i could use a little help. yeah, there's a lot of risk out there. huh ♪♪ hey, is this thing hard to learn? nah, it's easy. huh. you know, i think i'm going to ride it home. good thing you chose u.s. bank to manage and grow your money. with our 24/7 support at least you're not taking chances with your finances. yeah, i think i'm gonna need a chair. oh, ohhhh.

this is "gps, the global public square." welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm bianna golodryga filling in for fareed zakaria today and we are coming live from new york. today on the program i have an interview with iran's foreign minister who warned this week that if the attacks in gaza continue america will not be spared. >> i ask him where iran's threats stand now and how close the middle east is to a much wider role and hamas' october 7th attack and how are the israeli people feeling as the country launches its second stage of war? i'll ask top israeli anchor yonit levy. for one brief, shining moment sam bankman-fried was a crypto billionaire and the subject of a ton of buzz, but then it all

collapsed. this week he took a stand in the federal fraud trial. michael lewis was by bankman's side to witness his rise and fall and tells fareed the fascinating tale. yesterday israel's prime minister benjamin netanyahu called the war on hamas his nation's second independence war and warned that it would be long. meanwhile, the president of the international committee of the red cross has called the humanitarian situation in gaza a, quote, catastrophic failing that the world must not tolerate. cnn's sara sidner joins me live now from tel aviv with the very latest. sara, what more are you learning about this expanded operation into gaza? >> look, we heard from the prime minister, as you mentioned there and he really tried to frame this as an existential threat to the survival of israel and he said that the next phase of the war is happening. what you are seeing is not a huge ground invasion, but a small one. you are seeing that soldiers are in gaza, israeli soldiers in

gaza as we speak. we have also seen the volley of air strikes that have been going on there in gaza with devastating effect. we have also seen plenty of rockets that have come over. they come over daily, really. tel aviv is not used to getting this number of rockets or rockets at all. it is more rare here than it is along the border in places like ashkelon and ashdod and sderot, but now it has become a regular occurrence that rockets continue to fly over tel aviv here. the thing that israel has, of course, is the iron dome that knocks those out, but we have, really, we've been seeing just the enormous amount of fire power inside of gaza and on the perimeters there as tank fire we are hearing from our reporters, as well that there is small arms fire that has been going off over the past 24 hours and of course, those air strikes which is causing certainly a devastation there in gaza and a lot of death including a lot of

civilians, men, women and children and babies, but here in israel there is also a big call by those who have hostages still in gaza. they are demanding to have some answers and to know exactly whether or not this new phase of the war will put their loved ones there in danger. they met with the prime minister and defense minister yoav gallant and demanded that their hostages, that their family members be put as a priority and they were promised that they were a priority to the israeli government. since then we have seen so many strikes and is so much fear on the part of those with family members in the tunnels that they will not be able to make it out alive if this continues the way it does before a negotiation is able to get them out, bianna. >> we just heard jake sullivan say that the release of the hostages remain a top priority.

let me ask you about the situation in gaza. do we know if any additional humanitarian aid has been able to get in? >> it's such a miniscule amount. normally, you have somewhere near a hundred trucks coming in each day and that's on a regular day, that is on before any war is going on. they've only been able to get a few dozen trucks there over a week's time and so you are really seeing this just enormous, humanitarian catastrophe not just the munitions being used on gaza because of israel and also because of the blockade and also not being able to get in the aid and there is not enough food and there is not enough water. it is really a situation where the civilians are suffering greatly and it gets worse by the day. >> you've been covering it all for us for the past few weeks. sara sidner. thank you. on thursday night u.s. officials announced that american f-16s had struck

weapons and ammunition storage areas in syria. these facilities were used by iran's revolutionary guard core and affiliated groups. the strikes were in response to a series of attacks of u.s. forces in i rabraq and syria. earlier, jose amir seemed to threaten the u.s. in a speech saying that america wouldn't be spared from the fire if the war in gaza continued. i sat down with him on thursday afternoon to ask him about that threat, but i began the interview with what began this war in the first place, the october 7th hamas attack. >> mr. foreign minister, thank you for taking the time. let me start by asking you, did iran play any role direct or indirect in the october 7th hamas attack on israel? >> translator: what happened on 7th of october in the occupied

territories of palestine, it was a decision that was made by the palestinians alone, and since the country was occupied, the thought that it was a natural right to defend their own territories, to carry out the operation. that was a total palestinian operation and decision. >> yoet the new york times" and the wall street journal say their sources in hamas and the irgc was told that iran was directly connected in the attack. >> translator: i think this is totally baseless claim and allegation. naturally, we do support palestine. we always have political media and international support for palestine. we have never denied this.

this is the truth, but in relation to this operation goal, the al aqsa storm and there was no connection to -- between iran and this hamas operation, not my government, no part of my country. what they did considering the international law. they did it in defending the occupied territories and they want to retake their territories and to liberate palestine from occupation and to free it. we believe that according to the

international law they did it in defending themselves. >> mr. foreign minister, you know what happened in that attack. babies, the elderly, women, children were murdered. they were tortured. that was part of the mission. how can you justify that as being legal under international law. no one else has. >> translator: first of all, from the 8th of october until now in an -- in an -- in a vengeful operation the israeli regime is continuously day and night targeting non-military areas both in gaza and the west bank, bombarding them and even using fast response, several

times more than 7,000 women, children and civilians have been killed. [ crying ] >> i do want to go back to the brutality in this attack perpetrated by hamas because it horrified the world and yet your office, the day after said this, quote, the resistance has so far achieved brilliant victories during this operation and this is a bright spot in the history of the palestinians' people struggle against the zionists. you yourself called the attack a historic victory. how on earth can you call the butchering of innocent civilians a bright spot? >> translator: let me ask you a question. has israel occupied palestine or the other way around? the palestinians occupying israel? which one is the occupier? in response to occupation, 75 years of humiliation. >> you know israel has not been

in gaza for many years. hamas has controlled gaza. >> translator: in a large number of territories belonging to palestinians israel has been there for years. they're demolishing their houses of the palestinians and they are expanding upon their settlements. they have killed thousands of palestinians and made them homeless. this is continuous genocide as the crime was going on. what happened was a general response of 75 years of crimes and genocide and occupation. >> we could go back and talk about 75 years and i'm talking to you specifically about this attack which precipitated the war that we are now seeing. >> translator: i'm asking you

specifically, what -- for the prevalent and extensive attacks against gaza and killing 7,000 women and children, why are you not seeing both sides? the occupying side? yes, you know, we don't approve of the killing of the civilians. >> so you condemn? >> translator: i have met with the leader of hamas. i asked him, he explained to me why -- what they did. he said we wanted to retake our occupied territories. they explained to me that. in the past month netanyahu was involveded in very radical extremist actions and also desecrated the al aqsa mosque and even disrespected the christians and also jewish settlements on the west bank.

for 16 years gaza is a small area is under total human blockade. when you treat a nation like this they believe it is the right to defend their mother land. you see, i would like to emphasize we are opposed to the killing -- the killing of the civilians, the political leader of hamas told me that we stand ready to battle the military israelis for a long time, but the civilians should be left out. >> next on "gps" i asked the iranian foreign minister about his perceived threat to the united states where he said at the u.n. that america wouldn't be spapared if t the war conont. wewe'll be bacack in a momoment.

u.s. officials are now warning of a growing likelihood of escalation in the wider region. israel is trading heavy fire with hezbollah militants in the r lebanese border. these groups are part of what iran calls the axis of resistance. i asked amir abdollahia in about the prospects of a larger war. >> i want to talk about your time in new york because you spoke at the u.n., and i want to quote what you said for our viewers. i say, frankly to the american statesmen, we do not welcome expang of the war in the region, but i warn if genocide in gaza continues they will not be spared from this fire. is that a threat? is iran prepared, really to go to war against the united states? >> translator: we don't want

this war to spread out. >> with all due respect, your actions do not seem to match your words. you say you are playing a constructive role in peace and security. group affiliated with iran have targeted u.s. forces on bases 15 times now injuring 20 u.s. military personnel and a u.s. carrier strike group shot down 15 drone, four cruise missiles fired by houthi-backed militants aimed toward israel. president biden said this yesterday, he said -- >> translator: any attack that is carried out in the region, and if the u.s. interests are targeted by any group without offering any piece of proof is totally wrong. you see, two weeks ago i was in

iraq also in syria and lebanon. i could see up close and personal that the people of the region, they are very sensitive about the developments in the palestine. they are angry. they are not receiving orders from us. they act according to their own interests and also what happened and what was carried out by hamas and it was totally palestinian. they decided to take responsibility for that. >> you keep saying that and yet you continue to weigh in on this issue, and that's what i don't understand. iran wasn't attacked and iran wasn't a party to this current crisis. so why are you involved? >> we are not involved. why is the u.s. so involveded? >> the u.s. is protecting an

ally that was attacked and provoked. >> translator: we are living there. the u.s. is not. from thousands of kilometers it is a way, they are interfering in all aspects of our region. we should ask the u.s. government what are you doing in iraq? has the syrian government invited you to have your military bases there? ask them. what are you doing behind netanyahu in a war that -- in which 7,000 palestinian men, women and children have been killed? yeah. we do care about national security in our region, but there are groups in the region, and they do things and they're responsible for their actions. >> your regional neighbors have moved on. the u.s. has brokered,

normalization between israel and saudi arabia when hamas attack took place. why does the prospect of that normalization frighten iran so much? >> translator: you see, those countries that have normalized ties, the israeli regime, what they did was was perfunctory, not substantive. on the 7th of october in the afternoon the country in which israel has embassies -- you see, what happened to their embassies by the people in those countries, you know, just the source of evil. you see, israel is a source of insecurity. they have assassinated our nuclear scientists in our

streets. they don't care about the security of the region. they just want to foment insecurity because israel exists and its longevity is tied to insecurity. today, if the war in gaza is ended, there's no doubt that in less than 24 hours the government will fall, netanyahu's government. >> that's what happens in a democracy. >> up next on "gps, how the war is playing out among the israeli public. i'll speak to one of the country's s most prorominent tv anchors yonit t levy. that's n next.

i wanted to get a sense of israel three weeks after hamas attacked and in the second stage of war which netanyahu promised would be long and difficult so i asked yonit leff toe join me. she is a top anchor who join us from her news channel. yonit, thank you so much for tabing the time in your busy schedule to join us today. as you noted we are now two days into what prime minister netanyahu described as the next phase of this operation. he says that he has the fullbacking of the government going into this stage. how are the israeli people feeling about it now? >> well, i mean, bianna, as you mentioned it's been three weeks and a day. the ground incursion and the idf's ground incursion into gaza has started and this is a very

complicated thing to achieve, first because there are 230 hostages, israeli hostages held by hamas in gaza. the red cross hasn't seen them and their families don't know their condition and the israeli government wants and thinks that this is a tactic to pressure hamas into somehow a deal to release these hostages and of course, the bigger goal or the biggest goal by the israeli government is to topple hamas and to dismantle its abilities to do this again. i think it's important to say israelis are still very much in this. they are reeling from the worst terror attacks that they have ever suffered every day, more and more information is coming out. you know, i've spoken to sources telling me that there are still 100 israeli bodies that haven't been identified and let that sink in a minute on what that means and what that has been

done to people before and after. this is where we are and the whole public is watching things very, very closely and concerned about the hostages and also about what the next steps of this war will look like. and it comes as there's continued criticism of prime minister netanyahu not just in how he's handling the aftermath of the october 7th attack and not to mention that he's taken some heat for blaming his intel officials which he's had to retract and apologize for in the last few hours, but there is frustration in how he's handling the hostage situation, as well. so given all of that, is there faith that his government can orchestrate his next phase of the operation in the weeks and months ahead successfully? >> look, ideally, the situation will be where everyone would work together and that there would be solidarity and unity.

among everyone, i think you would see this in israeli society over the past three weeks and we need to mention that this, of course, this war that has been forced upon us happened when israeli society is already very divided over the judicial overhaul and the protest that you've seen this over the last couple of months. on the one hand, you have people reminding netanyahu that he was warned by his security officials by the defense establishment that our enemies might see this as a moment to strike israel because what they perceive as weakness and he on the other hand in his supporters in a tweet he's since retracted say i did not have a specific alert to what hamas intended to do. all of this, bian a just a prelude to what we will see when this war is over. the documents and the questions who knew what? what kind of policy vis-a-vis hamas was a prominent policy by the government, but again, i think many in israel kind of feel that this is the moment to

try, if we are able to try to come together because the external threat is bigger than anything else that is happening right now. >> you know, ionit, in the hour and days, i know israelis were very moved by the compassion and support that was provided by the u.s. president, president biden. he made a trip to the region, as well and to meet with leadership there, and i know his popularity soared. i'm just wondering if there's concern now given the humanitarian crisis that's unfolding in crisis and the continued pressure from other countries, for a ceasefire or a halt in operations, if there is a concern that perhaps some of that, what appeared to be unconditional support from the u.s. may fade at some point? >> first of all, i must tell you that the support, i think, no

one is more highly supportive of a world leader more than president biden who came here and showed not only all of the empathy and all of the support that the united states could muster and israelis felt like he got us and he understood how devastating this massacre was and how israelis feel. it is not only, by the way, the support of aircraft carriers or anything like that, there are military experts and generals helping israel with the guidance of how do you fight this kind of war against terror in a densely populated area and there are many experienced american generals on, you know, fallujah or other places like that. so i think that there might be some sort of difference between how patient the biden administration is and how patient the rest of the world is to what we are seeing in gaza. i think that what israelis feel from the israeli point of view again, the world has moved on

quite quickly from showing very, very brief empathy to what we are still going through to, in many cases, even blaming israel for what has happened, and i think that many israelis feel like their case isn't clear enough, maybe hasn't been clear enough for years, but how do you wage this war against a terror organization that is so cynical that starts by murdering your own children and hides under their population not at all caring if they're hurt. so it is a very difficult thing to maneuver, and i think that israelis on the one hand, do feel like the stop watch has begun to run its course. israel always has a very short window, but they're also angered by the fact that there is a stop watch to begin with because they feel like they've been through something that should never happen again and if anyone knows anything about jewish history

know that those words have a lot of meaning and tragedy. >> yonit, sometimes we forget journalists are humans, as well and you have been working 24/7 over the past weeks and i hop you are taking care of ourselves and i've been watching you and your coverage and it's been phenomenal throughout all of this. thank you for your insight throughout all of this. >> thank you, bianna. next on gps, fareed will be back and he has a fascinating interview with the author mic michael lewis. bankman-fried took stand in his own federal fraud trial. we'll be back in just a moment.

this week sam bankman-fried took the stand at his criminal drill in lower manhattan. the department of justice accuses him of orchestrating one of the biggest financial frauds in recent american history. the 31-year-old founder of the

cryptocurrency ftx has pled not guilty to charges. what should we make of bankman-fried from wall street trader to billionaire and disgraced, the arthor on "the cristo titan," the rise and fall of a new tycoon. >> michael, welcome back to the show. >> pleasure to be here, fareed. >> let me ask you something top ginn with, after doing all of this, did you figure out what is cryptocurrency? [ laughter ] >> and why does it exist? [ laughter ] >> well, so -- this is a very good question. to start with, what's curious about the story is you don't really need to know and he didn't need to know. he saw it -- it -- cryptocurrency is in the eye of the beholder. >> yeah. >> he almost says that. >> in that bloomberg interview, what he sees when he first walks

in is an in, fert market and it doesn't matter if it's crypto currency or tulip bulbs and it's priced one way in one place and another way another place and you arbitrage and he didn't care about it. to answer your question, before i started this book, i used to kick around crypto and think is there a story here? it always struck me, two things always struck me, one, is it always felt like a solution in search of a problem. that's always been the first -- the first pitch is he was going to replace the dollar and it's not going to replace the dollar. it's not a means of exchange and the second pitch was an uncorrelated asset and it didn't move around with anything else and unfortunately, it moves around with everything else. and a year and a half ago, the market for cryptocurrency, and the market value is $3 trillion, so for me, you ask me what's interesting to you about crypto, what drew you in to write about it. it was the social consequences of that.

it's what happens when you out of nowhere create $3 trillion of wealth and distribute it unequally and some people have it appear out of nowhere and have huge sums of money. >> let's get to sam bankman-fried, do you think his interest was fundamentally the same as yours, oh, my god, there's this exploding market. another guys, certainly steve jobs and bill gates are fundamentally interested in the technology. >> right. >> it seems to me sam bankman-fried was fundamentally interested in the money. >> he was fundamentally not interested in the technology. his interest is the interest of a wall street trader. he's working at james street who is the high frequency trading firm that is set prices in markets for assets and he is introducing radical efficiency to say the market for stocks and in these trades he's doing it's pennies that they're making on the trades. the margins are fractions of a percent and he looks at this other market that issal oall ofa

sudden a $3 trillion market and you can sell it for $1,000 in japan. you don't see this in order nah financial markets so his interest was that. i'll pour framesjames street th bo into it and that was it. . what do you think explains his success because a lot of the people you've talked to have succeeded and what was the genius behind it. >> right. >> what's the genius here? >> it was partly the brazenness of being willing to jump into a market that was shady, rickety, unpredictable and apply these tools. i think it was a couple of things. one, he built on his business on an oilfield. essentially ftx was the casino and in the way it made money is it took a slice out of every transaction and in a booming market the transactions are booming and so the sum of those

slices gets to be a pretty big number. i mean, a year after he starts it he's generating a billion in revenue a year and $400 million in profits and the question is why people came to his exchange, and he had the -- >> because there were others. >> dozens of others. his was the first that was really designed for the institutional trader for the jane streets and jump trading and goldman sachs of the world. they're used to trading on professional exchanges with professional technology and he had a sense of what that was because he'd come out of that world and he's the first to build an exchange that actually suited them. so they follow him into the market and they want places to trade and this place looks relatively attractive and there are technical things about the exchange, but it was an insight that these people who i know from wall street are coming and i'm going to build the casino that they want to be in. >> it's such a complicated story, but at the heart of it, it seemed to me that what he did wrong and what the government

alleges that he did wrong seems pretty simple in finance and it was a sacred rule that if you have customers' money, you can use it for very specified purposes and one that the customer understands, and he took that money $9 billion of it -- >> and moved it -- so at the heart, is this a very simple story of massive misuse of customer, of third party funds, as they call it? it's easily muddied up and made more complicated than that because of how and the why of it, but the what of it, everybody agrees. even his lawyers aren't disputing this, that crypto was unusual in that unlike on the stock exchange, it served as a custodian, so that if you owned crypto you kept your money at ftx as if it were a bank and they were meant to crypto in cold storage and it was meant supposed to be there and

customers would have thought that was true and what was true instead was that money was largely inside of sam bankman-fried private hedge fund, alameda research and so everybody agrees with that. where it gets complicated is the how, the why and the intent. the bulk of the money and our guess there is in the beginning banks wouldn't open accounts for ftx and not because ftx was an illegal thing, but because they didn't want to be associated with crypto and it tricked them into thinking it was out of crypto and in order to get the fiat currency and it was to get your dollar, yen and you had to send it into an account in alameda research and it would stay there and later on, ftx gets bank accounts and it's pulled there and never gets moved and what i found just from the point of view of story telling is that if you took -- if you looked at this thing from not just sam's point of view, but the point of the view of the

people who worked for him and the point of people outside the firm, you might come out on different -- with different answers. different readers might control different things about the intensions of sam bankman-fried. i think some of the readers would lynch him. i think others would think he's just weird enough so that this was maybe more complicated than just pure theft. >> stay with us for a moment. when we come back i'll ask a question that many reviewers have asked did michael lewis let bankman-fried off too easily in this book?

and we're back with michael lewis. the author of the new book "going infinite." and you've heard people say a lot of people think you're very soft on this guy.

he's a crookster and a fraud and he ran a ponzi scheme and government claims one of the biggest frauds in history. you even, in the way you've been responding, you're quite sympathetic to his point of view. >> i don't think -- if you read the book, the book -- so the book is told in a -- it is a structure to this. it is not me. i'm using other people to tell the story. what i don't do, and this is intentional, i just don't inject my own judgment. i felt like i'm writing a story for a juror to read. it wasn't my job to pile on to the moral outrage. it was my job to report what i s saw. >> but all of your books, they report. but the times for example said michael lewis knows how to tell happy stories. he doesn't know how to tell tragedies and this is a story of fraud and -- ripping people off

and it's -- >> it's so much more than that, though. if you told it as just that, you're missing a lot of fun of the story and the interest of the story and the curiosity of the story. so one of the benefits that i had, my privileged position was i was there for a year before it all went bad and figuring out what this story was and hadn't written ai word. i was just thinking through what this was. i could see the rise as well as the fall. right from the beginning, i didn't think of it -- certainly didn't this of this as sam bankman-fried is a hero story. i was thinking right from the start, the day i meet sam bankman-fried and 18 months ago he had zero dollars and now he's got $22 billion and the world is organizing itself around this pile of money, i thought he was a walking social satire, that he is lighting up parts of the world for us to understand because of his peculiar position in the world and his peculiar

relationship to the world. >> do you like him as a person? >> oh, yeah. i liked him when i met him, and i like him now. i can tell you, when it all fell apart, it wasn't that shocking to me. there's a foreshadowing of what's going to happen in this company. in 2018 when he opens his hedge fund. it all falls apart. half the people he's working with think he's a crook or so radically catastrophically careless and sloppy, they quit. the money is lost. nobody knows where it is. they wind up finding it. this is all part of this character's -- as a crime, this crime doesn't make a whole lot of sense in that his wealth and the wealth of all the people that worked at this place was tied up in this actually successful business called ftx. there was a cancer on the side of the business, the legacy

business, this hedge fund which was wholly unnecessary to the main business. any sane person would have shut down the hedge fund the minute this thing went boom. there's an intanity to this. it's not like, oh, this is bernie madoff, he had this, because this is just a necessary ponzi scheme. he was making half a billion legally. >> crazy. "forbes" magazine when they decide he's worth $22.5 billion, they're only valuing this business, this actually successful business. the character i had come to know when it all implodes is a really curious character, and very much a creature of modern wall street. he thrives in a state of semi chaos. anything stable -- he would be a horrible accountant. anything stable, careful, calculated, predictable, he can't function. total chaos isn't good because

he does have this aptitude for quickly discussing out situations and adapting to change. so figuring out this is where he excels in these board game like situations, he turns everything around him into this because that's where he's relatively strong. this was a version of this. he made it all more complicated than it needed to be. if you ask me another question, do i think he's going to jail? yes, i think he's going to jail. i think it's highly unlikely he doesn't go to jail. i just think the circumstances -- it's a shame to ignore how entering the circumstances are. >> michael lewis, always a pleasure. >> my pleasure. >> thanks to bianna golodryga and thanks for being with me in week.

here in the bay, our carss and all of our stuff where we want to go. but, our cars can't take us e with unpaid tolls. vehicles with overdue, unpaid tolls may not be able to renew their registration until outstanding balances are paid. payment assistance is available. visit bayareafastrak.org/ase so go pay your unpaid tolls y and keep your wheels on the !