this is bbc news — the headlines: president trump has stressed that he is willing to target iranian cultural sites, in retaliation for any future killing of americans by tehran. the iranian government has vowed retaliation following the us assassination of general qasem soleimani. rockets exploded near the us embassy in baghdad on sunday night. australia's prime minister has warned bushfires in the south east of the country could last for many months. the overall death toll has climbed to 2a and hundreds more properties have been destroyed. light rain and lower temperatures made little difference in the two worst—affected states. the first movie awards of the year, the golden globes, has honoured the first world war story 1917 with the prizes for best film and best director. taron egerton won best actor for rocketman and renee zellweger won best drama film actress forjudy.

now on bbc news, it's hardtalk with stephen sackur. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. we humans are fascinated with ourselves, what makes us what makes us behave the way we do? our universities are full of behavioural scientists, psychologists and sociologists trying to find answers but none of their learning papers captured the popular imagination like the best selling books of my guest today. malcolm gladwell has been described as america's most famous intellectual. his latest book, talking to strangers, challenges the assumptions we make about trust and truth, but how far can we trust malcolm gladwell?

malcolm gladwell, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. can i begin by asking how you would describe yourself? you are a journalist of long—standing, you are a writer but would you also in some sense describe yourself as a behavioural psychologist of some sort? no, no, not at all. i am purely a journalist, these are subjects that i approach like a journalist, i do my reporting like a journalist,

i write them up like a journalist. i have no advanced degrees to my name, i don't belong in the academy, i would never pretend to be on that level. but you do dig deep into areas of deep academic research, so therefore you need to have the skill set to be able to judge the quality, for example, of data, of research? yeah, i make sure when i write about things that there is some degree of support for the ideas i am writing about in the academic community, but i think that is something generous to do with anything they report. in every area, we make sure we are notjust representing some kind of far out opinion. an interesting phrase you use, you make sure there is some degree of support for the propositions, the theses you are putting forward, how far does some degree of support have to go? well, the lovely thing about the scientific community is there is no such thing that everyone supports.

there is always argument in disagreement and that is why we are so attracted to those debates, as generous. and i quite happily and willingly enter into those debates so when... i'm not pretending to give the... of my books are not written on stone and i am not moses. no — no, you are not. you are very frank about the nature of your relationship with scientists and science. you have said in the past that you see yourself as some sort of a packager, an accelerant who takes scientific research that for interests you, for one reason or another, fascinates you, and you turn it into something, an article in the new yorker or a book which then captures a much, much wideraudience. what is the relationship like between you and a scientist that you report upon? i think it's warm. i mean, i have developed many good friendships with the people i have written about over the years. i think one of the frustrations

of being an academic scientist is that you can do things that are terribly profound but that you feel you are not reaching outside of the narrow circle of fellow academics. so, i think many academics welcome someone like myself who is a kind of, offers them a bridge to the general public in a way for their ideas to be more generally known. your newest book, talking to strangers, addresses how we come all of us as human beings, approach new people in our lives, what we bring to the table when we encounter somebody for the first time are pretty much the first time. you seem to be suggesting that we are often deeply misguided in our impressions of people we meet, is that right? yes, that would be an accurate... this book, talking to strangers, is devoted to the notion that we are not very good at one of the central tasks of living in a modern world, which is drawing accurate conclusions about people we don't know very well. is that not blindingly obvious to all of us?

i don't wish to be rude, but is it not blindingly obvious to us, common sense, you don't assume you can draw conclusions. you and i, we have never met before butjust because we are here together, i would assume i know who you really are. i'm not sure it is blindingly obvious. think about it, if i was hiring you for a job and i followed general conventionas of hiring practices, we would chat for 45 minutes and then i would decide whether i want to hire you. in the light of what i am writing about in this book, that is an absolutely preposterous notion, that i should be able to talk to you for 45 minutes, look at your resume, maybe make a single phone call to a former employer, and on the basis of that extraordinarily slender piece of evidence about you,

decide whether you are fit to work for my company. that, what i've just described, is repeated thousands of times every day. i don't think it is blindingly obvious. it may be blindingly obvious when we reflect upon it but it certainly doesn't make a difference in the way we behave, we continue to behave as if we are very good at this kind of thing. not only is it your contention that we behave as if we are good at it but we have a default position which is to think the best of people we meet. to be naive and think that by and large, people tell the truth, have integrity, and that we can take people as we see them. as we see them. this lovely idea is called default to truth, it was raised by tim lavigne...

this goes back to your relationshihp with scientists. you draw a great deal from his work. oh yes, tim and i are actually good friends now, and he was trying to explain this long—standing puzzle in psychology which is why are human beings are such terrible lie detectors? you would think we would be good. you would think evolution would have prepared us for that one particular task. but, in fact, i can test this 100 ways and every it comes out, we are not good at telling whether someone is lying to us. and tim lavigne says that evolution has not prepared us to be good lie detectors but the opposite. it has favoured those who implicitly trust others. so we are trusting engines and we will only default from that position, that what we are being told is the truth, if evidence becomes overwhelming. and that explains so much of what goes awry in dealings politically with problematic strangers. you seem to conclude,

this dystopian conclusion, conclusion, that we are actually better off not trusting our human instincts when we meet new people at all. you go through a whole list of occupations, whether it be police officers orjudges or, as you have just said to me, job interviewers, who you seem to say would do a much more effective, efficientjob, if they never met the people that were the subject of their scrutiny. so this is a...it is a somewhat kind of intuitive notion that has a good deal of support in psychology, which is... the question is, let's talk about a hypotheticaljob interview, i'm trying to decide whether you would be a good journalist to hire into my company — what is the value of the specific pieces of information that i gather from my face—to—face encounter? so, i can look at things that you have written, i can talk to people who have worked with you, i can look at your work,

and then i can meet you face to face and say, what do i learn? and the answer is what we learn from the face—to—face encounter is probably so noisy and so fraught with error and so are relevant to the task at hand that i am probably better off not doing it. now, if i was hiring you to sell perfume on the ground floor of harrods, i would want to meet you, that seems to be crucial, but i am not, i am interested in hiring you as a journalist. why do i need to meet you? i find out that you are tall, you are handsome, you have white hair. let's not get into that. let's dig deep into what you do, and you do it notjust in this book talking to strangers, but in the books that many people watching and listening will know from tipping point to blink, watching and listening will know from tipping point to blink, you have this capacity to row across history, you have this capacity to rove across history, across geography, across cultures, to make your points by drawing in all sorts of connections,

making connections that many people frankly find perhaps even dizzying in their complexity. in this case, talking to strangers, you link, for example, neville chamberlain in the late 1930s, his encounters and misreading of hitler, you link that to the degree of which bernie madoff, the crooked financier took the investors in his company, you link that to some of the leading sports coaches in america who took in the parents of children who were abused by those very same coaches. it is dizzying. are you really sure that these connections you make have any intellectual validity? oh, yes. i mean, there are all of those.. the ones you just mention are all variations on a theme and they have to do with answering the question which consumes the first half of the book, which is why are we so bad at detecting lies and what are

the consequences of that failure? all of those cases that you have mentioned are fundamentally the same. neville chamberlain goes to see adolf hitler and his inclination is to trust him, despite, and he ignores whatever mountain of evidence there is. but with respect, neville chamberlain‘s encounters with hitler are so deeply political and connected to his position on politics at home, and motivations that are nothing to do with what he makes of adolf hitler as fellow human being. that is a very strong statement, nothing to do. on the contrary, if you read neville chamberlain‘s letter to his sister, which are profoundly... all historians of chamberlain take seriously. it is where he unburdened his heart about his... he talks very much about his personal relationship with hitler, it really mattered to him that he felt hitler took him

seriously, hitler was someone he felt he could have a real conversation with. there is a very strong... what you are saying about how there are many other factors at play is exactly the case. i never pretend that i am doing justice to this story in the same way that someone who is devoting a book to the history of neville chamberlain was, but there is a threat in that story that strongly remembers that thread in the bernie madoff story and countless other stories i tell... it depends how strong the thread is because what you do in all your books is pull threads together but if they're not strong enough, what you have a compelling narrative which actually imposes itself on facts which don't quite tally up, that is what some of your critics do conclude about your work, that in the end, story is king, and data and facts that don't fit your storyline are rather conveniently put to one side. what would be a good example?

let's stick with the book you've just written. let's talk about the way you weave into this narrative the misconceptions that people bring to the table, what i find it very confusing set of circumstances around racial interactions involving the police and individuals. that is the signature story of the book. it is a very important one, and it seems to me, and i may be misreading what you are saying, but when you describe the encounter between a young smart african—american woman in texas and a police officer with people, and you are dismissing the notion that it can be seen in terms of racial tensions and all the things that have happened in the recent past between black people and the police in america.

no, i would respectfully respectfully differ with that. what i say very clearly in the book is that race obviously takes the role. but i am choosing not to dwell on the particular perspective of race... sorry for interrupting but that is an extraordinarily self—confident thing to do. through the black lives matters movement, havejust said this is about america's race problem, and you are saying it is not. i'm not sure that is true, actually. funny enough, some of the warmest comments that have been made about this book have been from black activists and those involved in this issue, because they have been frustrated, as i have, with the degree of the interpretation of these incidents, in a strictly racial lens, has led people to dismiss them, to say "what can you do?

the cop was a racist" and to shrug and go on with their lives. we have a history in the united states of these kind of incidents going back hundreds of years and nothing ever happens, and one of the reasons that nothing ever happens as we persist in viewing them simply as personal encounters gone awry. and what i said and what this book begins by saying is i have become frustrated with that way of looking at these problems and i would like to give a structural interpretation of what went wrong, that talks about this case on a much deeper and i think more profound level. you would be astonished at how many people who are deeply involved in this case, and these kinds of cases, have welcomed that kind of approach. they are, as i have been, profoundly disillusioned with the level of inaction and apathy that has greeted these kinds of problematic encounters in the past. this book is part of a general movement among those who take racism in the american context very seriously, i am someone who has been writing about it my entire career. i'm interested when you say you have had positive feedback. sandra bland

is the one at the heart of this issue. hanging herself after being picked up from the police after a traffic violation. have her family spoken to you about the way her story features in your book? i haven't talked to her family directly, no. iam name—dropping here but who was the most enthusiastic proponent of this book? oprah winfrey. you have to remember the context that i'm coming at this from. i am first of all someone for whom... i am biracial, these are deeply... just to be specific. your mother is from jamaica? my mother is west indian. so for 25 years, i have been writing about this. it is not a decision to focus this book on a broader structural question of how does law enforcement work? how do our minds work when we confront someone who is other? these are not whimsical or trivial

decision that i have made. they arise out of a career of thinking deeply about these issues and, as i said before, a deep frustration with how limited our conversation has been about these kinds of encounters. let me come at this question of how important the narrative, the storytelling is for you. from the beginning of this interview, you have been extremely honest, saying that you are a journalist, but is what i am, i tell stories. i was very struck by something you told an interviewer back in 2008 which i happened to see in the course of research, you were asked, would you prefer that in the end your ideas be interesting or right? and your response was fascinating. you snorted and said interesting, of course, i don't even know why you are asking the question! if i was the president of the us, i would rather be right, than interesting, but i'm a journalist, and what jealous journalist would rather be

right rather than interesting? imean, you i mean, you can understand the spirit in which i say that. i think it is important, what you have said there. let me rephrase that perhaps in a less provocative way. what i mean is myjob is to challenge my readers, myjob is not simply to peddle the conventional wisdom to them. if i am telling you something that you believe you already know,... then i have accomplished nothing. but what if the conventional wisdom is right? i'm not sure you can boil it down like that. even if it is, even if there is a conventional wisdom out there that we believe at this moment to be right, it is always useful to look at a familiar issue through an unfamiliar lens. i believe strongly it is the job of journalists to perform that function in society so if we had been talking about encounters between african—americans and police officers for two generations entirely in terms of the personal racism of the police officer, it is profoundly useful for someone

to come along and say stop, here is another way to look at this problem that might be more fruitful. that is a role as a journalist i take very seriously. if i wanted to do nothing more than to re—purpose the conventional wisdom, i would have a good dealfewer critics, i would probably sell more books, and i would be accomplishing a good deal less. well, you don't have a problem selling books,... i could sell more! they sell by the shedload. here is something i suspect you won't like but i am putting it out there — in this desire of yours to tell interesting stories and take on and challenge conventional wisdom, ijust wonder if — and i am saying this because stephen pinker, who i am sure you know, who also writes pretty popular books that look at economics and culture, he has called you a kind of populist

in your writing and i wonder whether you see, in the age of donald trump and all the questions that are being asked about what truth really is and whether the things that you don't like are inconvenient truths that you can dismiss as fake news, whether there is an element in your writing that, at times, you have been tempted to adopt a populist stance which puts more importance on the flow of the narrative than it does on the randomness and difficulty and complexity of data? i mean, first of all, it is a funny thing for stephen pinker to say since some of his positions are so far outside of the mainstream that they will seem a little embarrassing in retrospect. let's get not get involved in the personal stuff, but there is an interesting question there. i don't know, can you think of a good example of a popular position i have taken? i can't, actually. i thought... not long ago, at the beginning of the interview, you were saying my

position was blindingly obvious but now you are taking the opposite tack, and you are taking something else... it is my prerogative to test you from different positions. am i going back and forth between positions are far outside the mainstream and restating the obvious? well, you have written five bestselling books and at time, perhaps, sometimes you are saying something obvious and other times... so, i have many sides, is what you are saying? maybe i am. well, perhaps that is a compliment. you have doing this a long time. you started writing for the new yorker in the mid—90s and here you are in 2019, you have written, i think this is the sixth book. in that time, as you have focused so intensely on human behaviours, why human societies behave the way they do, have you changed, evolved, do you think? a little.

i mean, certain ideas have remained central. i have always been what i have termed an environmentalist. that is to say, i believe very strongly in the role of context and situation and environment in explaining behaviour and motivation. i am not someone who thinks that our personalities and our decisions are all coming from within, are indifferent to the world around us. that has been a very consistent theme. 0n the other hand, there has been — i think i have made quite — i have changed quite dramatically in how i approach certain kinds of complex issues. for example, the difference in the way i talk about law enforcement from my first book to this book is quite dramatic. i have probably made... specifically, in what sense? i used to be very focused and

enraptured by the positive effects of aggressive policing. i am now the opposite. i am now far more concerned about the side—effects of aggressive policing. that represents quite a substantial shift in my thinking. and in sort of the complexity in which i am... does that mean that malcolm gladwell has become more small l liberal? i have gone from populist to liberal! just answer the question, have you? some people have seen — you were raised in canada in a mennonite — quite religious community. your parents weren't necessarily particularly religious. i know, they were very religious. people look for morality in the way you look at society and individuals, do you feel like you are a moral person, a judgmental person? i do think there is a strong moral theme and a lot of my writing,

and i do think it is fair to say that i am much more of a small l liberal now than i would have been in my youth, but that is not a typical as people age. well, some people go that way. some people go the opposite. have you mellowed out or become more extreme? that is a different programme altogether! unfortunately, we have run out of time on this one. malcolm gladwell, it has been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you. thank you. i have enjoyed it. hello. red sky for some on sunday night but not a huge amount of delight for the shepherds or indeed the rest of us for the weather over the next few days. quite a turbulent spell with the potential for disruption from notjust heavy rain at times

but more especially or severe gales, particularly to the north and west. it will bring with it, during the next few days, some very mild conditions before things turn chillier later in the week. first spell of turbulent weather comes from this area of low pressure, it's to the south of iceland. heavy snow here. but gales and heavy rain push to the west of ireland by the end of the night. most, though into the morning rush hour, cloudy, a few spots of rain or drizzle and frost free. but through the morning rush hour itself, northern ireland, some heavy bursts of rain and gale force winds, spreading across scotland from mid—morning onwards. not too much rain in the east. as for wales and western england, it's really from lunchtime onwards we will see that heavy rain before sunshine returns to the west later on. it's to the north and west where we'll see the strongest of the winds, potential for gales, maybe 50 mile—per—hour gusts or more for some. not quite as windy for east anglia and the south—east. but the breeze will pick up by the end of the afternoon and into the evening rush hour we will see this band of narrower but quite heavy rain spread its way eastwards. it does mean we finish the day in south—west england, wales, and northern england with a greater potential for some sunshine. a few showers in northern england, and we'll see a few showers

in northern scotland, northern ireland, maybe wintry over the tops of the scottish mountains. and temperatures drop away a little bit through the afternoon but not as windy for the evening rush hour as it will have been for the morning one. and then as we go into the evening, that rain spreads across east anglia and the south—east, clear skies for a time, a brief dip in temperature. could rule out a touch of frost and there but temperatures rise later as more wet and windy weather spreads its way in from the west. and that's this area of low pressure. our next one, which is a deeper bigger area of low pressure, that means the winds are stronger, extent further away from the centre, which will still be around iceland, producing snow here, but for us dragging in exceptionally mild airfrom the mid atlantic, rocketing temperatures from what will have been a chilly start for some in the south—east. here though it should stay dry and bright through much of the day. it's northern england, scotland, northern ireland, outbreaks of rain at times, the biggest disruption could come from the winds. widespread gales, strongest the winds north and west of scotland, 75—80 mile—per—hour gusts not out of the question. those winds coming over from the mid atlantic and will bring some exceptionally mild weather to the north—east of higher ground, so north—east wales, the north of northern ireland,

and to the north—east of scotland we could see 15—16 degrees. that milder air swept away as we go through the night and into wednesday morning. a chillier start on wednesday morning with a touch of frost around. rain returns from the south—west later. more wet and windy weather around on thursday before a quieter end but a colder end to the week.

this is the briefing. i'm sally bundock. our top stories: president trump arrives back in washington and says he's willing to target iranian cultural sites if americans are killed by tehran. in australia, cooler weather helps evacuations, but the prime minister warns the fires could burn for months. in business, the price tops $70 as those tensions between iran and the us show no signs of cooling.