← Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
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This is a Global Player original podcast.
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Hello and welcome, everybody. This is Jamie and I's bonus Q and A episode, the X Files, with me, Christiana Manpour and Jamie Rubin, where we answer your questions. So let's get started. Jamie, first one for you.
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Tony, on YouTube says he's a New Yorker. Who do you think will win the upcoming mayoral election? And do you think Zoran Mamdani has given the Democrats a template to follow nationally even if he doesn't win?
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So, Tony, I am happy to answer this because I'm not a New Yorker. However, like everybody actually around the world and certainly in this country anyway, there's a lot of ink being spilled and written and analysis pieces on the Zoran Mamdani effect. And so I'm really following it closely. One of the most interesting things, first of all, I think Mamdani is going to win. But what does that mean and how does it manifest itself, et cetera? One of the most interesting things is that he belongs to a group called dsa, Democratic Socialists of America. And they haven't had huge numbers of people run for office. A long, long time ago, there was one. But even people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, they don't belong specifically to that group, although they are on the socialist, very progressive wing of the Democratic Party. I mean, Bernie Sanders is an independent, but caucus is with the Democrats. So we know from presidential runs that Sanders was very, very popular, that he gave Hillary Clinton a good run for her money in the 2016 campaign. And we also know that the Democrats are flailing around. Even Trump and others. Even Trump musing about 2028, said, oh, I can't run. I'd like to run, but it wouldn't be fair, blah, blah, blah. But at least we have good people. We have, you know, Secretary of State Rubio. We have Vice President J.D. vance. The Democrats don't have anybody. So I guess what I'm saying is, as of yet, the Democrats do not have a party leader who can, who's been identified and who can take them into the next major cycle. And a lot on the progressive side of the Democratic Party are looking to the young people and who the young people are following. And in this case, it's Zoran Mamdani. What happens after Election Day, I honestly don't know. I don't have crystal balls, as one of my former colleagues used to say. But it's certainly a phenomenon. It's one that we're gonna have to wait and watch. And I would not count him out. And I would not root against him right now.
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Let me just make a comment about that. As a New Yorker who lives in New York City and New York State, I don't vote in Manhattan, so I won't vote in the election. Frankly, I don't know who I would vote for. And let me tell you why. New York to me is the capital of the world. It's always been the capital of the world. It matters to me. And I want the mayor of New York to be able to run the city as successfully, for example, as Michael Bloomberg did for many, many years. Michael Bloomberg was not a partisan or political person. He was just a great businessman who ran the city really, really well. I should also disclose that I was a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey appointed by Andrew Cuomo. So I know Andrew very well and I know he's gone through some terrible troubles and obviously made some mistakes in how he treated women. And it was, you know, horrible. And, and I think, you know, he's already suffered. And whether he should suffer more will be up to the voters to decide. But Andrew also got things done. He passed the first laws to give gay men and women and lesbian women, sorry, gay men and lesbian women all of their rights. He passed gun control laws and he got hard things done. It's hard to build in America right now. Whole books have been written about that. Anytime you go to LaGuardia Airport, Kennedy Airport or Penn Station, which has now been revived, it's because of Andrew Cuomo, because he's a, he's a, he's a doer. Now sometimes in doing things, he can be quite aggressive and he obviously infuriates a lot of people. But I do struggle because I think Andrew would be great at building New York, at building the fading infrastructure, at fixing up all the things that need to be fixed. But he's probably not going to win. Mamdani will probably win. I don't know Mamdani very well. One thing I do know is that his opinions about Gaza and the Palestinians are irrelevant to running the city of New York. They may matter to Jewish Americans and American Jews who live in New York, and they are entitled to vote on that basis. But the mayor of New York doesn't have a big role in the Gaza peace process. And I also worry, and I'll just be honest about this, I worry that he's never run anything. New York City's mayor is an extremely difficult job. We had a very, very far left mayor, Bill de Blasio, and frankly, he was not very successful. So if Mamdani uses all this enthusiasm that he's created and hires the right people and inspires people to help New York succeed, maybe he'll be a great mayor. I kind of doubt it. I kind of think that his excitement and fun is going to be easily translatable into the nuts and bolts of running a city. But I'm open to it. I hope he succeeds. But what I don't think should happen is that anyone should use him as a model for national politics. New York City is the most democratic city in America, possibly. And of course, the Democrats are likely to win that election. But our country is not a democratic country. It's divided. And I hope that we don't delude ourselves into thinking that because Mamdani wins the election in New York, the questioner asked whether it would help the national party. I don't think it's going to help the national party because it's just going to bring to the fore this internal battle between the left that thinks you can inspire more voters by veering left to vote. And then we'd win when the data show that had more people voted in 2024, Donald Trump would have beaten the Democrats by an even large margin. Because we are a deeply divided and largely conservative country. And the candidate that I hope we have is someone who can appeal to independents and centrists and Democrats. And that isn't going to be Mamdani, that's for sure.
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Well, that's all well and good, and it might be relevant in the big picture and supported by stats in the big picture, but right now you've got a very unconventional non politician, you know, in charge of the Republican Party, maga, and frankly, the country right now. And it's been identified as a movement. And so what they're saying is Democrats need a movement. And whether or not, you know, Mamdani has ever administered anything in the past, the fact is that he has tapped into the deep angst that youngsters feel. Very much so, which is about the increasing inequality, whether it's in New York or all over the country, and frankly, all over the world, whether it's the unaffordability of housing and the unavailability of housing. Maybe Cuomo is good at building big infrastructure, and of course, those projects are great, but people need houses to live in and flats and apartments, et cetera. And he's talked about that kind of thing, plus the price of groceries. Let's face it. That's what helped Trump win. The price of eggs in 2024 was a big, big deal. So he has identified what motivates so many people, not just in New York or in the United States, but, um, let's, let's move on because we'll, you know, this could be, you know, endless because it's so fascinating and we will see what happens if and when he wins and how it all shapes out. Jamie, I'm going to read this one for you. Rachel on thread says. Jamie, you recently spoke about the importance of mandating watermarks on AI generated content. It's possible to superimpose those watermarks onto genuine videos or even remove the watermark on AI content. How do you both think this will influence journalism, politics, when public trust in what we see is already fragile?
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Wow. Very specific, very interesting. Look, I joined the state department in 2022 and learned over two and a half years an enormous amount about disinformation, information warfare, and the technology of AI and the ability to generate fake content through fake videos, fake everything. And we're seeing more of that now. I really, really, really worried that AI is going to industrialize the business of information warfare. You know, in the past, China had to spend billions, Russia had to spend billions. They had to hire thousands of translators to do their information warfare. But with AI, instead of telling one big lie to, you know, millions and millions of people, they're going to figure out a way to tell a million little lies to a million different people. And that's part partly through AI and through these fake videos that the questioner asked about. I think we need to cooperate with the other major countries in the world, the ones that believe that media and free press, which is, is video, radio and written content, has to be trustworthy. We need a trusted mechanism watermarking AI, watermarking fake videos, watermarking content is one way to do that, but it'll only work if everybody or most of the countries of the world work together and cooperate. And unfortunately, that's not happening right now because the Trump administration doesn't believe in this problem and has thankfully fired everyone in the State Department and around the government that knows something about it. Fired the people in the FBI, fired the people in the CIA, fired the people in the State Department, all of whom were working on this extremely difficult problem of information warfare affecting our very way of life. We need truth and trust in information if we're going to be a thriving democracy. And I think we need to get the smartest people around, work with the companies, work with the tech bros. I call them that. You know, they say tech bros, I call them the Tech bosses, because they're behaving like bosses. Those people need to be regulated in some way or cooperate with the governments of the Western democracies and Asian democracies so that tech, you know, disinformation, doesn't destroy our way of life.
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Obviously, as a journalist, I'm equally terrified of public trust completely disintegrating. Very interestingly, my friend Jimmy Wales, I don't know Jamie, if you knew him, but anyway, he's the founder of Wikipedia and he's written a new book called the Seven Pillars of Trust. It's something like that, but it is about trust and how you can, you know, hang on and identify in various different, you know, corners of. Of enterprise trust. So that's one thing. But another thing I read this weekend, which I found fascinating in the ft. It was a column by an expert who said a little bit of a take on what Jamie just said about, you know, people getting together and, and agreeing to control and regulate AI. But this was a specific idea, akin to arms control agreements. This guy pointed out that there have been all these arms control agreements between countries that were fighting the Cold War to see who would be ascendant, the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet they managed to come together to control what was an existential threat. So AI, if it's left to run rampant with no regulation, you know, will be an existential threat. It can do great stuff, medical and all the other advances, but in some ways it can be very, you know, dangerous and threatening to us. So I just thought that was something interesting to read and to pursue that you could maybe go into some kind of arms control agreement around, you know, dangerous information in that space.
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Just a quickie. One of the ideas that I wasn't able to implement in my job was to get together a meeting of the senior tech leaders, the senior lawyers in the world, the senior government officials, the senior intelligence people, to sit down the way we did during the arms control era and figure out how to deal with a new problem in a constructive way. And someday I hope we can do such a thing, because that's the only way to do it.
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It's a good idea, right? I thought it was a good. A good sort of analysis.
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Nicola, on email, asks, we have a friend named Nicola, but I'm sure that wasn't.
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We do, but it's not this one, I don't think.
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What do you make of Kamala Harris suggesting she is considering another bid for president? Christiane Amanpour.
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Well, funny you should ask. Kamala Harris was in London this weekend promoting her new book. I didn't get to see her. I didn't get to interview her, but she did go on the main BBC Sunday interview political interview program. And the journalist who hosts it was so taken that she said it was like a thriller. And she read the book three times before drilling down and grilling Kamala on why she didn't tell Joe Biden much earlier that while she found him fit to be president, she had serious concerns that he could. He had the fitness and the agility physical to actually do such a difficult, you know, physical job of going all over the country for a year to actually run for president. Anyway, I'm not sure she's actually said she's going to run, but I think she has sort of left the door open. But she hasn't said one way or another. And that's all I can tell you. She's promoting her book, and some people think it reads like a thriller.
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Well, you know, I've watched politicians my whole life. As you know, I started working for Joe Biden back in 1987 for five years and worked for with Hillary and worked with President Clinton and President, not President Obama, but President Biden. I don't think if you've been vice president for four years and a senator for whatever she was, that you can move on. She came very, very close to winning the election. It was a close election. Whether or not it would have been better have she, you know, started earlier, I have my doubts.
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And that gets her very, very central thesis that she didn't have enough time.
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But I, and here's my point on that, is Kamala Harris was a politician who, you know, was during the primaries in 2020, was on the left side of the party. She supported an open border, decriminalizing immigration. She attacked Joe Biden for allegedly centrist positions. I think Biden won in 2020 because he was the centrist that voters trusted to stand up to Trump. Now, if Kamala Harris learned on the job, as I know she did, the benefit of moderate policies on domestic affairs, especially immigration, the crucial lessons that Joe Biden taught us about how to deal with Putin and Xi Jinping in the Middle east, she could make a great candidate. But if she reverts back to her initial desire to appeal to the left of center and goes back to open borders, I don't think she's going to be a great candidate. But the truth is she was a prosecutor in California for a long time. So I think her instincts are very good on criminal law and legal matters. And if she returns to those instincts, takes the lessons she learned as vice president. She'd be extremely well qualified to be president. She saw what it takes. And there is no substitute for that in my experience and my judgment. The substitute of sitting next to the person who's making these decisions every day, who sees the fact that a president only makes hard decisions. If they were easy, they would be fixed at a lower level. He only gets the tough ones, where it's 60, 40, 55, 45, where three lousy options are presented and you have to pick which is the least lousy option. That's what it means to be president. And I think she learned that and could make a formidable candidate. And I'd love to see this whole issue of a woman running for president just be ignored as it's a woman running for president and it's just who she is and what she supports. You know Martin Luther King's famous phrase, people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin or whether they're men or women.
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Except we do need a first woman president of the United States. Can I just make it clear that the United States right now is 42nd on the gender parity list, whereas Iceland is leading and it is now into its second female president. Anyway, that's for a whole nother story. NICHOLAS ON EMAIL A position we hear occasionally from Putin's defenders is that Russia wanted to join NATO but was not welcomed. Yeltsin floated the idea in 1994, and Clinton was initially agreeable, but it didn't happen. Can you explain what made that request fail or if that is even correct?
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Jamie Look, I was around for that period. I worked with Madeleine Albright. I was in the trenches back then when NATO enlargement started and we enabled Hungary, Czechoslovakia, I think it was then, the Czech Republic and Poland to join. And at the time it was quite controversial. I think you remember many people didn't like the idea. They were worried it would alienate Russia. And I remember Vachlav Havel, the Czech president, who was one of the wisest men I ever met, said, look, right now Yeltsin is president and they're Russia. Russia is really behaving extremely responsibly. And one could see Russia joining Europe in many different ways. But he predicted that it wasn't going to always be that way and that NATO enlargement was an insurance policy against the day that Russia might revert to its dangerous expansionist behavior. And of course, he was right. And I think the invasion of Ukraine should have ended the debate about whether NATO enlargement was a good idea. Everyone who's in NATO is protected. Ukraine was left out, Georgia was left out. And those are the countries where Russia invaded. But could Russia have joined? Well, look, joining NATO is, actually requires an enormous number of very specific steps. Civilian control of the military, democratic laws, transparency, integration of weapons systems between the United States and its various allies, standardization of equipment. I think the idea of inviting Russia, which we did do, was a demonstration that we had no ill will towards them and that NATO was a defensive alliance. It's only there to protect NATO countries. But I think Russia's evolution was so chaotic and so difficult that it would have taken a long, long time, even with the best of will on the part of Moscow and all of the European countries in the United States, for them to have reached the threshold of meeting NATO's CAPAB abilities and needs and requirements. And so I think we came up with the alternative of the NATO Russia Founding act that Madeleine Albright negotiated, which was a way to bring Russia almost into NATO. They would meet with NATO, they would coordinate, they would get an officer in Brussels at NATO headquarters, but leave the question of formal membership for a later date. Had Yeltsin been able to continue with the policies that he had. Remember, Yeltsin believed in a free press. He allowed Russian journalists to say and do whatever they want. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong guy to hand over power to to Vladimir Putin. And they've taken Russia to a totally different direction that makes NATO enlargement not conceivable. Now, could we ever come back to that? I kind of doubted after this war that any European country on the eastern side of NATO will ever trust Russia not to be a threat.
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All right, Jamie, if you can read.
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Question 8, Talia, on Instagram, thank you for speaking so openly in a different podcast last week about your ongoing treatment for ovarian cancer. For anyone who doesn't have time to listen to it in full, what is the one piece of advice you'd give to women listening who are worried they might be affected by it?
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So, Talia, I did this precisely to raise awareness for women and for their partners, children, loved ones, their communities, to understand certain warning signs to help, and certainly women to get their annual test to do all the things that they need to do to make sure that they are clear. Much of which is certainly in the uk, is available on the nhs, because diagnosis in ovarian cancer is absolutely crucial. It's known as the silent killer because it's often, often very hard to find these symptoms. And to diagnose it in time. I would also tell them that the treatments are incredible and have made so much progress. So I'm now in my third rendition. This is the third time I've had it. First two times was massive surgery. First time was chemo. The second time wasn't. And this time it's neither chemo nor surgery. This time it's immunotherapy, the kind of treatment that was not available even four years ago when I first got it. And this is controlled and has got it totally under control. It's a two year program. It's daily pills, and every few weeks an infusion of another one of the immunotherapy drugs, an intravenous infusion. So, you know, I just want people to know that sometimes cancer can be, quote, a permanent condition that has to be managed. And that certainly is what I'm going through. And it's possible to do it. It's possible to. Well, look at me. I'm working. I'm doing everything that I was doing. I have very little side effects on immunotherapy, which I think is another fantastic thing about immunotherapy. And I just wanted my oncologist, who's the expert, to be with me and to tell people and reassure them and tell them what's out there right now about this particular disease. Because, remember, so often, and too often, women's cancers are given short shrift. Not breast cancer, because that has really got a lot of research, a lot of resources behind it, but many of the others are simply not resourced enough. The gynecological cancer. So I'm pleased to be able to do this. And I, frankly, I really. I know people have little time, but if there's anybody who really feels the need to know it and it affects them, listen to the whole podcast, because my oncologist really does tell some very, very interesting and important information that can be life saving. So that's what I would say. All right, Jamie, you look a bit gobsmacked.
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Yeah, well, it's a hard topic, obviously. You know, we were married for 20 years and I wasn't with you when you found out about your cancer, but I know it's affected our son in a. In a normal way, and. And we obviously, all of us, hope that this immunotherapy continues to be as successful as it's been so far.
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Yes, thank you. And I'm absolutely sure it will be. I'm a good candidate for it, says my doctor. And my particular rare form is called clear cell ovarian cancer is also particularly responsive to this kind of immunotherapy. So I'm a very, very lucky person and I know that. And I just want everybody to have the information that they need. So, Jamie, that's where we are. Thanks everybody for listening to this bonus Q and A episode. Thank you for all your questions. Keep them flowing. Our next episode will come out on Tuesday. In the meantime, you just search for Christiana Monpour presents the x files on YouTube. To be able to watch what we do, subscribe to our channel. There you can listen for free on Global Player and you can download that from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com we'll see you, as I said, on Tuesday for the main episode. In the meantime, email us at amanpourpod or find us on social media. Handle Amanpur Pod. Bye, Jamie.
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Goodbye from New York.
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Bye from London.
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