Munk Dialogues - Malcolm Gladwell

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Munk dialogues I'm Rudyard Griffiths the moderator of the Munk debates and your host tonight this is a project of the OREA foundation that Peter monk and Melanie monk Charitable Foundation it's really an attempt to convene over a series of weeks conversations about what the world will look like after kovat 19 look we are in a difficult situation right now but we know that at some point in the months possibly next year maybe longer new therapeutics will be introduced a vaccine let's hope will be available and the world will move from the state we're in now this unparalleled global crisis arguably the biggest crisis of many of our lifetimes to a new reality the reality of a post kovat world so what we want to do through these Munk dialogues this week and each week for a period of time is to encourage all of us to begin to think a bit about this experience that we're having right now this experience we're having all together what does it mean what does it mean for our society what does it mean for our politics what does it mean for international relations and the state of our world how will this change us and what will the world look like what will our individual lives look like after kovat we're gonna do this next week with Fareed Zakaria the the host of CNN's top-rated geopolitical show we've got Mohamed el-erian a top geopolitical and economist big thinkers both of them on next week April 15th at 8 p.m. and April 23rd at 8 p.m. but this week we really wanted to start with a person that we consider one of the most versatile and creative thinkers of our time he's a former monk debater I the pleasure of hosting him on the Munk debate stage a number of years ago for a debate on progress we might get into that tonight and his views about human progress and the light of what we're all going through right now he's an internationally best-selling author and a passionate Canadian so I want to welcome Malcolm Gladwell to the Munk dialogues Malcolm great to have you on the program Thank You reg my pleasure well let's start by talking pulling back a bit and kind of pressure testing you with what I think is the big question we want to explore in these dialogues which is what's fundamentally in your view gonna be different between the pre kovat crisis world and that post-crisis world that let's hope we're gonna move to sooner rather than later and what do you think the biggest impact on our society the biggest change that's going to occur between preak ovid and the post kovat reality that we're all going to inherit yeah well I guess the first answer to that question is do you want the best-case scenario do you want the worst-case scenario let me let me take a stab at the best-case scenario which is and I would rephrase the question slightly which is what could we in the best case now you learn from this experience and I think there is a really crucial lesson that I hope we learn from it and this this as is always the case of me explaining this we will acquire a little bit of a detour but so I for the longest time I have been fascinated by an observation that was made by these two economists Chris Anderson and David Sally who wrote a book about soccer and they were trying to answer the question a very basic question about soccer which is how do you make a soccer team better by upgrading its best player or its worst player and their answer is it's not even close you make a soccer team better by upgrading its worst player because soccer is what they would call a weak link sport your team is only as good as its weakest link and that's because soccer is highly interactive right and one bad player means a botched pass and the efforts of everyone else in the field are end up going to waste it's a everyone has to chip in and together really well even this even the weakest players on the team so you make a team better by identifying your weakest link and making it stronger that is in stark contests contrast to basketball which is a strong link sport if you want to make a basketball team better you bring in Kawhi Leonard right you bring in a superstar that's a team where you're only as good as your best player and I think for the longest time in Western societies we have been playing a strong link game and we've tried to be better by strengthening our strongest links if you think about a country like Canada in the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century he was playing a strong link game right it was let's build some elite universities let's build strong central institutions let's have you know a core of very well-educated middle-aged white guys to run things you know that's strong link thinking let's have McGill and University of Toronto be world-class institutions I could go on when that kind of what I think has happened and what many people myself among them have argued over the last five or ten years is that the world we live in now is increasingly a weak link world now we are really only now as strong as our weakest link and that's because the kind of world that we fashioned for ourselves is highly complicated and highly you know interconnected right we're now playing we're not basketball where one player can take over where we Resaca where you need to have everyone on the field to cooperate if you're going to score a goal and what I think this crisis has brought home very powerfully is the is how true that observation is this is the classic weak link crisis right this is the economies of the West essentially brought to a standstill because we don't have enough masks and gowns that's I mean it's an incredible observation for the lack of for the want of a mask right the kingdom is being lost it's not even in New York City the you know where I live the epicenter so-called epicenter of the we have 20,000 people in the hospital right now that's not the problem we've got 60,000 hospital beds in New York City hi the problem is it's literally that we don't have enough nurses to work around the clock to handle this and we don't have enough gowns and gloves and masks to protect the frontline healthcare workers that's why we've shut down New York City right and that's true wherever you go in the West right now it's an extraordinary fact that we are now incurring trillions of dollars in economic damage because we we don't have on hand millions of dollars of medical supplies right we didn't spend a couple million dollars pursuing the SARS a potential stars vaccine because we defunded exact that got with another that's a classic so that that idea that we that our vulnerabilities now are are numerous and scattered and hidden and that those vulnerabilities have the potential to bring down the rest of society that is that's soccer I mean you look at a soccer team that's doing badly one player they you know one bad player spells doom because the other team starts to pick on that plate you know imagine a a weak defender who makes mistakes in his own end it's over right that's exactly what we're so my hope for a post-carbon nineteen world is a world where we finally take weak links seriously passing and say now c'mon let's let's play with that a little bit we're what does that lead us to practice practically does that lead us to a world where we see let's say in the United States stronger public health care is this a world where there is war government that there is more collective intervention through the mechanisms and institutions of society to shore up these weak links and create some robustness or a push back against this fragility that you're identifying yeah well what that's exactly right I think what this is exposing is that we've spent all of our time worrying about the 99th percentile and not enough time worrying about the 50th percentile so in context of the United States the highest end of the health care system has received extraordinary unprecedented levels of support and funding over the last 25 years we have built world-class facilities to handle the most at the highest level you know the cancer you know cancer or heart disease what have you when what this disease has what this pandemic has exposed is the weakness of the middle so we don't you know all of that exotic machination isn't helping us right now what we need is our more nurses you know the the the world-class medical schools we built aren't helping us right now what we realize now we need are more community colleges that turn out nurses and nurses aides and people capable of handling patients in this time of crisis you know we spent millions if not billions of dollars buying exotic exotic therapies and we neglected to have a stockpile of paper masks now that's so it's that kind of reorientation towards or even on a more basic level if you think about the way health care has been conducted this healthcare strategy that Western countries have followed over the last 20 years it has been focused overwhelmingly on medical care and not focused nearly enough on the health of the citizens which is a separate issue and this pandemic is striking though the the least healthy with the greatest ferocity right this is there's an incredible chart I saw of those who have died a description of those who have died from Kobe 19 in New York City and it was simply it was it broke them down by age and what you saw was the most obvious thing that we've seen with this disease which is it strikes the elderly who are the most vulnerable the greatest but the second fascinating fact that know one thing I think that has been overlooked is to some extent is it listed the number of people who have died with underlying health complications and I've forgotten the exact numbers but something like 70 or 75 percent of those who have died have had some other underlying complication has made them vulnerable anything from hypertension to diabetes to obesity to heart disease to some kind of respiratory problem asthma those are these kind of garden-variety ailments that are a function of people living in unhealthy environments and living unhealthy lifestyles that is now coming back to haunt us and those are the like I said garden-variety things we have overlooked over the last 20 years because we have chosen to focus our attention on the more exotic and complicated and intellectually interesting facets of medical care I'm going to go to questions in a second Malcolm and just for our friends watching right now on Facebook we do have our questions section open I'm gonna take some email questions first we've had hundreds of questions from our friends at the Globe and Mail from the Munk debates community so if you are posting on Facebook give us a sec our staff will be busily collecting those questions and then forwarding them on to me to put two Malcolm Malcolm talked to us a little bit about your take on this incredible isolation that we're all experiencing I think one of the things we I've enjoyed as a reader of you over the years and many people watching is you're kind of astute observations on the human condition the things that make us tick what what does this this bizarre period of profound isolation do to a society that option till this point has just seemed hardwired for connection and connectivity do we do we come away with this with some new kind of shared characteristics understandings of isolation something that's positive or or is this kind of traumatic for our society something will be very difficult for us to get over unless I have to say I am a little bit of a skeptic about whether this kind of social isolation especially this temporary social isolation has any kind of long-term in fact mostly because of duration you know the we think of the Second World War as having an extraordinary impact on a population because it lasted for five years right or the depression because the depression begins in 29 and doesn't really abate until ten years later till 39 those you know left enduring scars on populations not just as a function of how this is the degree of hardship that people went through but the duration of the hardship we're three weeks in here so you know I know I wouldn't be in any great hurry to to to speak about that aspect but what concerns me far more is the economic damage it strikes me that that is the right the the recovery from that and the fact that three weeks is a very long time if you can't make rent it is not a long time if you can't see your friends yeah that's a good segue to a question we got from Dennis again here I believe from Toronto who picked up on the theme you were just talking about about World War two he asked in relation to Thomas Piketty the the French economist saying that after World War two those remarkable decades the glorious 30 years we had this pushback against income inequality in other words a big kind of cultural shift towards redistribution do you see something like that coming out of this Kovich shock if you're identifying again a need to play to the weakest link to shore these up could we see the debate about inequality being kind of supercharged maybe to a positive result as a result of this crisis Thank You Denis again for that question appreciate it in the best case scenario yes and I sort of I mean perhaps this is an overly optimistic position to take at this point but I sort of think we don't have any choice because the economic burdens that's our following massively disproportionately on the bottom third of of our society that people at the bottom of the economic ladder you know most people have most most middle and upper-middle class people have the resources to wait out a month and a half two months of disruption they're not the ones that I'm worried about at the moment but I think that we're going to emerge you know from this with with a portion of the population who will have been devastated economically devastated by what's happened and we have no choice I think what to pay attention to redistribute wealth in their direction malkov ovide you're an astute observer of society and history I mean often when we've seen these big economic dislocations we see political dislocations that flow from them Bernie Sanders stood down his campaign today effectively ending his call for a political revolution in America do you think he that was just in a sense a precursor for a revolution that could come as a result of this crisis and as you say the profound effects that it will have on the life expectancy the the quality of life of the bottom third of society yeah well you know that I think the way you have to think about the crucial question about the political fallout from crises is what is the quality of the political end of the political response during the crisis so if you look back this to use we've been talking about the second world war which is a kind of a fascinating example there is a in the two major powers on the Allied side you have Roosevelt in America and you have Churchill in England you have by shears good fortune to extraordinary leaders at at the time of greatest crisis and as a result you emerge from that world war in both those countries with a renewed appreciation are strengthened appreciation among the population for the importance of public institutions faith in government is redeemed in both England and the United States by the Second World War why because they got lucky they had two extraordinary leaders who used that crisis to strengthen public institutions if you will enter into a crisis with the opposite with someone who doesn't have the either the wit or the ability or the inclination to strengthen public institutions you could have a very different outcome right you could emerge from the crisis with the opposite with people who have lost faith in the quality of collective action you know I don't need to name any names here I think you know who I'm talking about it's not the occupant of of 24 Sussex Drive it's his counterpart to the south it's pretty I'm trying to think of an of an analogous situation where a major country has entered into a profound crisis with someone so sorely lacking at the helm you know let's not forget if even if you think that Neville Chamberlain was not up to the task in England then he wasn't the strongest leader of all he's gone remember he's gone before the you know before anything profoundly serious starts to happen in the Second World War Trump is still around for the next foreseeable future and that's that that is to me the great danger here let's take another question that was emailed in to us from Globe and Mail reader Eva Boras though asking we're all connecting virtually like never before what do you envision will be the new normal and how we live learn and work will our future be a virtual future Malcolm are we all going to kind of understand that homeschooling and eight-year-old as I'm trying right now with online learning tools doesn't really work and you actually need really good teachers in a classroom to educate children yeah yeah I don't like I said I don't see I think the ops it's gonna happen we will be so thoroughly sick of each other by the end of this that we will we will race back to this to the way things were before you know that this is a this is this is I was trying to think of analogies for this and the one that always that I always come back to is when refugees or immigrants leave the country of their origin and come to the new world what do they do they they tend to reconstruct the best parts of the world they left behind right they don't it's you what one interpretation would be Oh things were so terrible in the old country when you come to Canada the United States the first thing you would do is to become overnight the most American of Americans are the most Canadians of Canadians actually that's not what they do what they do is they take the best of what they left and they they reconstruct it if you drive around southern Ontario and you look at the architecture you think you're in Scotland why is that because the Scots came to Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries and rebuild build houses that looked exactly like the houses they left behind in Scotland right that's what immigrants do and I suspect weird that's what we're gonna do we're gonna go back and rebuild the best parts of the life we had before I don't I don't think I don't see home schooling crowding out the public schools of North America okay they can't the Khan Academy is not going to take over the world okay let's go to a question from Emily Eames also a reader of The Globe and Mail who sent in the following for you Malcolm I've been overwhelmingly inspired by the various care mongering groups both in my community and in neighborhood ones will there be a major shift in recognizing the power of local and community-based problem solving that's getting a bit too your analogy here of the shoring up the the weakest link yeah yeah I think that's interesting I think you know one of the things that one of the wonderful things that comes out of crises like this is that they are opportunities to experiment so I see this already you know a month or a month two months in I see numerous examples on many different of a willingness to try ideas that were not being talked about before all this so the readers question listeners question is one of those is that I think people are experimenting at a local level to see what what can be done it's been fascinating for me to see in North America the resurgence in the role of mayors and governors mm-hmm taking a lead in you know more people seem to be listening closely and being impressed by governor como of New York City than the president United States that seems that's a really interesting thing that was not true in December right there are many many New York residents of New York State who were barely aware there a governor was Andrew Cuomo in December now they're you know they're understanding how important those kinds of those local levels of government are more interestingly almost to me is what's happening in the scientific community is you know when you when we when we face a crisis like this and I I remember I was covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post back in the early 1990s really in the early stages of our response to it when we were as terrified excuse me as terrified of HIV then as we are of a more so than we are of coab in nineteen now i mean remember HIV had 100 percent mortality rate not a 1% mortality rate and watching the most extraordinary thing about the early 90s was watching the way in which the medical community and the scientific community responded just kind of turned on a dime abandoned all kinds of old ways that didn't work experimented with new ways entered into partnerships that would have thought that we would have thought were unthinkable and resolved from a scientific standpoint resolved the problem in what was an extraordinarily short time or partially resolved the problem and I'm seeing now we're on a kind of much more expedited time frame but I'm seeing that you know Bill Gates talking about building multiple manufacturing facilities for various vaccine ideas so when the time comes and we find one that works we can get off the ground instantly you know that's like no one's talking about that in December that's kind of fascinating that people would be willing to to try different approaches let's talking about different approaches go to a question from Josh Jensen also from Toronto and it gets this idea of experimenting it says as government's distribute funds directly to citizens is this a form of universal basic income and could it be a tournament fixture of a post kovat world Malcolm we're seeing this again across the developed world these direct cash payments to citizens do you see this as a good thing is this a type of against by innovation that we would never would have considered before certainly not on this scale and do you see it becoming now or future of work and I guess our perceptions of productivity yeah I mean I when I think about the long-term impacts of this one of the fun I'm not just me I think about the long-term emphasis of this the first thing that comes to mind is is consumer debt I mean we entered into this crisis off one of the longest economic booms in living memory and even given that we had in among the poorer parts of the population very high and unsustainable levels of consumer debt that problem has just got a lot worse and one of the first issues we're gonna have to face after this crisis is resolved is what are we gonna do about those debt problems what are you gonna do about people who have credit card debt at 18 percent right that's that's gonna take a very difficult conversation with a credit card company a very difficult conversation with the bondholders of the banks that are holding some of these loans and also to the to the listeners question how are we going to get very fast effective fare relief to the people who are going to be overwhelmingly burdened and yes I mean if the conversation I was surprised by how much traction the conversation about a universal basic income was getting before this hit we were still in the midst of this magical boom now I would imagine that would be turbocharged let's go to a question from Jeff Davis Jeff is writing from Wimberley Texas of Jeff thanks for catching the show will this singular event once and for all dispatch dispel the American myth of the bootstrap self-made rags to riches American Dream Malcolm do you give some credence that American exceptionalism will be blunted by this crisis or not I think nothing will ever blunt American exceptionalism i I've lived here I've lived here long enough to understand that that is the one great constant in American life they will emerge from this with a narrative that paints them all as heroes trust me it's just it might be a different hero right they'll find a hero yeah that's what they always do just might not be who you expect dr. Falchi maybe yes I mean we've it's funny I remember it's funny that when I think back to my days covering HIV when I was working for The Washington Post who was the person that mm-hmm all the time found she Anthony eventually ouchy in the 90s when already he was like 60 years old I mean he is yeah he seemed ageless back then and he seems unchanged now I don't know but we was he was exactly the same person he was this calm calm rational supremely organized confident warm heart I mean he's like we we worshipped him back then I couldn't imagine how we could have fought HIV without foul Chi back in the 90s and then here he is you know it's he's quite an extraordinary individual let's go move on now to our Facebook questions and as our team cues those up Malcolm maybe just kind of continuing this mood of our conversation what are you optimistic about in terms of what could come of this crisis I mean shoring up the weakest link I get that it's a horton i can see the kind of sociological reason for doing that but are there other things that are happening in terms of how you see people behaving at this moment that kind of I don't know gives you a renewed faith in the human condition that you see something that could grow out of that that could have greater significance they could make all this seemingly mean something to us yeah well I mean on a fundamental level I am optimistic that this will prove such a learning experience that when the next pandemic comes we will be prepared right oh the the best case scenario from the beginning was that this was this was the training run for the really really big one you know it yeah let's not forget that this is not the worst that we can this is not the worst that a viral epidemic could be right this this is a virus which is reasonably contagious not in the grand scheme of things not terribly lethal I mean what I say I say that in I'm talking about in the in the grand scheme and the kind of scientific epidemiological sense it is not terribly lethal it is it is going to leave a devastating imprint on the society it touches but 1 percent mortality viruses can do a lot worse than that right you chubby was a hundred Ebola was pretty close to 100 so you could get worse and so the one optimum bit of optimism I have is I I have a feeling that that we will be better prepared next time around you know we won't make the mistake we started with the last SARS epidemic we started all of these programs to Quine under try and understand this class of viruses they continued had in in the intro I mean there are people who have come forward and talked about all the work we so we're reasonably prepared it's just that we didn't I think take the task of preparation seriously enough I really doubt we'll do that again yes let's hope ok let's go to some of those Facebook questions I know we've got a few of them queued up now so we've got William Cowper does this universally experience crisis present a challenge to world peace setting up new conflicts that could play out with unintended consequences I think he's pursuing a military dimension it is an interesting question Malcolm whether this is destabilizing to geopolitics it certainly could seem that way yet at the same time this is the very moment that we need to come together to confront a a common thread and have public health coordination not just within borders but between borders and between nations yeah well a lot depends on the path that the virus takes in the coming months right now the bulk of the damage has been confined to more developed parts of the world if you already have sort of radical population instability in many parts of the developing world if we add to that a major viral epidemic then you're only going to see more refugees going to Europe and more refugees you know it's gonna make it's gonna be one more factor to lead to a continuation if not an acceleration of these kinds of migratory movements we've seen in recent years the I wouldn't say that it necessarily accentuates conflicts so much as it changes conflict it just changes the terms it changes the kinds of people who come into conflict and the things that they're arguing about you know the if you think about it on an economic basis I read a really fascinating article today in The New Yorker the magazine for which I plug it about whether this the long-term consequences for the oil industry of something like this and does this speed up or move away from oil for a variety of reasons that's you know if oil goes away as a as a as a kind of central player in world politics and the world's economy that's huge Dedes destabilizing creates a whole new class of winners and losers so I do think there are some depending on how long this disruption lasts there are some potential for a kind of scrambling of the power structure of of the world fascinating let's go on to another question from our audience right now watching on Facebook and again that question section is open so if you have a question our team here will grab it and I'll put it to Malcolm because that's what these dialogues are all about it's an opportunity for you to put questions to some of what we think are the world's most interesting thinkers on this critical topic of the world after kovat 19 so Rachael Atkins Malcolm is asking you if you were given a magic wand what are the top three things you would make happen right now in order to minimize the negative and optimize the positive for both human and the economic impact of this kovat night teen crisis how do we all come out of this better well that's it that's it that's how are you are you saving up the hardest questions we're just getting started I mean I remain I mean I was talking about early about my experience with covering HIV back in the 90s when the pessimism was even greater than it is now and how surprised I was at the speed and effectiveness of the medical and scientific response so I would I would divide that my answer up into several the one thing I think that I have no doubt in my mind that by the end of the summer we're gonna have a vastly improved medical response to this virus so right now what is it I don't know what the exact number is half of those who are on ventilators died they don't make it I would be very surprised if that number was that high by the end of August I think we're gonna get much smarter about what what the best medical protocols are and whether we're going to I think there gonna be some therapies that are gonna emerge that will really help us solve that problem inside the hospital I'm a little less optimistic about our ability to contain the spread of this I'm in the general population for the simple reason is I don't know how long we can go with a economic shutdown I mean the there is a point at which it just doesn't I mean it's an unsustainable that it becomes it's an you know the the estimates of the economic cost of the the shutdown through three weeks in North America and Europe or a month they're just mind-blowing I mean there's kind of they're almost too large to make sense of and I just don't know how much longer can we really sustain this into May and if we can't if we have to kind of lift it it's gonna the virus is gonna come back I mean I think we're gonna have to live with the fact that you know there was something that was said the very beginning of the epidemic by many epidemiologists which is the point of this shutdown is not to prevent you from getting infected you probably will get infected the point of this is just to buy some time for the health care system and I think people may have been indulging in a fantasy in the last couple of weeks that they can avoid infection at some point maybe maybe we can't I mean maybe we should just accept the fact that at some point we're all most of us are going to get it and let's just try and make that that experience as as as as as manageable as possible yeah and again I think important to note that what we're doing now in terms of isolation and social distancing is critical to try to bend that curve so while the total infection rate at the end may be quite high at me hit that 50 to 70 percent that experts said were we want to get there with a fully functioning health care system that can deal with the critically ill not only from kovat 19 but the critically ill generally in our population who require that kind of intensive care yeah that's right okay let's go to another question from our audience watching online on Facebook Julia is asking what is the ethical framework we should be using this is interesting as far as who gets the vaccine first when they come out you know Malka there's been a lot of speculation here that governments will you know rush to control this vaccine there could be some very very ugly power politics around how the vaccine is deployed what's your guess as to how that will play out Julia thinks that's a great question appreciate it well how she has said that one of his big concerns is there will not be in the early stages a enough vaccine to go around so the the the questioner is is absolutely right there's going to be have to be some kind of of protocol for who gets it gets it first and I think that the by by the time we get a vaccine a year or a year and a half from now whenever it is we'll have a very very clear understanding of who the most vulnerable people in the population are when I say a very clear understanding where I was this think there's a there's a podcast called this week in virology which I cannot recommend enough going on for 20 years it's the nerdiest most fascinating it's just a bunch of these old-school biologists some of them retired who get together every week and just kind of chat about things that touch on the world of our ology and so when this hit they were these are the perfect guys so they you know everyone who's dealing with Kobe 19 these are they're all friends from old scientific meetings and and they call up all their friends and they have these incredible conversations and I was surprised in listening so I've become like everyone I know of course yeah speaking of neurology and so one of the reasons I was listening to they were talking about how even now if you talk to clinicians they can describe quite precisely the kind of things that allow them to know whether someone is at risk of a very serious outcome with this you present at the hospital they can tell you know after a an initial round of relatively brief tests who the problematic patient is and who's the who's likely to make it so I imagine a year from now we'll have an even clearer understanding of who's most at risk and if we do if we give the virus first to anyone other than those most at risk I will be I will pray for our mortal Souls Malcolm there's been reports in the last number of days that the African American community in the United States has been especially hard hit by this virus due to the significant number of comorbidities amongst that group often it they correlate with poverty if you don't have enough food if you're not eating the right kinds of food you develop these diseases like diabetes obesity and such I mean this seems to be just a horrible new dimension to this and it gets to this question of of equity and how do we respond with equity to this crisis well you know I will point out that this is it's not like this is a new observation all this pandemic is doing is accentuating and exaggerating a problem that already exists it has always been the case in the United States and I'm sure in Canada as well that the disease burden falls disproportionately on the poor right there are the the the first lesson of any kind of epidemiology is that you see anything bad is most concentrated at the bottom of the economic ladder among those with the least education living in the most impoverished communities what Cove in 19 tells us is not anything new it's just reminding of something that we do we choose to conveniently forget out the time so you know the the part of me kind of you know there have been voices crying in the wilderness for years and years and years that say our priorities of society are all wrong that we should be spending our time and attention in dollars where the diseases are not where people are waving their hands or talking the loudest right and this this pandemic simply reinforces that you you pay your attention spend your money where the problem is and the problem here as has been the case for millennia is at the bottom right shouldn'ts and it says that it says that to a certain extent we had been solving the wrong problem in the medical system for the last 50 years great let's go to another Facebook question Joetta has the following for you Malcolm if some human behavior does not fundamentally change change as a result of this virus do you believe that a worst crisis lies ahead of us and maybe just to stick a parenthesis around that Malcolm it is kind of interesting to think back that we seem to be as a civilization more and more prone to crises I mean the financial crisis in 2008 very very different doesn't have a virus but it's still a crisis of complexity it's a crisis that hits the poorest and weakest in society hardest you were part of a very memorable debate that we had on the month at the Munk debates here in Toronto on progress and was it inevitable you spoke against that resolution with Alan du bateau against Matt Ridley and Pinker what's your feeling about this is our is this somehow symptomatic of this virus of a bigger crisis of fragility that the civilized world faces all right well interesting I mean thinking back on that debate first of all with that debate replayed tomorrow you know as you will remember my side lost tomorrow we would win right I mean it wouldn't even so yeah should you wish Roger to reschedule yes let's do that I was you know the I'm of two minds about this one is that I I I kind of agree with the general proposition that we there is a march towards progress in human history you know the I don't think we're more crisis prone I'm gonna give one exception to this in a moment I don't think one more crisis prone in the modern world than we were in the past things were so much worse 75 years ago 100 years ago that it's not even I mean you if you were a parent in 1910 you woke up every morning in deadly fear that your kids are going to die of any number of epidemic diseases from you know from measles to chicken pox to diphtheria - I could go on and on and on things that have just disappeared polio the 1918 flu epidemic was an order of magnitude worse than anything Co good 19 will will throw at us the the second world war the first world war was you know a war of a kind of a desire more allanne disaster of a sort we haven't seen since I mean I can't even there's just no comparison between so you know let's not I think it's important for us to put this in perspective our grandparents and great-grandparents had it way way way WAY worse than we do right now this is a you know there is no doubt in my mind that we're gonna come out of this pandemic eventually still better off that people did in 1918 or any of those you know those previous cases that said we have we have moved to a different kind of vulnerability whereas the vulnerabilities in the you know a hundred and years ago our great-grandparents dealt with multiple problems multiple predictably predictable problems that had devastating but not overwhelming consequences we've now moved to very very rare crises that have absolutely devastating consequences I'm still far more concerned about global warming than I am about viral pandemics I mean I don't even think that's an argument hi I would steal Malcolm that's an important point to jump in on because many people have rightly brought up the existential threat that climate change represents but you know you do not see a societal response like the one that we're seeing now in fact you see a lot of resistance do accepting the consequences of manmade climate change and the policy responses that arguably are needed to address it yeah yeah that's you know it was fascinating to watch the with this pandemic to watch the the trajectories of denial that happened in the first at say months so you had a group of people who were way out front and saying this is serious right in a scientific world and then you have as you move further and further away from the scientific world what you see are various levels of denial so you know they're the epidemiologists who came back from Wuhan at the in the middle of January and said oh no right they initially were mad with drugs with even on my beloved this week in virology one of the main biologists he was initially sceptical he was like I don't think this one's gonna spread right and then he changes his mind like two weeks later and then two weeks after that you get the next wave of people who changed her mind and finally accept that something serious is happening and then you see if you look across various political jurisdictions you know the Governor of California is sounding the alarm well before the mayor of New York who in turn is sounding the alarm well before the Trump administration and in the media you see the same kind of thing this kind of staggered acceptance of risk what you see with climate change I think is a kind of elaborated elongated version of that same staggered acceptance of risk so the scientific community is almost entirely on board with the risks of climate change and they are slowly converting the lay population beginning with kind of activists and scientifically literate lay people slowly working its way through the political arena but you know so you see there's no way around that there's no model there's no way there's no conceivable scenario where absolutely every corner of society changes its mind and accepts a new truth at the same time and by the way we don't want to live in a world that looks like that that world is also terrifying for wholly different reasons we just have to accept the fact that in a free society that has thrived for and survived as long as it has precisely because it does have a diversity of opinion right that the reason we can tackle big problems is we have these vigorous debates which push every side to justify themselves to think more deeply about what they're doing that that's our that is our strongest card is the fact that we have this kind of vigorous debate about things the price of the hat though and it's a small price the price of that is you're never going to get an immediate acceptance of some new reality it's always gonna be staggered that's a good point okay let's conscious of our time here Malcolm you've been generous we're gonna take you right up to the top of the hour 9:00 p.m. Eastern so I want to get some more questions in from our friends on Facebook who have been patiently waiting there David Goodman what do you think will be the best thing coming out of this is there a single transformation a political consequence give us your thoughts on the fall election in the United States how does this play out in the context of that campaign yeah well I know better than to prognosticate about politics everything people predict about politics turns out to be false as far as I can tell the single if I had to identify the best thing that can come out of this is a [Music] is a resurgence in the profile and importance of the public health community so we had if you look back on the 20th what is the great success story of the 20th century it is public health right it Dwarfs every other thing we invented in the 20th century the 20th century is the is the century where a group of public health professionals step forward took control of the way we live our lives and managed to eradicate a whole raft of extraordinary diseases fundamentally change the health profile of billions of people around the world permanently make lives better for untold people in every corner of the of the of the planet that's the 20th century is that's that's to me that's the story those the successes were so Swift and so dramatic that I think we began to take them for granted and we pushed the public health world aside and we went on to other things right we you know we fell in love with tech fancy technologies and we fell in love with the internet and we fell in love with all kinds about it and we let and we let those we silenced and marginalized all of those voices to our enduring discredit and what I think what I hope happens out of this is that we invite the public health folks back to the center of the conversation and we say you know what you know who should be leading the conversation about the health of our population the public health people they're the ones they're the may have the most important lessons to teach us they're the ones whose priorities are in order they're the ones who are looking for you know for resurgent viruses coming out of some distant corner of China you know they they're you know we're gonna I hope we're going to invite them back to center stage and I hope they remain there for a good long time great point okay let's squeeze some more questions in going to get into our audience on Facebook that's been posting questions live to Malcolm Gladwell jenny has a question could you see this crisis bringing about a permanent shift towards working from home we talked a little bit about school but look you're a writer I assume you spend a lot of your time at at your home working in a study so maybe this isn't as big a transition for you but what do you think of that okay coffeeshops I'm I I cannot wait to return to the coffee shops of New York City please let me my I think the exact opposite this is going to set back working from home a general generation people even one nothing more I think then to get on the bus in the morning and go to an office yeah and speak to each other face to face that that human dimension okay let's take another quick question here let's get that up from our Facebook audience we'll pull one up for Malcolm to answer just give that a moment or two more and we're waiting on these questions we know we've got a lot in here so our staff is sorting through these just give them a moment more and if not I'm always happy to pepper Malcolm the question you could ask me I know I know but I don't want to be greedy Malcolm I want to acknowledge our our audience here online in the thousands watching right now so Nadine said what was the the tipping point for this pandemic I guess a riff-off one of your internationally best-selling books well I mean I'm not sure that we know exactly I mean it's it the three places where this endemic took first deepest roots were you know northern Italy Wuhan in China and New York City which are just all traveled places where they were a lot of travel international travel in February right I mean so I think those are that's a kind of obvious tipping point one of the things that's that we that one of the fascinating things that we will learn which is always true of epidemics epidemics are profoundly particularly viral epidemics are profoundly asymmetrical phenomenon that an enormous amount of the work in spreading them is done by a very very small percentage of the population and it took us years with HIV to understand who those super spreaders were and the answer was not they were not the same people we thought going in and I think we're gonna learn something quite profound about this disease why is it that some people are far more contagious than others because it does seem to be this same radical asymmetry with this virus as with others and that will give us a much better handle on what we mean well what constitutes a tipping point in the growth of it and how we can prevent that kind of exponential growth in the future before we get in the last question Malcolm I am gonna just take my privilege as moderator in your latest book talking to strangers I enjoyed it it's had a really kind of intense following around the insights that you drew out of that book what for this experience that we're going through now and what may come next what what do you think some of the key lessons that we can pull away from talking to strangers in this moment and again I urge our audience to they haven't read it already to break the spine on it in in the moments we have now quietly in our homes self isolating it's a great read well that's very nice of you first of all what are the lessons well you know the great lesson of talking to strangers is that for better for largely better and not so largely worse we are trusting machines that the reason human beings have thrived for as long as we have is that we have an desire compulsion to trust others and believe what we're told that means that we are occasionally easily victimized by liars and frauds but it means that 99% of the time we were able to get along with others construct meaningful relationships build institutions that work and flourish and that that desire that impulse to trust is not some kind of recent cultural acquisition it's something built into our DNA it's why we why we among all species rose to the top of the heap and I think that's in a time like this where we may feel that those are building trust others is shaken by this virus is very important for us to realize that no it can't be nothing nothing can shape the fundamental desire and compulsion of human beings to want to trust other human beings even if this madness lasts another year it will not shake that desire nothing can Malcolm that's a lovely note for us too to end on I just really want to thank you for kicking off these weekly monk dialogues I wanted you to be our first presenter because of the range and breadth of ideas and issues that you think about and you've approached this topic as you do with all your writing with real humility and humanity so thank you for coming on the Munk dialogues tonight and spending this time with our audience my pleasure Richard Wright thank you well audience that concludes our first weekly Munk dialogue we're committed to doing these for the next period of time our goal is really to bring to you people that we consider to be some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers and on that score I think we've checked a box for you next week we've got CNN's Fareed Zakaria coming on this Wednesday evening next week at 9 p.m. April starting a p.m. to 9 p.m. on April 15th the following week April 23rd 8 p.m. we have also Mohamed el-erian a fascinating economist thinking big on some of these large structural changes that are going on in our own economies and globally that's just the beginning of the Munk dialogues I want to thank our partners The Globe and Mail wned PBS Buffalo who is also participating in this project and our friends at Facebook Canada who are helping us bring these dialogues to a Canadian audience as a public service and finally to the Munk debates the OREA foundation and the Peter and Melanie Munk foundation who make all of this possible this initiative is funded entirely through the charitable generosity of the OREA Foundation and the Munk foundation and again I thank you for listening I'm ready to Griffis your hosts we'll do this all again next week with Fareed Zakaria stay safe stay sane let's keep the dialogue going let's have a conversation about what the world will look like after kovin 19 we will get through this let's imagine a new collective future together thank you for your attention tonight good night [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

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Length: 62min 41sec (3761 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020