The Heat is On

Summary

Amanpour – "The Heat is On"

Podcast: Amanpour (CNN)
Date: August 11, 2026
Host: Paula Newton (substituting for Christiane Amanpour)

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Episode Overview

This episode, entitled "The Heat is On," explores the twin, interwoven crises of climate change—with a special focus on extreme heat events and wildfires—and the rapidly escalating debates around the future of artificial intelligence. Key guests include climate journalist Jeff Goodell, FT AI editor Madhumita Murgia, AI/digital artist Refik Anadol, and New Yorker writer Evan Osnos. The program deftly unpacks the human, societal, and geopolitical consequences of environmental disruption and technological acceleration, while also spotlighting stories of adaptation, creativity, and global competition.

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Section 1: The New Normal – Climate Change and Extreme Heat

The End of the 20th Century Climate

[01:04 – 05:06]

• Context: July set new records for heat both in the US and globally, with the UK's Met Office concluding the "climate of the 20th century has now gone."
• Guest: Jeff Goodell, climate journalist and author ("The Heat Will Kill You First").
• Quote:
  • "There’s no going back to the kind of cooler climate that many of us grew up in and that we think of as the sort of normal state of the world."
    — Jeff Goodell [03:59]
• Key Points:
  • The planet is rapidly warming, and events like wildfires, droughts, and heatwaves are harbingers of a hotter future.
  • Twofold challenge: swift emissions reductions (mitigation) and adapting to a fundamentally altered environment (adaptation).

The Hidden Dangers of Heat

[05:06 – 07:01]

• Heat’s Deadliness:
  • Many underestimate the lethality of heat; it's often a "ghostly event."
  • "You can’t tell what the heat is, you can’t tell if it’s, you know, 85 degrees outside or 115 degrees outside...you can be dead in 20 minutes."
    — Jeff Goodell [05:45]
  • Heat is especially deadly for the vulnerable; recent European heatwaves reportedly caused 16,000 deaths in one month.

Adapting to Extreme Heat

[07:01 – 09:05]

• “Bracing” for Heat:
  • Current adaptation often just means warning the public.
  • Cities need to rethink urban design:
    • More green spaces; less concrete
    • More accessible cooling centers
  • Air conditioning is vital but not a solution for all heat impacts, especially in agriculture or natural settings.
  • "Air conditioning is a lifesaving technology ... but it is not a magic silver bullet for extreme heat." — Jeff Goodell [08:29]

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Section 2: Wildfires in a Warming World

[09:05 – 13:47]

How Wildfires have Changed

• Wildfires are now "bigger, faster, more intense, hotter."
• The landscape, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, is increasingly a tinderbox.
• Notable quote:
  • "There was a French fire captain who described the wildfires in France as a meteorological nuclear bomb." — Jeff Goodell [09:28]
• Firefighting has become more complex and more urgent. Some policy responses, such as “raking the forests,” are dismissed as unrealistic for wild fires in remote wilderness.

Socioeconomic Inequality and Climate Impact

• Wildfires and heat disproportionately affect the most vulnerable—those who lack the resources to escape or adapt.
• “I’ve written about it as the divide between the cooled and the damned… the people who die in heat waves are people who are not sitting in air conditioned offices; they’re outdoor workers.” — Jeff Goodell [13:04; 13:47]

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Section 3: Hope, Adaptation, and the Path Forward

[14:52 – 16:33]

Prospects for Mitigation and Adaptation

• There is no single solution, and different regions will face different futures.
• Some areas will become uninhabitable; others may flourish with new energy sources and urban designs.
• "There’s going to be dramatic changes in our world and the question is... how well are we going to sort of guide those changes? Is it going to be just sort of chaotic or is it going to be something where we think about these questions of climate justice and who’s suffering, and do something to help them?" — Jeff Goodell [15:04]
• Highlights advances in renewable energy (Texas cited as a leader for cost reasons, not ideology).

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Section 4: The AI Debate – Control, Regulation & Societal Impact

AI’s Expanding Environmental Footprint

[18:41 – 19:58]

• Guest: Madhumita Murgia, FT AI Editor and author.
• AI is increasing demand for energy, water, and land at unprecedented rates.
• “Anthropic has said... the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next few years and that will show up in electricity prices for the average consumer.” — Madhumita Murgia [19:10]

Who Gets a Say in AI’s Future?

[19:58 – 22:01]

• Most people do not feel they have agency over AI development, despite the impact AI is starting to have in daily life.
• AI has infiltrated even intimate and sensitive roles—friendship, healthcare, therapy.
• “Without sort of our voices ... there’s just a commercial imperative to keep going, to keep building, and rolling this into the economy.” — Madhumita Murgia [21:11]

Open vs. Closed AI – The Regulation Debate

[22:01 – 25:22]

• Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) argues for open access AI systems; OpenAI and Anthropic push for stronger government oversight.
• Open AI systems risk misuse; closed systems risk concentrating power.
• "At what point does that risk outweigh the benefits that these companies want to bring to us?" — Madhumita Murgia [22:41]
• Murgia asserts that social media’s trajectory—lack of regulation led to serious, societal harms—should be a cautionary tale for AI.

Government Regulation and “Kill Switch” Debate

[25:22 – 27:31]

• Senator Bernie Sanders has called for an AI development pause due to security lapses.
• Murgia is skeptical that a true “kill switch” will happen. Both market and geopolitical competition (U.S. vs China) are too intense.
• “We are going to move forward. The market forces, the geopolitical forces create that sort of forward roll downward, roll down a hill. So we just need to figure out how we can place accountability, regulation, standards into this so that we get there safely.” — Madhumita Murgia [27:16]

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Section 5: Art in the Age of AI – Rafiq Anadol and “Dataland”

[27:45 – 37:24]

AI as Artistic Partner

• Guest: Rafiq Anadol, digital artist and founder of Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI art.
• Anadol positions AI as a collaborator, not a competitor:
  • “We are in a new renaissance. … What we are seeing, I feel, is a form of art, truly human machine collaboration.” — Rafiq Anadol [28:51]
• In Dataland, visitors wear biometric devices; their physiological responses inform, in real-time, the generative artworks.

Nature, Data & Ethical Practice

• Dataland’s installations merge nature’s data (flora, fauna, fungi) with advanced AI trained only on ethically sourced, institutionally approved datasets.
• “I believe nature is the most beautiful and inspiring thing we have as humanity. … Our model is ethical, sustainable, and free for everyone to make art and to make research.” — Rafiq Anadol [32:48, 33:51]
• The museum uses ultra-low energy, striving for both technological and environmental sustainability.

Tensions in AI Art

• Acknowledges controversy over generative AI and unconsented use of artist’s work.
• Advocates for artist-led, ethically grounded model training:
  • “I believe the future for artists is to create their own models and they have their own vocabulary. … Artist-led platforms are needed to bring solutions.” — Rafiq Anadol [34:53, 36:05]

Personal Collaboration

• Shares about the collaboration with his wife/co-founder, painter Efsun Erkulic—embodying a synthesis of tradition and innovation at “the kitchen table.”

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Section 6: The US-China Tech Race & Global Power Shifts

[39:06 – 54:27]
Guests: Evan Osnos (New Yorker), Walter Isaacson

China’s Technological Transformation

• On return to Beijing, Osnos notes an environment saturated with technology—from robot butlers to ubiquitous surveillance.
• China is now “the Saudi Arabia of data,” powering its AI ambitions with the world’s largest datasets.

Societal Contrasts

• U.S. citizens are wary of government data collection but willingly give it to private tech giants; in China, privacy concerns are muted, in part due to visible improvements in living standards and heavy official surveillance.
• “They tend to be a little bit more tolerant, perhaps a little more optimistic about technology.” — Evan Osnos [43:12]

Policy: Central Planning and Its Discontents

• Central planning yields both spectacular achievements (EVs, solar, lithium batteries, shipbuilding) and costly missteps (property bubble, demographic crisis following the One Child Policy).
• China faces paradoxical job market: youth unemployment is high, even as the overall young workforce shrinks—pointing to educational/skills mismatches in a rapidly changing economy.

Demographics: The Legacy of One Child

• Shrinking birth rate (now one child per woman) is both a policy and psychological issue: “people don’t feel confident about the future … uneasy with the level of government intrusion into private life ...” — Evan Osnos [47:26]
• Global trend toward lower fertility, but China’s stands out for its magnitude and the government’s inability to reverse it.

The Race and the Need for Balance

• China's response to U.S. trade policy (especially under Trump) was to double down on tech "self-reliance" and outspend the U.S. in basic R&D.
• Risks of zero-sum thinking noted; both nations must find ways to collaborate, especially to prevent runaway risks in AI and advanced technologies.
• “We don’t have the luxury of imagining that China is going to suddenly disappear from the world stage. ... These two big, powerful countries, ambitious countries, have to figure out a way to coexist.” — Evan Osnos [53:29]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "There's no going back to the kind of cooler climate many of us grew up in."
  — Jeff Goodell [03:59]

• "I call it a kind of bug zapper ... you can be on a hike on a hot day and, you know, get yourself into the wrong situations and be dead in 20 minutes."
  — Jeff Goodell [05:45]

• "I've written about it as the divide between the cooled and the damned."
  — Jeff Goodell [13:04]

• "At what point does that risk outweigh the benefits that these companies want to bring to us ... this is being debated at the moment."
  — Madhumita Murgia [22:41]

• "Nature is the most important, the most beautiful and the most inspiring thing we have as humanity. I think nature is a form of intelligence like AI and as important as AI."
  — Rafiq Anadol [32:48]

• "China could be the Saudi Arabia of data, meaning that what oil was for the 20th century, data could be the makings of wealth and power in a new century."
  — Evan Osnos [41:49]

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Timestamps Quick Guide

• [01:04–16:33] – Climate change, extreme heat, adaptation, and inequality (Jeff Goodell)
• [18:41–27:43] – AI’s environmental and social impact; open vs closed models; regulation (Madhumita Murgia)
• [27:45–37:24] – AI art, ethics, and nature at "Dataland" (Rafiq Anadol)
• [39:06–54:27] – The US-China tech race; societal, economic, and demographic shifts in China (Evan Osnos & Walter Isaacson)

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Summary Takeaway

Amanpour’s "The Heat is On" is a rich, multilayered episode examining how environmental and technological revolutions intersect with democracy, justice, and creativity. In both climate and AI, the same themes surface: new perils, competing narratives of control, inequality, and urgent calls for adaptation and ethical guardrails. Despite daunting challenges, the episode offers space for hope: through adaptation, creativity, and the struggle for agency in a rapidly changing world.

Transcript

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[Paula Newton]

Hello everyone and welcome to amanpur. Here's what's coming up. Europe braces for yet another heat wave as wildfires threaten to rage and rivers start to shrink. We speak to Jeff Goodell, who wrote the book the heat will kill you first. And tech titans split over who should control the future of artificial intelligence. Look at both sides of this high stakes debate. Then Art in the time of AI Digital artist Rafik Anadol tells me about his unique creative process and his museum data land. Plus the fight for tech supremacy. New Yorker writer Evan Osso brings WALTER Isaacson inside Beijing's battle with the U.S. to see who's number one. And a very warm welcome to the program, everyone. I'm Paula Newton in New York, sitting in for Krishna Mompoor. Another month, another broken record. July was the hottest month in the United States since record keeping began in 1895. That's according to data from the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Now, globally, it was the joint second hottest July ever, which, coupled with the beginning of the El Nino weather phenomenon, led to record high sea surface temperatures in Western Europe. Meantime, extreme heat has become the norm. In fact, in the past few months, this has all been that new normal with hardly any rainfall to relieve the situation. Many areas are experiencing drought warnings, while wildfires have devastated parts of Spain and France. In the uk, both England and Wales had their driest July on record, with one scientist from the Met Office concluding that, quote, evidence shows the climate of the 20th century has now gone. Jeff Goodell is a longtime climate journalist whose latest book is the Heat which Will Kill you First. Life and death on a scorched Planet and he joins me now from Texas. Good to be with you, Jeff. We really are just trying to take all of this in. And despite the breathless headlines, we know many people are feeling this intimately in their own communities. And so I want to ask you about the quote we just heard right from the UK Weather agency. Quoting them again, evidence shows the climate of the 20th century in has now gone. I'm wondering, do you agree? And if you do, how would you describe the new status quo?

[Jeff Goodell]

Thanks. And thanks for having me on. I think that's a very true and very profound quote. I think that one of the things that a lot of people don't understand when we think about climate change and what it's doing to our world is that there's no going back to the kind of cooler climate that many of us grew up in and that we think of as the sort of normal state of the world. We are rapidly moving into a much hotter world. And as long as we continue burning fossil fuels and emitting CO2, that world is going to get hotter and hotter and hotter. And the kinds of events that we're seeing this summer that are coming together right now with the wildfires and the heat and the drought are just a sort of harbinger of what we're going to see more and more of in the future. And I think the fundamental challenge that we have is twofold. One is to reduce our emissions as quickly as possible to halt this. This warming, and secondly, to adapt to this new and different world, which is a profound and expensive challenge.

[Paula Newton]

Jeff, as you know all too well, there does not seem the political will to do the first. I do want to get to adaptation because it's important. You know, in press coverage of oncoming heat waves, we read headlines like, the UK and France are bracing for the fifth heat wave of the season. What does bracing mean for a heat wave? And what should governments be doing? And I say that in Canada. One of the things I've studied was a terrible heat wave that happened in British Columbia in 2021, and they had more than 600 deaths, according to their coroner's report. Heat kills, as you've pointed out, many times.

[Jeff Goodell]

Yeah. And heat is particularly difficult and dangerous to deal with. First of all, I think most people don't really understand how dangerous heat is. There was a study, for example, that came out a few weeks ago that suggested in one month in Europe this summer, 16,000 people died during the heat wave. They're kind of ghostly events. You look out your window and you can't tell what the Heat is, you can't tell if it's, you know, 85 degrees outside or 115 degrees outside. If it were a hurricane or a storm, you would know very well. So it doesn't register with us in the same way. And a lot of people, including myself, before I started writing my book, didn't really understand how dangerous heat is to our bodies and how quickly you can die from it. I call it a kind of bug zapper. I mean, you can be on a hike on a hot day and, you know, get yourself into the wrong situations and be dead in 20 minutes. I mean, that is the kind of thing that we are not used to thinking about when we think about weather events is the risk to human life. That heat, that heat really sort of underscores.

[Paula Newton]

So if we've said to ourselves that the weather of the 20th century is gone in the 21st century, then what does that adaptation look like when again we go back to the headlines and they say things like brace for, you know, worst heat wave in a decade?

[Jeff Goodell]

Yeah, I mean that phrase, bracing for the heat wave is, you know, a kind of media shorthand for pay attention. I think one of the things that we certainly do need to do better is pay attention to these events. Better warning systems, better public health awareness, better messaging about when heat waves are coming. Here in Texas, where I live, we have tremendously good messaging around, say, flood events. We, there's all kinds of, every time there's a big rainstorm, you know, I get 15 alerts on my phone and everybody knows what to do. Heat events are very different and I think we need to get, to get much better at that. We need to build our cities in different ways. The heat impacts are mostly centered in cities where people live. Cities have a, this is something called an urban heat island effect when because they're built of concrete and asphalt and things like that, they're 7 to 10 degrees hotter. So rethinking how we build our cities with more green spaces, less asphalt, more cooling centers. And just the last thing is, you know, there's been a big debate this year in Europe about air conditioning and the importance of air conditioning. And I want to be very clear that I think that air conditioning is a life saving technology. It needs to be in more places for more people, especially people who don't have access to it now, who or and often can't afford access to it. But air conditioning is not a solution for extreme heat. We are not going to air condition the fields where the crops grow that are now failing in this heat wave. We are not going to air condition our oceans, we're not going to air condition our forests. So air conditioning is important, but it is not a magic silver bullet for extreme heat.

[Madhumita Murgia]

Yeah.

[Paula Newton]

It is a rational point that you make, but as you said, sometimes so overlooked. I want to turn to the issue of wildfires. Of course, the heat driven by climate change. Climate change brings the sort of dry conditions that give us these very high intensity wildfires that in many cases are unprecedented. How are wildfires different now when we are dealing with this warming planet?

[Jeff Goodell]

Wildfires now are bigger, faster, more intense, hotter, they move quickly. I mean, they are a construction of this hotter, drier climate. Everyone knows about starting a campfire or a fire, that you need dry tinder to get a fire going. Well, our world is turning into a tinderbox. And so when these fires start, they take off faster, they burn bigger, they burn hotter. There was a French fire captain who described the fires, the wildfires in France, as a meteorological nuclear bomb. I mean, they're so hot that they evaporate the water that these aircraft are trying to drop on them before they even hit the fire. So they're bigger, they're more intense. They are the sort of articulation of this hotter, drier climate. And then beyond the fire itself is the dangers of the smoke, which many of us are, are learning about very vividly this summer.

[Paula Newton]

Yeah. The minute we step out our doorsteps, in many cases in Europe and in Canada elsewhere, governments are trying, right, to adapt to a strategy to try and make these fire seasons less severe. Firefighting is evolving. They're taking a more holistic approach. What do you believe needs to be done? Because clearly more needs to be done. I mean, even here in Canada, when we had our technical. You know, I listen to the technical briefing from the Canadian government every year, have for five years. This was not supposed to be what the fire season looked like in Canada, and yet here we are. That's just one example.

[Jeff Goodell]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's very difficult. I mean, especially the Canadian wildfires are a great example. I mean, you have things like President Trump out there talking about raking the forests and things like that, which is just absurd. I mean, these forest fires in Canada, for example, are burning in a wilderness area that there's no access to. There's nobody out there raking forests and things like that. So they're very difficult to control. I mean, the most important thing, again, is to not continue to heat up our world so that these fires continue to grow the way that they're growing.

[Devin Dalton]

Yeah.

[Paula Newton]

The irony of what you're saying, the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney was a one time UN climate envoy in Canada. They're talking about burning more fossil fuel, not less. Even though they will argue with me about that point. I am wondering though that when you have the impacts on certain communities like in Canada, I want you to listen now to just what one resident said in British Columbia. And I want you to know that in the last few years I have heard so many testimonials like this one you're about to hear. Listen.

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It's like a freight train coming at you. The heat, everything, it's just, it's unexplainable.

[Paula Newton]

20 years of building and everything we've built to watch it go up in

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flames in five minutes, just gone.

[Paula Newton]

I mean you have called this really these predatory events because they're calling out the world's most vulnerable people. I mean, how do these heat emergencies really hit at the key of what so many people are enduring? Because, and I think you brought this to many people's attention. This also goes to income inequality and how there is such a disparity between how some communities can handle this and how other communities cannot.

[Jeff Goodell]

Yeah, and that's. That I think is the big story of climate change and the big story both in the sense of impacts and in the sense of why the politics has not moved as quickly. You know, I've written about it as the divide between the cooled and the damned. I mean, you have people who have air conditioning, they work in offices, they're mobile, they have money. When a fire is coming, for example, they get out of town, they leave, they don't have to be there working their jobs or putting water around their house. The way people who are more vulnerable, they have all kinds of flexibility. And the same with extreme heat.

[Walter Isaacson]

Right?

[Jeff Goodell]

I mean the people who die in heat waves are people who are not sitting in air conditioned offices, they're outdoor workers. Here in Texas, I see guys on the roof next to my house here on you know, 110 degree days. I don't know how they, they survive. You know, there's a, there's a big gulf in the, in, in, in our world between people who cause the impacts, people who have high carbon lives and live in essentially air conditioned protected bubbles. And the people outside of those bubbles who do not have access to cooling, who do not have access to early warning system for fires, who are there on the front lines. And the irony, the terrible irony is that they're the ones who have done the least to cause the problem. They're the ones who have burned the least amount of fossil fuels. They're not flying around in private jets and getting overnight orders from Amazon and doing all the other kinds of things that underscore our high carbon lifestyle.

[Paula Newton]

I want to ask you, we talk about mitigation and then we also talk about adaptation. Are you hopeful? Do you believe we can do one, the other, both?

[Jeff Goodell]

Well, I think we're going to do all of it, yes. But I don't think that there's a sort of simple solution. Right. I don't think that it's going to look the same everywhere. We are going to lose places, places are going to become uninhabitable. There's going to be mass shifts in where people live. There's going to be big ecological shifts. Certain cities, places are going to be flooded out, are going to be too hot to live in. On the other hand, there is going to be really interesting adaptations that will happen. We will build cities in new ways. We will shift more quickly to carbon free vehicles and things like that. I live in Texas. The renewable energy boom here is amazing and they're not. It's, it's the, the state in the country that is doing the most to build renewable power and we're not doing it here because we're tree huggers or anything, but because the cost of renewable energy is so much lower. So there's going to be dramatic changes in our world and the question is how well are we going to sort of guide those changes? Is it going to be just sort of chaotic or is it going to be something where we think about these questions of climate justice and who's suffering and do something to help them?

[Paula Newton]

Yeah, chaotic is certainly a word that so many people use. I'm glad to end it on a note where at least you have looked into these issues so closely. Have some hope for how we will all adapt. Jeff Goodell we'll leave it there for now. Thanks so much for the conversation.

[Jeff Goodell]

Thanks for having me.

[Paula Newton]

All right, stay with cnn. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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[Paula Newton]

Next to AI, where a major disagreement is opening up between the tech titans On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg came out arguing for free open source AI models and against government regulation. And this puts them in stark contrast to the public position of companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, who have claimed to want more government oversight even as they race ahead in developing technology that they acknowledge carries enormous, possibly existential risk. Meanwhile, in Washington, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders is calling on the major AI companies to pause AI development altogether. For more on this, we want to bring in Madhumita Murgia, the AI editor for the Financial Times and author of Code Dependent Living in the Shadow of AI. I want to welcome you to the program. Thanks so much for being with us.

[Madhumita Murgia]

Hi there.

[Paula Newton]

Now, we have just been talking about a planet already under enormous strain from climate change. And now AI is becoming a now major competitor for some of the scarcest resources. As this technology expands at such an extraordinary speed, we have to say exponential speed. How significant is that demand becoming and how much more space, to use a term, will it take up in the global economy?

[Madhumita Murgia]

Yeah, well, you know, AI's environmental footprint is broad and it's just growing. And it spans everything from greenhouse gas emissions to energy consumption, but also the use of water and land, as you talked about scarce resources. And the scale is just increasingly being revised upwards and upwards by the experts. And so we're seeing, you know, unprecedented demand on energy and water. For example, Anthropic has said that, you know, the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next few years and that will kind of show up in electricity prices going up for the average consumer. And, you know, there's unrest around jobs and use of agricultural land. So there's really a whole host of environmental impacts that we're going to see grow.

[Paula Newton]

Yeah, and they're scarce resources, I will add again, and yet the ordinary people do not feel like they have agency or autonomy over any of it. Your book is called Living in the Shadow of AI. You've reported on what these systems Mean for again, we'll use the word ordinary people, you and me, around the world. How will AI develop if society does not have a meaningful say in what AI can do for us and what it should do for us? I mean, I will say a lot of people, most people, I would say, are wondering, what has AI ever done for me?

[Madhumita Murgia]

Well, that that distinction is really key about what it can do versus what we should use it for. And I think you have the perspective of the tech companies, the AI giants, who've really, you know, they've got this massive hammer that they can kind of hit at anything. You know, it can improve economy through making work more productive. It can improve healthcare, they say, by kind of improving diagnostics. And really any industry you look at, AI is essentially intelligence that has become cheaper and less scarce. And so think about all the ways you could apply that. But on the other hand, you have the ordinary people that I kind of went and spoke to, whether it's Uber drivers, single mothers, teachers, priests in the Vatican who are looking at how this is, you know, curbing their agency, where you're replacing AI, you know, in, in places that humans used to hold a key and important role, even when it comes to AI, you know, friendships, therapists, all of these really sensitive, intimate areas of our lives are being taken over by these systems. And without sort of our voices, the voices of ordinary people, there's just a commercial imperative to keep going, to keep building, and to keep sort of rolling this into the economy. So I think there really needs to be a pause here, not just of the development of the technology, but into to ask the question of how do we apply it? Where should AI actually be used?

[Paula Newton]

You know, some governments are starting to ponder that, but so many other governments seems to be at the will, as we call them, the tech titans. Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, putting forward one vision, his vision, and he says restricting access to powerful AI concentrates enormous power in the hands of a few companies, and he claims governments as well. His alternative is a disruptor. Many people are saying you make these systems more open, like perhaps they have in China, and distribute them more widely, and ultimately AI is cheaper, more accessible. Do you believe that his vision will get us to more autonomy and more agency?

[Madhumita Murgia]

I think this is the key debate currently at the heart of Silicon Valley. Open versus closed. You know, the question isn't really which one is better? Because we've seen this with our phones, right? You have the two systems existing alongside one another. You have the Android open source system, and then you have the iPhone model of a closed owned system. So this is the, this is the dual sort of use. And I think, you know, what Mark Zuckerberg is saying is that everybody should have access, everybody should be able to kind of modify this in the way that they want versus what OpenAI and anthropic feel is that that could be unsafe. It could lead to sort of unfettered access to bad actors who might use this to do malicious things like hacking into important, you know, healthcare systems or power networks. And so I think the question really is at what point the risk of letting these powerful systems be used by anybody and everybody, at what point does that risk outweigh the benefits that these companies want to bring to us, which is, you know, making our work easier to do, getting us better health care, making fairer decisions in the judicial system? You know, ultimately this is, these things are going to coexist, but the question is when does the risk outweigh the benefit? And that's what is being debated out at the moment.

[Paula Newton]

And there doesn't seem to be a forthcoming answer on that. Zuckerberg's argument is essentially that government should just get out of the way and let innovation. And a lot of those arguments are predicated on the fact that that is what China is doing. I don't know if you agree with that, but you could surely turn completely. Go ahead, I'll have you answer that.

[Madhumita Murgia]

What do you think I was going to say? I certainly don't agree with it. I mean, we've seen what Meta has done in the past. A lack of social media regulation has meant that we have social media companies that have been responsible and have sort of proliferated all sorts of harms that we're only now seeing the consequences of whether it comes to mental health for young girl disinformation, misinformation, even political unrest, you know, kind of the teetering of democratic situations and countries. And so I think really there is a need for regulation. We can see already the harms. My book really talks about how this has changed the calculus. You know, the biases that come out of AI systems means that those who are the weakest, the most vulnerable are going to be those who are hurt most by the outcomes of these systems. And power is going to concentrate towards those who already have it. So yes, yes, we need governments to intervene here. We need to find a way to make these companies accountable for when things go wrong, which they will, because no system is perfect. And the question really is when that's going to happen and how far they can Push it how much the companies can water down these regulations. But we certainly need them.

[Paula Newton]

So we need them. Independent US Senator Bernie Sanders points to, he's pointing to a lot of the errors and I would say mishaps that have happened in the last few weeks. He says that there's a human loss of control. Do we need a kill switch here? And I ask you. I do not see governments stepping up. Certainly not the US Government. They continue to convene these tech titans at the White House, but we do not see any rational steps to go forward.

[Madhumita Murgia]

This is a tough situation. The particular events that you're talking about that Bernie Sanders is referring to is really around cybersecurity. And we've seen a few incidents in recent weeks of models made by OpenAI, anthropic and meta that have sort of been able to access the Internet and hack into the systems of external companies. Really, you know, cybercrimes technically, but done out of a testing environment. This is quite concerning because the companies themselves weren't aware of it. And you know, the, the call for a, for a stop or a kill switch, I think, you know, is fair because there's a lot of concern around it. But realistically I don't think that's going to happen. As you say, governments aren't motivated to do it because we have a twofold race going on, right? You have the, on the geopolit level, you have US versus China, the two leading powers really developing AI. And it's really existential to the national security of these two countries to be the leading power. So it's hard to sort of stop yourself. And then secondarily you have the corporate race which is being fought in Silicon Valley primarily between, you know, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, two of those companies wanting to go public who are all trying to race to creating these super intelligent systems and making money off of them. And so there too the motivation to, to stop, to slow down is sort of non existent. So we are going to move forward. The market forces, the geopolitical forces create that sort of forward roll downward, roll down a hill. So we just need to figure out how we can place accountability, regulation, standards into this so that we get there safely.

[Paula Newton]

You say we are still waiting for a government to step up on that and hopefully it won't be a crisis that actually leads to them acting. Madhavita Maduria, thank you so much. Really apprec your time.

[Madhumita Murgia]

Thank you.

[Paula Newton]

Now, it's not all existential angst, right? In the world of AI, its role in the Creative process is increasingly prominent and controversial. Many artists have forsworn its use. But at least our next artist is unashamed in his use of the technology, arguing it is a tool unlike any other. Rafiq Anadol has spent years fusing art, architecture, visualization and AI. And now he has a new museum, Dataland, which he calls the first museum of AI Art. You see him there. He is joining us from Los Angeles. Welcome to the program. It is good to see you.

[Rafik Anadol]

So good to see you. Thank you so much for inviting. So happy to be here.

[Paula Newton]

Rafiq, you call Dadaland the world's first museum of AI arts, and you've described it as a place for human dreamers. Oh, that is so much food for my soul. So what exactly are we looking at here? Is it art made by humans using machines or art made by machines?

[Rafik Anadol]

So first of all, super happy to be here. As an artist working with data since 2008, working with AI for more than 10 years, I felt that we are in a new renaissance. And what we are seeing, I feel, is a form of art, truly human machine collaboration. Taking the human imagination in the core idea, but assisted by the machine intelligence, in this case, AI using ethical data, sustainable compute to create a new form of art. I call them living sculptures, living paintings, and living stories that can have a conversation with the visitors. Through the emotions, through the movements and even the scent molecules can be transformed in this experience. So as an artist, as a studio here in Los Angeles, we have been working in this field for almost a decade and work with wonderful museums globally from the MoMA, Guggenheim and Pompei du. We have been trying our best to really show the world what happens is truly when the artist and thinking brush, in this case, train from scratch with the intention and with the great partnerships of, of course, innovation and discoveries, and find great ways of exploring these art with, of course, concerns and fears in our mind.

[Paula Newton]

Arfik visitors, in fact wear biometric devices. They measure things like your heart rate and your skin response, and the artwork changes in response to what your body is actually feeling and experiencing. Why is it important to break down that traditional boundary between the viewer and the work of art?

[Rafik Anadol]

I think it's a wonderful question. I'd like to go back to two years ago at MoMA in Nimi, York. Our work unsupervised received more than 3 million visitors. It was an incredible moment for me as an artist witnessing the people's reaction to like 200 years of Momo archives. And in that time I was like daydreaming. About what happens for 5,000 years as humanity we look at artworks and we feel something. And the question was here in the renaissance age of technology and innovation, could artwork also feel us back? And I think this was a very exciting question to me because it brings different ways of sorry imaginations in a way that the whole this 1 millimeter shutters in a positive way that finally we can think about art's impact to our societal perspectives and human perspective. And I felt that emotions such as heartbeat and even the goosebumps are one of the most fundamental feelings that we create. So I want to appreciate my mentor, Rose Speakard from MIT Media Lab. And she has been for 10 years mentoring and she had this pretty much FDA approved medical device called Empathica. And she allowed us to create art by using this scientific device. And to do that, we write more than 10 million lines of code last three years, by the way. And we train our own AI model in mind that the conversation between the visitor and the artwork can help. For example, in one of our galleries called the Sanctuary, it's the end of the experience. This artwork can receive the people's emotions in the room and real time create a living painting while literally smelling a moonflower, which is only one day blooms in Amazonia. Of course, no harm to the flower. We use a headspace technology and teleport sent to the visitors based on their emotions, again based on the goosebumps. And I think it's a new form of renaissance we are in. And I feel that I'm excited to create this form of new arts that has a depth and meaning and a purpose and a discourse and context.

[Paula Newton]

So in that way, and especially when you mine so many of the archives, whether it is from nature or in these museums themselves, Right. Data is the new paint for you. It is the new paint. It is the new paintbrush. How would you describe it to people? Because I was actually shocked at at how much of the natural world you dug into in order to really have this immersive experience.

[Rafik Anadol]

So first of all, I believe nature is the most important, the most beautiful and the most inspiring thing we have as humanity. I think nature is a form of intelligence like AI and as important as AI. I felt that to pay attention, to take attention, not replace nature, but to understand, to have a conversation. I thought that we can dedicate an AI model called called large nature model for AI. So first we asked for permission from incredible institutions such as Smithsonian Museum, one of the best archives in the world. And we got permission to use half billion images and inside Those images we have flora, fauna, fungi, the rainforest, you just name it. And we found this information. And then we also use sustainable compute, by the way, thanks to our Google Cloud friends and also Nobel laureates Demis Hassabis and his team, they allowed us to use sustainable energy, which means that the whole museum is using less than one smartphone per person, by the way. And then this model became our form of intelligence. And also we were so deeply understood that nature is still very hard to understand. Even though we are trying to go to space and understand other forms of intelligence. I felt that nature is still one of the most important things we have for humanity. By the way, our model is ethical, sustainable and free for everyone to make art and to make research. And we found that the future of arts and the museums can be a great place, kind of a campfire for humanity, where we can discuss and share openly and honestly these technologies and show good examples for any age and any background.

[Paula Newton]

You know, your lack of tension between technology and art is really inspiring in a way. But there is some serious criticism, right? I mean, generative AI has been accused of absorbing, just lapping up all the work of artists, writers, photographers, without meaningful consent or any compensation to speak of. I mean, you emphasize that your large nature model is trained on, ethically sourced, as you just described to us. But where should we see the line drawn here? Because as I said, the word I used is tension. There is friction there.

[Rafik Anadol]

Yes. First of all, I'm an artist and I'm a teacher. For 10 years I'm teaching this medium. I can completely understand both sides of the world. First of all, I completely agree if an artist feels uncomfortable to use someone else's data. That's a feeling, it's a fact. I don't think it's about technology, innovation or discoveries or science. It's a pure human feeling. But I knew that very well ten years ago, by the way, when I trained my first model as a studio, we knew that our compass has to be train our own models, train our own data sets and collect. By the way, we traveled 16 rainforests to collect our own data just to frame this process. Because. Because sometimes people that don't really understand how hard it is to work with AI. Of course there are ready tools and technologies and services. But I believe the future for artists is to create their own models and they have their own vocabulary. And I think it's possible if you join the forces between the technological pioneers and breakthrough minds and souls, I believe it's possible to solve this problem. I mean, we sold the sustainable energy problem and we solved the ethical data problem and I'm pretty confident as Dara land one of the example of the museum in the world. I think art artist led discussions, artist led practices has a different merit and context of life. And I do believe that for science and extreme complex like problems of humanity we need extremely complex AI models to solve those problems. But for art making, for culture, for creating intellectual new context of life and imagination, I believe artists like artist led platforms are needed has to be used to bring solution to many problems.

[Paula Newton]

Now Rafiq, I only have about 30 seconds left but can you bring us to your kitchen table then because your co founder is in fact your partner, your wife, Efsun Erkulic, she is a painter in the traditional sense. What do you guys talk about at your kitchen table?

[Walter Isaacson]

About this.

[Rafik Anadol]

So she is an incredible person that more than now 18 years we are together in this journey and he is my true compass of life. He is not only just creative but also extremely logical. While we dream, she got reality. So very grateful to join the forces in this life to create art and

[Paula Newton]

no tension there between the traditional artist and everything you've brought to this. As I said, she is a co founder.

[Rafik Anadol]

Yes she's a co founder and a true believer of the future. We are going.

[Paula Newton]

Rafiq Anadol, you have been absolutely nourishment for the soul through all of this. It's an immersive experience and we'll continue to watch your work. Thanks so much,

[Rafik Anadol]

so much. Back up in Los Angeles.

[Paula Newton]

Thanks. Stay with cnn. We'll be right back after a quick.

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[Dr. Sanjay Gupta]

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. For a lot of people, it's obvious the appeal of medical tourism is all about the cost. It's about the price tag. But cost isn't the only driver, as you're about to hear. My guest today is Harvard Law School Professor Glenn Cohen. He's an expert in bioethics and the law, and he has written a book about medical tourism.

[Glenn Cohen]

So it varies a little bit by country, but I'll give you some examples of things that are sometimes discussed in the literature. So sex reassignment surgery is an interesting example. Thailand has long been, I think, ahead of us in sex reassignment surgery, and many people think that that's a great place to go for that. India has often been a leading center for cardiac, but the US Is very good at cardiac, too. But when someone's thinking about cardiac, that's a possibility.

[Dr. Sanjay Gupta]

Listen to Chasing Life Streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Paula Newton]

Now, earlier we spoke about the AI tech race between the US And China. From deploying more industrial robots than all other countries combined to becoming the world's largest maker of electric vehicles, it's clear China has made enormous strides in recent years. So what does this dominance mean for the global order? The New Yorker's Evan Osnos speaks with Walter Isaacson about how China has pushed itself forward and held itself back.

[Walter Isaacson]

Thank you, Paula and Evan Osnos, welcome back to the show.

[Evan Osnos]

Thank you, Walter. Great to be with you.

[Walter Isaacson]

You have a new piece called the Future made in China. You lived in China from, I think, 2005 to 2013. First of all, what struck you most when you went back for a week or two, do this piece?

[Evan Osnos]

One thing that jumps out at you right away is that technology is everywhere. I think we feel that in our own lives in the United States. But it is even more acute when you step into Beijing. I'll give you an example. If you get room service at the hotel, there's a decent shot that when you open the door, there'll be a robot there painted to look like a butler about R2D2 height, delivering your room service. And there's also a kind of uneasy element to this, too. Obviously, we're aware of Chinese surveillance cameras everywhere. You get the sense that everything that happens is being documented. And that's something that we're thinking about in the United States, too. But it can feel a little bit like a preview of a world to come. When you step into China these days

[Walter Isaacson]

and you say it's been documented, there are cameras that follow you, there's facial recognition. But every time somebody does an exchange, a digital exchange, money gets exchanged or whatever, all of that goes to a big database. Right?

[Madhumita Murgia]

Right.

[Evan Osnos]

It does. One of the things that's been a big change in China is that they've essentially gotten rid of cash over the last decade. People may have heard about that, but when you do that, when you're paying for every convenience store visit, every taxi trip, every time you take out a bicycle on a ride share, all of that is feeding into the system that knows where you are at any moment, what your preferences are, what your tastes are. So in some ways, it draws you in more deeply because all of a sudden, you're being served products online that look particularly attractive to you because they know what you. It is a fascinating plunge into the world of the algorithmic era more thoroughly than we've even felt here in America.

[Walter Isaacson]

Well, one thing that makes it particularly interesting is that in order to have good artificial intelligence, good AI, it's not simply about the software that runs the AI, it's about the data upon which it trains. Are they creating these huge pools of data that will give them an AI advantage?

[Evan Osnos]

They are. In many ways. They decided that, as one venture capitalist put it, that China could be the Saudi Arabia of data, meaning that what oil was for the 20th century, data could be the makings of wealth and power in a new century. And there's some pluses and minuses that come with that. By hoovering up all of this data about people in their daily lives, they get an extraordinary portrait of not only what you're doing now, but what you might seek to do down the road. And that's very useful for things like. Like Chinese police agencies, but it's also true that it allows products and companies to sell you things very effectively. I think there's a real debate going on in the United States that's not possible in China. And that debate is about where do we want to be observed and where do we actually want to have these sort of zones of privacy where we say, okay, we're interested in you helping us maybe improve medical care and health care, but we'd like you to stay out of decisions when it comes to more private things. That's something that you can. A debate you can have in the US and you can't really have it in China.

[Walter Isaacson]

Well, one of the strange things about that debate in the United States is that we pretty much freely give up our data to a lot of private companies. I mean, this shirt was bought at Amazon. It now promotes things to me. Everything I do, whether it's Google, Amazon, anthropic, they tend to understand me. But we're very afraid of the government doing that. Is that different in China?

[Evan Osnos]

Yeah, in China, they. Well, to be frank about it, Walter, they don't have the luxury of telling you as a visitor that they're uneasy about government surveillance. That's for sure. But there's another thing happening, which is that Chinese life during the computing era, which for all of us has been about the past. Let's Call it the past half century, Chinese life has improved dramatically from that time. It used to be that three quarters of the population worked in agriculture. Today it's down to less than 25%. So they tend to be a little bit more tolerant, perhaps a little more optimistic about technology. When we are in our country, Warrior, we've gone through the social media era where people have said, look, there are negatives for our democracy, for our emotional health. There is a kind of robust public conversation here. Whereas in China, in many cases, it's full speed ahead, whether you want it or not.

[Walter Isaacson]

Yeah. You say they're less wary about technology than we are here. We kind of see data centers or AI. We get kind of wary. But they're also, and you write that in the piece, they're less wary about data collection. Is that true?

[Evan Osnos]

It is. I think people have come to assume over there that anything you're doing, as one person put it to me, anything you're doing can be watched at any time. It's become a feature of the modern life. And so as a result, yes, there are people who are uneasy about it. Occasionally you run into somebody who says, I am not on Weisin wechat, the big social media platform, but it's relatively rare. But here's the difference, is that in the west, as let's call it what it is, as flawed as democracy can seem to us right now, it is also a place where you're able to have these kinds of public debates about it. China is forging ahead. They've said from the top level down. The Communist Party says we think it's better for us to have data, to use it for all kinds of advanced purposes, and we're going to go ahead with it. So that creates the tension.

[Walter Isaacson]

You talk about top down, you talk about the social engineering that can be done when the government has that power. One of the great failures, tragedies of social engineering, I realized from your piece, kind of knew it, but it hit me, was the One Child Policy that was social engineering. How has that affected China today?

[Evan Osnos]

It's been a fascinating story. People will remember the One Child policy was adopted in the early 80s. Basically, they tried to reduce the population so that more people could have a larger share of the pie. But the net effect was actually an economic fiasco. Today, as a result of these curbs on population growth, they don't have enough workers to be able to fill the kinds of jobs that they need to take care of the elderly. They have a real imbalance in society. They're struggling for Instance, to make sure that they have enough workers 20, 30 years down the road at the same time that they have unemployment among young people because they were trained in universities that were geared for yesterday, not for tomorrow.

[Walter Isaacson]

Wait, wait, stop there. Because I don't quite get that, why unemployment could be 20% among young people and yet there's a shortage of young people.

[Evan Osnos]

Well, what you have is a lot of people who studied the kinds of majors aren't that different than we have in our country. That made sense five years ago, even two years ago. But as somebody who works in AI told me recently in China, he said, look, I have a 15 year old son. I don't know what that kid should be studying in college when he goes off in two years. He says AI is the hot new major. But AI might not even be a major in 10 years. So what the takeaway from the one child policy history is is that when you try social engineering on a broad basis like this, it can seem as if you're just twisting the dials of society and making great advancements. But you're also exposing yourself to the risk that taking a giant leap of that kind exposes you ultimately to bigger downside, like the kind of economic and employment problems that they're facing today.

[Walter Isaacson]

Yeah, and one of the things that struck me about the one child policy is they said, okay, that was a bad idea, let's reverse this, let's lift it. And yet the birth rate in China continues to go down. It's even lower than that of the United States, less than the two per family replacement rate you need. It is why stay low?

[Evan Osnos]

I think this is the biggest story in China right now, Walter, is this question of why people aren't having kids. And, and the answer when you talk to them, and I've had a lot of conversations with young people kind of marrying age, childbearing age, and they say that they don't feel confident about the future. They feel tremendous unease, frankly. They're uneasy with the level of government intrusion into private life that's grown over the last few years. They're uneasy about what the AI era will mean for their employment. Will they be able to pay for education, healthcare for kids if they have them. So in some ways you can go to a place like Shanghai and as somebody said to me, it can feel like one of the truly the greatest cities in the world. But if people aren't choosing to bring their children into that future, what does it tell you about the underlying mood in the country?

[Walter Isaacson]

Well, it's not just China that's true in Japan. It's true in Italy. It's true in the United States, true in Western Europe. Is this part of a larger global trend, or is there something particular about China?

[Evan Osnos]

It's both. I mean, the global trend is real. You see that as a country industrializes, as a country gets more urbanized, that people do have smaller families. And as you say, we've seen this in Korea, in Japan and elsewhere. But in China, the numbers stand out. There is now essentially one child per woman in China. That's the fertility rate. It's the lowest rate they've had since 1949, when the People's Republic was founded, and they started keeping these records. So they are dealing with a problem they haven't been able to solve with policy. They've tried, for instance, saying, well, you know, we'll give you subsidized health care or fertility treatments. They've given actually people inducements. They will give you money if you have kids. Kids. It's not working. And if you talk to demographers, they say that's because the issue is actually more spiritual and interior. It's really psychological. It's about how people fundamentally feel about their level of personal agency in the future. And that, I think, is in some ways the missing piece of the puzzle. Both the United States and China are trying to figure out. How do you give young people a feeling that they have a hand in shaping this future that's coming down the pike at us?

[Walter Isaacson]

This idea of China leaping ahead and surpassing us on so many technolog right now is the theme of your piece. But there's a paper that somebody wrote about it with a title that just really struck me, and the title was thank Trump. To what extent is Trump's policies causing this?

[Evan Osnos]

Trump's policies have been a big piece of this story. It turns out when the first Trump administration came in back in 2017, one of the things that China realized because they were now dealing with a trade war, was, you know what? The future looks rocky. We need to depend on ourselves. And then when Trump came back in again for a second term, this was a big clarifying moment. As we remember, he went, in a sense, went up against big research universities in the United States, going to battle against Harvard, cutting funding in places for things like basic research. China said, and they said it very explicitly, this is an opportunity for us. Last year, China expanded its investment in basic R and D by 7%. This was a record. This is on top of large federal investments in research, research and science over the last few years. The Net effect is that China now today is doing more clinical trials, for instance, than the United States is doing. Their shipbuilding capability is 200 times as large. They're now producing 70% of the world's electric vehicles, lithium ion batteries, solar cells. All of these technologies, Walter, which of course were invented in many cases in the United States. But China has invested heavily in saying, how do we master that manufacturing? How do we leap that ahead and solve that challenge for ourselves and also dominate the manufacturing for the future?

[Walter Isaacson]

Since we're saying how great China has the winds in its back, what are the actual bad things that are causing problems in China?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, you have some serious issues around the economy, particularly the real estate sector. This is a case where for many years China believed that its economic future depended on pouring as much money into real estate as possible, even when they were building homes and apartments that people didn't need. So at a certain point, as you can imagine, a market like that crashes. And beginning in 2021, the Chinese property market has collapsed to the point that today people are spending about half as much for new homes in some places as they were even five or six years ago. There are now so many empty homes in China right now, Walter, that you could in fact house the entire population of Russia just in these empty kind of ghost apartments.

[Walter Isaacson]

That's another example, is another problem with Central park planning that you gotta mess up.

[Evan Osnos]

Absolutely. Is central planning. Is the problem here that when you have an economy that is ultimately directed from the top, what you lose is the ability to pick up signals when things are going wrong. And so, as in the case of the one child policy or in the case of the real estate crisis, there were signals that were saying to them, we need to slow down or reconsider. But at that point, when the policy is chosen, they'll continue down the track, and it's harder to change it than it is in a more free market market economy. And that's sort of the tension here is between these two different approaches to the technological future. In some ways, there are some people who say, well, the United States could take a note from China and do a bit more industrial policy, something that used to be allergy to us here but now seems more attractive if you're trying to make big investments in microchip manufacturing and things like that. But at the same time, you wouldn't want to copy too much of the Chinese system, or you choke off the kind of innovation that has produced American inventions in the the first place.

[Walter Isaacson]

We talk about the race between China and the United States. Whether it be on AGI, biotech, all the tariffs that are flying back and forth. Tell me you've been China expert for 20, 30 years now. Does it have to be a zero sum game or is there a way in which the US and China can work with some competition but a lot of cooperation towards a shared bet?

[Evan Osnos]

I think you've put it well. I think we're coming to the realization, and this is for me the result of 30 years of studying and working in China, that we don't have the luxury of imagining that China is going to suddenly disappear from the world stage. It is a fact of our lives. And these two big powerful countries, ambitious countries, have to figure out a way to coexist. Particularly now that we've developed these enormously powerful technologies in AI. I think we're heading towards an era and it reminds us a little bit of a moment in the Cold War. Not a perfect analogy but a useful one when the Soviet Union and the United States realized we're both nuclear armed nations. If we don't figure out a way to talk about these technologies, these weapons, we're going to find ourselves in a dangerous situation. There's a lot of people calling for it now saying the United States and China have to sit down and come up with some rules of the road to make sure that these technologies do not get out of control control before we're able to make the best of them.

[Walter Isaacson]

Evan Osnos, thank you so much for joining us.

[Evan Osnos]

Thank you Walter, Great to be with you.

[Paula Newton]

And finally for us, the greatest arms I've ever seen. That's how Matt Damon described his formidable 4 foot 6 stuntwoman Devin Dalton. She is one of those invisible warriors propping up Christmas Christopher Nolan's new movie the Odyssey. Stunt doubling for Damon's character Odysseus when he comes face to face with a group of giant cannibals also known as Lystrogothians. The 35 year old height and her muscular biceps, her pipes as we call them, made her the perfect stand in to illustrate Odysseus being dwarfed stunt doubling for a man for the first time. Dalton made sure to give this exciting opportunity her all. Here's what she told cnn.

[Devin Dalton]

I was already ready to go when I got the call but I definitely was doing a lot of pull ups, a lot of push ups. I love body weight stuff because I think it's just amazing and definitely working in like bicep workouts about three times a week just to get that extra growth. I really wanted to impress Matt so I'M so happy that he's, he's thrilled.

[Paula Newton]

Not just Matt Damon, who's impressed. There, that does it for us. If you ever miss our show, you can find the latest episode shortly after it airs on our podcast. And remember, you can always catch us online, on our website and all over social media. I want to thank you for watching. Thanks for watching and goodbye from New York.

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[Evan Osnos]

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[Jeff Goodell]

Tennessee 2012 Go inside the sports moments that brought us together and made history. From the underdogs to the rivalries and

[Walter Isaacson]

the miracles, it sends chills down your spine.

[Evan Osnos]

It's what sport was all about.

[Jeff Goodell]

The new CNN original series, Decades in

[Evan Osnos]

Sports, now streaming on the CNN app.