December 27, 2024

[Music] >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to "Amanpour & Company."

Here's what's coming up.

A desperate and chaotic situation in Lebanon, as Israel escalates airstrikes across the country.

I speak with Mona Fawaz, a professor at the American University of Beirut.

Plus nobody can deny the impact of climate crisis anymore.

At least, I hope they don't.

They must be brained in it, they do.

Hurricane Helene is sweeping away homes and killing hundreds of Americans.

But is either candidate for president taking the climate crisis seriously enough?

We discuss with climate policy expert Leah Stokes and former South Carolina Congressman Bob Inglis.

Also ahead.

A small number of determined armed men can control an enormous population.

Part two of Christiane's conversation with Hollywood A-lister Meryl Streep and Afghan activist Fawzia Khoofi and Habiba Sarabi about their fight for women's rights.

Plus -- I thought it was started fresh.

Revenge of the tipping point.

Malcolm Gladwell tells Walter Isaacson why he's revisiting his best-selling book to make sense of the contagions of the modern world.

Amanpour & Company is made possible by the Anderson Family Endowment, Jim Atwood and Leslie Williams, Candace King Weir, the Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poyta Programming Endowment to Fight Anti-Semitism, the Family Foundation of Layla and Mickey Strauss, Mark J. Bleschner, the Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation, Seton J. Melvin, the Peter G. Peterson and Joan Gantz Cooney Fund, Charles Rosenblum, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Katz and Beth Rogers, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

And a very warm welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Paula Newton in New York, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour Lebanon has become a place of fear and chaos, as Israel continues to escalate in the south and in Beirut.

Latest strikes, according to an Israeli official, targeting a potential successor to Hezbollah's slain leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

And Hezbollah is answering by sending projectiles into Israel, though with no casualties reported at this point.

Now, within Lebanon, about a million people have already fled their homes and desperation is reaching such a fever pitch that some people are crossing into Syria.

All this as the world awaits Israel's response to Iran strikes on Tuesday and any further escalation.

Now, for those in Lebanon, it is, of course, a terrifying and uncertain time, and unfortunately, one that is all too familiar.

To understand what life is like right now, we want to go straight to Mona Fawaz.

She is a professor at the American University of Beirut.

And we thank you for giving your insights as you continue to live this out hour by hour.

The escalation of the war in the last couple of weeks has been, of course, devastating.

I mean, think about this.

It is the most intense aerial campaign outside of Gaza for two decades.

So, a logical question is, how is everyone coping?

I mean, what does every day look like right now?

Hi, Paula, and thanks for having me.

I really -- I mean, as you described it, our days are full with anguish.

There's a lot of fear.

Fear for our own safety, fear for the safety of our children, for their future.

We're stranded, schools are closed.

And in your everyday life, you're afraid to go to the supermarket because you're worried that this will somehow become a target.

Just to give you an example, I have a broken foot.

I have to go see the doctor.

I'm scared to death to go to the hospital because they've become the iconic target of the Israeli army in the last year.

So, there's a lot of anguish.

Our lives are suspended.

And we try to fill our time doing as much solidarity as we can.

But the truth is, really, there's a lot of fear.

And that fear is for a very good reason.

I mean, if you look at just the numbers in the last week, we've had almost 2,000 people dead.

That is more than the entire 2006 war on Lebanon.

We've had one million persons displaced.

That is about one in five Lebanese or Syrian refugees in Lebanon, because we are a population of five million.

And then the demolition levels are already reaching the level of 2006.

So, there's a lot of fear in the country, particularly because it comes in the heels of what has just happened in Gaza, which we can talk about.

I mean, for anyone you ask in Lebanon today would tell you that for the last year, they've heard Israeli politicians in general promise them that Lebanon or Beirut is going to become the next Gaza.

And they've watched one after the other, the hospitals in Gaza, the homes, the buildings, the schools be demolished.

And they've seen the world's greatest superpowers actually call this self-defense and continue to send weapons to Israel.

So, we are afraid that the same thing is happening here.

And Mona, indeed, we have heard from people on the street, from our correspondents, speak to people and they invoke Gaza with that sense of palpable fear.

You know, you have been through tough times.

You grew up during the civil war.

In an opinion piece in August, you actually mentioned that then you had this aching sense of silence, signaling in your words a readiness for the next round of violence.

Now, in recent months, of course, that violence probably even you would tell me in recent days, it seeped back into everyday lives.

What similarities do you see in the escalation?

And do you think, though, that this is going to be a watershed, something that no one could have imagined would happen in 2024?

I'm really afraid that's the case and that's what everyone is saying.

And there's so many signposts for this.

I mean, this is a combination of what Israel called in 2006 the Dahiyya doctrine, which is the doctrine in which they flatten neighborhoods and destroy people's lives so that people get upset with Hezbollah and basically they undermine the party's control.

And it's on top of this, the Gaza playbook.

And that's not my words.

This is the recognition of the head of the UN population fund today and many other responsible international figures that are pointing to this.

It is basically a state that has gone rogue and that has a belligerent posture and is emboldened because it has the support.

And so, yes, that silence is the silence of deep fear.

And I mean, honestly, we've never had a day of peace since the state of Israel came to this region.

I, as someone who has lived here, have never had a day of peace because we have that sense that the war can erupt at any point and that belligerence can come your way.

So, that silence that we're accustomed to live with because we're afraid of something happening is very much now the dominant mood in our city.

Yeah, I can hear in what you're saying that there is that sense of literally standing on the edge of the abyss and given what's happened in Gaza, that the fears are real.

You are criticizing, of course, Israeli policy, but turning to the Lebanese government now.

You have long detailed the lack of government response through so many crises in Lebanon.

You know, I looked at your social media feed in a great way.

You've been highlighting social media, the grassroots volunteers there, every hour they continue to do the most to help the most vulnerable.

But that is in the absence of so much government work that needs to happen.

This week, the Lebanese foreign minister was asked on this show about the power and presence of his government.

His response, the decision of war was not ours to take.

Is that an acceptable response as far as you're concerned, given the decades of history here?

I mean, look, yeah, I would agree definitely that we did not take the decision to start a war.

We did not take the decision to establish a North supremacist state in this region and to basically have Israel also have that disposition of a racist bully that does not want to live with its neighbors.

It's -- I mean, there are so many ways in which someone can imagine that people from this region can live together as equals.

But the problem is we have an ethno-nationalist bully that basically does not want and has not wanted for one day to live with its neighbors in peace.

So, this means that basically we don't choose war and peace.

That doesn't forgive the Lebanese government, of course, from -- and not this government, but all the successive governments since the end of the civil war from having continued a policy of neglecting all the aspects of building state institutions.

Of course, we are still today run by warlords and their allies who bankrupted the country.

So, I will not forgive them.

I have actually tried all my life to be an activist and build an alternative.

And I have to shout out for everyone in my society right now that has turned their lives around to support people who are displaced.

And they are indeed stepping up.

I do have to ask you, though, it is an incredibly salient point.

Hezbollah has really filled the political vacuum now for so many decades.

On October 8th, a day after October 7th, that horrific attack on Israel, Hezbollah's late leader Hassan Nassala decided to join the conflict.

And in solidarity with Hamas, he -- you know how he engaged in terms of all the projectiles, all the rockets it has led to at least 60,000 Israelis having to abandon their own homes.

They have not returned.

Do you blame Hassan Nassala for the situation that Lebanon finds itself in now?

Look, I said it already.

We've never had a day of peace.

Hezbollah started in 1983, '84.

My mom, who was a five-year-old in 1948, had to run away from her South Lebanese village with Palestinians because they were under Israeli fire.

As long as the Israeli posture is one of bullying and not living together as equals in this region, they are the party that needs to be blamed.

And their allies who are sending them now weapons and emboldened them so they don't live with us.

But does that mean that you support what Hezbollah did on the day after that savage attack in Israel?

Look, I -- again, I know I don't -- I don't think Hezbollah has even created solidarity between Lebanese and Palestinians.

What I really -- I don't want to support any kind of war or aggression, but I seriously ask that people look at who is the aggressor in this case.

And the aggressor in this case by and far in the last 78 years has not been Hezbollah.

This border has been hot.

I've lived the 1982 invasion of Israel from my village in South Lebanon.

I've seen the soldiers walk on us at that time.

So, honestly, I think we really need to widen the historical scope and work towards de-escalation by asking for a ceasefire immediately by stopping the flow of weapons to our countries.

Mona, I don't have a lot of time left, and Lord knows you are likely fatigued of trying to really tune into that optimism that I know you have for Lebanon.

Do you see, especially in your work as an urban planner, as a scholar, a future for Lebanon that gets beyond our current crisis, a good opportunity here?

Look, we have amazing skills in this country.

We have great people.

I look at my students who graduate from the American University of Beirut.

They go all over the world.

They are building the infrastructure of the Arab Gulf.

They are involved in so many great inventions.

I have no doubt that we have the capability to build a great country.

We have to be able to do it.

But we need to, once and for all, create some kind of stability at the regional level without inventing those new Middle East, which every time an initiative comes from Israel, as in 1982 or more recently in 2006, and ends up destroying even more the basis of our Lebanese society.

But I definitely have hope that the kind of students that I see, the kind of colleagues that I have, have an incredible capability to build a better country.

And they don't want war.

No one wants war here.

And we will continue to check in with you, Mona Fawaz.

Stay safe as the country goes through yet another difficult time.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Paula.

Thanks for having me.

And now we turn to the United States, where floods and devastation are spread right across the Southeast after Hurricane Helene carved a path through multiple states.

More than 200 people now have been killed in this historic storm.

Hundreds, though, think about that, still unaccounted for right across the states.

People feel that no matter where they are, they are not, indeed, safe from the ravages of extreme weather and climate change.

Now, a quick reminder, all the science says this is now the baseline.

So, while efforts to reduce carbon, emission -- carbon emissions ramp up, all of those efforts we've been outlining on this program, so, too, must efforts to adapt infrastructure meet up this new reality and this new moment.

Joining me now to talk about all this is Leah Stokes.

She's a climate policy expert at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

And Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, one of the states, in fact, that has also been hit by this historic storm.

I do want to get to this storm that has just thrown everyone in the United States, even those who felt they were prepared.

Leah, how might Hurricane Helene change the way voters, Americans understand climate and how it will impact them?

Yeah, thank you so much.

You know, I know people who live in this region who have been talking to me, and they've asked me to speak up about the links between this devastating hurricane and climate change.

You know, the climate scientists have done these rapid studies, and they show that it's 20 times more likely to have an event like this because of climate change.

The flooding that we saw in Western North Carolina and places like Asheville and lots of smaller towns was huge.

We're talking a one in a thousand year rainfall event.

The water just kept coming and coming.

It inundated the water treatment plant.

People have no water.

Entire communities are gone in Western North Carolina.

And this is because of climate change.

And we have one candidate running for president, Donald Trump, who said in the wake of this disaster that the people in Western North Carolina will be OK, and that climate change was a scam.

This is terrible.

This is climate change in action, and we deserve leaders who take this crisis seriously.

And so, it will be very interesting to see how the election goes in North Carolina, because North Carolina is, of course, a swing state.

And the, you know, the polls are very close right now.

My heart really goes out to everybody who is affected by this disaster.

The stories that I've been hearing from direct colleagues and friends living in the region are terrifying and really devastating.

And we deserve a government who takes this crisis seriously.

And that's why I think, you know, a lot of people might be turning towards Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, because they're on TV saying the climate crisis is real.

They're not out there saying that they're not sure if carbon emissions are linked to climate change, as for example, J.D.

Vance did during the VP debate.

Bob, you have been on the front lines with your Republican Party in saying it is indeed real.

You've done a bit of a mea culpa on this and yet have been working for years now to convince people that this matters.

When you looked at the effects of the storm over the last week, did you think that this could in fact perhaps affect the U.S. presidential election?

Maybe a more important question is, do you believe it should?

I think the, you know, experience is an effective teacher.

It's often a very harsh teacher.

So, we're being taught very harshly about climate change.

But it has a way of getting through and it could well have an impact on the election.

You know, I live in upstate South Carolina.

I'm joining you now from Utah at John Curtis's conservative climate summit, but there's no power at my house.

I've got two daughters that live in Asheville, North Carolina.

So, they had to de-camp to our house in South Carolina, but they're - I've got a son-in-law that's going up today, again yesterday.

He was up there in a bucket brigade to dip water out of swimming pools to take to the public housing complex to flush toilets.

They were able to flush about 600 toilets yesterday.

I've got a daughter is up there handing out food in one of the very ravaged communities.

These places are absolutely devastated.

And so, to call it a hoax, that shouldn't go down very well right now in Western North Carolina, because I think everybody there realizes this storm came over very hot water in the Gulf of Mexico, gathered up in its clouds a great deal of moisture.

And then because of that warm water in the Gulf, accelerated toward Florida, hit there, but then carried that water way inland to a place like Asheville, North Carolina, and then dumped it.

And so, I think the sense of vulnerability is real right now across the Southeast and especially in places like Western North Carolina.

And it is very real, as I hear you, Bob, for you and your family.

And yet, do you believe this should be a political issue?

And right now, what's in place right now?

Is the government response been effective?

I mean, you've just outlined how basically your family is in some way, shape or form, fending for itself and trying to help others in the community who have not had the help they need.

Yeah, well, I think as we were just hearing, it is this problem of the infrastructure.

You know, we've got to harden the infrastructure.

But who would have thought before this that the French Broad River would be 25 feet higher than expected.

So, that water treatment facility, well, it's going to have to be hardened.

And so, enormous effort is going to have to be undertaken in this country to get ready for this reality.

And we are living in climate change.

You know, when I was getting tossed out of Congress back in 2010 for heresy saying climate change is real along with some other heresies, it was basically aggressive disbelief.

I don't believe in climate change and you shouldn't either.

Now, as my friend Katherine Hayhoe likes to say, people have stopped arguing with thermometers so much.

And I think folks are going to argue about the rainfall possibilities now.

So, it's very real.

And so, but there is movement.

That's the good news, is there is movement.

It's slower than it should be.

But, for example, I'm here in Utah where John Curtis is doing this, Representative John Curtis, likely to be Senator John Curtis, is doing this conservative climate summit.

And all five of his replacement parts, the people that are running for his house seat, all five of them agreed that they would join the thing that he started in the house, the conservative climate caucus.

That's remarkable change.

I -- That what I was experiencing in 2010.

I hear you that it is remarkable change.

And yet, in terms of hardening the infrastructure, what more has to be done here?

I mean, both candidates, both former President Trump and VP Harris have been at least to Georgia surveying what's gone on there and the devastation.

I want you to hear now, though, from VP Harris from her tour.

We are here for the long haul.

There is the work that we have done together that was the immediate response, well, preparation for and then the immediate response after.

But there's a lot of work that's going to need to happen over the coming days, weeks and months.

You know, Harris speaks there of having to be there for the long haul, but, Leah, can people impacted by storms like this -- essentially, it's been a slap in the face for them -- is the federal government really equipped for this, especially if we still do not have the cross-partisan support that really is needed on all levels?

Well, what's so interesting is that we actually are having bipartisan cooperation in the devastation of this storm.

We have governors all throughout the region that are both Republicans and Democrats saying that they are partnering with the federal government, with the Biden-Harris administration, and that they are getting the help that they need.

That is happening from Republican governors in South Carolina and Georgia and Democratic governors in North Carolina.

And so, you know, this is something that we can see bipartisan cooperation over.

And I think that's so important, because some people are taking this devastating disaster -- and my heart really goes out to Bob Inglis, who is a wonderful person, and I feel badly for his family, and I really value that he is a Republican out there speaking about the links between climate change and a disaster like Hurricane Helen.

You know, we have good people in the Republican Party willing to speak up, but the fact is that Donald Trump is not one of them.

Donald Trump is saying that climate change is a scam in the wake of this disaster.

He is saying that climate change is a hoax.

He is saying things like these people will just be OK. And I want to remind people that there was reporting just yesterday that Donald Trump, when there were wildfires in California, withheld federal aid to people suffering from a climate disaster because he didn't think they were voting for him enough.

And it was only when somebody showed him that actually there were lots of Republicans in Orange County, California, that he decided that they should send federal aid.

We can't have a president deciding who deserves help.

Every American deserves help in the wake of a disaster, whether it's caused by climate change or anything else.

In fact, Donald Trump, whether it was what happened in Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2019, I mean, he went there and he visited, but it seemed to take him a while to really grasp the magnitude and the federal help that was needed.

And in 2019, he also said that in terms of authorization and trying to get FEMA to come up with 100 percent of the funds that were needed to recover from Hurricane Michael, he apparently actually said, they love me in the panhandle, that is according to the state's governor.

And that's why he piled in.

Bob, so I have to ask you, there's a very real chance that Donald Trump could be the next president as well.

Do you believe politics has shifted enough at this point, or is this a both sides are to blame kind of situation that Trump will point to?

Well, I certainly hope that he's not elected.

That's why I'm voting for Kamala Harris.

I'm a Republican who will be voting for Kamala Harris because of the things that Leah has just said.

And so, if he gets elected, it really is - it's going to be a reality that he's going to have to deal with the cleanup, the fix up of all these systems, because we are talking enormous sums of money.

And Leah can tell us about the studies about, you know, just how we too often talk about how, oh, it's going to cost so much to invent new energy.

Well, no, no, it's costing an enormous amount to continue with the dirty stuff.

That's where the cost is.

And so, when you factor that in, you pay me now or pay me later.

And so, what we're doing now is paying later basically in Western North Carolina.

And we're going to pay a lot.

The American taxpayers can pay a lot for the climate damage that's just happened there.

And so, if you count all these storms and wildfires and these things, that needs to go in the economic analysis.

And it has with the great work that people likely have done.

It's there.

It's just now we need people to pay attention to it.

Our policy elected officials to particularly in my party, the Republican Party, to have some courage and depart from Donald Trump's hoaxerism.

Bob Inglis, we wish the best to you and your family.

We thank you for being here.

And Liz Stokes will continue to check in with your research on what is definitely must be a cross-partisan effort.

Appreciate you both.

Now, with women's rights serving as a key topic in the upcoming presidential election, we turn our focus to Afghanistan once again, whereas Meryl Streep said at the U.N. General Assembly, a female cat has more freedom than a woman there.

Christiane sat down with the actor alongside former lawmaker Fawzia Koofi and the nation's first female governor, Habiba Sarabi, to discuss a new documentary called "The Sharp Edge of Peace," which follows the doomed efforts of peace talks with the Taliban back in 2020.

Let's take a listen to the second half of their conversation.

I think that societies that doom their women, that suppress their women are the least successful economically.

And I know money is important to everyone.

It's almost like follow the money.

You work with Jessica, with Margo Wallstrom, you all work together.

And one of your issues is, do not engage with the Taliban, because if you engage, then they have no incentive to change.

When you think about it, and you guys as well, after nearly two, three years of this, no engagement with the Taliban has made it worse, not better.

Do you think about that?

I think about it.

I can't speak for the group.

Yeah.

But just as a mother and a grandmother, I don't think anything gets solved by shutting people out of the room.

Or I think you have to engage somehow.

And whether it's with the compulsion of financial hardship or -- you know, it's very important that we not neglect the Afghan women right now in working towards an eventual solution.

So, the frontline women's organization is something that is helping get money to the women directly, so that it's not diverted off into Taliban hands.

And Fawzia, as a politician, a former MP, what's your assessment of the attempt to get forced change?

I mean, they're not invited to the U.N., no country recognizes the Taliban, but they're still there and they're still, you know, issuing the most unbelievable edicts, as we talked at the beginning.

The latest is you can't raise your voice or speak in public.

Did you think that it would get this bad?

As for the Taliban promise, no, because they have publicly said on the record that they want women before the negotiation, throughout the negotiation.

And this was a narrative also promoted by some diplomats in Washington, the Taliban 2.0, and they have changed, they have become more moderate.

I want to see them, I want to know where they are.

I think -- you and I talked when the withdrawal was announced in April 2021, when I say that it's a moral defeat for the Americans to leave the way it is.

No country wants a foreign troop in their soil.

We, as a freedom-fighting nation, we never wanted the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan forever.

But I think the way the withdrawal happened, I think it was a failure of moral from the U.S. foreign policy one after the other.

I'm not saying President Trump did good and Biden did not good.

I think it started with President Trump and continued with President Biden.

Nobody actually thought about us, the people of Afghanistan, as their allies.

And it continue until now, Christiane, I'm telling you, the world is actually engaged with Taliban day and night, if I'm not mistaken the figures, maybe around 10,000 meetings, with the Taliban, not Americans, all the international community.

And if you ask them, where is women's rights in this discussion, I think in the region women's rights is number six or seven priority.

From the global community, global north, I'm not really sure, because the last meeting in Doha in June, they actually excluded women and they excluded women's rights from the agenda.

So, I think the continued engagement with Taliban, without principles, has only emboldened them.

But we're going to play this clip about Muslim and attacking your own civilians.

[Speaking Foreign Language] [Speaking Foreign Language] [Speaking Foreign Language] We were talking about Islamic nations.

There is no other Islamic nation that bars girls from school or from work or from other such things.

This is the only one.

And we talk a lot about the United States.

But why do you think your Islamic brothers and sisters have not come to your rescue?

The countries in the region that have leverage, that surround your country, why do you think they've left you hanging?

Actually, this is our question.

This is the women of Afghanistan question, that why our Muslim majority country, our Muslim brother and sister are not taking part or not being with us very seriously.

Of course, there are some countries, there are some figures that they are supporting us.

They have to create debate with the Muslim scholar that to challenge Taliban or women in the other Muslim country enjoying from their life, from their basic rights and which is not happening in Afghanistan.

It appears that there are two kinds of Taliban.

There's the Kabul Taliban, the Haqqani Taliban, which is much more sophisticated.

I interviewed the leader.

He said all the right things.

And then there's the Akhundzada, the so-called supreme leader in Kandahar, who has a much more hard line view and is surrounded by a few people who have that kind of view.

Is there any way, do you think, to rip that apart, to separate?

That's something that the international community again try to portray.

And that's what we hope as well.

However, how much time we have to wait for the Taliban to divide and then allow girls to go to school, allow women to go to work, it's been three years.

Yes, we have lost democratic institutions, but people of Afghanistan did not lose democracy.

If this continues, my fear is that radicalization become a new norm in Afghanistan, because now they have created 15,000 madrasas across Afghanistan.

They have recruited 100,000 madrasa teachers.

The question is, where do they get that money?

If women in Afghanistan, dignified women having Ph.D. and master degree is after $20 to feed her children because she lost her husband in the war.

It's heart-wrenching for me, Christiane, to speak about all of this after 25 years.

I get emotional, because how long and for what, why?

We have to be sacrificed of all of this.

And in five years' time, we will lose the whole generation to radicalization that embraces suicide bombing.

You're talking about political violence, and I know that that's on your mind as well.

Well, I was just going to say that all these madrasas, these are the religious schools.

Yes, they teach young boys, they separate them from girls.

They don't know how to be with girls.

They fear women and girls.

This leads to a rise once again of al-Qaida, of Daesh, of all the mischief makers in the world.

And so, it's a global - there's a global concern about this development.

What do you think the effect on the world is, let's just say, in Afghanistan, watching the political shenanigans in the United States?

I feel that - I can't speak for how other people view us.

I just - I just know from my own life, in a small town in Connecticut, we had two bad actors, two bad guys who were selling drugs, they were beating up women, they were - and everybody in the town knew who they were.

And one person got murdered, and everybody in the town knew who did it.

But because they were afraid of this group, because this group was violent.

That's a small number of determined armed men can control an enormous population.

All around the world, it's the same story.

Which is why I'm interested in what the Taliban are doing to the men now.

And it appears that the men are rebelling in a way.

A lot of men are trying to leave.

I mean, tell me what's happening.

So, yeah, we talk about women's rights because obviously this is a severe human rights violation of our century, what's happening to the women in Afghanistan.

But I must say that men also do not enjoy a luxury life.

If your daughter cannot get out of your home, if your wife, who was the supporter, contributor economically cannot work, if your sister is suppressed and if your beard is controlled, if you don't have a job, if - you know, in the office you're being supervised by somebody who is not even educated, but he's a Taliban.

How does it feel?

I mean, obviously, a lot of people either make a hard choice to fight back the Taliban or they leave Afghanistan.

And there is a brain drain, I feel, for my country, because we have invested so much of energy to build that nation.

And I see all of these educated young men are on taking enormously dangerous route to go to Europe or other countries, which can actually contribute to a migration crisis.

And that's why we need to actually have a different approach to Afghanistan, a more political approach, rather than just humanitarian aid, rather than just publishing report about human rights.

Because if we do not change the political ecosystem - and this is the time, I think, in the United States, because they will have a new government soon - I think they will consult the Afghan women.

They should consult the women.

They should make them part of their process of policy review, listen to us, because we know what's good for our country.

Thank you so much, indeed.

Thank you.

Now, you can watch the full interview online on our website.

Now, from ending racial segregation to the spread of pandemics, tectonic shifts in social norms can often be traced back to multiple small actions.

Understanding the how and why of this has become the life's work of our next guest.

Twenty-five years now after his groundbreaking publication, "The Tipping Point," social thinker and New York Times bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell speaks with Walter Isaacson, revisiting, in fact, the subject in his latest book.

Thank you, Paula, and Malcolm Gladwell.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Walter.

Your book, "The Tipping Point," which came out about 25 years ago, spent eight years on the bestseller list.

I mean, that's huge.

Why did you decide to revisit it now?

Well, it was the 25th anniversary, and I thought we thought it would be fun to just do a revised edition.

And I went back and I hadn't read it in 25 years.

And I went back and I read it and I said, actually, I think it would be silly to revise it.

It's a time capsule.

You know, it was written in 1999.

If I really want to revisit this, I should write a whole new book.

And so I reversed course in "Midstream" and just started from the beginning again.

You talk about "Midstream."

Was there a tipping point, so to speak, that when you said, wait, wait, I got to do a whole new book?

Well, I wanted to, you know, there were so many things I wanted to kind of I wanted to talk about COVID.

I wanted to talk about the opioid epidemic.

I wanted to talk about I was you know, I had my ongoing obsession with elite schools.

I made a list of all the things that I wanted to talk about, and I realized it was none of the original book left.

So it was kind of, you know, there was that was I think the crucial point was the opioid stuff.

I really, really, really did want to try to the book begins and ends with the opioid crisis.

And I that was the thing that got me started.

And I had a lot that I wanted to say about that, and I couldn't find a way to fit that into the architecture of the old book.

And so I thought I would start fresh.

So you talk about the opioid crisis and then, of course, the COVID epidemic and the framing device for the whole concept of a tipping point, both in your original book and now, is that sometimes social movements or ideas become a tipping point, like an epidemic, as if a virus attacks and they spread virally.

So how did that apply to things like opioid, and for that matter, COVID?

Well, COVID is super interesting, because, you know, one of the things we did not realize until very late in the pandemic was that the COVID pandemic had a feature that is often distinctive of epidemics, which is that it was profoundly asymmetrical.

It was being spread by a very small number of people.

So we had this assumption going in that everyone who was infected with COVID posed some risk to others, and that it spread sort of from person to person to person to person.

And then what we began to understand near the end of the pandemic was that sort of a very small fraction of individuals, 4, 5 percent, probably at most, for some reason we don't entirely understand something to do with their genetic makeup, were producing hundreds, if not thousands, more viral particles, or exhaling them in their breath and in their speech than everybody else.

And that those people were probably the ones who were doing the majority of the damage in the pandemic.

That idea of a super spreader takes me back to the original book, because sometimes you talk about people who are the super spreaders of ideas, that small percentage.

Yeah.

So that was that -- that becomes -- I talked about that in the original book, but the idea of the super spreader becomes a very big part of this book, because it's also what makes -- helps us make sense of the opioid crisis.

That when you -- the stage one of the opioid crisis was driven by doctors prescribing OxyContin.

And the question was, you know, how do we make sense of that behavior?

Was this evidence of some kind of fundamental failing of the medical profession?

And when you look closely at how Purdue fomented the spread of OxyContin, you realize they weren't relying on a flaw in the medical profession.

They weren't even relying on the efforts of the majority of doctors.

What they were doing was exploiting a very, very tiny number of highly problematic, highly susceptible doctors who they realized that they only needed a couple thousand doctors to start a national epidemic around OxyContin.

And there was one doctor who -- there were doctors -- one doctor who could be convinced to prescribe thousands and thousands of pills of OxyContin was sufficient.

You didn't need to convince a 100 to prescribe it 10 times, right?

That -- and it was this exact same principle that drove the COVID pandemic, was being driven by this very -- a small core.

And if you want to understand why the OxyContin spread as quickly as it did, you have to understand the behaviors of a very selective group of doctors who were deliberately targeted by Purdue.

>> And yet, when you frame these things as epidemics, there seems to be a major distinction, to me at least, between opioids and say, COVID.

COVID is an epidemic that hits us from the outside.

A virus comes and gets us.

Opioid is something we did to ourselves.

Why do you mush those two together?

And I know at the end, you say we have to take responsibility for the ideas and themes that surround us.

So to what extent is this tipping point idea, this epidemic idea, one in which we have power to control?

>> I think we have power to control.

I mean, what links those two examples?

One is obviously a biological phenomenon.

The other is a behavioral phenomenon.

But they -- first of all, they resemble each other in the pattern of their -- of the phenomenon.

In other words, they follow an epidemic curve.

These are not problems that rose slowly and steadily over time.

They exploded at a certain critical moment in exactly the way that nonlinear phenomenon like epidemics do.

Secondly, there is this dynamic of asymmetry, which is a powerful indicator of epidemics, that small numbers of people were moving them forward.

But there's also -- there is a contagious element in both.

You know, in one case, it's contagion that we understand, biological contagion.

But with OxyContin, there was a behavioral contagion that this was something that spread within communities where there was, you know, the exposure to someone who was an OxyContin user dramatically increased your chance of becoming an OxyContin user yourself.

I think we have to understand that our biological model of contagion is too narrow.

That this is -- these are phenomenon that apply very broadly to behaviors.

You call it the revenge of the tipping point.

Why revenge?

Because I was struck in the book by how often I thought institutions or individuals were deliberately using the epidemic principles to further their own ends.

So that Purdue would be the classic example.

That's why I spend so much time on that case.

But, you know, I have a chapter on Harvard University.

I think that elite universities are playing a similar -- you know, it's not as egregious a game.

But they're playing a game around -- they're using epidemic rules to try and manage their cultural -- their institutional culture.

So how do you -- if you're someone who, you know, that chapter is all about the way sports are used by Harvard and schools like Harvard, essentially to maintain a kind of culture, super middle class, privileged culture in their school.

The way you -- Harvard looks at a school like Caltech that has had dramatic shifts in ethnic proportions over the last 25 years, and I think makes a very deliberate decision that that's not what they want to be.

That's what the whole court case last year was about, right?

It was about why is Harvard suppressing the number of Asians?

So my chapter is all about, well, how did they go about suppressing the number of Asians in their school?

And the answer is, in part, that they used athletics.

They used the backdoor, that they use -- they have more varsity sports than anybody else, and they create a backdoor for athletes to get in a much lower -- with much lower test scores.

And that's how they maintain what they think of as Harvard.

Now, those -- that is, in a certain sense, using epidemic principles to control the culture of an institution.

>> Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, just signed a law sort of stopping legacy admissions, giving favored status to people whose parents went to a certain college or university.

What do you think of that?

>> Oh, my God.

So happy about this.

This is the best thing ever.

I would have gone further.

This is not my idea.

It's Adam Grant's, a psychologist's idea.

Adam Grant says it shouldn't be that schools are neutral.

It should be they should penalize you if your parents went to that -- to the same institution, because you've already received -- the child of someone who's attended Harvard has already received the benefits that Harvard bestowed on their parents, right?

So they should -- so they've already got their leg up, so they should be penalized if they want to attend the same institution.

Now, that's slightly tongue-in-cheek.

But I think that legacy admissions in elite schools were -- I think it's safe to say that were a stain on American meritocracy.

And I am astonished it has taken us this long for someone like Gavin Newsom to take action against it.

And if this time next year the schools of, you know, the Northeast have not followed suit, I will be appalled.

>> When I was growing up, the term "the tipping point" often referred to racial tipping in a particular neighborhood.

I grew up in Broadmoor in the central city of New Orleans, which was a mixed neighborhood.

And there was conscious efforts -- because the Broadmoor Association came together to make sure that real estate agents weren't allowed to tip the neighborhood to make it all black or all white.

And it remains and still is a mixed racial neighborhood.

How does that notion of a tipping point tie into our race and neighborhood discussions?

>> So the phrase "the tipping point," you're right, actually originates from the 1950s during the era of white flight.

Realtors -- in fact, it's a -- we know exactly where the -- if you look in the kind of -- the history of that term, it was first used by realtors to describe this very thing, the point at which there were so many blacks in a neighborhood that the white population would leave en masse.

And you're absolutely right as well that in the '50s and '60s, there were some unscrupulous realtors who sought to reach the tipping point because they wanted the turnover.

That, you know, that they were landlords who welcomed the influx of -- who thought they could exploit the newcomers in a way that -- so that's where the term originates.

And many of our ideas about behavioral contagion and the applicability of epidemics to social behavior come from that era, right?

It was, you know, the famous economist Thomas Schelling, who writes about -- who did -- produced all kinds of literature on tipping points, spoke -- wrote explicitly about this -- this same phenomenon.

And one of the things we learned when we learned -- and I have -- I talk about this in one of my chapters.

One of the things that we learned from that era was where the tipping point was, that it is not the case that one black family moving into a white neighborhood is sufficient to make the white -- all the white people leave.

There is -- it is a -- there's a number.

It's somewhere around 25 -- between 25 percent and a third, where when the outsiders reach that -- the newcomers reach that number, the existing population leaves en masse.

And I describe in the book this fascinating experiment done in Palo Alto in a community called the Lawrence Tract, where they noted that fact and they said, we're going to make community rules that say that no ethnicity, white, Asian, or black, can ever be above a third.

So, we're going to try and police -- we're going to use -- explicitly use the principles behind epidemics to make sure we can maintain racial diversity in our neighborhood.

And what you were describing in Broadmoor sounds like an informal version of the same thing.

The people realize that through collective action, they could keep the fear of white people in check by telling them, we're not going to let this process be taken over by unscrupulous real estate agents or landlords.

We're going to -- we're going to have a -- we're going to have a -- in the midst of this kind of upheaval, keep a steadying hand on the way that the change works, right?

And that to me is -- I love that.

I know it's complicated, and I know it raises all kinds of questions, but I think the idea of thoughtfully intervening in these kinds of processes, because you understand the way contagion works, is the solution to many of these kinds of social problems.

>> I want to apply some of this to immigration.

There seems to be a certain point -- it's kind of close to the tipping point you talk about, about neighborhoods, 15 to 20 percent, where throughout American history, or the history of almost any other country, if the number of immigrants is more than 15 or 20 percent, you have the big backlashes of the 1840s against the Irish or the Italians or Jews or blacks or Haitians now.

Tell me about how what you write about applies to our current debate on immigration.

>> Yeah.

So, that's a really interesting question.

And I do think there is something to be learned from the literature on tipping points and apply to immigration.

So, if I had -- if I was to wave a magic wand and redo American immigration policies from scratch, what I would rather have seen, rather than have these surges followed by backlashes, followed by surges followed by backlashes, a smarter thing to do would be to have a steady state at somewhere below what we believe to be the tipping point for kind of -- for social unrest.

So, never have -- and then what -- so, you could sort of avoid -- you could engineer your way out of these very socially unproductive and problematic backlashes.

Because very often, the backlash -- what's going on right now with, you know, Haitians in Springfield is just appalling.

I mean, people who have come to this country or are working who are here legally, who have revived a community.

But so, backlashes are things that we desperately need to figure out ways to avoid.

And I think something, you know, lowering the -- be careful not to exceed the kind of public threshold for -- is a -- would be a very wise strategy.

That being said, you know, I'm a Canadian.

Canada has been a country that over the last 30 years has quite happily, until very recently, sustained a much higher level of annual immigration than many other Western nations.

So, I wonder -- I would -- I would couple that advice with saying it would be useful to go to countries like Canada and Australia and find out why they have managed to maintain higher levels of immigration without that kind of public backlash.

That's a very -- I've -- the Canada puzzle, as someone who grew up there and was an immigrant to Canada myself, has always fascinated me.

Canada takes way more refugees and the public support for taking refugees is much higher than almost anywhere else.

It's really a -- that has something to do with the story Canadians tell themselves about who they are.

That that story includes a kind of -- that they're a, you know, a big empty country that wants to be filled up with people from around the world.

Like, that's a very powerful story that's been told for 250 years in Canada.

And how they've kept that story alive would be a very interesting thing to investigate.

>> One of the big differences between 25 years ago when you wrote "The Tipping Point" and now when you write "The Revenge of the Tipping Point" is you've had two kids.

How does having a couple of kids change the way you look at this?

And how does the way you look at this new book change the way you raise your two young kids now?

>> Well, having kids means that I will never give parenting advice again.

I'm out of that -- I'm out of that game.

I now realize how futile it is to tell anyone how to raise their kids since I have no clue myself.

You're just every day confronted with -- I try and track the percentage of times my three-year-old agrees with me or obeys some command I make.

It's now -- I'm now down at like 25% and she's only three.

So, where will I be when she's 16?

And also, I don't know, I've also been pleasantly surprised at how little all of my theorizing about the world is -- how little of it I use in my own day-to-day parenting.

I think all bets are off when you're raising small children.

So, it has been a powerfully humbling experience.

>> Malcolm Gladwell, thank you so much for joining us.

Appreciate it.

>> Thank you, Walter.

>> And that's it for our program tonight.

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