it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, there’s a lot to think about. Congratulations again on your book.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, no. Thanks, man. I really appreciate it.

Preet Bharara:

By the time this will air, I’m not sure of the right tense usage, I will have already been at your book launch and I’m sure it will have gone splendidly.

Ian Bremmer:

I hope so.

Preet Bharara:

Ian Bremmer, thanks as always for coming on the show.

Ian Bremmer:

Great to see you, man.

THE BUTTON:

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Ian Bremmer continues for members of the Cafe Insider community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:

So a common question I get every week when I put out a request for queries from the audience is, “What’s good in the world? What’s something good?” Well, here’s an example. I saw an uplifting story in the Washington Post recently about the power of debate, not the kinds of debates we have on the show or that you see on cable television, but the power and importance of high school debate.

Preet Bharara:

If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you know that a big part of my high school life and experience was speech and debate. I did speech. You also may recall that I used to judge at high school speech tournaments when my boys were doing extemporaneous speaking. So it’s an incredibly important thing to me, and I think to a lot of people. Debate and speech are a great way to learn and grow and prepare for the workplace. It also teaches rigor, which is much lacking in the discourse lately.

Preet Bharara:

So here’s an inspirational story about that. It’s the inspiration that one struggling New York City public school student received 13 years ago from his debate coach, and now, he is paying that get forward today. In 2009, Jonathan Conyers was 14. He was heading in the wrong direction having just been caught breaking into a home. No charges were ultimately brought. A second chance came in the form of a new school, the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, and the fortuitous decision he made to enroll in an afterschool debate club.

Preet Bharara:

Jonathan found an environment that was new and daunting, but that he embraced. The high school freshman also found K.M. DiColandrea, the debate instructor who would change his life, whom he called DiCo for short. DiCo encouraged Jonathan and his classmates to challenge themselves, often bringing them to compete against private schools with children of significantly more financial means, but DiCo was also in the midst of a significant internal challenge at the time.

Preet Bharara:

Jonathan recalls competing at a tournament at Harvard, “Everyone was looking at us. It’s not every day you see a transgender teacher with all these big Black kids, and it was very obvious that we were poor. Everyone else was wearing ironed dress shirts and khakis. We’ve got plain white tees and sandals.”

Preet Bharara:

Fast forward to today, Jonathan is now 27 and he’s a respiratory therapist and he remains close with DiCo. He sits on the board of DiCo’s Brooklyn Debate League, an organization that provides free debate training and access to tournaments for teens who would otherwise not be able to participate. You see, every high school teaches English or tries to, but not every high school offers speech and debate. Jonathan recently shared his life story with Humans of New York, a popular blog with millions of social media followers.

Preet Bharara:

He emphasized the influence of DiCo in shaping who he is today and also revealed that the former debate coach had spent $6,000 of his own savings just to keep the Brooklyn Debate League afloat. Guess what happened? That Humans of New York post went viral in the very best sense of the word, and a GoFundMe page was posted. It not only helped DiCo recoup his financial losses, but has blossomed into a collective pledge of over $1.3 million. Yeah. That’s $1.3 million to expand the Brooklyn Debate League and its mission to provide high-need schools throughout New York with access to debate coaches for many years to come.

Preet Bharara:

As DiCo explains in the GoFundMe page, this is why he created the program, “The community is dominated by private schools, parochial schools, and rich kids. Brooklyn Debate League is a safe space for all kids, queer and trans children, kids of color, kids from all income brackets, kids who are national champions, and kids who have no experience in speech and debate. No matter what their story, we are here to help them tell it.” That’s something good.

Preet Bharara:

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

Preet Bharara:

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 at Preet Bharara with the hashtag, AskPreet 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 is Tamara Sepper. The Technical Director is David Tatasciore. The Senior Producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The Cafe team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan. Sean Walsh, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.