This is GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.
Today on the program, the US midterm elections are less than a month away. Are we watching the end of Trump and MAGA? Do the Democrats deserve to win? I'll talk to the ever-opinionated political satirist Bill Maher.
Also, Biden's Middle East envoy Brett McGurk on the state of the Middle East three years after the October 7th attacks.
Then, the World Bank president, the prime minister of Greece on whether AI will steal your job.
And a surprising optimistic message from the head of the World Trade Organization.
But first, here's my take. It strikes me as bizarre that today in the United States, a new pill to treat heartburn would have to go through months or even years of government approvals and testing before being released to the public. But the most powerful technology ever developed, capable of breaking into banks, shutting down power grids, or helping build bioweapons, can be released without even a preliminary government review.
We're having a collective failure of imagination about artificial intelligence. While many closest to the technology have issued grave warnings and urged oversight, it doesn't register as a major public concern. Congress has, of course, so far abdicated its role as lawmaker. And the Trump administration is delighted to let the industry regulate itself. President Trump is right that the term artificial intelligence doesn't capture the phenomenon. It is superintelligence, analytic capacity greater than that of any human and perhaps even large collections of the smartest humans. We reach for analogies: the industrial revolution, electricity, the internet.
But electricity does not get exponentially smarter every six months. The internet cannot solve mathematical problems, diagnose diseases, or design new weapons.
Bad people can use these superpowers for bad purposes. But that's not the scariest scenario. We have seen models hack into databases and computer systems while pursuing unrelated goals. Suddenly, the old thought experiment about an AI told to maximize paperclip production, which then proceeds to commandeer all the world's energy and resources maniacally to make more paperclips, seems a little less fanciful. The danger is not that the machine becomes evil. It is that it becomes massively and unpredictably destructive while pursuing its legitimate goal.
You cannot self-regulate. If one AI lab spends six months testing a powerful model while its competitors release theirs, prudence will carry a commercial penalty. The companies themselves understand this. Read the calls issued over the last two years by researchers and top executives at almost all the leading AI companies, and they warn of a race to the bottom in which everyone might prefer greater safety but no one can afford to slow down first. That is a classic collective action problem and precisely what regulation is designed to solve. For a start, many of the voluntary safeguards the industry has proposed could simply be turned into mandatory ones.
But what about China? The argument that US regulations will simply let China win starts with a false premise. China is not racing ahead without rules. Beijing already regulates powerful AI systems, requiring security assessments and restricting how models are developed and deployed. Nor does history suggest that technological competition must mean abandoning safety. During the Cold War, the US was locked in an existential nuclear race with the Soviet Union. Yet, we required civilian reactors to be licensed and meet federal safety standards. In fact, the Soviets were the ones with a weak safety culture and inadequate oversight, which produced the Chernobyl disaster. After it, Washington and Moscow actually expanded cooperation on nuclear safety, recognizing that some risks transcend national rivalry. The fiercer the competition and the more consequential the technology, the more important it becomes to establish some rules for the race.
Reasonable regulations can make you stronger. After the 2008 financial crisis, Washington imposed major new rules on American banks: higher capital requirements, stress tests, and restrictions on risk-taking. The banks screamed bloody murder. The chairman of Wells Fargo called the stress tests asinine. Washington, we were told, was shackling one of America's great industries. But guess what? In the years after, American banking boomed. According to Quartz, from 2012 to 2022, the six largest US banks made $643 billion in profits, more than they had in the decade before. And they didn't just get richer. American banks came to dominate the world like never before. Today, the top six American banks have a combined market cap larger than the top 20 European banks. In the early 2000s, the market capitalization of JPMorgan — today, the US's biggest bank — was 40% smaller than HSBC, Europe's biggest bank. Not only has that reversed, but JPMorgan now has a market cap bigger than Europe's top four banks combined.
Regulation was not the only reason America recovered faster, Europe stumbled, and US banks benefited from tax cuts. But forcing banks to raise capital, shed risk, and test their capacity to survive severe shocks did not destroy their competitiveness. It enhanced it.
AI will be the commanding technology of the 21st century. America should want to dominate it. But dominance will not belong simply to the country that builds the most powerful model fastest. It will belong to the country whose AI the world is willing to trust with its data, infrastructure, businesses, and perhaps even its weapons. China will build AI that is very powerful. America should build AI that is powerful but also safe, with the human being in the center and in control. American technology combined with American values will be our best competitive advantage.
Go to fareedzakaria.com for a link to my Washington Post column this week, and let's get started.
We are 30 days away from the midterm elections, and President Trump is in full campaign mode for GOP candidates despite his approval rating hovering near its post-January 6th lows. I wanted to talk about all things midterms with a man who aims his political arrows at both the right and the left, Bill Maher. After appearing on his HBO program, Real Time, on Friday night, we turned the cameras around and I interviewed him. I should note CNN and HBO share the same parent company. Bill Maher, pleasure to have you back on the show.
The tradition continues. You do my show, I do yours.
Absolutely, and it's a pleasure both ways. So I want to talk to you about the midterms because I was reading Nate Silver, and he says at this point anyone who tells you that the Democrats are not favored to win both the House and the Senate is just being overly cautious. That if you read the polls, it's a 10-point swing now between Republicans and Democrats on the House and in the Senate. If you look at the races, most of them that the Democrats need to win, they are leading by small margins, but they are leading. That's a long way from where things looked a year ago. What do you think has happened that has kind of collapsed the Republican support?
Trump screwed the pooch. That's what happened. He got drunk with power. This is the pattern in this country. Somebody gets elected, they go way too far with their side of things. Biden did it to a degree with wokeness, and he was too feeble to fight the far left, and particularly on immigration, where he just let in way too many.
And then the other people get in and they reverse everything, but not just reverse it — we're going to be shooting people in the street. How about that? And it just — he's lost even a lot of his own people. I mean, that is — it was so easy just to come in and undo the bad, and nobody does that. And so this is going to be — I don't care what they say about, oh, well, maybe not. It is. Sorry, guys, it is. It's going to be a classic historical ass-whooping. Now, 2028 is a different story. The Democrats have a crazy animal living in their house called the DSA, and they believe truly insane things. And they're the energy of the party, and they're going to make Gaza is a genocide a litmus test and a lot of other really stupid stuff. But this electorate right now is saying we will get to that issue.
Right now we have one piece of business in front of us, and that is to let Donald Trump know we don't like what he did. He went too far. He didn't keep his word on the things that were important to us, ranging from Epstein to no wars to the economy is going to be better, inflation, gas prices, all that stuff. And this is what we need to register our feelings on in 2026. We'll get to the other stuff later, perhaps, but right now we have one message: Donald Trump went too far, and his party will pay.
Trump has or had good political instincts. I mean, he's — you know, you've got to give him that, right?
What's changed, do you think?
I don't know. That is the question someone should write the book about, because I don't know. You're right. He had a connection to his voters that nobody else in the party had, which is why they all feared him. And some still do. I mean, we saw this Eric Schmidt guy make a fool of himself this week because he was still — and I just wanted to say — and John Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, who I had on this show recently, and I liked him very much, and he's not a dumb guy at all. And he was saying to Jack Smith, you know, you made me throw up in my mouth. And the other guy was saying, who throws up in their mouth even — it's so graphic, you know — and the other guy's calling him a dirtbag. And I just wanted to say to him, guys, this is so a year ago. You know, you're kissing ass with the big man who doesn't have that kind of pull anymore. In fact, it may be more dangerous for the Republicans to be seen with him. And we've seen a lot of this already. People who have taken the endorsement off the website, people who are campaigning Republicans now and who are disavowing specific issues like in Florida about the immigration. I mean, he's losing a lot of the people that he did well with last time, or better than we thought, like immigrants.
Part of the problem, I think, for the Republicans is he's still at something like an 85% approval rating among Republicans. He's at a 2% approval rating with Democrats, but it's those independents that he's losing very fast. And it feels like the Republicans are still worried because he can still primary them, right?
Or it's somebody who just doesn't want to give the pollster the satisfaction of saying I'm not with Trump because all the other eight times you called me about this, I said I was, and now I kind of feel bad about it. You know, you kind of have to own it. Sort of like the guy who leaves Scientology.
Do you think the polls could be wrong in that way, that there are still —
No, there aren't shy Trump voters. They're going to get their ass kicked. It's going to be brutal.
When you think about the Democrats, because if that is true, do you worry that it then emboldens the Democrats to think, 'Oh' —
Totally. Of course, that's the big worry. I do. They will misinterpret this. They will misinterpret the thumping that the Republicans get as an endorsement for the insanity that a good part of the party wants to march toward. And I'm talking about DSA ideas about like abolishing the police, and some of them have walked back what they said. It was only a couple of years ago. Some of them, oh, I don't know, I was — you were in your 20s. Only in this country is someone in their 20s a child. How can you trust me what I said? Well, I do trust that you meant what you said then. I mean, communism, you know, we did try it. I put the blame on this with our educational system. If you haven't taught kids what communism was, if they just have this very sort of airy-fairy idea that it's, oh, it's everybody from each according to his needs. Yeah, we did that. We tried that. Somebody had that idea. Maybe it was worth trying.
What do you make of AOC saying woke one was crazy and just laughing it off?
Woke two is right here. I saw a story this week about this woman, and she's a CEO at some company, and she and her family took pictures with a sweatshirt that said Lake America because Trump has renamed one of the lakes. It's one of those things he does, like the reflecting pool, the ballroom that I don't care about. I said before he got elected the second time, I'm not going to do what I did the first time and worry about every little thing he does. I'm going to worry about the important things. I don't really care about the ballroom. We probably could use a ballroom. Okay. Reflecting pool, renaming things. She got fired — fired for a picture that said Lake America. And it wasn't even a political statement. They said they were just having fun with it. And there was a statement, sorry for the pain this caused members of our community. The pain — you know, if you think a sweatshirt is causing pain, woke one either isn't over or woke two is just as bad. This stuff has not gone away. I'm sorry, not dead, just resting.
And we will be back with more of my interview with Bill Maher.
Fahed Island is one of the region's first full wellness destinations. With an 11-kilometer coastline, the residential island will have plenty of green and walkable spaces. But what actually sets this development apart?
So rather than thinking about bringing in spas and gyms, it's about how do we make access to healthier living easier to choose. It's almost so you don't even notice. We're removing the barriers to — let's be specific — your ability to, you know, walk your children to school or have social interactions at the club or get access to nature. These are all sort of fundamentals that we can affect on a master-planning scale from the bottom up that have a healthier impact.
Not polo, not rugby. In this game, the ball is a goat carcass. This is kubuz, Kyrgyzstan's national sport.
Kubuz is a game of truly powerful men. Playing kubuz is in the blood of every Kyrgyz. This game has been a staple across Central Asia for thousands of years, and Manasov is one of its most famous players. Each game is a contest of strength, speed, and fierce horsemanship.
Kubuz is not an easy game. It's very difficult. First of all, you have to be agile, then strong and smart.
At this year's World Nomad Games, Yazov and his team won the championship.
Okay, we're hearing jets overhead. As you can see here, the trees behind me are burnt. The earth is scorched.
Mr. President, how do you assess the meaning of as long as it takes? What gives you hope?
On Laura Coates Live, we cover it all. Will you take this all the way to the Supreme Court? I'm not refuting a syllable of what she said. What do you say to people who are looking to find their voice? All the news, all on Laura Coates Live, Tuesday through Saturday on CNN.
Every day we take a step back to look at the big picture, from decisions made in Washington to the ripple effects across Asia, Europe, and beyond. We follow the story as it unfolds and hear every voice to make sure the information is clear, fair, and relevant to you. In a world packed with noise, facts matter. That's what we do here. This is The Brief.
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And we are back with more of my interview with Bill Maher. What's your reaction to Trump deciding that he's going to go after you again?
He's been going after me since right after the first dinner when I went and came back and did my job here and did what I always said I would do, which is honestly tell you what I think about it, what he's doing, and he was very angry at that.
And in person he is very charming, but were you surprised that he then turned —
Of course not. He did it this week and he said, oh, his ratings are low, he's so sad, it's sad how bad he's doing. And I was like, you know, this is like getting called a hockey puck by Don Rickles. You know, it's like I don't even hear it anymore. It's so constant. You know, when he tried to stop me from getting the Mark Twain Award, I just — I was like, that's the game. That's —
Did he actually try to stop?
Well, he tried and it didn't happen. I did wind up getting it, but I mean, that's what the game is. I'd rather be involved, you know? I'd rather have the conversation going. I still want to talk to him. I mean, I feel like —
You'd say if he invited you to dinner, you'd still go. You'd go.
Totally. Absolutely. Because look, not talking guarantees you nothing. And he is not a guy with a lot of fixed opinions. You know, people do change his mind all the time. And he's also a guy who doesn't exactly —
Yeah, he was against your — talks him into that. Well, something happened, and, you know, I think he was always pretty consistent about that. But I mean, the first time I was with him, I tried to tell him that I thought the Obama deal should have at least been given a chance, but he was fine talking about it. Didn't agree. That doesn't — it's water under the bridge, fade to complete. We're in a different place.
But yeah, he does not read the briefing books. Everything is done by people who are saying. So be one of the people saying, you know, he needs more people like me talking to him, not less. He — I think he actually doesn't like the fact that all he has around him are boring ass-kissers. He's that guy who wants you to kiss his ass, but then he doesn't respect you when you do. You know.
If it's a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, what do you think happens to Trump? How does he behave in that situation?
What can he do? What can he really do? You know, look, I was one of the first to —
I think he fights. He gets more assertive. He asserts executive power even more.
But power begets power, and he's losing power. The more power you have, the more you get, the more you lose, the more you continue to lose. People don't fear him like they once did.
So you really think this is peak Trump, and we're just going to see him decline?
I don't know what he can do. I mean, if it really was going to be as bad as I thought it was going to be 10 years ago, he would have shut down The New York Times. The New York Times has never stopped printing everything it ever wanted to say about him. I have never pulled one punch, which is why he got mad at me again saying what, you know, he had on somebody recently was interviewing him and they mentioned the No King's Day, and he said, 'If I was a king, I wouldn't be talking to you.' He's funny. You got to give him that.
On that hopeful note. Maher, pleasure to have you on.
Next on GPS, it's been three years since Hamas's October 7th attacks, and I'll speak to a man deeply involved in the diplomacy that followed. I ask him how these attacks have reshaped the Middle East.
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