this is gps , the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i m fareed zakaria coming to you from new york. today on the program, what is happening inside putin s russia? is he losing his grip on power? is he at odds with his own commanders? and how might his forces fair against the up coming counter offensive. we ll get inside from julia yoif and andrei soldatov. and since china opened up its economy in 1978, it has averaged almost 10% growth a year. but are we now at peak china? the economy ims keyu jin weighs in. also, has humanity gotten, well, dumber, thanks to the supercomputers in our pockets that could tell us everything that we need to know in an instant. i ll talk to the author simon winchester about the past, present and future of knowledge. but first, here is my take. america s debt ceiling crisis once again provoked the usual commentary about how it shows the country s basically dysfunctional. but the truth is t
that aren t directly from putin. all of his work in africa and the middle east have permitted him to take various mines, refiners and gas and oil that give him a separate income stream. so he has ironically in a country where putin was trying to eliminate any kind of dissent, any challenges of power, which he did from the liberal flank, he allowed a guy with an army to start criticizing him. which, people like alexei navalny never had. andrei, is this is there an early premonition of the fact that the russian army and the security forces are not, a., as united, and b., as loyal to putin in the reports that i ve read that putin created his own presidential security force which some people say, i think it was in 2016, that the special
joining me now to talk about this is andrei soldatov and julia ioffe. they are living in exile in london. and julie is a founding partner and washington correspondent at park news. julia, give us an overview of just what from you could tell, are we over duoing it, or in reading of tea leaves and looking at the fact that putin doesn t doesn t discipline prigozhin or the defense minister or allowing this all to happen, there is more going on underneath the surface than we think. what is your basic read? well there is usually something more going on under the surface. and when you re looking at such a closed and opaque system, one in which journalists like andrei have been kicked out or have been forced to leave, there is very little reporting on the ground. it is hard to tell what is going on. and it is important to know what is going on when russia s waging
ottle s view of winning happiness not through pleasure but through achievement and doing the right thing. now that may not sound too profound. sort of thing that you hear from the pulpit. but nonetheless, it was thought about, and put down on paper or parchment or whatever but someone who had no idea of the capital of south dakota or the name of the senator from new york or wherever. more broadly, do you worry that the fact that we can know everything is making us dumber? no, i thought when i started writing this book, i thought that was the premise. is everything that began with the invention of a electronic calculator in 1967. that is when labor saving devices started working on our brains. we didn t know how to calculate,
how to spell, how to find out where we were and how to know anything. and then initially i thought this is going to make us dumber. it is made us fatter and flabbier, the physical labor saving devices but the mental ones will it make our brains dumber? will it and the ultimate question will it remove the possibility of wisdom from society. because wisdom is a lot of knowledge multiplied by a lot of age. old, wise people. we need them in society. but then i thought, well, wait a minute. maybe what all of the devices are doing is actually purging our brains of the stuff we don t need. because with great respect to the people of south dakota, we don t need to know the capital or the fact that it is called pierre not pierre. it is like holding on a brain under a cold tap and getting unnecessary stuff away. leaving us like plato, and arrogant that might be to say, enable us to think the important things in life. so i m quite optimistic.