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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Trump's Decision To Bomb Iran; Donald Trump's New World Order; Can Blue States Build Nice Things? Interview With Taubman Center At Brown University Fellow Marc Dunkelman; Interview With Practice For Architecture And Urbanism Founder Vishaan Chakrabarti; Interview With Author Tom Friedman; Interview With Author Walter Isaacson. Aired 10- 11a ET

Aired July 06, 2025 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:43]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: 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 the Aspen Ideas Festival.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: We'll start with two national security advisors and a four- star general who was also CIA director. Susan Rice, John Bolton and David Petraeus join me on stage to talk about Donald Trump's foreign policy.

Are we headed to regime change in Iran?

Also, the big question Democrats are grappling with is, can they get things done? Can they build stuff?

The iconic example, of course, is New York's Penn Station, considered the busiest transit hub in the entire western hemisphere, which for decades has been a dysfunctional embarrassment.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ongoing delays tonight at Penn Station.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Scary, dangerous and dilapidated.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A dangerous dungeon.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a real fear of just trying to get to work.

ZAKARIA: I sit down with two shop scholars to talk about the problem and more importantly, the solution.

Finally, Walter Isaacson is not only a founder of the Aspen Ideas Festival, but one of America's great historians. He and I had a wide- ranging conversation about America and the world.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Over the last year, Israel has been assaulting Iran and its axis of resistance with deadly effect. All this came to a head in the last few weeks with a bombing campaign against Iran, joined by the United States.

Will the next step be regime change in Iran? We talked about this at the Aspen Ideas festival with a high-powered panel -- Susan Rice, national security advisor under President Obama. John Bolton, national security advisor in the first Trump administration before a high profile split with the president, and General David Petraeus, a former CIA director who also led allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: I thought I'd begin, Dave, with you by asking you, the Middle East, that you dealt with when you were in Iraq in the early years after 9/11, 24, almost 25 years ago. How different is the Middle East of today from that Middle East?

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS (RET.), FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Well, it's transformed enormously. And of course, after Iraq, I was the commander of U.S. Central Command. So, we owned the greater Middle East and Afghanistan and so on.

But this is dramatically different. The last 18 or more months have seen that Iran has had tremendous degradation to its security forces of all types, not just the Artesh, the traditional military, but also the revolutionary guards corps. Many of their leaders have been killed, well over a dozen of their scientists when it comes to nuclear program. They're essentially defenseless right now.

And then you have Israel, really, as the preeminent military power in the region, but with a very different strategic outlook. We have to really appreciate how significant 10/7 was in terms of convincing Israel that they can never allow a threat to develop, not just on their border, but in the region as well, in the face of Iran. The Gulf States are dramatically and much more important -- their hubs of innovation, developing sectors beyond fossil fuels. They're anticipating the India-Mideast corridor.

And then the U.S. is still there. Try as we might, leaving the Middle East for the United States is like Michael Corleone trying to leave the mafia. You just keep -- you just keep getting sucked back in.

ZAKARIA: All right. Let's hold on that for a second and let's drill down on the big subject, which is, of course, Iran.

John Bolton, when you have had a complicated relationship with Donald Trump.

(LAUGHTER)

JOHN BOLTON, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS: It's not complicated.

ZAKARIA: And on his -- on the days when you guys weren't getting along, he would -- he would talk about crazy John Bolton. All he wants to do is bomb Iran. But then he ended up bombing Iran. Did you do the right thing?

[10:05:00]

BOLTON: Partially. You know, Trump doesn't follow strategy or policy. What he does at any given moment is always up in the air. His decisions are like a vast archipelago of dots. You can try and draw lines between them, but he can't.

So, I can only say what I think and that is that what Dave said is about the situation in the Middle East post-October the 7th is exactly correct. To me, this is the moment to finish off the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which I think we have the capacity to do.

And most importantly, the key that has to take place before there's going to be real peace and stability in the Middle East, long term regime in Tehran has to be overthrown by the people of Iran. And I think it's doable. I think the regime is weaker than at any point since the 1979 Revolution, which I'd be happy to go into at length.

But I think we will never have an opportunity this good to remove not just the nuclear program, but the Iranian support for terrorism, which dates back to 1979, when they seized our embassy employees and it went downhill from there.

ZAKARIA: Susan Rice, regime change in Iran?

SUSAN RICE, FORMER U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Color me skeptical that the population will successfully overthrow the regime anytime soon. Ironically, Israel and the United States bombing Iran may have had the unintended consequence of dimming opposition internally, because there's quite a bit of evidence that many regime opponents are among the most outspoken reacted, as one might expect when their country is bombed by an outside entity not to rally around the regime, but to rally around the country and the national identity.

And I don't think that advanced the objective of peaceful regime change or internal regime change. I say peaceful, I mean not imposed from outside.

But on the nuclear program, I think the resort to military action when diplomacy had not been exhausted, was a strategic mistake. It has long been the objective of every American administration, Democratic and Republican, to ensure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon. That has got to be our objective. The question and the debate has always been on how -- how best.

And the reality is, and we're back to this point today, only diplomacy and a negotiated settlement can ensure the sustainable and verifiable dismantling of Iran's nuclear program. You need inspectors on the ground. You need verifiable constraints that are very significant, and you don't achieve that by ripping up the 2015 nuclear agreement and replacing it with nothing.

Trump had an opportunity, I think, before military action, of using the threat of military action and the continuation of sanctions to get potentially an even better deal than in 2015. And we lost that opportunity as a result of military action that I think preceded when it was necessary, when diplomacy had proved that it could not succeed.

And as a result, we don't know. And we may not know as we didn't in North Korea for many years. If Iran goes underground and rushes to try to create, whether it's a crude device or a more sophisticated device, and we may end up inadvertently with the outcome that we have long sought to prevent.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll ask my panel what they make of Donald Trump's attitude towards allies and enemies, and who fits in which category.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:13:35]

ZAKARIA: We're now almost six months into Donald Trump's second term. How is America standing in the world changed?

I discussed this with three of the most experienced voices in American foreign policy, Susan Rice, John Bolton, and David Petraeus.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Susan, I want to ask you about to step back the broader picture here, the United States and the world. The United States is imposing, in many cases, the highest tariffs on its closest allies. It's having the biggest squabbles with Canada and Europe. When you look at the kind of alliances we were trying to build in Africa, the dismantling of USAID probably has some effect there, some negative effect.

How much do you think this impedes American leadership?

RICE: Enormously. In my view, if you add up all that we're seeing, you know, aligning our interests in bizarre ways with our adversaries, picking wars or fights economically and otherwise with our allies, withdrawing USAID and VOA and all of our tools of global engagement, we are seeing a president that is systematically shrinking us from a global superpower to potentially just a regional great power, like back in the 19th century.

[10:15:00]

And you got to imagine, you know, with all of his love for Xi Jinping and all of his love for Vladimir Putin, that he may well be content with returning to a sort of 19th century great power division of spheres of influence where, you know, Canada and Greenland and Panama are in our sphere. You know, let Putin do what he wants with Europe, and let Xi do what he wants in Asia.

This is exceedingly dangerous. And withdrawing our global presence through USAID is not just a humanitarian disaster, which is going to cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. It is a strategic disaster because the assistance we have provided, whether it's in the health sector, in governance and support for human rights and security assistance in all of these realms, helps to mitigate and prevent conflict, helps to keep Americans healthy and protected from infectious diseases that can span the planet, as we've learned the hard way, with devastating consequences.

And when we withdraw and, you know, allow millions to die, we are not only creating great anger and animosity towards the United States, we are creating a vacuum into which China is eagerly deploying. And that sets us back in very substantial ways globally.

ZAKARIA: John -- John Bolton, tell us a little bit, you know, look, you're the only guy who has sat down for hours and hours with Donald Trump. And so, we're all trying to people sometimes ask me, what is the world going to look like, you know? And I always say, like, were in this strange moment where to try to answer all these questions is to try to get into the mind of one single human being, because policy is not being made by the National Security Council. It's not being made by interagency processes, and it's being made by this one guy.

And so, when you think about how he's looking at the world right now, we've got three and a half years to go. Sketch for us what you think is going to happen.

We know one thing which you've talked about before. He wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but other than that, how is this going to play out?

BOLTON: Well, I have no idea. And I'm not troubled to say that because I'm absolutely convinced Trump has no idea. It is -- it is really ad hoc and transactional.

And we were told the story when I first started the White House, that in the Trump organization he would he never made a daily schedule. He would come into his office each day and say, well, what will happen today?

Maybe that's a formula for success in Manhattan real estate development. It's not the way you run the U.S. government.

I would say, though, that it's important not to overestimate the damage that Trump is doing. I think the tariffs in particular are shredding decades of American effort to build up credibility, good faith, reliance on us. It's going to be very hard to get them back.

But I think it's possible. And I think just remind everybody of my hero, Edmund Burke, who warned against overgeneralizing from insufficient information. And I remain hopeful, by the 20th, we'll be six months in, 1/8 of the way through. It's almost over.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the mayoral election in New York city has focused attention on why New York and America more generally cannot get things built anymore. From housing to public projects like Penn Station, I ask an architect and a scholar to explain the problem and, crucially, give us a solution.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:23:27]

ZAKARIA: New York City's Penn Station is one of the busiest transit hubs in the world. It may also be one of the most despised. The station is a massive underground labyrinth of dreary passageways, confusing signage and dangerously cramped corridors.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul once called it a "hellhole", but despite a near universal consensus that the station needs to be rebuilt completely, it has never happened. Why?

I sat down with two experts at the Aspen Ideas Festival, architect Vishaan Chakrabarti and Marc Dunkelman, the author of "Why Nothing Works".

Welcome, Vishaan.

VISHAAN CHAKRABARTI, FOUNDER, PRACTICE FOR ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Marc, thank you so much for doing this.

Why don't you tell us first a little bit about Penn Station? Why is it important? Why was the old Penn Station so important? And why was it regarded as such a crime that it came down, that it triggered the landmarks preservation movement in the United States? The destruction of that one building.

CHAKRABARTI: This is a huge national embarrassment. This is the Penn Station as it exists today. It handles about two and a half times what the busiest airport in the world, Atlanta-Hartsfield, handles. It's underground. It's unsafe. It's unworthy.

And this is what it used to look like. Built in 1910. Glorious building. Had a famous kind of roman baths as its inspiration. Designed by McKim, Mead and White.

[10:25:00]

With -- Eisenhower passes the Federal Highway Act. Aviation takes hold. Private sector owns the station.

Station goes bankrupt, basically, and they tear down the station in the 1960s. And they replace it with the underground morass that we have today. And so --

ZAKARIA: Can I -- can I?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

ZAKARIA: Am I right in remembering Vince Scully, the great architectural historian, said, we used to enter New York City like Roman gods. We're now scurrying like rats. CHAKRABARTI: That's right.

ZAKARIA: Right?

CHAKRABARTI: That's right. And we continue to scurry.

ZAKARIA: So, we now saw what was, what it became. And everyone agrees that this was a national embarrassment, both in terms of the destruction of the architecture, but also, as you say, unsafe, unsanitary, difficult to navigate. And it is the busiest transit hub in the western hemisphere. Right.

I think five, six governors have pledged that this is going to be the thing that they get done. Yeah. Why? Why was it impossible to get it done, to do something to reimagine rearchitect Penn Station?

MARC DUNKELMAN, FELLOW, TAUBMAN CENTER AT BROWN UNIVERSITY: Well, when the original Penn Station comes down, it's in an era where it seems like the great men, the establishment of the time have done terrible things sort of across the board. It's not just in great architecture and destroying a beautiful building like Penn Station, it's that they allowed cars to be produced that were unsafe at any speed. As Ralph Nader said.

It's that they allowed DDT to be sprayed on crops causing birth defects. It's they sent us into Vietnam. It was the sort of sense that the establishment was bad and that they were making decisions now, like taking down Penn Station.

And so the progressivism at the time thought to itself, it's time for us to put some guardrails around these folks. And so, we have spent as a movement, the progressive movement, Democratic movement, center left to the very left, have spent the last 50, 60 years thinking, how can we put new barriers to prevent bad things from happening.

Among them, how do we prevent people from destroying something like Penn Station? And those barriers are now so substantial and numerous that when someone like Vishaan comes with a plan to fix it, it's almost hard, if not impossible, to clear all the barriers that we ourselves have created.

ZAKARIA: And the barriers have been put in at almost every level, right? Like there's some national issues. There's some state issues, there's some local city issues.

DUNKELMAN: Absolutely. And some of its processes you have to do in the executive branch. Sometimes it's giving ordinary people the right to sue if they don't like a project. It's -- it's just we could we could spend the next 4 or 5 hours just delineating all the different ways and how they interact. It is just a complete gantlet to get anything done.

ZAKARIA: Now, Vishaan, as somebody who has tried to build and tried to re-architect things, what has been your experience of how do you navigate this? How does anything ever when you look at the list of things, you think to yourself, how does anything ever get built? CHAKRABARTI: I mean, this has been an obsession of mine for 30 years.

I am on governor number five. I've watched hundreds of millions of dollars be spent. It's a poster child for Democratic dysfunction.

And so, I think there are false debates about -- well, I mean, I've had any number of elected officials say to me, the architecture doesn't matter. We just have to care about the rail operations. As if we could tear down grand central, put a CVS there and run around like hamsters in a Habitrail underneath.

And this is actually at the core of this scarcity idea that that Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, talk about, that we have absorbed this idea that we as the richest city in the richest country in the world, can't have both a beautiful station and great rail operations. Why?

And so those debates, an extraordinary amount of fighting among jurisdictions, the different railways, governor, mayor, federal government that nothing gets done. I worked in the Bloomberg administration after 9/11. A very, very smart man named Dan Doctoroff, who was the deputy mayor, got an awful lot built under a Democratic process, you know, the high line and so forth.

And we proved that if you built things really well -- great design, great waterfronts -- it built up the value of the city. The city's budget at 9/11 was $43 billion. They just passed one. That's 137.

That's because we grew the city. We grew the tech industry. And so, these things do not have to be mutually exclusive and can have democratic process, but it has to be done with some sense of smartness.

What I like to say is we have to be both inclusive and impatient, right? We have to include voices, but be terribly impatient for why we're not getting things done more quickly in this country.

ZAKARIA: You have a plan for Penn Station. There are a bunch of plans, but I want you to go through yours just to demonstrate how this is actually doable.

CHAKRABARTI: Twenty seventeen, right before the pandemic, 16 people were injured at a false event in Penn Station, right? And so, that inspired me -- when we started our firm, we did this whole thing with "The New York Times" and the governor's office didn't want to take the risk. So, nothing happened, pandemic.

And so, a couple of years ago, a man named Peter Cipriano, who runs a company called Halmar here in the United States, made a kind of gesture to the Garden that they could take out the theater, which is the blue box. It's a very, very large theater that sits inside of the Garden and sits on top of this lovely space in the station, with about a 10-foot ceiling height.

Now, you don't have to be an architect to understand why a space like this is unsafe in the event of a fire, right, or a terrorist event, right? So, when you take out the theater, you can go from this to this, with a 55-foot-high ceiling and light coming through, and you understand where you're going. We're still in the middle of designing this. It's going to look even better than this.

Now, the way this can happen is the federal government announced a couple of months ago a full-scale takeover of the project, citing the fact that the local government has spent years dithering on this, spending hundreds of millions of dollars. I, for one, very much welcome it. Secretary Duffy stepped in and said, this is ridiculous. This is a federal facility because the Amtrak owns it. We're going to take it over.

So, you know, our team will put a bid in. There will be others. But this is the most hope I've had for Penn Station in 30 years, because again, it is a slightly less deferential process.

It's saying, we're the federal government. We're going to take -- we're going to take this over. We're going to hire developers. We're going to knock everyone's head together. And then we're going to do this thing, which is going to be the most complicated piece of construction, probably in North America, that we've seen.

Because, again, a train comes in every three minutes. It's like doing -- it's like doing open heart surgery while the patient is jogging. But LaGuardia was done that way.

ZAKARIA: And you've got basketball games going on above.

(CROSSTALK)

CHAKRABARTI: Right, and we've got basketball going on above. But LaGuardia was done that way. And you notice, they never shut it down. It was this amazing act of phasing. We think we can do the same.

But really it comes from the leadership that says, you know, we're not going to defer to every last concern here. We've got to find compromises and make this thing work. And that's what's really coming from our federal government right now. And I, for one, am glad.

ZAKARIA: So, presumably the new next mayor of New York will be Zohran Mamdani. He says housing is his absolute priority. The most important way you can lower the price of anything is to increase the supply of it. But how would you increase supply in New York? How do you get -- how do you take some of those obstacles out of the way?

DUNKELMAN: Well, the core of it is actually sort of is to say, look, if you own this piece of property, the presumption is you should get to build on it what you want. And right now, what we've done for fear of Robert Moses or whatnot, is to give the community like -- just an excessive amount of opportunities to criticize, to change.

We don't want so many floors. We don't want it to interrupt our view of the Verrazano Bridge. We don't want it to prevent us from, you know, this or that. We're not sure what the impact is going to be on the environment, like, as if another building in New York is going to somehow have some dramatic effect on climate. So -- but people use absurd reasons. And so, what you want to do is you want to return power in the -- in the first instance to the person who wants to do the building so that they don't have to jump through so many hoops before there's actual construction.

CHAKRABARTI: So, our firm did an analysis of all the empty sites available in New York near mass transit, out of the flood zone. Found enough space for 1.3 million New Yorkers, 520,000 units of housing, most of that coming from mid-rise housing in the outer boroughs.

The fact is, we then looked at those sites. Those sites have so much regulation that small builders -- I'm not talking about big billionaire developers. Small builders cannot afford to build them because the amount of regulation.

So, Houston, which has no zoning and has been the punching bag of jokes for urban planners for years, has no homeless problem or virtually little compared to San Francisco and Boston and New York, because we have so overregulated our housing market. And so, Mr. Mamdani seems like a very smart guy. Hopefully he really listens to this, because I think the gut instinct for the progressive is to add more regulations and more programs, not less.

Why has the city become so unaffordable? Because it's impossible to build supply, right? That is why -- and that built up under Mayor de Blasio and undoing that is going to take a decade. It's not going to take some magic trick where you freeze the rent. It has to do --

ZAKARIA: In fact, de Blasio froze the rent three times.

CHAKRABARTI: And the housing crisis got worse.

ZAKARIA: And people think that's what -- that's what caused it.

CHAKRABARTI: Right. And so, look, the examples are all over the place.

[10:35:01]

The cities in the red states do not have this problem, right? And so, we have to confront the fact that the politics of this has to change in our cities. I mean, New York is -- it has a GDP roughly the size of South Korea, and it's run like North Korea.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next, I want you to hear what Tom Friedman, one of the sharpest observers on Israel, has to say about how to think about that country at this moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:40:10]

ZAKARIA: As I've said, Israel has emerged as perhaps the mightiest country in the Middle East in the wake of its conflict with Iran. What does this mean for Israel's place in the region going forward? At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I moderated a panel with "The Economist" editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, and Tom Friedman. I want to show you something very interesting that Friedman said to me there.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TOM FRIEDMAN, COLUMNIST, NEW YORK TIMES: I operate out of a general principle that to understand the Middle East, I believe, the Arab- Israeli conflict, you actually have to hold three thoughts in your head at the same time. And unfortunately, that's very hard, particularly on American college campuses, OK?

One thought is that Israel is an amazing place. What Israel has built in 75 years, by way of technology, agriculture, ingathering of exiles -- Israel is an amazing creation, OK, number one. Number two, Israel does really bad stuff sometimes, and it's doing really bad stuff as we speak in the West Bank right now and in Gaza. And third, Israel lives in a crazy neighborhood, OK? All three are actually true at the same time. And that is true about Bibi Netanyahu, OK?

He just achieved a monumental victory over some really bad actors who have perverted not only Israel because -- for me, you know, I use the Princess Di rule here. There are three people in this marriage, OK? It's not just Israel and Iran. It's Israel and Iran, and I'll deal with them as a collective, Lebanon, a country I care very much about, Syria, and Iraq who have been occupied by Iran, basically for all these years. They are as much rooting for the downfall of the regime in Tehran as anyone in Tel Aviv.

So basically, you have this sort of tripartite situation with Netanyahu where on the one hand, he achieved an incredibly important victory. At the same time, he has pursued Hamas well after it has been defeated at the expense of the hostages. And they are killing a lot of people in Gaza who should not be killed, OK? And at the same time, at home, he is pursuing a judicial coup to destroy the Israeli Supreme Court, to pave the way for the annexation of the West Bank.

So, I can keep all three of those thoughts in my head at the same time. And I would urge people too when you -- when you think about him. Now, one of the most interesting dynamics, my friend Ari Shavit pointed this out to me in a column I wrote the other day is that the people who delivered this victory for Israel, I'm talking about the air force pilots, the technologists, the strategists, the scientists, the cyber warriors, were for the most part the same people who, on the eve of the Hamas war, had spent nine months in the streets of Israel protesting against Bibi's judicial coup. So, they will be damned if he is going to take this victory that they delivered these scientists, this tip of the tip of the Israeli spear, and use it to win the next election to produce an Israel that their kids will not want to live in.

So, you know, my fear is if we -- just to finish this point, Israel today is the country the Iranian middle class wants to be. And Iran today is the country the Israeli secular elite fears it could become.

(END VIDEOTAPE) ZAKARIA: Donald Trump says his tariffs are going to kick start a resurgence of manufacturing in America. But what would it take to actually rebuild post-industrial American communities? That's what Walter Isaacson and I talk about when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:48:29]

ZAKARIA: The stated aim of Donald Trump's tariffs is to bring back American manufacturing and make America's heartland great again. But what about the very real economic gains of the past several decades?

As I pointed out before, in 2008, the American and Eurozone economies were roughly the same size. Today, America's economy is almost twice the size of the Eurozone. Since 2000, German wages have grown by 15 percent. American wages have grown by 26 percent.

If either the U.K. or France or Japan were the 51st state of the United States, on a per capita income basis, they would be this country's poorest. So, why this American nostalgia for a bygone economy? I discussed this question with Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON, AUTHOR, "ELON MUSK": Let's go back to your broader point which is we've had just this amazing great wealth over the past 30, 40 years. And somehow the people in America don't get it, that they are clueless, they're wrong.

Maybe they know more than we do. Maybe they were left behind by some of this wealth that was created and generated mainly into profits that went to the financial sector, the meritocratic elite, not just because we didn't do enough retraining truckers to be coders, that's never going to, you know, be the solution. But it was because we didn't believe that the dignity of good jobs, good wages in America should be the point of the economy, not growth, and the expansion of wealth being the point of the economy.

[10:50:08]

ZAKARIA: I get it. And the way I would put it is so I went to -- from some of these towns in Pennsylvania and in Ohio, where people seem to have been left behind. And to me, the story was fascinating, which was if you looked at these places the -- you know, the factory had gone away, but most people were working and they had -- you know, they were making roughly the same.

You know, the unemployment rate in the United States is the lowest it's been roughly in 50 years. So, it's not like we have mass unemployment. What had gone away was the community, what had gone away was that -- they all worked for the same steel factory. They all went to church the same time. They all went bowling together. They all went -- didn't belong to the Kiwanis club. They all went to the movie theater together. They went to the hardware store together. But the thing is that -- you know, yes, globalization is part of it. But the reason they don't go to the movie theater is because of Netflix, not because of China. The reason they don't go to the hardware store is because of Home Depot, not Mexico. The reason they -- you know, even something like bowling. I mean, there's been an explosion of online gaming that most -- particularly young men do.

So, some of it is technology, some of it is globalization. But what has gone away is that community, that sense of community. And I think that's very important to people. And that even if you're making the same amount but your world disappears, the people you hung out with, the community you were in, I think you feel somewhat purposeless.

And, you know, again, I don't -- I don't know what the solution to it. Now, I want to ask you about before, because I know we are running out of time, we've talked about the explosion of wealth, and you've seen this new elite, the technology elite up close in a way that very few people have.

My own sense is that they don't seem as civic minded, as determined to give back and build these communities. I'm speaking in the aggregate. Obviously, there are lots of exceptions. But I think about what sustained the great museums and the great cultural institutions in New York and Boston and -- you know, and I look at San Francisco. It's the center of the biggest explosion of wealth in the history of humanity. And look around and tell me what great new museums you find, what great you know -- what's-- what's your sense about it?

ISAACSON: It's interesting. In the 1890s, we had a technological revolution that I think even greater than the ones we're seeing today. You had electricity all of a sudden. You had automobiles. You had electric lighting, light bulbs. You had telephones --

ZAKARIA: Cars, trains.

ISAACSON: -- telegraphs, trains. All this is happening totally transforming the society. We did some smart things. Then we decided, OK, we're going to -- instead of doing job retraining in the Obama sense, it was like, no, we're going to make high school universal and free. Major changes that we did, which we haven't done for this revolution.

You also had malefactors of great wealth who were as vilified as some of the tech bros are today, but they become the great philanthropists, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Fords. And I'll do it, all the libraries get built. So, the question is, will the tech bros go through that? Bill Gates obviously has led the way.

But why is it that the tech bro culture has been, in some ways, less community oriented, much more -- it's hard to figure out the philosophy there, but it's a little bit libertarian populism if that can exist, the Peter Thiel, David Sacks type libertarian populism. And whether that can get back to being connected to what you said, and which I was trying to say, is that, yes, creating great wealth is a good thing, but creating community and the dignity of each individual and each of our neighbors, that's the real thing. And as Jim Barksdale said, always remember that the real thing is the real thing. And we haven't gotten there yet. And you correctly pointed out that the wealth growth in our country in the past 40 years has far exceeded France, you know others, but maybe we need other metrics, too, to say what is an economy actually for? And the more narrow definition is, it's to create growth and wealth. A broader definition is, and this gets back to what Aspen was all about, to create a good society.

We can wrap it up by bringing it back 75 years, was the concept of a compass in which we balanced our values, and in understanding not just what's great for growth or wealth or whatever, but what is a good society and what is a good life.

[10:55:16]

And I think one of the things I loved about this institute is it starts with Plato, and you go through that all the way through to the people who influenced our founders, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Descartes, all are looking for something higher. What is truly the good society? What is truly the good life?

ZAKARIA: And the people who have those answers, at the end of the day, are the ones you really remember. I don't know who was the richest guy, who had the highest net worth around the time of Plato, but we -- we remember Plato, not him. Walter Isaacson, thank you.

ISAACSON: Fareed, thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Thanks for being part of my show this week from Aspen. I'll see you next week from New York.

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