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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Tough New U.S. Sanctions Against Russia; Trump. Tariffs and a Different GOP Tack on Trade; The Inventions That Really Made the Modern Economy; One Year After Charlottesville; #MeToo, Men, Women and Work; Aired 10-11a ET

Aired August 12, 2018 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:14] FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: 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 show, the battle over the border wall. Tough talk on Iran. Less tough talk on Russia. What does this all have to do with the midterm elections? We will examine where American domestic politics meets American foreign policy.

I'll talk to Richard House, Ross Douthat and Gloria Borger.

Also, Ronald Reagan famously called America --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RONALD REAGAN, 40TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: A shining city on a hill.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Shining city on a hill. Has America now lost its place as a beacon of freedom? Even as a great nation?

Jon Meacham says you must look at the long arc of history to answer that question. He'll explain.

And women in the workplace. The MeToo Movement has uncovered abuses and women still just make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. The "Star" editor Joann Lipman joins me to discuss how to even up the power and the pay dynamic between the sexes.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here is my take. The United States has reimposed sanctions on Iran but it is the only country in the world to do so. The other signatories of the Iran deal -- Europe, Russia and Chine -- all believe that Iran is in full compliance of the accord and that pulling out would undermine the process that was working in keeping Iran's nuclear program limited and peaceful.

So will Washington's move, solo and isolated, make a difference? In fact, yes. Almost no company in Europe will agree to do business with Iran and risk its much larger business with the U.S. Even more significant, very few companies anywhere in the world will do large transactions with Iran because these are generally denominated in dollars, which means they cannot take place with U.S. sanctions in effect and the U.S. government determined to oppose them.

The dollar has been the global currency for awhile, but surprisingly, its central role has endured even increase in the last two decades. I say surprisingly because America's share of global GDP has actually declined in this period. Despite that fact, as Ruchir Sharma, wrote in 2016, almost two-thirds of the world's reserves are held in dollars. The reasons for this are varied. The dollar has a first mover advantage. It was the most important currency when the great expansion of globalization took place after the collapse of communism and the entry of China and India into the world economy.

Like the English language which has become the lingua franca of global business, the dollar is the convenient common denominator for global currency transactions. The alternatives are weak. The Euros docked by concerns about its future, the Swiss Francs represents to a smaller country to become a reserve currency, and China has not reformed enough to freely float its currency the yuan.

This unusual role for the dollar gives the U.S. enormous power but with power comes responsibility and it is troubling to see Washington wield it in such an arbitrary and high-handed manner.

The scholar Barry Eichengreen has pointed out that nothing lasts forever, the pound sterling, which was the reserve currency of the world for much of the 19th century started to be over taken by the dollar in the 1920s. Eichengreen argues that history will not repeat itself precisely, you could end up with a few reserve currencies, the euro, the yuan, and Swiss Franc, all for example.

European countries and companies are seething at the Trump administration's moves. They have begun to discuss ways to respond. China will eagerly step in to take on more and more of the trade and economic relations with Iran since it can conduct its dealings without recourse to the dollar. Iran will search for ways to free itself of its dependence on America's currency.

So the long-term cost of the Trump administration's reneging on the Iran deal might prove far more consequential and negative than we now realize.

Let's get started.

All American eyes were on Ohio on Tuesday as the state held the nation's final special election before the midterm vote in November. President Trump's name was nowhere to be found on the ballot but the vote was seen as a referendum of sorts on his presidency as the November vote will also be.

[10:05:01] I wanted to take the opportunity to examine the importance of the president's foreign policy on the way he's been perceived by voters in this midterm election. Immigration, Russia, tariffs, they are all important issues that will help voters decide which way to vote.

Joining me now are Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order," Ross Douthat is an op-ed columnist for the "New York Times" and the author of "To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism," and Gloria Borger is CNN's chief political analyst.

Ross, let's ask you, start with the Russia piece because we have this one more step in this strange part that the Trump administration plays where the president cannot bring himself to say anything negative about Putin but the administration quietly continues to sanction Russia.

ROSS DOUTHAT, OP-ED COLUMNIST, NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, I mean, you have this ongoing dynamic where if you've just ignored Donald Trump, you would say that this is a fairly normal Republican administration that is dealing with Russia, sort of in ways that fall well within the normal guidelines of bipartisan foreign policy.

You have sanctions, you have criticisms, you don't have big sweeping deals with Moscow or Putin and the latest example is, of course, the sanctions following the poisoning case in the U.K. but meanwhile, Trump himself obviously pines for a partnership, a grand bargain, you know, detente, with Putin and famously can't bring himself to say anything negative about the Russian president. And this has continued for 18 months.

ZAKARIA: Richard Haass, you've been in fourth administrations. Have you ever seen something like this where the president seems at odds with his own administration's foreign policy?

RICHARD HAASS, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: You get asked that same question about virtually everything we've seen over the last 18 months and the answer is no. This administration is shall we say a departure both in policy and in process from all of its predecessors going back to Truman. This is a radical administration, it's a fundamentally different kind of administration. The only thing I'd say on Russia, and I know there is this view that a lot of the policy is quite traditional, it's just Trump, I think that misses an important point.

Yes, a lot of the specifics are tough, some of the sanctions, the arming of Ukraine, and so forth but, but, but the big issues, if you were Putin, you'd say you're more than willing to pay the price they've been asked to pay given the hollowing out of the U.S. relationship with NATO, given what the United States, the trade war with the allies.

The weakening of the fiber of the basics of post World War II American policy, a lot of international organizations and the like, this is -- you know, this was a Soviet goal. This distancing, this driving a wedge between the United States and its closest allies, that has happened to a significant degree.

So yes, some of the specifics, if you will some of the lyrics are pretty tough but the music, you've got to like the music if you're sitting in Moscow.

ZAKARIA: Gloria, what does it say about the Republican Party that Trump has been able to create this extraordinary situation where a party that was defined by hawkish foreign policies --

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Absolutely.

ZAKARIA: Like suspicion toward despotisms like Russia, you know, I think -- I can't remember the numbers but something like 50 percent of Republicans want a better relationship with Putin, more people distrust NATO than they distrust Russia, and some of the specific strong, but it's a sea change in Republican opinion.

BORGER: Totally. Totally. This is a party of Trump now. It's not the Republican Party of old. Trump has a 90 percent popularity rating with Republicans. It is a personality that people in the Republican Party who are true Trumpers are attracted to and they believe that whatever he says is correct. It is not Richard Haass.

(LAUGHTER)

BORGER: But it is sort of this cult of Trump and they believe that he knows what is best and so suddenly there is nothing wrong with what happened in Helsinki even though we're not sure what happened in Helsinki. But they believe that Donald Trump who wants to establish a good relationship with Putin will be able to best Putin because they believe that Trump can be the great negotiator as he has been telling them, and not only with Putin, but with North Korea, right? With Kim Jong-un.

And by the way, Trump feels the same way about the special counsel Bob Mueller. I'll sit down with him and I'll face him down and I'll win that one. So there is this sense, and not among all members of Congress, I might say. There are a few, a few Republicans who stand up to him and say it is not correct but by in large, the party has shifted and it is the party of Trump now.

[10:10:06] DOUTHAT: But it isn't just -- I mean, I would say yes. It's Trump himself. But there are underlying structural reasons for this shift, too, right? I mean, the reason that Republicans were united against the idea of the Soviet threat for 50 years is that Soviet communism was seen as a radical left-wing ideology that was a global threat to American values.

BORGER: Right.

DOUTHAT: American religion, American capitalism, and do on. And Russia under Putin shares, as Richard says, some foreign policy goals with the Soviet regime, but it has a different ideological position. It's battle lines are the border lands of Eastern Ukraine and Crime, not the center of Germany, and it's seen I think somewhat reasonably by a certain swath of Republican voters as less of a threat or a different kind of threat than it was in the past. And Trump has accelerated that transformation, away from sort of Mitt Romney's world view. But I don't think he's alone and causing it on foreign policy. I

think Trump's view of himself as this deal-maker sits -- you know, who is willing to make deals with hostile powers and stop our allies taking advantage of us, and so on, it fits well with some preexisting currents in Republican politics that Iraq and Bush and that failure brought to the surface.

BORGER: And so --

ZAKARIA: We got to take a break. When we come back, I want to talk about two other fissures in a sense in the Republican Party, trade and immigration, or are they fissures at all. When we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:15:47] ZAKARIA: And we are back with Richard Haass, Gloria Borger and Ross Douthat, talking Trump immigration, trade.

Richard Haass, this was another great area where the Republican Party was always the party of free trade. The way you make trade deals, you remember when you were in government, was you got democratic, technocratic elites to ally with Republican House members because that was where the -- you know, the Democrats, because of the unions, were always supposed to trade.

Now you have this extraordinary situation where you'd take polls of registered Republicans and they're 10 percentage points more suspicious and hostile toward free trade. Is this a case where what Ross was talking about where Trump didn't reshape the Republican Party, he saw that it had already changed and jumped on that bandwagon?

HAASS: Yes, I think there is an interesting dynamic between Trump and Trumpism. And some of these trends were already there. If you look at previous trade the degree of Republicans who have begun to erode so they're closing in on the lack of Democratic support for free trade, and what I think it shows is over the years that the pro-free trade didn't make the case for it. Didn't show how it was good not just economically but strategically, and also probably didn't do enough for the losers.

And there have been losers from free trade in part because of China in gaining the WTO, in part just because sometimes specific factories get pushed out, and we haven't systematically done nearly enough in training and education, and by the way we better get it right because the problem, as you know, for all this job loss is not trade for the most part, it's certainly not immigration. They both get scapegoated.

It's increasingly technology, and whether it's artificial intelligence or robotics or autonomous vehicles, that wave is coming. And unless we get it right, Fareed, unless we put in place, for example, the training, the education, the social support, the safety net, we haven't seen nothing yet when it comes to populism and nationalism.

ZAKARIA: The thing that Trump has been -- has decided to nationalize the midterms on is immigration and actually when I had Steve Bannon do a long interview with me, he predicted it. He said Trump will nationalize and should nationalize the election on immigration.

BORGER: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Is that a winning issue for him? It does seem to put the Democrats on the defensive partly because they embrace policies like abolishing ICE in sanctuary cities.

BORGER: Yes. Well, the Democrats played into his hands, by the way, by saying they wanted to abolish ICE. I don't know where they got that idea. They got to stop it. It doesn't --

DOUTHAT: It was a powerful Internet meme.

BORGER: It doesn't work --

DOUTHAT: I'm not kidding, that's where they got that.

BORGER: Right. It does not -- it does not work for them. Immigration has worked for Donald Trump from the first moment he came down that escalator, right? The first day he declared and he said people coming into this country, they're rapist, whatever, it works. He has promised to build a wall. He knows that he's not going to do that right away. Mexico certainly isn't going to pay for it. But immigration has been one of his key issues and he is never going to get off of it because it works for him. I do think tariffs is something that could boomerang for him.

HAASS: For sure.

BORGER: Because of the fly over country in this country, people are going to suffer as a result of it and you see members from the Midwest saying, don't do this to us, and now he's saying we're going to give you billions of dollars to get you through this, you know. So --

DOUTHAT: Well, he's doing what Richard suggested.

BORGER: Well --

DOUTHAT: He's compensating the losers.

BORGER: Yes, but -- but he's created a wound and now he's --

(CROSSTALK)

BORGER: A self-inflicted wound that he is now sewing up. Right?

ZAKARIA: Ross, what do you think of immigration?

DOUTHAT: I mean, I -- I actually disagree mildly with Gloria in that I think it's possible for Trump to over reach on this. I think it was sort of a deeply underestimated part of his appeal at the beginning where people said, you know, the country is pro-immigration, Trump is just speaking to this small minority and what Trump realized was both that there was a lot of sort of general disquiet about immigration rates that didn't show up in polling, and also that it was an issue like guns where you had a coalition on the right that was extremely motivated by it and the coalition on the left was much more diffused. But, you know, this stuff at the border, the child separation, the optics and so on.

BORGER: Right.

[10:20:06] DOUTHAT: I don't think that part of it helps Trump. Abolish ICE helps Trump but being perceived as sort of cruel in the pursuit of immigration restriction I don't think helps him. I And I think it's -- you know, it's a sign in certain ways of his weakness that he has to focus on this to sort of mobilize -- you know, to mobilize to sort of try and hold the House. But I think that there are -- you know, there are actual disadvantages to him here even though it was certainly under estimated as a source of his support at the beginning.

ZAKARIA: And the Democrats don't still seem to have a grip of -- on how to counter it. They do seem on the defensive.

Richard, I want to ask you the cost of this in broader policy terms. I mean, one of the great achievements of American foreign policy over the last 20 or 30 years has been this incredible harmonization of policy with Canada and Mexico. With two neighbors, you know, certainly with Mexico, longtime contentious relations, you have -- you know, the last five Mexican presidents have been pro-American, you know, pro-trade, pro-integrationist, and it seems like we now have very bad relations with our two closest neighbors, our two closest trading partners, can't be good.

HAASS: No, can't be good. It isn't good. Now one of the great luxuries of the United States for decades now is we've been able to deal with the rest of the world and not have -- not have to worry essentially about our neighborhood. That is almost unprecedented in the history of great powers. It's one of the reasons we could be as great as we were at a relatively affordable level. And we seem now determined to undo that.

The spat with Canada is preposterous on economic terms or anything else. With Mexico, you know, Trump is caught. He's so anti-NAFTA yet NAFTA turned out to be the best immigration policy you ever had. By improving the economic condition in Mexico far fewer Mexicans were incentivize to flee and come toward the United States. And by the way, we want to prevent people now from coming from Central America.

If you don't want to deal with it at the border, we need to deal with it locally, and that means helping these economies, helping these governments deal with gangs because that's why people are fleeing. But we should really think twice and then three times before undoing this and I guess I'd call it strategic luxury of having good relations both to our north and our south.

ZAKARIA: All right. This is fascinating but we have to go. We'll have to pick this up another time.

Next on GPS, when most people think of the things that built the modern economy they think of everything from a steam engine to a silicon chip. My next guest looks at things slightly differently. He says we need to look at things like gramophone, concrete, the breaking mechanism on an elevator. Why in the world? Find out when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:26:41] ZAKARIA: Steam engines, silicon chips, social media, these are the sorts of inventions that people point to when asked what made the modern economy, but the undercover economist Jim Harford looks at the subject differently. He always puts a twist on any subject he covers and that's why I love reading his columns in the "FT" and his books.

His latest book is called "50 Inventions That Shape the Modern Economy."

Tim Harford, so you have figured out what are the 50 inventions that shaped the modern economy. Actually they are the fun ones. This is sort of --

TIM HARFORD, THE FT'S "UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST": Yes. Yes. Not the steam engine, not the motor car, the ones that we don't appreciate, the ones that we overlook. The bar code or barbed wire or one of my favorites is paper. It's --

ZAKARIA: Paper? Explain that.

HARFORD: Well, when I started looking on this book, "50 Inventions," people said you must talk about the Gutenberg press, the movable type printing press that was revolutionary, it was disruptive, the novel, the newspaper, all of this was made possible by the printing press. And of course, that's true but the whole point of the printing press is it's a way of mass producing writing and there is no point in mass producing writing unless you can also mass produce a writing surface.

And that's paper, and if you try to use a printing press on, say, animal skin parchment or silk, you can do it, technically it works, economically completely impossible. So then paper was just a wonderful symbol to me of an invention that's very inexpensive, it's quite simple and it's disruptive, it's important because it's so inexpensive.

ZAKARIA: And the gramophone. Another strange invention to my mind, why do you think it defined or -- you know, the modern world?

HARFORD: Well, the thing about the gramophone is it's a lesson for us. There's a warning story here. Obviously it's culturally important but the economic significance of the gramophone is that it changed who got what.

ZAKARIA: I guess for younger viewers, we should explain. This is --

(CROSSTALK)

HARFORD: It's a round and round --

ZAKARIA: You need a needle on it. Yes, that amplified sound. Yes. HARFORD: But that was the thing. It was the first way in which

rather than sitting in a room listening to a musician, listening to a band, listening to an orchestra, you could get a recording of the music and play it in your own home. But what that meant was winner takes all in the music industry. So suddenly you don't want to listen to the 12th best opera singer in the world, you can buy a gramophone record with the recording of the very best. And so suddenly all the rewards flow to them, the people at the very top despite the fact their skills haven't changed, they moral worth haven't changed but their economic gains have changed.

And of course you can see obviously why that holds out lessons for us today because Silicon Valley, for example, many, many Silicon Valley firms, you know, Uber, Google, so many of them have basically managed to scoop up what you want localized value and concentrate it in the hands of a few people.

ZAKARIA: You also talk about the incredible importance of something people may not recognize, which we had -- this one really strikes me crucial. The elevator.

HARFORD: We take it for granted. We absolutely take it for granted. It's a hugely important mass transit system. You always debate about mass transit, should we install light rail, buses, trains, do we invest enough in infrastructure? But the elevator is a wonderful example of a mass transit system.

[10:30:03] People in cities all over the world use elevators every day. Ship huge numbers of people. They're incredibly environmentally efficient. Just imagine a 100-story skyscraper for a moment and then imagine chopping that into two-story sections and then distributing them all out over some office park surrounded by tarmac and surrounded by --

ZAKARIA: Which is what the world looked like. I mean, you know, before, right?

HARFORD: And much of the world still looks like that if you have (INAUDIBLE).

ZAKARIA: So --

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: A city can only go high, either residentially or in office terms if you have elevators.

HARFORD: Absolutely. You need air conditioning, you need a reinforced concrete and you need the elevator.

ZAKARIA: And it turns out it was a complicated -- you know, you point out. It's not a trivial invention.

HARFORD: It's not a trivial invention at all. I mean, it's been around for a long time but the really crucial breakthrough was the elevated break. So Otis, of course, the elevator guy, he's not the elevator guy, he's the elevator brake guy and he demonstrated this in the mid 19th century at one of the world's fairs and he had this huge public demonstration. He was raised up above the crowd and behind him there is a guy dressed as an executioner with his ax who sliced -- if you can imagine the sense of doom and peril, slices the rope and the elevator falls half an inch. The crowd gasps, everything stops and Otis calls out all safe, gentlemen, all safe. And that's his public demonstration. Now elevators are safe and the rest is history.

ZAKARIA: Tim Harford, pleasure to have you on.

HARFORD: Thanks very much.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, there are many people in America who are deeply worried about the future of the nation but should they be? Jon Meacham has looked at the long arc of history and if you're one of those worriers, he does have some good news for you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:36:21] ZAKARIA: And now for some good news of sorts. Jon Meacham is one of the finest historians I know. He is a Pulitzer Prize- winning biographer of American luminaries like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, FDR, George Herbert Walker Bush, and when he looks at America's current struggles and at the long arc of American history he says the good news is that we have come through such darkness before. That is straight from Meacham's new best seller "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels."

Welcome back to the show.

JON MEACHAM, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING BIOGRAPHER AND HISTORIAN: Thank you, sir.

ZAKARIA: So the book was inspired by Charlottesville and by the kind of ugliness we saw there. But you as a historian were able to remember that while we did see white supremacist marching in Charlottesville and perhaps more distressingly the president seeming to justify it, we've been there before and worse.

MEACHAM: We have. Donald Trump represents the most vivid manifestation of our worst instincts but they're instincts that are part of the national character, I think to act as though he is somehow a different thing all together, lets the country and history off the hook. Strom Thurman, who was running as a Dixiecrat, explicitly segregationist platform, he's spoken (INAUDIBLE), talking about how integrated swimming pools would mean the triumph of communism. And that was 60 years ago, 70 years ago.

And so these moments come, they tend to go but what we have to do I think is just really concentrate on how did moments of particular fear, which can be so irrational make people lash out. What is it about those moments that we can address and hopefully move forward?

ZAKARIA: The fear of the emancipation of blacks, for example, by the 1920s had created a Ku Klux Klan that was so much more dominant than we realized. Describe the Klan, you know, you talk about it in your book.

MEACHAM: And immigration. There was fear of immigrants. There was fears of blacks, fears of Jews, virulent anti-Catholic prejudice because of the immigration issue. Three to five million Americans were members of the Klan from 1915 to about 1927. 50,000 Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1925 without their masks. The governors of Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Georgia, were members of the Klan.

It was all about economic transition, uncertainty, a fear of the other that somehow people that did not look like us or sound like us, meaning white Anglo-Saxon protestants, were going to take those jobs, take over the country. We have been in these moments of transition before and ultimately, usually with presidential leadership on the good side as opposed to the exacerbating side, we've come through.

ZAKARIA: You talk about how fear is often the facilitating factor here. When you get scared, you get nervous, it's easy to lash out.

MEACHAM: Right.

ZAKARIA: And you talk in your book about a case in some way the most heartbreaking case because it's about a good man who did a bad thing. Franklin Roosevelt and the internment of the Japanese Americans.

MEACHAM: It's early 1942. Pearl Harbor has happened. The attorney general of California, a man named Earl Warren, some people speculate that the Brown decision was in some ways an act of atonement, recommends the internment not of foreign nationals, of American citizens.

ZAKARIA: These are Japanese Americans.

MEACHAM: Americans. Americans. Roosevelt caved to that. You know, I think we have to judge people on the totality of their lives. Roosevelt is a complicated figure, in many ways represents these competing impulses of kindness and cruelty and grace and rage as most of our great leaders have, and my argument is not we've been here before so it's going to be fine.

[10:40:08] It's that we've been here before, how did we get through it, and one essential element, one common denominator is that the people themselves were relentless in saying this is not who we want to be. We may be who we are sometimes but we don't want to be that and if we can get to 51 percent for our better angels, that's a pretty good day.

ZAKARIA: Talk about, though, what is the process as you see it of sort of evoking those better angels, how does one do it in an atmosphere of fear? You know, one of the things I wonder about is most of the time it's fair to say that the more optimistic candidate has won the presidency of the United States. 2016 was a break. It was the more pessimistic candidate who won.

MEACHAM: It would be a different conversation. I'm not sure I would have written the book if he had won the popular vote. I think that's a significant thing. And I'm not saying he's not legitimate, put away your Twitter before you say that, but it is the case that this was a quirk, and she was a -- Hillary Clinton was a particularly weak nominee for a number of reasons.

I think most people, and I think you see this in the polling, most people don't want to be part of a Donald Trump America. A key percentage are willing to go along with this as long as there is prosperity, as long as he's doing things amid the chaos that any Republican president would do. The Supreme Court justices would have come from any Republican president. The tax cuts would have come from any Republican president. The deregulation would have come from any Republican president.

So my sense is FDR once said that there is something in the human psyche that cannot stand the constant repetition of a note in the highest scale, and I do think that ultimately there will be a kind of breaking of the fever because his -- the president's cultural dominance is something that we genuinely haven't seen before. I know he loves that. But I do think that as John Adams once said, he studied politics so his son could study math, and his son would do math so his son could do poetry.

There is something in American life that does not want politics to be the defining characteristic of one's cultural life and I think there's going to be a backlash to that. I also think that the country in 20 years because of demography is going to look a lot more like Barack Obama's American than Donald Trump's.

ZAKARIA: We are all grateful that you study history.

Jon Meacham, pleasure to have you on.

MEACHAM: Thanks, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the Me Too era has brought many issues to the fore that have long been swept under the rug but problems between men and women in the workplace remain unsolved.

My next guest, former "USA Today" editor in chief Joanne Lipman has some great ideas when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:47:17] ZAKARIA: Men, women and work. The relationship among those three has been fraught forever and the troubles have come to the fore with the Me Too Movement.

My next guest, Joanne Lipman, worked her way to the top in the male- dominated media field. Her last job was as editor in chief of "USA Today" and long before the Me Too Movement started, Lipman saw a major reason no progress was being made. She's written all about it in a new book called "That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know and Women Need to Tell Them About Working Together." I invited her to come tell me what she learned in writing and reporting the book.

Joanne Lipman, pleasure to have you on. JOANNE LIPMAN, FORMER EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, USA TODAY: Great to be here,

thank you.

ZAKARIA: So you must have been thinking about this book and writing about it before the Me Too Movement. So do you feel as though -- did you anticipate some of these things? Did you already sense them because you've been in the working world for decades?

LIPMAN: Yes, well, I will tell you. So I started working on the book more than three years ago and the reason is because women have been talking about the issues that we face at work and I'm talking about things beyond not just the really extremes of sexual abuse but the issues we face every single day, things like being marginalized, overlooked, under paid, simply not given the same level of respect as the guy sitting right next to us.

The issue for me was that women talking amongst ourselves is half a conversation and at best gets us to half a solution and so what we really need to do is to bring men into that conversation. That's the only way we're going to solve this.

ZAKARIA: Just so people can understand, what you're talking about is you say is not necessarily physical abuse and such but a whole series of other kinds of things that are routine and that men don't even often notice but that women are deeply aware of.

Is it your experience from talking to women and, you know, you've gotten to a point where you've run huge organizations with hundreds of thousands of people even people like you feel that sense of marginalization?

LIPMAN: Every women has felt it and the research backs this up. So for example, women are interrupted three times more frequently than men. The Northwestern University actually did a study of the Supreme Court of the United States and found that the female Supreme Court justices are interrupted three times more frequently than male Supreme Court justices. So this is women at every level and in fact there's been research done that looked at the respect gap between men and women and it found that if you put a man and a woman in exactly the same position, same title and same duties, that the man has more respect. He has more influence over his organization, and he has more power than a woman in exactly the same position.

[10:50:08] ZAKARIA: What works to fix this?

LIPMAN: So the good news is there are a variety of things that can be done that actually do move the needle. In terms of wages, for example, there are in the U.K. legislation was recently put into effect in which companies have to report the gender wage gap. I think there is some movement here in some areas in the United States to do that and some companies are doing it voluntarily.

Another -- you know, there is very, very simple things that I -- the men who I spoke to gave me some great tips. One of the television executives, for example, instituted a no interruptions rule in meetings for men as well as for women. When someone is pitching an idea, they get to finish and then as he said, you can tear them apart afterward but let them finish, and what that does is it allows women who very often do not get their ideas across in a meeting to actually be heard.

There is another thing that happens that very, very common. I always ask when I speak to live groups, I will ask for a show of hands among the women, how many people have ever had that experience where you say something in a meeting, nobody hears it, crickets, then a man repeats it two minutes later, and everybody turns to him, and they're like, Dave, great idea you had, Dave.

And I always ask for a show of hands, and literally, it's about 100 percent of women who have experienced this. It's so common. But that's another thing that in meetings, there's a -- the women of the Obama administration actually came up with a concept that they dubbed "Amplification," which was very effective. Amplification, a woman that says something in a meeting, another woman repeats exactly what she said and gives her credit for it by name, which means that her idea first of all doesn't die on the vine and secondly that she gets credit for her idea.

ZAKARIA: You've traveled around the world for the book. It seems to me like Iceland was your favorite country. Explain why.

LIPMAN: So Iceland is the number one country in the world for gender equality according to the World Economic Forum. So I traveled to Iceland because I wanted to know, first of all, what does that feel like? Right? But what I found in Iceland, what was fascinating to me was the difference between Iceland and other countries and really what the most meaningful issue there I think is that the men are as likely to see the gender gap as a problem as the women are. It is not seen as a female issue. It is seen as a humanitarian issue and the men --

ZAKARIA: You point out that men very often describe themselves as feminists.

LIPMAN: Absolutely. I would sit down with the burliest fishing boat captain and he would like bang the table and say, of course I am a feminist, as if to say of course I'm a human being. There is no political connotation whatsoever to the word feminist. And men as well as women also believe by the way that the World Economic Forum is wrong, that they are not equal and their point is if we're number one, it just shows you how far we have to go in the rest of the world.

ZAKARIA: Joanne Lipman, pleasure to have you on.

LIPMAN: Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

ZAKARIA: And we will be back.

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[10:57:58] ZAKARIA: As some of you enjoy some well-earned vacation time, perhaps by the ocean this summer, consider this question of the week. What is the oldest color ever discovered on earth? According to

researchers from the Australian National University. Is it pastel orange, flaming red, pale blue or bright pink? Stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer.

My book of the week is Helen Simonson's "The Summer Before the War." This is a gentle sweet novel that describes how a small town in England reacts to its first female teacher on the eve of the first World War. If you like "Downton Abby," you will love this little jewel of a book.

The correct answer to the GPS challenge question is D, bright pink. Take a look at this picture of the oldest color produced by a living organism ever discovered on earth. What you are looking at is 1.1 billion years old. It was pulled from deep below the Sahara Desert in Mauritania, West Africa. An oil company was drilling for petroleum and sent rocks removed from the earth to scientists at the Australian National University to study the molecular composition of the oil.

The scientists extracted the pigments from the rock samples and were surprised to find bright pink colors. Now these aren't the remnants of prehistoric bright pink creatures. Indeed 1.1 billion years ago there was no life on land. All life was microscopic and largely bacterial, but the scientists say these bright pink pigments are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that shifted from a blue green color to a reddish hew after the organisms died and sank to the ocean floor. They were then preserved at the bottom of oceans that have long since vanished, unearthed more than a billion years later and extracted in a lab half way around the world.

Before you wonder what could be discovered from our oceans a billion years from now, some scientists suggest the sun will have evaporated all the oceans by then.

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

BRIAN STELTER, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Brian Stelter and this is RELIABLE SOURCES. Our weekly look at the story behind the story.