♪ >> Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour and Company.

Here's what's coming up.

>> I always quote Victor Orbán because he's a very respected tough guy.

>> Who's inspiring Trump?

Warning signs from an illiberal democracy with a former US ambassador to Hungary.

Then.

No other land, displacement and injustice in the occupied West Bank.

Now an Oscar winner, a look back at my interview with the Palestinian-Israeli duo behind an extraordinary documentary.

And.

>> That was the compost pile from where I would become an adult.

Because of that experience, I've always believed that it is a beautiful thing to get out there and get to know the world.

>> On the Hippie Trail with the famous travel writer Rick Steves from Istanbul to Kathmandu and why we should all get out of our comfort zones.

♪ Amanpour and Company is made possible by the Anderson Family Endowment, Jim Attwood 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 Straus, Mark J. Blechner, the Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation, Seton J. Melvin, the Peter G. Peterson and Joan Ganz 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.

>> Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.

A new world order ripping up the transatlantic alliance, upending Western security, just some of the descriptions we've heard of Donald Trump's foreign policy.

In just over a month, the president has executed a startling realignment of America's place in the world, effectively throwing U.S. support behind Moscow.

And in this, he seems to be taking inspiration from one European country, Hungary.

We know Trump likes strong men, he tells us all the time.

And he certainly likes Viktor Orbán.

The two leaders apparently spoke on the phone just this week about, quote, everything.

Orbán has been tightening his grip on Hungary for years, proudly reshaping his nation as an illiberal democracy.

Well, one American saw this up close.

And now he says it's hard not to notice the parallels with what's happening in the U.S. David Pressman was America's ambassador to Hungary from 2022 until this year.

And he joined me to discuss his experiences and what it tells us about where America is headed.

Ambassador David Pressman, welcome to the program.

>> It's great to be here, Christiane.

>> Who inspired who?

What's going on between the illiberal Hungary and what's happening in the United States?

>> It's a great question.

I mean, Prime Minister Orbán, when I was in Budapest, would speak about Hungary as a, in his words, at a partisan political convening actually in Budapest, as a Petri dish to fight against the woke illiberal, woke liberal virus.

And, you know, to a certain extent, I think Orbán's right.

I mean, Hungary is a testing ground.

It's a testing ground, I think, of an example of how you take one of the greatest successes of the post-communist era and turn it into an increasingly authoritarian and illiberal country.

And to your point, there are, Viktor Orbán is not alone.

I think increasingly around the world, there are authoritarian, leaning leaders who view Orbán as a prototype or a model and think that they have figured out how to crack the liberal democratic order.

>> Let me start with your own story.

You went to Hungary as a longtime, I guess, Foreign Service officer.

You were made ambassador in 2022.

You're the first openly gay U.S. ambassador to Hungary.

And you suddenly became very famous.

You know, U.S. ambassadors don't usually become that famous, but your name, your face was all over the newspapers.

Before you even set foot there, we have this image of a boat on the River Danube with your name and a skull and crossbones.

And it says, "Mr. Pressman, don't colonize Hungary with your cult of death."

What did you think was going on there?

>> I mean, it's outrageous, and they were scared of me.

And I think one of the things that the Hungarian government has constructed over the course of the last 14 years that Viktor Orbán has been in power is architecting essentially an ecosystem of rewards and punishment.

And what they do with that is they try to render voices who are dissenting voices or voices who may have a perspective that is critical of some of the policies of the Hungarian government.

They try to render those people individually radioactive.

So one of the tactics certainly they took vis-a-vis me as the representative of the president of the United States in Hungary was to attempt, even before I ever stepped foot in the country, was to attempt to focus Hungarians' minds on the fact that I was gay.

And, you know, Christian, I remember one of the very first meetings I had with a senior Hungarian official.

And I sit down in this meeting, really nice guy, sit down, and he opens the conversation by saying, "Ambassador Pressman, I know you're here and you want to discuss gender ideology and LGBT issues."

And I had to interrupt the guy and say, "No, no, no, I don't want to discuss that.

I want to discuss your relationship with Vladimir Putin and your relationship with the Chinese Communist Party."

And so I think what the government did vis-a-vis me in particular is they made a strategic error, which is they continued to try to promote me personally as somehow a marauding outside force that was attempting to overthrow the Hungarian government.

I mean, quite literally, the prime minister spoke about that.

But what ended up happening is it ended up giving me and my team a platform that is, as you know, pretty unusual for a U.S. ambassador.

And we certainly tried to leverage that to communicate with Hungarians.

>> Okay, so I've spoken to their foreign minister often, and they very proudly admit that they are, quote/unquote, an "illiberal democracy."

They like it.

I mean, they use that word, and they feel that it is -- you know, they use it as, you know, "We're not liberals, you know?

We're conservatives.

We're more right-wing," et cetera.

But, you know, they have weaponized woke, you know, the press, the courts, LGBTQ.

It all falls into the basket of saving Hungary, I've seen it said, making Hungary great again.

And now it's not just them, it's elsewhere in parts of Europe, and, of course, it's in the MAGA movement that is now in power in the United States.

So, having said that, I want to read what you wrote about how they control people.

You wrote How did Orbán do that?

I mean, again, he was elected democratically.

How did it go from that to this?

Yeah, great question.

Let me take that in a couple of pieces.

First, to your first point, I think it's really, really important that your viewers internationally and in the United States understand that this is not about liberalism or conservatism.

I mean, you quoted Foreign Minister Ciarta, who I work closely with.

This is not about whether you have liberal views or conservative views.

This is about small-D democracy and Hungary's relationship with Putin and Xi Jinping.

And, in addition, it's not about liberalism and conservatism.

I mean, the Hungarians, as you note, hold themselves out as sort of this bulwark against this corrupt, decaying Western values and transgender ideology and migration and all these things.

When, in fact, what's happening in Hungary is a country that is consistently ranked one of the poorest countries in Europe, for the last two years running has been ranked the most corrupt country in the European Union, and is really struggling.

And so what the political impetus is for the prime minister is to focus Hungarians on all of these outside adversaries and enemies, whether it be George Soros, whether it be Ursula von der Leyen, whether it be the United States ambassador, to try to explain why Hungary is suffering in the way that it is and is not performing as its peers are.

Now, with respect to the media ecosystem, look, the media ecosystem in Hungary at this point in the United States government's estimate and independent estimates was controlled 85 percent by a single political party, by Viktor Orbán's party.

And what happened is an oligarch class that was enriched through these corrupt deals, often through Russian energy deals and other corrupt deals, including with China, bought up all of the media outlets, all of the radio stations, all of the television stations, all of the print outlets, and now donated those assets to a foundation of which the board of directors of that foundation is all party loyalists, and that they get editorial direction on a weekly basis from Viktor Orbán's government.

So this system, this mediocre system, is then, is utilized in a really venal, personal way to try to go after Hungarians who are voicing dissenting views.

You know, I mean, one of the things, if I could, is you mentioned Foreign Minister Sziartos' pride in illiberalism and standing up to wokeness.

They often speak of Hungary as a defender of Christian nationalism.

I mean, one of the people that the Hungarian government has gone after is this extraordinary Christian pastor named Gábor Iványi.

And Pastor Iványi across Hungary is widely revered from liberals to conservatives.

I mean, this is a man who spoke up against communism, takes care of the poorest of Hungarians, runs homeless shelters, an incredible individual.

He married Viktor Orbán to his wife.

He baptized Orbán's children.

But when Pastor Iványi began to express concerns about the authoritarian-leaning policies of Viktor Orbán, this Christian pastor had his church registration stripped from him and was made to go bankrupt, and then had the tax authorities investigate him.

So this isn't, this is about persecuting Christians inasmuch as it is about anyone else.

And again, it's interesting to try to figure out why, but I also want to figure out, it is a big deal in the MAGA movement, too.

I mean, basically, you know, Orbán, after Trump's election, said the future has begun.

He posts pictures of himself with Musk and Trump.

A top official at the Heritage Foundation, of course, behind Project 2025, said, quote, "Modern Hungary is not just a model for the conservative statecraft, but the model," Orbán says.

"We've entered the policy-writing system of President Donald Trump's team.

We have deep involvement there."

So play that forward.

What does that mean for America?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I really, I wish that those who find a model in the Hungarian and Viktor Orbán's leadership could really dig into and unpack the facts.

I mean, I even heard a prominent U.S. official recently refer to the Hungarian government's actions vis-à-vis their universities there as somehow a model for what the United States should consider.

And I think what's motivating that is a legitimate policy disagreement in the United States about issues involving controversial social issues in the United States on which Americans have different views and strongly held ones.

But even using the university example, I mean, what happened to the Hungarian universities was not necessarily about, you know, pushing out woke ideology.

They took all of the public universities that existed in Hungary.

They removed the boards of directors of those universities.

They transferred all of the universities to these newly created private foundations and installed Fidesz party loyalists to run those foundations for lifetime tenure.

So what happened was while they were talking about wokeism, there was a wholesale removal of public assets into private pockets.

And so for those who are looking to Hungary as an inspiration of somehow standing up for values and ideas that Americans have different views about, I really think that some facts in this conversation are necessary and important because I think when you look at what's happening, what you see is not conservatism, but what you see is corruption.

So, you know, even Marco Rubio then as a senator now as secretary, well, then as a senator during the Trump first term expressed concern about Hungary's slide into autocracy.

How would you characterize it now?

What do you think now that Rubio is essentially, you know, on Trump team and as secretary of state?

What do you think the U.S. will do with Hungary or in essentially following the script, which is actually using the law to change the law?

Yes, it's it's it's it remains to be seen.

However, one thing I did take a lot of comfort in when I was U.S. ambassador was no matter how much the Hungarian government tried to frame the activities and policies of the United States as somehow the actions of a woke Democratic Party.

In fact, I think the concerns I'm articulating are much more bipartisan in nature in the United States.

I had, Christian, some of the most conservative members of the United States Congress come visit me in Budapest.

And you don't need to listen to my characterization of what they said.

Read their statements.

I mean, they were to a person concerned deeply about the relationship that was emerging between Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Xi Jinping, the corruption that was happening, the closing space for civil society.

And you're right.

The the current secretary of state, when he was when he was a senator, spoke very clearly to then President Trump about his own concerns on this.

So I hope, again, that the facts prevail.

What the policy ultimately is remains to be seen.

But I think it would be a mistake to buy into this phony narrative that Viktor Orbán is trying to sell, that he's somehow a champion of conservative values when, in fact, what's happening there is something far more base.

Both Orbán and Trump appear to be on the same side when it comes to Putin, Ukraine.

Where do you think this is going to lead?

How much power does Orbán have within the EU and NATO?

To be a spoiler, as we know, this week, the EU is trying to get together to figure out how to pick up the pieces that the Trump administration has left it regarding pulling its support from Ukraine.

Look, Viktor Orbán was, when we left office, was one of the most isolated political figures, certainly within the alliance and within the European Union, because what he was doing was leveraging his membership in those organizations for his own personal power and financial benefit.

And so I think that it would be a huge mistake to to relieve that pressure.

I mean, I can't explain to you what is happening with shifts in U.S. policy vis-a-vis President Zelensky and Ukraine.

I'm deeply concerned about it, obviously.

But I can explain to you why Viktor Orbán took the positions he did vis-a-vis Vladimir Putin's Russia.

And he did that for power and for money.

I mean, remember, this is a man who exempted his country at a time where Europe was finally getting serious about energy diversification after Putin invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.

Orbán exempts himself from the sanctions that are imposed, particularly on pipeline oil.

Then instead of reducing his dependency upon Russia, increases it, imports more oil, and in 2022, arbitrage the price and made two point two billion dollars that then went into his government.

And by the way, that money then went from his government to this oligarch network we were talking about.

So it's I can understand what is motivating Prime Minister Orbán's policies vis-a-vis Putin.

It's something pretty simple.

I can understand what's motivating the new U.S. policy.

>> Ambassador David Pressman, thank you so much.

>> Thank you for having me.

>> Now we turn to an amazing film and a triumphant moment of unity at this year's Academy Awards, where "No Other Land," a searing look at a community under siege in the occupied West Bank, won the best documentary Oscar on Sunday, overcoming the fact that it still doesn't have a U.S. distributor.

It was co-directed by the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and by Palestinian Basil Adra, who grew up in Masafayata, the community at the heart of this film, which was attacked by Israeli settlers just hours before the Oscars.

In the midst of awards season, I spoke to both filmmakers about their movie and what brought them together.

Basil Adra and Yuval Abraham, welcome to the program.

>> Thank you.

>> You know, I want to ask you first how you came together.

What was the point of connection that then led you to make this film together?

>> We met together in my village in Masafayata five years ago through other common activists in between us.

Yuval came with Rachel, the other co-director, to Masafayata to do journalism work.

Me and Hamdan were most of our time in the field documenting what's happening.

Then they start to come more and more to Masafayata.

And we were like in the same age doing activism and journalism together.

And from there, the idea came of doing this documentary.

We didn't have any experience doing any long film before, other than activism and filming and taping.

And we decided to go through this experience together.

>> So, Basil, I understand why you would want to film what's happening to your own villages from the settlers and the Israeli occupation forces.

But, Yuval, what was in your interest?

Why did you decide -- what was the storytelling part that attracted you as an Israeli?

>> Yeah, well, I learned Arabic when I was younger, and it really, really changed my life.

And when I met Basil, I was interested in writing about the policy of house demolitions, which I felt was very undercover in the international media and also in the Israeli media.

Because pretty much everywhere you look in the land between the river and the sea, you see Israeli bulldozers destroying Palestinian homes.

When I grew up, people told me it's because they're building illegally.

But when I began researching this as a journalist, I understood quite quickly that this is being used as a tool to push Palestinians out of their land.

So, you know, the military refuses 99% of building permits for Palestinians in the West Bank, so it's impossible to obtain a permit.

And I was interested in writing about that, and that's how I met Basil.

And if you ask me why I was, you know, interested in doing that, I think it's for two reasons.

First of all, you know, I'm opposed to the military occupation, and I feel it's a grave injustice that is being done in my name.

And I also believe that the Israeli people, my people, cannot ever be secure or free if Palestinians are not free.

And for me, I think it's in a way what I see as the right path forward.

And obviously this is all being done in the -- or at least we're talking about it now -- in the context of what happened on October 7th and how Israel was traumatized and how there's been a huge amount more activity from settlers and, again, the occupation forces against the Palestinian villages in the West Bank, not to mention what's happening in Gaza.

I think 16 more villages have been evicted, villages.

But I want to ask you first, Basil, because this is called "No Other Land."

And we have a clip that essentially is from the beginning of the film where you are narrating yourself as a young child watching this trauma and basically telling the world how you became traumatized.

We'll play this first clip.

So, Basil, we see your father there, and it's very clear from the beginning that he's an activist, your family are activists, and you are essentially an activist, but one with a camera in hand.

When did you start filming your family and your village's experience?

So, I grew up, as you said, in a community where activism and the people would like to oppose the occupation and confront the conditions that the occupation trying to put us under it.

So, for example, the story of my mother with the school and how they built the school.

My parents are not educated.

They didn't have the chance to go to school because it was forbidden.

But my mother and the community fight to build the school where I had the chance to be educated in it, and I learned English, and I could speak to you today in English.

And also, I learned the camera.

That's very important and almost the only tool we have beside our steadfastness and our land in front of the brutality and the occupation machine that try to uproot us from our home.

And, Yuval, one of the things that makes this so compelling is that we get to see ordinary villagers and their emotions, the men, the women, the children, as the houses are being demolished.

And this is the focus, as you said, the demolition of houses, which is a regular thing.

I mean, we've seen this for years and years and years.

I just want to know, when you saw that, if you did in real, how did you feel about that?

You've said that you won't do things in your name, but when you actually right there-- Yeah, it's a really good point, Christiane, because, you know, as you said, we have seen it over and over again, and I think people know the facts, and I just spoke about facts before, about 99 percent and all of that.

But, you know, facts are only one part of the truth.

There is a much deeper emotional truth to what it means to live under this military control.

And, you know, I remember the first time I met Bassel, I came to interview him, and in five minutes we had to run because there was a structure in his village that was being demolished.

And standing there and looking at the faces of the family that's being pushed out of their house-- and I remember I heard my first stun grenade, like the military immediately threw stun grenades-- the sense of dread that you go to sleep and you don't know if, you know, the next day your house will be demolished.

All of that is an emotional feeling and a truth that I feel journalism is often not able to convey, which really moved me, and I think it's part of what we tried to do in the film as a way, to speak for the emotional impact of it all.

So one of the other issues that is a constant theme throughout this is the notion of impunity.

For instance, for instance, a police shot and paralyzed a young boy called Haroon.

He later died.

This was as a house was being demolished and the generator was being removed.

And that's very, you know, viscerally portrayed in the movie.

Was this--was Haroon's death ever held accountable?

Did anybody ever answer to that?

So there was no accountability for sure for the soldier that shot him in the neck.

And putting Haroon's story in the movie of No Other Land is very important for us.

Nobody should be killed or, like, massacred for getting electricity or build a home or to have those basics like human rights that everybody, everybody in the world should have them without fighting for it.

This is basics that nobody--and this is why we put Haroon's story to explain to the people what prices we pay just to stay in our land, to build a home, to have a school, to build a clinic or a water pipe or to connect our home with electricity and what we are faced with.

So, as you know, the Israelis basically say, and they did say in the early 1980s, that this particular area, including your village, was designated as a restricted military zone.

They then said that Palestinians never lived there permanently, only seasonally.

And the court, the court apparently agreed.

So here's what the military told The New York Times.

In the early 1980s, the closure order was violated by Palestinians who began building illegally in the area.

The court ruled that the petitioners acted in bad faith and illegally built in the area while an interim order was issued and rejected any attempted compromise offered to them.

I'm going to ask you, Yuval, what is your response to that?

Well, first of all, Christiane, I think it's right that you tell your viewers that the judge is a settler who lives 20 minutes away from Masaf Riyadah.

And we should all think about how ludicrous and outrageous it is to believe that Palestinians should even be ruled under this system of laws that they cannot affect.

So the judges and the military laws that you have now referred to are all being created by Jewish Israelis while Palestinians are living under military occupation with no ability to influence the laws that control their lives.

As you know very well, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, a transfer of population from occupied territory, which is what is happening in Masaf Riyadah, is illegal no matter what kind of excuse the military can come up with.

And to directly respond to the claims, there are secret state documents that 972 magazine have uncovered and Akivot have uncovered, which show very clearly that the military training ground was designed in 1980 to quote Ariel Sharon, to push Palestinian farmers off of their lands.

And 20% of the West Bank are these military training grounds.

And they are used as a tool to prevent Palestinians from obtaining building permits and to expand the Israeli settlements in the area.

Like magically, the military training ground only falls on the Palestinian villages in the area while Israel builds settlements.

And all of this is clearly illegal under international law as per the recent ICJ ruling.

So I really think that we should not take these claims seriously when we look at the facts and when we look at international law.

I would like to play another clip at this point.

This, for want of a better way to explain it, is green and yellow.

Basically it delineates the license plates and their colors between Israeli vehicles and Palestinian vehicles that are allowed to use the roads and drive around the West Bank.

Basil, how does that make you feel?

I mean, being born and grew up and raised under this situation of injustice and racism and discrimination and all the time we have to fight and almost every day we have to be harassed by either soldiers, settlers and there is a big sometimes attacks either by soldiers and settlers.

It's frustrating to be living this life, to be honest.

When you, on the other hand, see that nobody is, as you said before, nobody is held accountable for what they are doing and there is no consequences for this.

How have things changed for you, Basil, and even what you've noticed, Yuval, on the West Bank since October 7th?

They took the advantage of what's happening in Gaza, both like the government, but with its elements, the military and the settlers.

So in the area where I live, in the South Hebron hills, there are six communities that flee because of what's happening.

They're like the soldiers and settlers without stopping, coming in the night and the day, attacking them.

They burned homes, they bulldozed houses and like water wells and destroying, uprooting trees, violently arresting people at midnight and torturing them and threatening them in a clear sentence.

If you don't leave in 24 hours, we would come back and shot you to death if you don't leave this home.

The amount of Palestinians being arrested is horrible since the war started.

And the killing also in the West Bank, killing of Palestinians, both by settlers and Israeli soldiers, raised in high numbers.

You know, we've heard several times from the government that, especially in the most egregious cases, they always say this is going to be looked into, this violates our codes of conduct, etc.

Yuval, what do you make of those statements by your government?

Well, I mean, I look at the statistics, you know, because I'm a journalist.

There's a well-known Israeli human rights organization called the Esh Din, and they looked at thousands of cases of settler violence attacks against Palestinians from 2005 until 2023.

And the chances for Palestinians to receive accountability, for a settler to be actually indicted and to pay a price, is less than 3%.

For soldiers who attack Palestinians, it's less than 1%.

And this is not because the police or the units investigating the army find out that no wrongdoing happened.

It's because they fail to investigate according to them.

So I think, again, I know this is a claim that the Israeli state is making, but I find it to be factually false.

There is very, very little accountability.

I think accountability cannot come when a military is investigating itself, or when a system is predicated on the dominance of one group over the other.

And I really think this needs to change so we can build a better future.

I mean, it's been going on for decades and decades.

It did not start when me and Bassel, who are the same age, were born, and not when our father was born, but when our grandparents were born.

And if we want to reach a place where both people can have political and individual rights in the land, we have to end this occupation, and it's been way too long.

One of the extraordinary facts around you both collaborating to do this film is that you are both together doing this film.

It's an area of cooperation between an Israeli and a Palestinian.

It's an area of friendship.

It's an area of understanding.

You know, it's what everybody would like to see, I think, in some kind of resolution for the future.

But Yuval, you have come under criticism for this work from your own fellow citizens.

And even when you presented this film at the Berlin Film Festival, where you won Best Documentary, your speech was immediately condemned by one or more German officials as being anti-Semitic.

How do you account for that?

I was very outraged by that, because the word "anti-Semitism" carries a lot of weight for me.

My grandmother was born in a concentration camp, and most of my family was murdered in the Holocaust.

And today, sadly, anti-Semitism is on the rise.

It's on the rise among the right wing, and it's also shamefully on the rise among the left.

And because of that, it's very important that this word will not be used to silence real and legitimate criticism of Israel's occupation or of Israel's horrendous policies all around the land.

And when people use this word, not only to silence Palestinian critics, but also Israelis like me, who believe that what is going on is wrong, they are emptying it out of meaning.

And precisely because we should care about anti-Semitism, this is even more dangerous.

And I think it's literally putting Jewish lives, as well, in danger.

And finally to you, Basel, this film is called "No Other Land."

You have no other land to live on.

So, what is your future?

What is the status of your village right now?

The status of my village and Masaf Riata and so many Palestinian villages in what's so-called Area C, it's really under so much attacks, and we're losing a community after another community.

This is not stopping, even with the very, very small sanctions that the U.S. and other, like, West governments are doing against these terrorist settlers.

I think the U.S., as the main player on this, should stop this from going on, and should stop and put limits and red lines for the Israeli government to stop these actions and these attacks against Palestinian communities, against the war that they are doing in Gaza, which is so horrible.

And, I mean, we don't, we are, as Palestinians today, very, very powerless and very worried and afraid for our future with what we are facing today from all this brutality and massacres and killing.

And the international community should stand for its responsibility and should defend the international law and should, like, stop this from going on.

And what about your own relationship?

How would you describe it?

I mean, we're friends and we're allies.

We're doing a form of co-resistance.

I mean, we have shared values.

And we, as I said, I mean, we think that the current situation of occupation is wrong and Palestinians deserve to be free.

And we believe in a future where both people, the Palestinians and the Israelis, have individual and political rights in accordance with international law.

And, yeah, this is, I mean, but I don't know, Basil, how would you describe it?

Yes, I agree.

Yeah.

Basil Adra and Yuval Abraham, thank you so much.

Thank you.

And after winning that Oscar on Sunday, Yuval and Basil repeated that call, saying the world must take a different path, one where both Israelis and Palestinians are, quote, "truly safe and free."

Now, have you heard of the Hippie Trail?

a legendary route for travelers thousands of miles overland from Istanbul to Kathmandu?

Today, of course, it's much too dangerous to travel through countries like Iran and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

But it's the journey that inspired Rick Steves, the highly respected travel writer.

Now, Steves is on an entirely different journey as he battles prostate cancer, and he tells Walter Isaacson why he believes travel is a vital force for peace.

Rick Steves, welcome to the show.

Walter, nice to be with you.

In 1973, you went backpacking through Europe, and then in '78 you do this amazing Hippie Trail track, and you record it in a notebook, in a journal, with a big pen.

And now you've gone back, you've looked at that journal, and you've published it.

Why did you do that?

Well, thank you.

Yeah, I had a-you know, I've always been a traveler.

I was a piano teacher back then.

I wasn't thinking about being a professional travel writer.

But I bought-every summer-my students wouldn't practice in the summer, so I'd say, "I'm seeing September, I'm going traveling."

And I went to Europe every year, and I was getting-I was kept tempted by going east from Istanbul and doing that classic Hippie Trail.

That's what everybody was doing when the Beatles were going to India to see the Maharashi, all the backpackers.

It was the ultimate road trip.

And every summer I would buy a hardbound empty book, a 200-page totally blank book, and I would fill it up with very thoughtful and diligent and beautiful handwriting.

I can't even read my handwriting now.

So I had my empty book, and I did the trip with my best buddy and happened to document it with a 60,000-word journal and photograph it all along the way.

And it turned out that was the last year you could do that trail, because the next year the Shah fell and Ayatollah Khomeini came in, and Iran turned into a religious theocracy or a theocratic dictatorship.

The USSR invaded Afghanistan, and that was a war zone.

So it was the right time in my life.

It was the right time historically.

And I documented it.

And I've been thinking about what that did to change my perspective.

And, Walter, when I think about it, it's like that was the compost pile from where I would become an adult.

And because of that experience, I've always believed that it is a beautiful thing to get out there and get to know the world.

That's so fundamental.

I've been aware that we in the United States are about 4 percent of humanity.

Ninety-six percent is out there.

And with that perspective, I've built my career as a travel writer and a tour organizer and a TV host on public television.

And I've got a mission.

And my mission is to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando.

But let me pick one thing that seems to be part of what you did, which is you documented.

You had a notebook.

And the people I write about, from Leonardo da Vinci all the way through Ben Franklin, they all kept a journal on paper.

And I haven't seen you talk about this, but this seems to be a core of something that we're missing today.

But it's a beautiful way to see how your mind grows.

You know, there's something about writing a journal.

And I don't even know if I can.

Yeah.

You know, there's a page from my journal.

And I it's like, I don't know why, but I did that right from when I was a teenager.

I had a journal, carefully written journal, when I was 18 years old and I came home.

Other kids were out staying out late.

I was at the youth hostel writing in my journal.

And again, this is when I was a piano teacher.

I had no interest in being a travel writer.

But I think when I when I look back and try to psychoanalyze it, I treasured those little moments, those little Eureka's, those little revelations, those lessons, those funny moments.

And I wanted to net them like somebody nets butterflies as they flutter by.

A butterfly is a beautiful thing, but then it's out of your life.

And here comes another one.

And did I see that correctly?

Well, if I could net them and pin them onto my wall and then study them and enjoy them and treasure them and put them together and find meaning in them, that's a beautiful thing.

So I'm a big fan of journaling.

I remember when we were taking our kids to Europe every year, they would have a journal and the most the most treasured souvenirs I've got are my journals from those trips.

Then when I started writing travel guidebooks, a couple of years after this trip, I wrote my I decided to give up my piano students.

And I turned my my recital hall into a lecture hall and I decided I was going to be a travel teacher.

I didn't have the bandwidth anymore to be doing all that journaling because I was writing books and taking care of all the details in the hotels and restaurants that go into writing a guidebook.

So my journal writing went by the way path.

But I always had my little black Moleskine notebook.

Journalists have this little I have it in my shirt pocket.

It looks like a passport.

So did your journeys in the 1970s.

And I'm almost convinced we may have crossed paths because I did my first hitchhiking in 1973 through Europe and then did sort of the hippie trail.

Mine was Marrakesh across North Africa, all the way searching for the perfect sunset and the perfect way.

But I also believe there's a reason, you know, we wouldn't have our kids do this if one of my students or my daughter or something said, yeah, I'm going to hitchhike for six months and take buses.

It just feels too dangerous.

Are we overprotective?

Should our kids be out there on buses and hitchhiking through Africa?

You know, Walter, first of all, the takeaway of the book is my hippie trail was Istanbul to Kathmandu.

That was the end of the rainbow for the hippies.

But the takeaway is you can have your own hippie trail like you had yours across North Africa.

Somebody could go biking across the deep south of our country.

You could do any number of things and have your hippie trail.

I think the value is getting away from home and looking at it from a distance.

You know, one of the five pillars of Islam is to make that pilgrimage to Mecca.

And Muslim friends of mine have explained to me, Muhammad was not all about going to Mecca.

He was all about learning about the world by leaving your home and gaining an appreciation of this wonderful planet that we share.

Now, as far as can people do it today, I would say it's no more dangerous today than it was back then.

Now, I know statistics are optional these days, but it's really important for us to get out there and overcome our fears, because honestly, I really think statistically, when we go traveling, it's no more dangerous than we stay home.

And when we travel, we make the world a safer and more stable place.

Fear is for people who don't get out very much.

When we are afraid, people with an agenda can manipulate us, as history has taught us, and I think we're learning right now.

When we travel, we realize that the flip side of fear is understanding.

And when we travel, we gain understanding.

Let me push back there.

You say the flip side of fear is understanding.

We gain that when we travel.

People have traveled so much more in the past 20, 30 years than ever before, and yet in Western Europe and the United States, they've become more nativist, more anti-foreign.

There's a wellspring of nationalism going on.

Travel doesn't seem to have helped.

You know, it depends on how you travel.

If somebody is just jetting around going to golf courses and going to casinos and going to resorts on the beach, they're not having a transformational experience.

I'm really about transformational travel.

I've been teaching travel really hard ever since I was a kid, and Walter, it occurs to me there's sort of a Maslow's hierarchy of travel needs.

At first, I was all excited about teaching the bottom rung, the practical skills, packing light, catching the train, finding dinner.

Then I moved up that hierarchy, and I was impassionate about teaching history and art and culture and cuisine, appreciating the fine points of the differences between cultures.

And lately, I've realized that the pinnacle of that Maslow's hierarchy of travel needs is what I call travel as a political act.

Intentionally getting out of your comfort zone, intentionally encountering culture shock.

I think it's wrong when travelers try to avoid culture shock.

Culture shock to me is a constructive thing.

It's the growing pains of a broadening perspective, and it needs to be curated.

But I just love to come home with a little less fear and a little more appreciation that the world is filled with good people.

It's filled with joy.

It's filled with love.

Of course, I'm not naive.

There's complicated problems and bad characters out there.

But the more we travel, counterintuitively maybe, I think the safer this world will become.

But you've got to travel in a way where you do get out of your culture, your comfort zone, and you celebrate different cultures.

To me, it's just a very, very healthy thing.

And it relates to do we want to live in a world that is primarily all about walls or primarily all about bridges?

You talk about getting out of your comfort zone.

I'll read something from your book, which is Europe is a well-worn pair of shoes, very comfortable.

But as a traveler, I need more, something to wallop my norms.

How come then you just write guidebooks mainly focused on Europe for tourists going to Europe instead of getting people out to other places?

Yeah, the big step, Walter, is leaving our country and going to some other country.

For me, Europe is the wading pool for world exploration.

It's a springboard for getting more comfortable with the world.

My favorite country is India.

And that surprises people because people think of me as so crazy about Europe.

But from a teaching point of view, I have the biggest market when I go teaching people to, instead of going to Orlando again, I keep using that metaphor, reaching out, go to Portugal, check that out, go to Ireland.

I love Ireland because I get the sensation I'm understanding a foreign language.

And from there, you can go further.

Also, I'm a businessman, and I want to work hard and help people go to a place where there's a big market.

And there's a huge market for going to Paris.

Now, where do you think people should go today besides Europe?

We've talked about Europe.

Could you go to Iran?

Should you go to Cuba?

Should you go to the Palestinian territories?

You've been to those places.

You write about them.

Yeah.

Well, I've been thinking a lot about how do you get the most value out of your travel.

And I wrote a book called Travel as a Political Act, and I think half of the pages in that book are experiences from the places that have been most transformational for me, the places that you take home a different perspective and so many lessons.

And those have been places my government has told me I'm not supposed to go or discouraged me from going or not even allow me to go.

If I think back on my travels, the most impactful trips I've had, I would imagine, were Nicaragua and El Salvador back in the day, Cuba, Palestine, Iran.

A lot of Americans don't realize that Cuba and Iran are real destinations, not when there's a war going on and probably not right now.

But some of the bestselling Lonely Planet guidebooks are to Cuba and to Iran.

The number one Caribbean destination for travelers from Germany and from Canada is Cuba.

But Americans go, you can actually go to Cuba.

I've had great experiences there, and I love the idea that we can get to know the enemy.

And when we get to know the enemy, it makes it tougher for their propaganda to dehumanize us.

And when we get home, it makes it tougher for our propaganda to dehumanize them.

And it broadens your perspective.

So these days, a big challenge for all of us is to avoid the crowds, because we all want to go to those Instagram spots, and we all want to go to those places that are trending in social media.

And we all have those bucket lists where we got to see the famous place and get a picture of us in front of it.

We've got to break out of that.

Your book, On the Hippie Trail, talks about a lot of adventures.

One of them involved a bus ride, I think, from Turkey to Iran.

Tell us that one.

That was a great way to kick off this adventure.

I'll never forget when my friend Jean and I headed east from Istanbul, Walter.

It occurred to me, I don't know a single soul between here and Seattle, where I live.

But started off, we had tickets, and it was like, okay, great, we've got row seven, seats A and B.

And at the bus lot, when the bus came in, the door opened, and everybody rioted to get on the bus.

And we thought, what's going on?

Just relax.

We've got tickets.

So we walked in last, and it occurred to us by row three that those numbers didn't matter at all.

We just had two places on the bus.

And we got the last two seats for this 48-hour trip, and they were the ones that were added as an afterthought over the stairwell in the back of the bus, and the only ones that didn't recline, and over something that was really hot and really noisy and really bumpy.

And I thought, this is going to be a long trip.

Every time I stood up to stretch, the bus driver would see me in the mirror, and he'd say, "Sit down."

After the first day, when he handed over the wheel to the first mate, before the guy could even get back to the bed behind the last seats, the new driver had run off the road, and we were stuck for a day trying to get our bus off the meridian.

I woke up just with smoke and screams and sparks, and I thought, this is going to be a short trip.

But thank goodness nobody was hurt there.

And the next day, the driver realized, we're never going to let the first mate drive anymore.

And he just said, "We're going to just get to Tehran when we get to Tehran."

I remember one time he said, "Okay, this bus is smelly.

Everybody has to go into the river and take a bath.

And we're not going to Tehran until everybody takes a bath."

And at night, we would stay in these horrible hotels.

The English-speaking people would hang out here.

The French-speaking people would hang out there.

We'd talk about, are we really going to get to Tehran?

And it was just the beginning of a trip, and we kept going farther and farther away from those travelers' paradises, like the Greek Isles.

And we kept thinking we could still turn back.

In three days, we could be in Santorini.

But we kept pushing forward, and we finally crossed Khyber Pass, and we descended into India.

And crossing into India was like the biggest high-five moment I've ever had in my travel career.

How did you-you just went through a bout of prostate cancer, I think it was.

And that seemed to affect you, as even just the introduction, you mentioned some of these things.

How does that affect you?

Well, I've had-I had prostate cancer.

I was diagnosed last summer, October.

I got my surgery, took out my prostate, and thankfully, my doctor-we've just tested my blood, and my doctor says I can consider myself cancer-free.

And I've gone public on this, and I think it's very important for men to realize that, just like women have got to be tuned into their body when it comes to something like breast cancer, prostate cancer for men is our version of breast cancer.

And I tackled this, Walter, like a traveler.

It was, for me, a trip I didn't know I was going to take.

I was kind of thinking, you know, I'm 69 years old now.

I never spend a night in a hospital until this, and, you know, my time will come when I have some health challenge.

And I wanted to be curious.

I wanted to be positive.

I wanted to be, you know, a good patient.

I wanted to be thankful and tuned in, and it's been a good experience.

And right now, I'm just very, very thankful for the medical technology we have, for the amazing surgeon I've been blessed with, and the fact that we live in a country where we can get prostate cancer and reasonably expect to get over it.

A lot of people don't appreciate that.

I don't think it's very easy to see the problems in our society these days and complain about them.

But this is a very, very good place to live if you've got a challenge like that.

You talk about the difference between being a tourist and being a traveler, but I also want to get you to that next level you kind of mentioned.

Tell me what it means to be a pilgrim.

You've got an opportunity when you travel to broaden your perspective and have that transformational experience and go home with the best souvenir, and that's an empathy for the other 96 percent of humanity.

So, I think we can travel seeing that the road is playground, that's a tourist.

The road is school, that would be a traveler.

And a lot of people say, "I'm not a tourist, I'm a traveler."

Okay, well, that means you're going over there to learn and to be that cultural chameleon and broaden your perspective.

Or the road can be church or mosque or synagogue, and that means you're leaving home to learn about yourself and explore dimensions of life that you might not be able to so well explore at home.

And that's travel as a pilgrim.

And pilgrimage travel is very trendy these days.

More people than ever seem to be taking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

And I have a pilgrimage experience when I'm traveling.

It can be just be poetic, to be thoughtful, or to be more spiritual.

But I find God on the road quite vividly, and I just think it's a beautiful thing.

Now, you don't need to be a monk and you don't need to be just a hedonist, but you can calibrate it, you can mix it.

And that's something we all have the opportunity for, and I think the default is going as a simple tourist.

And the goal is to mix it up and be a tourist, a traveler, and a pilgrim.

And that's one of the things I teach a lot when I take my show on the road.

Rick Staves, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Walter.

It's been a delight, and I wish you a bon voyage.

Opening our eyes to so many new horizons, and that is it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's coming up every night, sign up for our newsletter at pbs.org/amanpour.

Thanks for watching, and goodbye from London.