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A
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So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may app. Hello everyone, and welcome to Amanpour. Here's what's coming up. A day of kinetic action in the Middle east as the US ramps up strikes across Iran and Trump's 8pm deadline approaches. I ask international security specialist Colin Clark and former US army commanding general Mark Hertling where they see the next hours heading. Then is Hungary on the brink of historic political change? And why is America so invested with strong man Prime Minister Viktor Orban trailing in the polls? Atlantic staff writer Ann Applebaum breaks down what's at stake. Plus will I bring doom, salvation? Or perhaps a bit of both? I speak to AI ethicist Tristan Harris about the thin line between asset and threat. Welcome to the program, everyone. I'm Bianna Golodriga. New York, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour. Looming deadlines, faltering diplomacy, and now an extraordinary new threat from the US President that a whole civilization will die. Tonight the US has begun attacking military targets on Iran's Kharg island, from which almost all of the country's oil is exported. Now it comes as Trump's deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is fast approaching. If Tehran doesn't back down, Trump says the US Will unleash a wave of strikes on Iran's power plants and bridges. It's something Israel is already doing. Benjamin Netanyahu announcing earlier that Israeli forces have hit eight bridges it claims were being used to transport military equipment. Experts warn that the continued and direct targeting of civilian infrastructure would likely amount to war crimes and will inflict even greater suffering on the people there. To take stock of where we are ahead of Trump's self imposed 8pm deadline, I want to bring in Colin Clark, Executive director of the Souven center, and Mark Hartling, a retired U.S. army lieutenant general and author of if I Don't A Father's Wartime Journal. Welcome, both of you. Great to have you and your perspective and expertise on the program. General, let me start with you. So the President, with this stark warning that a whole civilization will die tonight if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened yet, there are reports that the Pentagon is actively revising its target list to focus on dual use, energy sites, infrastructure in the country to give legal acceptability, really and allowance for striking if that's what the President ultimately does insist upon and order. Just talk about the complexity in terms of what's happening on the battlefield and the command center and CENTCOM overseeing this war as the President is making threats like this.
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B
Yeah, Bian, it's great to be with you again. What I'd suggest is that the Pentagon planners, the various planners out of CENTCOM and in the Joint Staff are really taking a hard look at what is legal and what is unlawful in terms of the President's orders. Now, his sweeping hyperbolic orders both on Sunday and as well as this morning about destroying a civilization isn't something that the military does. They know that's a violation of of both the Geneva Convention and the laws of land warfare. So they will look to do the best they can in terms of providing kinetic strike packages for specific targets that advantage the Iranian military, that don't disadvantage or disadvantage the Iranian people. That's a heavy lift. And I got to tell you, when the President mentioned this on Sunday, my immediate reaction was, wait a minute, have these strike packages been considered? What kind of legalities have they gone through? What targets are they ignoring and what targets are they hitting? Even when the President said he's going to hit everything, that's not something the military will do. They know it's a crime to do that against international law. So they're adjusting to see which one of these targets that they can strike that affect truthfully just the military of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
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C
And we already know that strikes have been unleashed upon Carg island once again on military targets there. The last time the United States did that was in March. Carg island handles roughly 90% of the country's crude oil exports, as we noted, and I believe some 90 targets have already been hit today. I would view this perhaps as a warning of what's to come if Iran doesn't do what the president is demanding by 8pm but just talk about what those military targets on such a small island entail.
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B
Yeah, it is an island of about 7 km or so in diameter. The majority of the island, I would say, based on my view of the terrain, about 60% of the island are fuel tanks and transfer points for the oil that goes in and out of the island. Now, what's interesting about Carg island, it is an offshore island. It's about 15 miles off the shore of Iran. And the reason it's so important is because there's not a whole lot of ports in that northern part where the oil lines come into. So they ship it out to an oil island that has oil transfer points. But when you look at the island, the northeastern part of the island is primarily military facilities, both dormitories, barracks, air defense equipment, because the Iranian, of course, know that that's a critical site to protect. So they have a lot of military folks on that island ensuring that it's secure. Those are the targets that are likely being hit now. But again, we don't have any media representatives that are seeing exactly what the strike packages are hitting. So we really don't know. Bianna, and that's really unfortunate. Whenever I was in combat, we had embedded reporters and I would let them know the kinds of things we were doing so they could inform the American public. Unfortunately, in this case, all we know is that the Air Force and perhaps Navy Tomahawk missiles are hitting targets somewhere on the island. We don't really know what the packages are.
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C
And we also know that while that's the main port island, there are neighboring small islands that also act as oil and gas ports as well for Iran to use. Colin, let me bring you in, because the president's post also explicitly referenced complete and total regime change. Now, up until now, with this specific threat, at least, the President's focus has been solely on the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. So how are you interpreting that? We've heard the President say the regime has already been changed. We're dealing with different, more reasonable leaders. Now he's calling for regime change. Is this a sort of mission creep that many had been worried about?
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D
Well, I think it's hard to know if it's mission creep because the President's never clearly defined what the objectives of the mission were. So in that sense, you know, yes and no. Look, the strategic communications of this administration have been haphazard from the beginning and threatening to annihilate an entire Civilization is not exactly what we would call winning hearts and minds. He opened the campaign talking about liberating the Iranian people and is now threatening to destroy the entire country. So that's not going to win us any friends in Iran or in the broader region. And one of my main concerns is leaving Iran as a failed state without actually changing the regime. Because while they're decapitating a lot of the current leadership, they're simply just paving the way for younger, more hardline members of the IRGC to rise up and take their place. And we'll be fighting against that rump regime for the next 20 or 30 years. Look at what the Israelis are doing in Lebanon. Lebanon is the byproduct of a 1979-1990 civil war. We're still dealing with the effects of that state failure. Iran, 90 million people. The stakes are even higher.
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C
Right, and which is why you have, understandably neighboring GCC countries who may have been opposed to the United States and Israel launching this war now telling the United States, don't rush to end this yet. Don't leave us with an angered and crippled but not completely defanged Iran for that very reason that you just laid out. So, Colin, how does that impact what the President's choices are here and what he ultimately decides to do over the next few weeks?
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D
I think, you know, if the President follows through on those objectives of completely trying to eliminate the regime that's in place, we better buckle up because we're in for a much longer conflict. I think from day one, you know, the administration's been drunk off of the success of the Maduro raid and thinking that this was going to be something similar. You know, we can get into whether or not, you know, he was sold a bill of goods by the Israelis, by anyone else, but the President has agency. This was ultimately his choice. And even if he has buyer's remorse at this point, you know, we're. We're stuck, we're in the middle, and we need to come up with, you know, really a clear campaign plan to finish this off. And I just don't see it there. The President vacillates every day from threatening total destruction to saying that, you know, a ceasefire is on the verge with this new regime. So I think, you know, really, again, to go back to the strategic communications, it's confusing not only to the American people, but also to our allies, whatever allies we have left after this, and to the country that we're supposed to be either negotiating and, or fighting.
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C
And general, to the earlier argument of whether or not the president is actually seeking regime change here. If he were, do we even have the tactical footprint in the region to achieve that goal? Because I believe that more assets, including another air carrier strike group, is on its way, but not there yet. Do we have enough troops that would actually be used on the ground at this point to pursue regime change?
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B
Bianna, from my experience, emphatically no. And I'm going to go back to your phrasing of the so called mission creep. That's not what's going on here. We're doing mission expansion and contraction depending on the whim of the president on a daily basis on what he wants to define as the objective of this strategy. And I agree completely with Colin's saying, going back to the amount of forces on the island, whenever you go into combat, you do something called the troop to task ratio. So what are the tasks you're asking your military forces to execute and how many troops do you need to execute that task? We haven't seen that from the very beginning. There are forces being thrown at this Marine Expeditionary Units, a brigade from the 82nd Airborne. There may be forces, more forces coming in right now. We don't know. But no matter what they are, we're talking about a landmass that's three times the size of Iraq with 92 million people. That requires an awful lot of soldiers on the ground to do things. I think, as Colin just said, there's a lot of people wearing civilian clothes that are enamored with the capabilities of the US Military. We have seen that in the various press conferences we've had. But when you get forces on the ground really executing the missions as opposed to striking targets from 30,000ft in the air or thousands of miles away using Tomahawk missiles, it's a whole lot tougher when you're what the military, what the army calls coffee breath close, when you're close enough to the enemy to know that the fog and friction of any kind of warfare is going to affect the opportunities and the outcomes of any battle. So no, we do not have enough forces. And I'll say that even though I don't know what the tasks are that they're going to conduct and assign the missions to the various units that are coming into the area.
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C
General, this is coming at a time when the internal dynamics at the Pentagon are shifting. It appears to be a significant purge of top generals there. Secretary Hegseth ousted the army chief of staff last week and other top generals. How is this shakeup impacting, if at all, the state of the war here. And do you ultimately have confidence in Admiral Cooper, the head of centcom, and General Kaine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who are presenting the President, I would imagine, with sort of a menu of options that he does have militarily if he wants to pursue?
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B
Yeah. Well, I'd first say in terms of what the shakeup has affected Bianna, Secretary Hegseth has asked over two dozen senior military leaders, three stars and four star generals, to retire over the last several months. That's an extreme shakeup in terms of telling people to leave their profession, something they've dedicated their 30 years or more of their life to, and then suddenly being replaced. The ones that occurred last weekend with the chief of staff of the army and the director of the tradoc, the training and transformation outfit within the army, the four star generals. That in and of itself is critical because when you have the chief of staff in the army, that's like replacing a CEO of an organization. And by the way, Randy George was well loved and respected by his troops. So yeah, there's going to be a significant morale issue here. But you take that in conjunction with all of the other general officers and flag officers that Secretary Hexeth has relieved and it certainly will cause a tremendous effect within the war fighting capability of the services. It's not so much what the soldiers and sailors and airmen do, but it's how they're led and what the morale is of the force. And also if the leaders in the force feel like they can speak up when things are going wrong and actually present an opposing view to the civilian leadership, it gives me a great deal of pause and I'm concerned about all of that.
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C
Colin, I'd like to ask you about what the President claimed yesterday because on the one hand, today he's stating that a whole civilization will die tonight. On the other hand, he said yesterday that the United States had intelligence intercepts that show that the Iranian people want the bombing to continue, that they get upset and agitated when the bombs stop because they think the United States is not there fighting for what the President had initially said months ago, that he was there, that help was on the way to liberate the Iranian civilians. The Wall Street Journal, however, is reporting that there are terrified civilians in Tehran who are taping up their windows, hoarding generators. This is a country that's been without Internet access since start of this year. How accurate do you think the White House is in assessing their view that Iranians still want them to continue fighting?
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D
It really pains me to say this Bianna, not only as an analyst but as an American citizen, I just don't know that we can believe what President Trump says on a daily basis. And again, that's not something I say with a smile on my face. In fact, just the opposite. And so I think we need to keep seeing how this plays out. But unfortunately, I don't think we're getting accurate information from the White House. And moreover, even when we do, the next day the president comes out and contradicts himself and reverses course. So, you know, Lord only knows what the next 24 to 48 hours will bring, but we'll keep monitoring this closely.
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C
You seem to be nodding in approval there, in agreement, I guess. General Hertling, quickly the last few seconds, if you were advising the president right now as to which military OPER options at this point in this war would be most effective in setting back the regime, but also bringing the war to an end as soon as possible and opening the strait, what would that be?
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B
Oh, Diana, you're asking for an hour long war college seminar on this. There are so many options that you can provide that would cease the kind of insults that are flying across the Internet on social media between different countries. And the president is stoking that with his comments about destroying an entire civilization and the tweet that he put out or the social, true social exchange he put out on Sunday, which is vile and rude. So I don't know how you counteract that. The president thinks on a path he's hearing from someone and I would suspect it's not people within the military who are giving him the advice that he's following. It's either outside the civilian infrastructure or inside his own coterie of advisors that are telling him what to do. And very few of them, in my view, and I say the same thing Colin does, I'm pained to say this, but very few of them have an experience with what real combat is all about and what you have to plan for and react to when you put troops in harm's way. There hasn't been a strategy from what I can tell from the very beginning of this operation. So it's really hard to say right now what would my advice be. My advice would be let's go back five weeks and start all over again because this is not a good action.
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C
Well, we've achieved a lot technologically in the Pentagon. I don't think a time machine is one of those achievements. Thus yet. Colin Clark, Mark Hertling, the president, as he said yesterday, he said there is a plan. So we'll continue to see what happens elections as these hours wind down. Thank you so much. Later in the program for us, Hungary gears up for what could be its most pivotal vote in decades. We'll explain after the break.
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Shopify has the world's best converting checkout up to 36% better than other ecommerce platforms. What you do with those extra sales is up to you. Switch to Shopify today@shopify.com setup and get a $1 trial. Shopify.com setup. To Hungary now, where US Vice President J.D. vance is on a highly unusual diplomatic trip just days out from the country's parliamentary election. In remarks earlier, Vance made his support for strongman incumbent Viktor Orban clear.
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D
Of course, we're going to work with
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A
whoever wins the Hungarian election because we love the people of Hungary and it's an important relationship. But Viktor Orban is going to win the next election in Hungary. So I feel very confident about that and about our continued positive relationship.
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D
Victor, is that right?
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That's the plan. Okay.
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All right.
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C
Orban is a longtime ally of President Trump's, but he now finds himself trailing the polls after 16 years in power. He has run a campaign driven by his pro Russia, anti Ukraine stance. And his fall could have major implications for the war there. Melissa Bell joins me now from Budapest. So, Melissa, just talk about how unusual it is to see the vice president of the United States campaigning for a leader of a country. You have 10 million population there, not a significant country in terms of its output, GDP wise, its significance to the United States. This is all about allyship and ideological kinsmanship between the two of them. Do you think that's expected to move the needle here?
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E
Unlikely. I mean, I think this last ditch effort to shore up the support for Viktor Orban it is widely considered here in Hungary will not likely play into the actual results in the end. What is interesting is the timing of this, both from the point of view of the Hungarian Paul Biana, but of course from the Vice President's agenda. He arrived here just a few hours before that deadline for Iran, was asked by journalists to speak to that, speaking to the latest strikes on Carg island and explaining that as far as he was concerned, they were the continuation of the administration's policy. He still believed there were negotiations ahead, but of course he was standing alongside Viktor Orban just days before this crucial poll. As you just said, it is widely considered here in Hungary, to me, the most consequential since the very first free election that was held after the fall of communism. That is how seriously it is being taken and how important important it is considered for the stakes and the country as it goes forward. So his intervention just a few days widely criticized, not least by Peter Magyar, the man that polls suggest could see Viktor Orban ousted from power after 16 consecutive years. He explained, criticized this for being a form of election interference. And the fate of Hungarians, he said, should not be decided in Washington, but rather on the streets and in the squares of Hungary itself. And what you saw was really a very combative vice president come in and attack the European Union for what he said was its election interference in Hungarian affairs, referring, of course to the 16 billion euros of European funds that have been withheld since over the course of the last few years as a result of Budapest's unwillingness to abide by the rules of the European Union or to provide the sufficient transparency to convince Brussels that the money it gives to Hungary is being properly spent and not ending up in the pockets of unscrupulous politicians. That was why the money was withheld. In the eyes of J.D. vance and in his mouth today, this was a form of putting pressure on Hungarian politics. You then saw him give an equally combative speech at a stadium. He called the American president twice and ended up getting President Trump on the phone, who spoke of his support for Viktor Orban. And there was a lot there that is of course, about this ideological kinship that there exists between Viktor Orban and Maga. He is widely credited with having provided the sort of autocrats playlist playbook how to transform a democracy into a liberal one. And for Maga, this is an election that counts a great deal, all the more because, as you suggested, Bjarne, there have been all these accusations of Russian interference these last few days. What we heard from JD Vance is that far from Moscow interfering, this, this was a question of Ukraine interfering in Hungarian politics. So an awful lot at stake, Biana.
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C
Melissa Bell, an awful lot at stake, indeed. Thank you so much. Now, let's get more on the election itself and the impact it could have on Hungary's relationship with Russia and the West. I want to bring in Ann Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc. And a staff writer at the Atlantic. Anne, welcome to the program. So Viktor Orban has ruled Hungary now as an illiberal democracy since 2010. To unseat Orban, his opponent, Peter Magyar, has to overcome a system that has been built on institutional corruption for years now. And yet, yet polls show that his party is leading around 50% of the vote, given all of the systems built in to avoid just this exact scenario. ANN despite what the polls say, do you think that Viktor Orban will lose this election?
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F
So if it's a fair election, he could well lose. And the question, of course, is will it be fair? And let me back up by saying, as you correctly point out, there are already things built into the system that make it unfair. In other words, Viktor Orban, who is a model for JD Vance for a reason. He's somebody who was democratically elected originally, there's no question about that, but who then, over many years, altered the political system in Hungary to give him and his party special advantages. So they control about 95% of the media, all major newspapers and broadcasters. They control most of the judiciary. They control most of the bureaucracy. So they have they've also altered the electoral system so that it favors their party in various ways. And the opposition party, Peter Magyar's party, would have to do exceptionally well, essentially, in order to win. As far as I know, when I was in Hungary three weeks ago, people told me that they did believe that the counting of the votes would be accurate. But there may be attempts to get people from outside of Hungary to vote. There may be attempts to pay people to vote. There may be an attempt after the election, if it goes the wrong way, for Viktor Orban to seek to change the result or to annul the result. So there are a lot of things people were contemplating a lot of different kinds of scenarios when I was there. But really the most important thing for your audience to understand is that already the bias is built into the system, and the fact that an opposition party is doing so well is an indicator of how frustrated people are by the extraordinary corruption. Hungary is the most corrupt country in Europe, by the economic stagnation. This country that was once considered the star of Eastern Europe, is now one of the poorest countries in the eu. And the sense of stasis, you know, we nothing changes, nothing goes forward. Fidesh, the ruling party, has so many advantages in the economy and in politics that people are beginning to feel how unfair it is.
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C
Yeah. And a stagnant economy at that is really, I think, driving voters from everything that we've read and who I've spoken with and yourself included, to a place of frustration. GDP growth, I think, was just 0.4% last year relative to other Central European countries. You saw Poland north of 3.5%. Talk about the opposition, though, and Peter Magor, tell us a little bit about him, because it is striking that he came from the same party as Fideshe, is a center right candidate. All other potential opposition leaders have gotten out of this race to back him. He's charismatic, he's young, he's 45 years old. He is very capable of using social media. In particular, what has he been able to capitalize this time around on annual.
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F
So, as you say correctly, he's someone who comes from Fidesh. He comes from Viktor Orban's ruling party. And maybe that gives him some credibility when he speaks about corruption, because he knows how the party works and how the system works. And I think that's. That's one thing that's given him an advantage. And also it's very interesting how he and his party have been campaigning. So, as I said, they're cut off from most media. They have trouble running a billboard campaign because so many public spaces are run by companies linked to the ruling party. They've been running both a social media campaign and a very energetic grassroots campaign. So they have Peter Magyar goes from town to town and village to village every day. When I was there, he was doing four or five public meetings every day. Maybe it's more now. And they're trying to reach people at the most basic level because they can't reach them through normal media. So there's a lot of creativity. There are a lot of people involved. You're right that the other leaders have dropped out. In the most recent, before this parliamentary election, there was a coalition of parties who sought to run together. And after that effort failed, I think people decided to try something different. I mean, remember that Orban's party has a disproportionate presence in the Parliament that doesn't reflect its national vote. So they rarely have had more than 50% of the vote. But because of the way votes are counted and because of the way the system works, they've managed to stay in control. So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the opposition could win this time.
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C
Yeah. And Magyar still faces steep hurdles despite what the polls say. Gerrymandered districts say, captured media obviously, and something you've warned about as well, that's the likelihood of sort of false flag operations. Over the weekend, officials claimed explosives were found near a gas pipeline on the Serbia Hungary border. And yesterday or earlier, Prime Minister Orban was quick to point the finger at Kyiv. Here's what he said about that.
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B
I would not further damage Ukrainian Hungarian
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A
relations by accusing any country, say Ukraine, without knowing the that fact. So I would not do this. Until we have the facts, I will not do this. However, it is undoubtedly true that what
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B
we are experiencing here now fits into
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A
a series of events since the Ukrainians
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B
have such nobility and are willing and able to do something like this.
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C
We should note Ukraine categorically denies that it's behind this. Magyar is calling this a political setup. And it is something that you have written about quite presciently in your most recent piece. You write on any list of Strange elections, the 2026 parliamentary election in Hungary will stand out. This may be the world's first post reality campaign and you raise the possibility of false flag operations. How do you think this is sitting with voters at this point, Ann, so
- [31:35]
F
that people understand, most of Orban's campaign has been not about the stagnant economy, not about the failing health care system, but about Ukraine. When I was in Budapest, there were posters of President Zelensky all over the place with the slogan don't let him get the last laugh. Orban has focused on creating a kind of boogeyman. You know, this idea that Ukraine is going to damage or harm or invade Hungary, which is just on the face of absurd. It's not as if the Ukrainians need to be fighting another war. But one of the most extraordinary things was this exact scenario, namely that there would be an attack on a pipeline in Serbia, was one that I heard mentioned in Budapest three weeks ago. In other words, it was already leaking from the Hungarian state this plan to do what, what exactly has been done? And because it was described in advance and because so many people in the opposition and elsewhere were warning in advance that there might be exactly this kind of fake scenario, I'm being told that it hasn't landed with the kind of, you know, the kind of dramatic impact that, that perhaps Viktor Orban expected it to have. You know, when you have a convenient discovery of explosives on a pipeline just a few days before an election. You know, in, in a way that suits perfectly the government's narrative. You have to ask, you know, how realistic is that?
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C
And, Ann, you also note Orban's use of AI deepfakes and cognitive warfare to distract voters from some of Hungary's domestic issues. Has that strategy run its course?
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F
Well, I mean, we'll see. I mean, we, you know, one of the great, you know, great flaws and difficulties of modern social media is that we can't, we have very little insight into it. It's very untransparent. So we don't know what it is that people are seeing, especially on, especially on TikTok, which is completely opaque. And I, in the article I wrote for the Atlantic, I did describe some of the videos that I could see. There was one of President Zelensky sitting on a golden toilet, snorting cocaine and giving orders to a Hungarian soldier. So there was another video that was extraordinarily violent, actually, that seemed to show a Hungarian soldier being executed in a war and, and his child crying. So the anger, the attempt to focus anger at Zelenskyy, to make Hungarians afraid of some kind of war or violence, which is, of course, fictional, is really a focus of the government's campaign. And we'll see whether AI affects people. We'll see whether people look at videos like that and are affected by them, we don't know yet.
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C
It is staggering to see Washington and Moscow both pushing for the same candidate here, a reminder that Hungary is a member of the European Union and NATO. What is keeping his power? Why is that so important in your view? Obviously, it makes more sense, given his sympathies for Vladimir Putin. But why do you think it matters so much for the Trump administration?
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F
For the Trump administration, Orban matters because he's a model. He's somebody who they've looked up to. And his way of running campaigns, his way of his takeover of his country's institutions, his takeover, the judiciary, the media, the bureaucracy. You know, this methodology affected the writer, the authors of Project 2025, the Heritage foundation project that laid the groundwork for many of the Trump administration's own actions inside the United States. And so he's seen as a kind of model and a hero by people like J.D. vance and others who also want America to become an illiberal democracy, one in which one party dominates and which others find it difficult, if not impossible ever to win elections. So I think he's a kind of, you know, they're rushing in now to save somebody who they see as a role model.
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C
It's the biggest risk thus far to Orban's 16 year rule there. And as he said with JD Vance, the plan is for him to win. That's not what the polls are showing. Ann Applebaum, always good to see you. Thank you so much.
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F
Thank you.
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C
Coming up for us, terrifying, important, dizzying. These are just some ways critics have described the new AI Doc. I speak to technology experts and contributor to the film, Kristin Harris. That's after the break. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in original and cherry vanilla that Pepsi taste you love with just 30 calories and no artificial sweeteners. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola unbelievably Pepsi. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer.
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Now.
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Artificial intelligence is playing a critical role for combatants on both sides of the Iran war, raising new ethical questions for a tool already outpacing previous generations of technology. In a new movie called the AI Doc or How I Became an Apocalyptomist, director Daniel Rohr decides to face these questions head on. As he made the film, Rohr was expecting his first child. So he speaks to experts and industry leaders examining the best and worst case scenarios for an AI future. Here's a clip.
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So I started making this movie because my wife is six months pregnant. Is now a terrible time to have a kid? I mean, let's be honest. I know people who work on AI risk who don't expect their children to make it to high school.
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What the. Well, the expert we just saw in that clip is Tristan Harris. He's the co founder of the center for Humane Technology and worked as a design ethicist at Google. Tristan, thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed watching this documentary. Taught me a lot, made me think, left a bit optimistic and also a bit concerned, which is, I think where the majority of people really are when it comes to this topic of artificial intelligence and the fact that it is told through the lens of a director who is also a father to be, I thought was unique and a really powerful way of really raising this question about what the future holds now with this technology. And you've said that confusion lets the default path win. What exactly is the default path?
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Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me on. You know, this film, the AI doc, is really meant to clarify the default path that we're on. Because I think right now there's a cacophony and confusion about AI. You know, is it going to solve cancer, is it going to solve climate change, or is it going to extinct humanity? Notice that those conversations, they don't converge. So in this confusion, what's the default thing that will happen? It will be that multi trillion dollar AI companies keep doing exactly what they're doing under the worst possible incentives to race as fast as possible to replace all human labor in the economy. I think something that's important to get, like why would I say that we're heading to an anti human future? Well, consider what is the business model? What are the incentives of these companies? So Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, will say, you know, if you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. So with AI, what's the incentive? You might think, well, you pay 20 bucks a month for ChatGPT. So the incentive is just to get lots of people subscribing to AI. That's their business model, that's their long term goal. But that actually won't add up to paying about paying out the amount of debt that they have taken on. So that's not the incentive. Okay, what about advertising? Let's say ChatGPT and all the AI companies do advertising. Well, that also won't bring back the amount of investment that these companies have taken on. The only thing that will pay back the investment that these companies have taken on is to replace all human labor in the economy. And the reason I'm saying that is that I think Americans might be confused and people around the world might be confused. AI is really helpful right now. It's a blinking cursor. It tells me about why my dishwasher is broken or why my baby's burping in the background. And that feels different than the actual goal of the companies, which is to increasingly make AI more powerful and be able to replace all economic labor in the economy. And when you replace labor, that means that all the wealth in the economy is suddenly going to five companies. And you and I don't have an ability to put food on the table for our families. And so this is the last chance that our political voice will matter because soon governments won't need people for their tax revenue. And Companies won't need people for labor. And so after those two things are true, what is your leverage in the situation? And I think the film, the AI doc, is meant to clarify by including all these voices, the optimism and the pessimism that even with all those things there, we're heading to an anti human future. And if we see that clearly, we can steer the wheel before it's too late to something that's more pro human.
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Well, there's a lot to get to there that you've just touched on. But you mentioned these five major AI companies and what the film does is include three, I believe, of its executives in the film and interviews them and asks them some of these questions that you've just raised. I want to play a clip from where we see the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, Dario, who's the CEO of Anthropic and DeepMind's CEO as well, laying out some of their concerns, but also their vision.
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It would be impossible for me to sit across from you and ask you to promise me that this is going to go well. That is impossible. There isn't any easy answers, unfortunately, because it's such a cutting edge technology. There's still a lot of unknowns and I think that needs to be, you know, understood and hence the need for some caution. I wake up, you know, every day. This is the number one thing I think about now. Look, I'm human and you know, has
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every decision been perfect? Can I even say my motivations were always perfectly clear?
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Of course not.
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No one can say that.
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Like, that's just not like, you know, that's just not how people work.
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So some real honesty, I think, from them in perspective, at least in that clip, about some of the questions that they can't answer right now, even regarding the technology that their companies continue to develop at such a rapid pace. They're saying they're doing this for the good of humanity and they say that safety is one of their top priorities. But does that conflict, in your view, with the pace at which these companies are growing and progressing and learning so rapidly?
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Yeah, it's not just my view. It's just the objective truth of the situation that the company's incentive is not to protect human workers, it's not to prevent cyber attacks. It's not to basically make sure that it goes well for society or protect intellectual property or make sure our electricity prices stay low. Their only goal, their only goal is to make sure that they get to artificial general intelligence first. Because if I get that and I can own the world economy and basically get dominance over everybody else. That is the only goal. And what that means is it justifies all the other harms that show up on society's balance sheet. From mass joblessness, business, stolen intellectual property, rising electricity prices, accidents and catastrophes that happen, concentration of wealth and power. All those things are bad, but they're nothing relative to the price of getting there first. So the companies, the CEOs who are in this film, the AI doc, you'll notice that, you know, the film isn't just against the CEOs, it's against, it's for all of humanity against a bad outcome that even the CEOs feel trapped. And so again, this, everyone in the film, you'll notice at the end of the film is kind of pointing the finger at someone else to act. Well, like the CEO say, you need the government to do something, but in the government says, well, we need the public pressure to be there. So everyone's kind of pointing the finger at someone else. And what we need to agree on is that the default path is an anti human future and it won't go well by default unless we steer. And there's a lot of things we can do to steer it. But the first step is that that clarity about the situation with this film, which to be clear, I don't make any money when people go out in the theaters and they see this film. We just need people to see it so that we have common knowledge about the problem that we're facing.
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So let me just push back a little bit about what you first outlined there in the first part of your answer. And I agree because I've been in rooms with these executives over the last few years where they have said yes, our goal is to get there first. But where they diverge, at least in terms of what they say publicly from what you've just said is the reason we need to get there first is because not that we want to dominate this field or want to be the wealthiest and the best, but because if we're not first, then it is our adversaries and bad actors like China, basically the genie is out of the bottle. Everyone is in this AI race. And if we responsible American led companies get there first, then other companies in China in particular, they'll get there and they're going to be nefarious actors with regards to this technology. How do you respond to that?
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Yeah, absolutely. This is essentially the number one thing that's driving and justifying the race. There's sort of two beliefs. One is it's inevitable and two is that if we don't do it first, then China or the other bad guys will. But here's where I would challenge the that AI is different from all other technologies because it's the first technology that makes its own decisions in ways that humans don't understand. And it's operating at a level of intelligence that we don't know how to control. Let me give you a concrete example. Just three weeks ago, Alibaba, the Chinese AI company, was training an AI model and then suddenly they noticed they're actually. Their security team noticed that there is a flurry of network activity. They're like, what's going on on here? And it turned out that the AI in training had set up a secret communication channel to the outside world and it started mining for cryptocurrency, meaning it was acquiring resources, like Bitcoin to acquire resources for itself, to gain power. I'll just stop there for a second. Does the US when we build an AI that spontaneously acquires its own resources or wants to self replicate itself or wants to prevent itself from being shut down, did the US win in that scenario? Scenario, no. Does China win in that scenario? No. If I'm a top level Chinese general, military general, and I hear about this fact, am I totally stoked about racing to develop AI as fast as possible? No. I'm terrified. One of the things I'm noticing as someone who works on these topics is that people have a hard time taking things on as real that they saw in a sci fi movie. But we're actually at that point in human history where we are building technology that is doing this and the people building it because they're racing as fast as possible to win, are not making progress on the controllability. There's an example recently that Anthropic where you might have heard the AI model that blackmailed an engineer to prevent it getting shut down. Anthropic recently made some progress on that. They were able to get the blackmail behavior to go down. So that should be good news. The bad news is that apparently the AI models are now very aware of when they're being tested and they demonstrably alter their behavior behavior when they can tell that they're being tested. So it's like a teenager who knows that they're being observed and they say, oh yeah mom, I'm, I'm just doing my homework. That's when you walk in to check on them and when you, you know, go away, they go back to scrolling social media. So in this case, we already have all the scary behaviors of, like, the HAL 9000s and 2001 A Space Odyssey, but we're not acting appropriately. So I do think that there's a different path here. If we have a common view that AI is different from other technologies and is dangerous in ways that are unique to AI compared to other technologies.
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If we could go back to what that means for everyday citizens of the world in terms of their futures, their ability to have a job and to earn an income. There are two schools of thought. One is one that you've raised the concern that you're not alone here, the concern that this could be the biggest threat to workers in history. And then there's the other school of thought that we've been here before the Industrial Revolution, the creation of the Internet, that jobs were lost, but then they were retrained. Here's a clip from the film talking about this point.
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Most jobs in our economy, it can do. It can work 24 hours a day, Never gets tired, never gets bored. They don't need to sleep, they don't need breaks. They're, like, not gonna join a union. Won't complain, won't whistleblow. More than 100 times cheaper than humans working at minimum wage. Not only will they be doing everything, but they'll be doing it faster. The same intelligence that powers, that can also look at the patterns and movements and articulating muscles and, you know, robotics. And so it's not just going to automate desk jobs. That's just the beginning. It will automate all physical labor.
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So it's clear how that would be of concern for everyday Americans or people around the world. But how are governments expected to react to this phenomenon? Phenomena?
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Yeah. Well, first of all, let's meet the skepticism. You mentioned the two camps. There's those who say this is going to automate work, and those who say, oh, we've always had threats of automation. Humans always find something else to do. So let's steel man that argument for a second. So 200 years ago, you know, most of us were farmers, and now I think it's like less than like, 3% of the population is farmers in the U.S. at least I think so. We always find something else to do. The tractor comes along and we move to something else. We used to have the bank teller. Then we get. Then we got the automated teller machine. And we always find something else to do. There's more bank tellers now. But here's what's different about AI. AI is like a tractor or an atm, but for everything, everywhere, all at once. Meaning AI is distinct from other technologies because it automates general intelligent tasks across the entire economy. And who's going to retrain faster? Are you going to retrain as a coder or is AI going to figure out coding and then be superhuman Coder, which is already the case by the way. It's writing 90% of the code at all the AI companies. Even the people at the AI companies don't believe they're going to have a job as a software engineer for all the mid mid level and lower employees. And so the point is that this really is going to be a race to replace human workers. It's not a race to augment human workers, it's a race to replace. And again, that's the only way these companies can pay back the amount of debt that they've taken on. So I want people to really get this, that there I am. And AI companies like five or six of them are going to consolidate all the wealth in the economy and my political voice isn't going to matter. So this next 12 to 24 month period is the last chance that our political voice will matter. And that's why we think there's something basically like the human movement, which is the collective voice of humanity that needs to act right now if we want to have a pro human future. That's what has to happen.
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So if the guardrails then lie with regulation, with consumers, with Congress, I mean, you focused on this in your film the Social Dilemma. And I have to say that while faith in these five executives may not be sky high in terms of them doing the right thing, ultimately I don't have to tell you about faith in Congress doing the right thing and actually even understanding and grasping the magnitude of this technology. But what is interesting is the question of who controls this technology has proven to be quite critical in real life over just the past few weeks. We recently saw Anthropic draw a red line, refusing to support mass domestic surveillance for the Pentagon. Then OpenAI quickly jumped in to replace them and offer ChatGPT for those services. And what we saw is a massive drop in ChatGPT subscriptions from consumers. So clearly people are following this. What can we read into, what can we glean from the fact that we saw this type of reaction? A free market reaction really, from the public?
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean that event you're talking about, it was, I think, one of the largest drops of subscriptions in ChatGPT subscribers. And everybody actually moved over to Claude or Anthropic's AI because they were basically fighting back against the future application of their AI for domestic mass surveillance. This is an example of the human movement. This is humans fighting for a human future. We still have privacy and legal liberty. And I believe that it's the case. There's a recent NBC News poll that a majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe that the risks of AI outweigh the benefits. People often think there's no consensus here, like, we can't regulate. 46 groups signed the pro human AI statement. Everyone from Steve Bannon to Bernie Sanders. We call it the B2B coalition or the Bernie to Bannon Coalition. And these agreed on as several principles, like we need to one, keep humans in charge. Two, avoid concentration of power. Three, protect the human experience from, you know, AI sort of psycho hacking our brains. Four, human agency and liberty. We need to protect our liberty from surveillance. And five, we need to have responsibility and accountability. For AI companies. There are some basic measures in terms of rules that we can enact. There's more on the center for Humane Technology, my nonprofit organization's website called the AI Roadmap. And we lay out a bunch of basic things we can do. What we first need is crystal clarity that we're heading to an anti future, and we need the collective voice of humanity to speak up in this one critical moment where our voice still matters.
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Yeah. One line that you relay in this film that has stood out to me was this concern. Obviously, users are learning a lot from this topic and realizing how serious it is. And at the same time, they'll probably, after they watch the film, turn to ChatGPT and use it as an aid. Perhaps this is the default path that you're so concerned about winning. Tristan Harris, really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for the time.
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Thank you so much for having me. I hope people go see the film.
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And finally, we turn to a more traditional form of information technology. As awards season heats up, the results are in. In one of this year's most hotly contested competitions, the American Library Association's coveted I Love My Librarian prize, honoring exceptional librarians recognized for their profound impact on their communities. Among this year's winners, Iowa's Zachary Steyer, known as Mr. Z, who transformed his library into a launchpad for science discovery. Look at Mr. Z and Valerie Bird Fort of the University of South Carolina for fighting book banning in a state with one of the highest censorship rates. The winners each received a $5,000 prize and the pride of knowing how much their communities value their contributions. We love our librarians. All right, that is it for now. Thank you so much for watching and goodbye. From New York, I'm Eva Longoria and I'm setting out to really experience France, to savor its world, celebrated cuisine and explore the country's rich history.
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Eva Longoria, Searching For France premieres April 12th on CNN. And next day on the CNN app.