Return to Transcripts main page

Fareed Zakaria GPS

Interview with Bill Maher. Interview With University of Toronto Political Science Professor Jessica Green; Interview With The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired November 16, 2025 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:01:07]

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.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, the longest federal government shutdown in American history ends.

REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA): We're on day 30.

ZAKARIA: New Trump-Epstein documents come out and New York City Mayor- elect Mamdani prepares to take office.

I'll talk about all of that and more with Bill Maher.

Also, the Trump administration skipped out on this year's major global climate conference. What does this mean for halting climate change? I'll ask an expert.

And finally, what life lessons can we learn from someone who has broken speed records for running ultra long races when that someone also happens to be a great journalist and businessman? I'll ask the "Atlantic" CEO, Nick Thompson.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

It's hard to see how the government shutdown and reopening is anything other than a defeat for the Democrats. A high stakes confrontation that ended with their own goals unmet and their message muddled. If they didn't have the leverage or were not willing to use it to prolong the shutdown, then why did they stage it at all?

The shutdown reinforced the image of the Democrats as feckless. They promised wonderful sounding new programs, free childcare. But in fact preside over bloated bureaucracies and inept execution. If America has an affordability crisis, it tends to be in places Democrats govern, like New York, Illinois and California, which all feature high taxes, soaring housing costs and stagnant outcomes in basic areas like education and infrastructure.

Consider New York City, the country's largest and most important metropolis. The mayor-elect wants to spend more money on shiny new programs, but surely it would be worth first asking what happened to the money already raised?

In 2012, toward the end of Michael Bloomberg's mayoralty, the city's budget was about $65 billion. Today it is about $116 billion, an increase of more than 75 percent in just over a decade. Spending has soared while the subway deteriorates. Housing costs rise and public schools remain mediocre despite spending more than $36,000 per pupil last year, the highest in the nation among major school districts.

The result is a paradox that defines much of blue state America. Government that promises more costs more, but delivers less. New York state mirrors the city. Its spending has risen from roughly $70 billion in 2000 to more than $230 billion today, about twice Florida's budget even though Florida has several million more residents. When voters see that record, they conclude, not unreasonably, that more money is not the answer.

Yet Democrats' instinctive response to every problem remains the same -- spend more. The truth is that local government in the U.S. is already living on borrowed time. For decades, states and cities have traded short-term political harmony for long-term fiscal ruin. To keep peace with powerful public sector unions, they promise ever more lavish pensions and benefits, then quietly defer the bill to future taxpayers.

Across America these obligations act like slow motion fiscal time bombs. Invisible for now, but guaranteed to explode.

[10:05:01]

Meanwhile, daily governance suffers. In too many Democratic strongholds regulation has metastasized into paralysis. Housing is unaffordable because local zoning codes and environmental reviews, rent control and union carve-outs make construction painfully slow and expensive.

California has spent $24 billion on homelessness over five years, yet the problem has only worsened. More is spent per mile on subway construction in New York than in any other city on earth. Each new initiative layers another bureaucracy atop the last.

Nothing captures urban America's normalized dysfunction more vividly than the miles of rusting scaffolding that hang over New York City sidewalks. They transform public spaces into dim, dirty tunnels that harbor crime and drive away commerce. No other major city looks like this. Not London, not Paris, not Rome, though they all have buildings that are centuries older.

The primary culprit is a 1980 safety law that spawned an industry of contractors and consultants. Every mayor vows reform. None succeeds. Eric Adams tried with little success. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani says he'll try, too, but his plan is a complicated melange of expedited reviews and new rules, the quintessential Democratic response. Process without progress.

And it is precisely this instinct, endless process instead of results, that drives voters to tolerate Donald Trump's bluster and bullying. At least he gets things done, they say. Against that image of crude efficiency Democrats too often appear like dithering technocrats.

Americans do not hate government. They hate government that doesn't work. They will support ambitious programs if they believe they will be implemented competently, as they did with the New Deal and the interstate highways. But when government seems incapable of building housing, fixing schools, or balancing budget, even sympathetic voters lose faith.

If Democrats want to rebuild that faith, they must rediscover the lost art of simple competence. And they can prove it to the entire nation by governing well in the places like big cities where they are in charge. Fix the schools before promising new subsidies. Change housing rules before asking for rent freezes. And tear down the scaffolding.

American liberalism once stood for a confident creed that smart policy executed by capable hands could make people's lives better. Americans want that, but they watch Democrats in action and ask like Casey Stengel more than 60 years ago about the hapless New York Mets.

Can't anyone here play this game?

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The bill is passed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: This week Democrats and Republicans in Congress finally ended the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. But the outcome has left many Democrats furious with their own party for what they see as caving to Republican demands.

I asked Bill Maher about this on Friday night after I appeared on his HBO show, "Real Time." I should note that HBO and CNN share the same parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Bill, pleasure to have you on again.

BILL MAHER, HOST, HBO'S "REAL TIME": Great to see you as always. And you're always great on my show.

ZAKARIA: Thank you, sir. So you feel like the Democrats actually didn't do as badly with the shutdown because they brought health care up. It is an issue that helps them. But tell me, in general, do you think after these midterms, are the Democrats in a good place? I know you worry about this a lot. MAHER: Yes. Well, I notice in your columns, you use the word feckless,

which is a term I never heard until the Democrats were. I never heard that word until the Democrats started being it. And I've never looked it up. But I kind of get what you mean. I kind of get what you mean by it. I think I got it by osmosis. The definition of that word.

I mean, I do worry about it. It's funny, we both kind of were harping on the same idea this week, which is that, why can't either one of them be normal? That was the end of my show tonight. It made me think of that. We just had the World Series, and there was an 18-inning game. And for the last nine innings, one whole game, neither side could score. Every inning they would put men on base and they couldn't get it done.

It was like, that's what this reminds me of. It would be so easy to score points on the other side.

[10:10:03]

All Trump would have to do is stop doing the excesses. He is not wrong about a lot of the things he came into office and noticed needed fixing. Now he goes a little too far with that. You know, he thinks he needs -- let's do the Kennedy Center and, you know, bowling alleys need new -- you know, everything he sees he thinks he can fix. But he wasn't wrong about the border. He wasn't wrong, NATO should be paying more. He wasn't wrong about certain trade policies that needed to be fixed.

He wasn't wrong about colleges being out of control. DEI was -- went too far. Lots of stuff. And he just goes too far with everyone until he actually lost his constituencies on some of the issues, like immigration that were so popular. And he showed that you can close the border like that. It wasn't something you needed congressional help for. You could just do it. And he did it. He just did it too far.

And people don't like to see people tackled at Home Depot and people they know who have been in this country for a long time. And the economy, the tariffs don't seem to be helping that. Maybe --

ZAKARIA: But do you think the Democrats are getting that message? I mean, because in these midterms, as you pointed out on your show, mostly the moderates won.

MAHER: I mean, yes, but again, they just elected a socialist, some would say communist mayor in New York City. And I see now Seattle just like they're calling Mamdani West. So, you know, if we wind up with a situation where very blue cities all around the country have socialist leadership, but that's not where the country is in general, that's not good for the Democratic Party.

I said on a few -- the show a few weeks ago, if the face of the Democratic Party going into the next election is Mamdani in the East, and Katie Porter, who looks like she will be the governor of California here in the West, that's not a great look for the party.

ZAKARIA: You know who's amazing is the mayor of San Francisco. MAHER: Yes.

ZAKARIA: This guy, I mean, he's -- and he's doing such a good job of just delivering, of being -- he may be the most competent politician in America right now because -- and he has a 73 percent approval rating. I mean, you go any higher than that, you're in North Korea.

MAHER: Right. And he's the one who talked Trump out of sending troops to his city. Trump is sending troops to plenty of other cities. Nobody else just got on the phone. I mean, this is my other big theme always is talk to the guy. He can be talked to as opposed to the approach of lots of other people of let's go full high school and not have him over to the lunch table.

Why? Are you going to elevate him? My god, is he going to become president?

ZAKARIA: Right. But, tell me, a lot of people, when they hear you, you know, bashing the Democrats, bashing woke and all that, you still think of yourself fundamentally as somebody on the left.

MAHER: I never stopped bashing the other side as much as I ever did. But yes, it just -- they just became a party that also needed to be bashed.

ZAKARIA: Could you imagine yourself ever voting Republican?

MAHER: Of course. But you know -- but they would have to be very different. I mean, they would have to certainly lose the idea of we don't concede elections. And my biggest worry is that they feel that the excesses of the left are so great that they are so anti common sense. And again, they're not completely wrong about that. That they are so never met something that was counterintuitive that they didn't embrace.

That they just can't let these people take power and therefore even if there has to -- if democracy has to be sacrificed for hanging on to power, that's what I worry about, that even when Trump passes from the scene as president, will they still keep that idea that we cannot let these people take power? These people who just do not have any idea of common sense, they want to reinvent everything. They are revolutionaries in a country that is not asking for revolution.

They're just asking for politicians to fix things. That's -- that is my biggest concern. My hope is that Trump, who will not concede an election, when he is no longer on the ballot, but again, we're not even sure because he's talked about running for a third term, which is completely impossible constitutionally. Not that that seems to bother him. Maybe we will return to a sense of normalcy. Maybe J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio will go back to what we used to have, but I'm not sure of it.

ZAKARIA: Right. But people often wonder, like, have you gone over to the other side? You don't think of -- you still think of yourself --

MAHER: Those are people who don't listen to me. Those are people who -- most people are in their bubbles or they --

ZAKARIA: Or they watch a clip.

MAHER: They watch a clip.

ZAKARIA: Yes.

[10:15:00]

MAHER: I did a piece here a few weeks ago about -- the editorial I did where I bashed both sides, and then the FOX News and the "New York Post" only ran one half of it. Exactly one half of it. I was like, what about the other half? What about the part that began, and to my friends on the right? They just completely left that out. So to those people, I can't help you. I speak to a different constituency.

People who are open minded, people who want to hear both sides and people who want to know the truth about both sides. And if you say, I changed, I didn't change. The world changed. The parties changed. There was much less to make fun of when Obama was president because Obama was a centrist. That's what I would like to get back to. Obama politics. I mean, he deported a lot of people. He just didn't do it with masks on like thugs.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll get Maher's thoughts on an issue that Trump just can't shake off, his friendship with the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAHER: So to the question, is he going to lose people from this? Yes, possibly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:20:40]

ZAKARIA: There is one scandal that just won't go away for Donald Trump. His ties to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And this week, Congress released thousands of pages of documents related to Epstein's case. It has raised some new questions about Epstein's sex trafficking and how much the president knew about it at the time.

For more, I'm back with the always provocative Bill Maher who hosts "Real Time" on HBO.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: All right, let's talk about Trump. So, Bill, when you look at what's happening to Trump with Epstein stuff and maybe, you know, immigration, he went on Laura Ingraham and said, you know, immigrants are good. And that's caused a flurry on the MAGA, right? Do you think Trump, you know, the support that the base gives Trump, which has been so rock solid, is that cracking?

MAHER: I think it is. I mean, I think he's down to the ride or die, you know. The polls I saw this week, it's in the 30s. 30s is a different animal. 40s, that's normal for a president. You know, it's a tough job. I mean, half the country is always going to hate you or not like what you're doing. When you get down to the 30s, you're down to that group that just will never leave you for whatever reason.

I've seen numbers as low as 33. That's a third. OK. It's not going to get much lower than that. You will never lose that group. But that doesn't help you politically. Then you are kind of a lame duck. Lame duck is when, you know, you can't get your own party to go along. I see -- I thought this was very indicative. Both Kansas and Indiana balked at his plan for redistricting. He tried to get them both.

No, he got Texas to do it in an instant. They were like, great idea, boss. Let's rig this whole thing. And then California had to, of course, respond. And we did it, too. But that's interesting that Kansas and Indiana both said, no, we're not going to do that. And the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene used the word gaslighting, you can't be gaslighting your people. And as I said today, you can lie to people about a lot of things.

You cannot lie to them about their money. They know how much is in their pocket, and they know how much they're spending. So to be up there talking about like prices have never been lower, it's Baghdad Bob time. And that just infuriates people because not only do they not like not having the money in the pocket and the prices being higher, then they don't like being talked down to and lied to because they know it.

ZAKARIA: And what about the Epstein thing? Do you think that -- you know, because the right has been so fueled by conspiracy theories, and now this is one that they're on the wrong side of.

MAHER: Well, I mean, it's like Bobby Kennedy got the measles or something. You know, he brought this on and then it's coming back to haunt him.

ZAKARIA: Exactly.

MAHER: It's almost Shakespearean, you know, that he brought this up and promised his group when he was running, I'm going to get to the bottom of this because he knew it was important to them. It wasn't important to him, but he knew it was important to QAnon, which was a huge pillar of the MAGA right, is QAnon. This is something they've believed for a very long time. People who wear red shoes, you know, there's all these things.

They've got pictures of me wearing red shoes once, and I'm part of it. And Tom Hanks is part of it. It's crazy stuff. But that's what somehow animates them, is that it all comes down to this nefarious group that's running the world. And we've certainly seen that a million times before. People think there's this mysterious groups who run the world. Obviously, the Jews come into play here sometimes because that's something on the right now we see, like a lot of antisemitism and, you know, the Rothschilds or whatever it is.

ZAKARIA: And it's all part of that conspiratorial --

MAHER: More part of that. And -- but it was always about pedophilia that people, these kind of nefarious, horrible people who run the world, the shady group of this cabal, they are pedophiles at heart. And, you know, eating babies. Remember, that was something that -- eating babies the Democrats were doing.

So, look, it would not animate me as an issue, but it animates that side of it. And also the people who are probably not that aware of that kind of stuff, or they're aware of it, but they're not in on it, people like Mancy mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

[10:25:01]

I mean, I talked to Marjorie here. She did not seem like the crazy person that they presented. We don't agree on a lot of stuff, but she, you know, as I say about everybody, they're a monster until you talk to them. And then they're not quite that monstrous. But, you know, and Lauren Boebert, these are women, especially Nancy Mace, who's had the experience with being assaulted with men who act this way. And it's just too personal.

I just don't see them giving up on this issue. So to the question, is he going to lose people from this, yes, possibly.

ZAKARIA: Well, that's big, right? That's the beginning of the --

MAHER: That's very big. Yes.

ZAKARIA: Bill Maher, pleasure to have you on.

MAHER: Thank you. Pleasure to be with you always.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, has the world stopped caring about climate change? That's the impression you would get from some of the news coverage. We'll explore when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:30:15]

ZAKARIA: Representatives from almost every country on the planet descended on Belem, Brazil, this week to attend COP30, the world's most important climate conference. But one delegation was conspicuously absent, the United States of America, is not surprising, given President Trump's history pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement and calling climate change --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The greatest con job ever --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: -- at the U.N. in September. But it begs the question, what is the future of the fight against climate change without America's involvement? Joining me now to discuss this is Jessica Green, author of the book "Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them."

Welcome, Jessica. So, help us make sense of where things are, because right now they're all meeting in Brazil. But many countries, certainly in the developing world, are scaling back the commitments they've made, not just the United States, obviously dramatically under Trump, but much of Europe is doing the same thing, right?

JESSICA GREEN, POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: Yes. So, everybody seems to be scaling back. The Europeans, less so than other countries. But the developing world is basically saying, look, we would love to decarbonize, but we need your help. We need money from, and technology from the developed world. And until we see that we can only go so far.

So, things are slowing down but I don't think that that means we have lost the battle on climate. I think there's a lot of other steps that countries can take, both within and more importantly, beyond the COP.

ZAKARIA: So, tell us, what are you optimistic about? Like, you know, you said, there's -- you know, the fight isn't lost. What do you look at as signs of optimism?

GREEN: I think there are a few. First, countries there are many countries that are trying to decarbonize and they're figuring out how to do that. Number two is everyone will always say the cost of renewables have fallen dramatically over the last several decades. And that's making the business decision for climate somewhat easier than it had been in the past.

And number three is, that this is increasingly becoming a question of statecraft and economic futures for countries. So, this isn't about whether you like trees or whether you think emissions are important, but rather what is the economic future of your country going to be. And that really resonates with policymakers and governments.

ZAKARIA: And when you -- when you look at a place like China, which is simultaneously moving forward in many areas to dominate green technology, solar, wind, batteries, but at the same time burning an enormous amount of coal and is now the largest emitter of carbon into the atmosphere in the world. Do you -- where do you -- you know, what happens there seems to me the most consequential in terms of the future of emissions.

GREEN: So, like many other countries, China is riddled with contradictions. I think we should also clarify in this discussion what we mean by biggest emitter. Right now, China emits more CO2 than any other country. But if we look at their per capita emissions, they're not even in the top 20. And if we look at their historical emissions, it's half of what the U.S. emissions have been historically. So yes, China is a big emitter, but it's also a very big country.

ZAKARIA: Wouldn't it be fair to say, though, I mean, the atmosphere doesn't care about per capita, what it cares about is the total amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere, right? That's the -- that's the relevant -- for climate change that is the relevant number.

GREEN: Right. Of course, for climate change, that's the relevant number. For politics, it's a different story.

ZAKARIA: What does -- what do you think the effect of the United States essentially kind of turning its back on all this has? Is it consequential or has the world already kind of moved on and it's doing what it's going to do, regardless of what the Trump administration says?

GREEN: You know, this isn't the first time that the U.S. has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. And so, we've -- we've been here before and countries have continued to move forward in their -- with their own decarbonization plans. So, I think in one regard, it's -- it's not consequential.

The other way in which, I think, the U.S. withdrawal or retrenchment away from climate policy is less important perhaps than some people think is because the world is kind of reorganizing itself now according to fuel choice and energy choice, you know? So, we're seeing this emergence of petrostates, like the U.S. who are doubling down on wringing the last dollars out of the fossil fuel economy.

[10:35:03]

And then electrostates like China or aspiring electrostates who are trying to adopt renewable energy because they know that we will be living in a carbon constrained future and that is the smart choice for making investments in their economy.

So, I think, you know, the U.S. withdrawing just kind of puts in higher relief the issues that we're already seeing, which is countries have to make a choice of what their future energy sources are going to be.

ZAKARIA: Jessica, pleasure to have you on. Thank you for enlightening us.

GREEN: Thank you so much for having me. What a -- what a delight.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll talk to Nick Thompson. He's not only the CEO of "The Atlantic," he also set a record for his age group at running a 50-kilometer race. He'll tell me what life lessons he has learned from running. We'll be back in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:40:35]

ZAKARIA: My next guest is a man who holds many titles. Nick Thompson is a journalist and also the CEO of "The Atlantic." He is a survivor of cancer and of a bizarre kidnaping while on a trip to Morocco in his 20s. He is a husband and father, and the son of a complicated man. He is an ultramarathoner who runs faster in his 50s than he ran in his 30s. And now he is the author of a new memoir where he writes about his life and the lessons he has learned through the sport of running. It's called "The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports."

Nick, welcome. I read the book in one sitting. It is --

NICHOLAS THOMPSON, CEO, THE ATLANTIC: Amazing.

ZAKARIA: -- it is so -- it is so good. I cannot recommend it enough to people. And you don't have to be a runner to find it interesting, because there is a lot of family memoir.

THOMPSON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: But the heart of it is how you became this really extraordinary runner. You didn't start -- you still always ran and you were always fast. But what do you think made you a better runner in your 40s, you've just turned 50, than you were in your 20s and 30s?

THOMPSON: So, there's a simple answer, which is that I started training with a new coach who figured out that there were gaps in the way in the way I trained. The more complicated answer is that when I was 30, I had run a 243 marathon and I gotten cancer, had taken two years to recover, and then I'd run a 243 marathon, and then I had run about 10 years of 243 marathon after 243 marathon. And my friends nicknamed me Mr. 243, which I didn't like.

And I think what happened is I had to break through psychologically this idea that I couldn't be faster than I had been before I was sick. And once I had gotten through that, once I realized that I could get into an earlier, stronger version of my body, not just try to match the pre-cancer Nick then I started to go way faster.

ZAKARIA: What did -- what did you have to do to overcome that mental block?

THOMPSON: So very interestingly, one of the things that my coach had me do, he realized that I was kind of scared of running a marathon at faster than six minutes per mile. And so, he had me do these very interesting things where he would have me run short distances, and he couldn't tell me what he was doing. He had to kind of trick me.

A lot of running -- one of the things I've learned as I've gotten older, pain is physical, but it's also emotional, right? The things that slow you down sometimes it's muscle inflammation or it's something in your nervous system, but a lot of times it's just your brain and it's your brain deciding that you have a limit and that if you exceed that limit, you'll lose homeostasis. And so, it sends pain signals throughout your body to slow you down.

A lot of that is just emotions, right? And if you can learn to control that and you can understand what's happening and you can train based on that, then you can go to entirely new levels. ZAKARIA: You also -- the other leitmotif through this book is your father --

THOMPSON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- who -- a complicated guy. The marriage breaks up. He moves to the Philippines, Thailand. I mean, reading it -- just objectively, somebody would read it, they would say, this is a bad, neglectful father who kind of abandoned his children.

How was it? But yet you have a lot of love and affection for him.

THOMPSON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: And do you think the running was the thing that allowed you to find a way to have that empathy for him?

THOMPSON: I don't -- I think it was part of it. Running was part of the way we communicated. He taught me to run when I was five or six. He cheered for me. I watched him run a marathon when I was seven. Like it was part of a every father-son, mother-daughter, mother-son has a -- like there are things that connect them. Like deep ties, like strange things they do together and they, you know, attach themselves emotionally. Running was that for us.

But the reason why I forgave him, I mean -- and he was absolutely banana cakes. I used to say, what do your parents do for a living? Oh, my mother is an art historian at Babson, and my father runs a male brothel in Bali.

And, you know, the reason I forgave him was less because we connected through running and more because he always loved me. And he always wanted what was best for me. Like it is very rare to have someone in your life who 100 percent absolutely wants the best for you at all times.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that there are lessons from, you know -- because you really are an extraordinary runner. I mean, you're -- you're about the fastest at your -- in your age category, right?

[10:45:00]

THOMPSON: In the 50-mile, I am at least, as we're recording this, the fastest in the world this year.

ZAKARIA: Are there -- are there lessons for your -- the rest of your life?

THOMPSON: Oh, totally. So, there are so many lessons from running, one of which is it's like a little bit of a stoicism, right? You have to go out and you have to run. You have to run when it's hot. You have to run when it's cold. You have to run when it's snowing.

You have to run when you're sick. You have to run when you're dizzy. You have to run when you're hungry. Right? And you, you learn, right, that if you -- if you want to get better, you have to consistently go out there. And if you consistently go out there, you will get better, right? There's this very pure connection because running is such a simple sport and it's just you.

ZAKARIA: Yes.

THOMPSON: And so, you learn that and you learn it through running, and then maybe you apply it to work, right? Oh, this project seems impossible. OK, wait, I'm just going to go and I'm going to do the best I can today. And I'm going to work on it today, and I'm going to work on it tomorrow. And then, lo and behold, it gets done. And so, I think there's a lesson that I took from running into everything in my life.

ZAKARIA; And you do it by running every day from your house in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, to your office in SoHo --

THOMPSON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- and back at the end of the day, right?

THOMPSON: That's -- I mean, it's the most efficient way to --

ZAKARIA: How much is that? How much is that is running? Is that every day?

THOMPSON: Well, it's eight miles if you do it maximally, efficiently. But sometimes I add a little bit here and there. So, it's more like 10.

The idea is like I love running. I want to do it every day. But I got a lot of other responsibilities. I've got kids. I've got this job.

So, how do you -- how do you fit the maximum amount of running into your life with the minimum distortion on everything else? And run commuting, it's a good hack. I highly recommend it. Do you have shower here at CNN?

ZAKARIA: We do. Somehow in the middle of it all, you wrote a great book.

THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Nick Thompson, pleasure. We will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:51:22]

ZAKARIA: And now, for the last look. In advance of the COP climate conference in Brazil this week, Bill Gates put out an urgent memo. It was clearly motivated by the drastic cuts to foreign aid, most notably Donald Trump's dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Gates wrote that, given this new reality, the international community must prioritize saving lives using the most effective forms of foreign assistance.

Gates knows what he's talking about. The Gates Foundation has done extraordinary work in eliminating or reducing diseases in very poor countries, saving countless lives. Vaccines and malaria prevention are effective and cheap. Unfortunately, he wrote, some of the programs designed to fight climate change are not.

The memo prompted an outcry, but it contains hard truths. First, we do have a humanitarian catastrophe. The U.S. has historically been the world's largest donor, and Trump said in February that his administration would cut $60 billion in foreign aid, with many fewer dollars allocated to foreign assistance the money should be used more wisely.

The first crucial distinction that should be made is between humanitarian assistance, saving people's lives, and development, getting countries onto a trajectory of economic growth. We have generally been good at the first and not so good at the second.

A study in "The Lancet" this year found that two decades of USAID funding, which made up less than one percent of the federal budget, annually, saved more than 91 million lives. In the months since the agency's dismantling, one model estimates that more than 600,000 people have died, two thirds of them children.

But as Adam Tooze writes in "Foreign Policy," we must recognize that development is a different goal than saving lives. Tooze calls China, the greatest success story in development history. Over the course of the past 50 years, China has become the world's leading manufacturer, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. And it did so despite getting relatively little foreign aid.

In fact, as the economist William Easterly points out in his book "The White Man's Burden," the countries with the most success in modernizing their economies in recent history are the countries that weren't subject to much western interference at all. The many dynamos of east Asia, their success, Easterly notes, was largely homegrown.

He notes that from 1980 to 2002, the countries and territories with the highest per capita growth rates in the world, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore had either negligible foreign aid or none at all. In the same period, the countries with the lowest growth rates, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Haiti had relatively high amounts of aid.

Let's take another specific example of homegrown success, Japan. It's economic liberalization began not under duress from the World Bank and the IMF, but rather back in the 1870s under Emperor Meiji, who instituted sweeping land reforms.

The next decade, the government cut spending and privatized state- owned enterprises. And remember the Japanese economic miracle, that's the roughly 50-year period after World War II, during which its economy grew rapidly. Not primarily thanks to foreign governments, but with investment and oversight by its own government. In a new book, Easterly writes that foreign assistance has often been motivated more by a desire for political influence than by concern for the welfare of the locals.

[10:55:07]

Case in point, the modern aid apparatus was built up and refined partly to help defeat communism and bring western style economic systems to the rest of the world. But while we can agree that the strategy of using foreign dollars or technical expertise to try to turn a poor country into a rich market economy has a mixed record using that money for humanitarian assistance has been amazingly effective. So, let's do more of what works and save the lives of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet.

Before we go, I want to tell you about a special event, tonight's premiere of "CNN FILMS," "PRIME MINISTER." It's an intimate look at the extraordinary political career and life of new Zealand's former Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. Catch it here on CNN at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, or catch it the next day on the CNN app. Go to CNN.com/watch for more.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)