The Megyn Kelly Show - Malcolm Gladwell on Forgiveness, The Value of Being Disagreeable, and The Little Mermaid | Ep. 133

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author and host of "Revisionist History," to talk about the importance of forgiveness, the value of being disagreeable, Jeffrey Toobin's Zoom incident, the failures of journalists, why "The LIttle Mermaid" teaches terrible lessons, the cost of "cancel culture" in today's society (and historically), how to deal with criticism, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, and happy Friday. Oh, do I have a Friday gift for you. Malcolm Gladwell. I love his books, and I love him, and so will you when you listen to this interview. He's the author of many hugely successful, influential books, at least five of which have been New York Times bestsellers, Outliers, The Tipping Point, Blink, Talking to Strangers, all of which you should read. They're easy, quick reads that will really enrich you. They'll leave you feeling enriched. He also hosts a great podcast called Revisionist History, where he goes back and looks

at interesting stories or people and takes a sort of a fresh look at them. And he co-founded a podcast company called Pushkin, which is doing really well. He's also been writing for The New Yorker since 1996. He once was a Washington Post journalist, which he'll talk about a reporter. And we get into everything. He did great work recently, sort of blowing the lid off of U.S. News and World Report and how we rely on them for the college rankings and what BS it is. He has also blown the lid off the Little Mermaid. And it's probably the best part and maybe most contentious of our interview where he actually questions my parenting skills. And we will get into that. We get into the importance of being disagreeable in today's day and age, the importance of forgiveness and whether his being a contrarian,

which is, that's my word. We'll see whether he agrees with it, is a good thing or a bad thing. It's so chock full of goodness, this interview. You're going to love it. He's coming up one minute away. Malcolm Gladwell, thank you so much for doing this. Not at all. I'm happy to be on your show. I'm excited for many reasons. I'm your fan. I've read your books.

I've proselytized a lot of your messages. I feel like I'm living some of the core theses espoused therein. And also because I am married to a writer. And so that's kind of where I want to kick it off. He's been writing fiction. His latest work is nonfiction, so he's moving more into the Malcolm Gladwell world. But what is your process? I watch my husband write.

He writes long form on legal pads. Then he types in the book into into his laptop himself which is his editing process you know he edits while he does that um he's in a book club with some great great authors who you would know very well nelson demille and um oh gosh just a bunch of like yeah um amor tolls and um one of the authors in there the guy who gosh, gosh, I'm blanking on his name. He writes the Jack Reacher series. Oh, my God. Lee Child. Lee Child.

Yeah. I'm obsessed with Lee Child. I've read every single Lee Child book. No, he's amazing. But he writes Stream of Consciousness, Chain Smoking Cigarettes, and then just hands it in. He doesn't edit. So I'm always fascinated when I meet successful authors about what their process is. Oh, well, you know, the actual writing doesn't take very long. What takes a long time is

the thinking and the arranging. And so I'm actually, and I was an old newspaper guy. So I spent my first 10 years at the Washington Post and being a newspaper person permanently cures you of any kind of preciousness about the writing process. So at the age of 23, I'm at the Washington Post and basically they put a gun to your head and they say, okay, this is the story you have to write. It's now 11 a.m. We need it by four or, you know, so I was, they used to call me at the Washington Post, Picasso, because I was, you know, when I got there, I was like, you know,

a great, you know, I thought deep thoughts and took my time and created beautiful paintings. That was, I was all gone after about two months so I don't have any I can you know I can I write really quickly and without any kind of must and fuss but I do spend I'm a runner and I will you know on my long runs I will spend time thinking through everything I'm doing and I sort of arrange it it all in my head before I sit down at the computer. I do not write on yellow legal pads and have not done so since the 1990s.

That's just Doug's thing. And you'd think Doug was 70 years old. He's not, he's 49. He just refuses to advance. Does he use a BlackBerry? I mean, how many different ways is he old school? He would be. If I hadn't insisted that he upgrade to the iPhone, I think he still would be on the BlackBerry.

It works for him. But I know what you mean. You can't have any of your little darlings, right? Was it Hemingway who said that it's so hard to get rid of your little darlings? Yes, you kill them pretty quickly. But that was the best thing that ever happened to me as a writer was spending 10 years at the Washington Post. I learned everything.

And I got, by the way, their patience with me and I arrived there not knowing how to do a single thing related to journalism. God knows why they hired me. I did not know to this day why I was hired. It's like a mystery. No one ever answered this question. I didn't know what I was doing. And they sat with me and worked with me. And I finally kind of put it together.

I can relate to that, though. I'll tell you my first job in television, I had zero TV experience. I had just I was still practicing law, and just an unhappy lawyer trying to try my hand at something else. And there was a breaking news story. And it was a slow day. So they didn't adequately staff the newsroom. And that's why they chose me to go out and cover it. So I went, it was, it was, it was actually a school shooting. Nobody was hurt. It was an attempt. And so I get on scene and they say, okay, you know, you're gonna be live at the top of the six. We need a donut. We'll see it, you know, five minutes. I'm like, I got it. Of course, I look at my team like, what the hell is a donut? What is it? What is a donut? It means you're live in the intro to the piece. Then you go on tape and then you're live out of the piece. So I don't know if that's really

a donut. So it should be more like a sandwich. You know, I don't know. So even the term they use to describe it is not the right term. So that's even more baffling. Yeah. Yes, exactly. But you were a lawyer. Now, I'm going to quibble a little bit. So you were not unprepared. Being trained as a lawyer is actually a really good preparation for being a non-air journalist, right?

Yeah, that's true. You're trained to think on your feet, to process with, to process a lot of information pretty quickly. I was not a lawyer when I started to watch. I didn't know anything. What have you been doing? I had been working. Well, you know, my first job was with a magazine called the American Spectator.

A conservative magazine out of Indiana. Still around. I like them. Still around. And I would write these. I was an editor there, but I was like, I started there when I was 20 and I made $9,500 a year. And I would write these like book reviews for them from time to time, which would take me like eight months. So it was like, I was this, that's all I did. And then I, I moved to, I, I got fired from that job, moved to Washington DC, worked at a think tank for a while. And I

continued to freelance, but I wasn't, it was the opposite of newspaper writing. You know, it was this kind of, I would toil away on these things for months and months and months. So I didn't know what, how to do the thing that I was being asked to do at a newspaper, which was five hours. I knew five months. That's what I knew. In the law, we used to say,

if I had a longer time, I would have written a shorter brief. And that's, that's the frustration of newspaper writing and television writing too, because there are two areas in which you're expected to write tight. You know, you don't have a lot of time. You don't have a lot of space.

And, and yet it takes a while to get really clear, concise, tight writing. It takes practice really. So coming into it green, it must've been frustrating. I know it was for me. Yeah. Yeah. No, I survived. They, they did not fire me, uh, contrary to my expectations. And so I, I survived, I survived to write another day. And you, you got your 10,000 hours in, right? As a journalist, as a writer. Well, you know, I was 10,000 hours equates to 10 years of kind of, and that's, I was

at the Washington Post for exactly 10 years. And I, I left, when I left, I was like, I think I learned everything that I need to learn from this place, but it took 10 years to learn what I needed to learn. I understand that. I actually felt one of the reasons I left Fox was I felt like I had learned everything I was going to learn. And I had, there was no more, there was not one more muscle to grow. You know, I just felt like there's no more growth available to, to me here. Um, it was one of the many reasons, but that was one of my concerns. I wanted to go someplace where I could grow and grow. I did at NBC for all my complaints about how my relationship there ended.

I definitely grew as a journalist and still use some skills. One of the things I've, by the way, the 10,000 hours thing is a reference to you. People may not know that comes from you. That's from outliers. Right. And right. Was it outliers? I get them confused.

It was outliers where I popped. Yeah. That was a notion that had been floating around. No, it wasn't. It was yours. where I popped. Yeah. That was a notion that had been, um, floating around. No, it wasn't. It was yours. You are the one who made it famous. I've made it famous, but I, you know, I didn't invent it. I it's very clear. I have to be very clear that I, yes, I was a, a popular, I'm a popularizer, Megan. That's my, that's my job. Well, I, it was fascinating because I do think, and I'll get to this with you in a little bit, but I think you've changed the world. I really think you calling attention to some of these

things, you've changed certainly my own experience in this world and schools. And I don't know, just people pay attention to what you write and then they start doing things differently. And that's power. You have real power. But here's where I want to start. I know you were born in England. You were raised in Canada. And unlike most Canadians, I feel like you are a contrarian by nature. But you probably disagree. when we were taught that the world was round. And I derailed the entire lesson that day. This is like third grade. And I was like, well, how do we know it's round? I hadn't sort of understood the thing that you can watch the earth from space.

I was like, how do you know there's not a little bump in the earth or in Africa somewhere? And I just would not accept the teacher's explanation that the world was round. So it goes back a long way i am a little and you're right it's not a canadians are not by nature um disputatious and we are but i'm not a canadian now i will say i'm a canadian but i you know i was i i am an immigrant to canada so i have um i came from from england when I was six. So I have, I have so

many different like little, um, cultural tendencies floating around inside of me that I feel like I, I, there's a good reason why I'm not the most perfect, uh, Canadian. So I wonder if being a contrarian has made your life better or worse, more difficult or just more exciting and successful. Well, it's very useful. I mean, journalists should be contrarians in a sense that our job is to be the kind of first line of skepticism, particularly to those who are in power. So in that sense, it served me very well. And the other thing that being a contrarian does is that it forces you to keep updating your own beliefs, right?

The really good contrarian is not just a contrarian about what others say, but it's also a contrarian about what he or she believes. Right. So that's those are two very useful things. Does it make my life easier? Who knows? Does it make me happier? I have no idea. Does it but does it suit my professional life? Yes, very much. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I love what you said about journalists needing to be skeptical. And I do feel like it's being forgotten. You know, the Democratic, the more left leaning press, very, very skeptical of Trump and Fox and the conservative media, the opposite. And now with Biden, Fox is full of skepticism and the left-leaning press, the opposite. But it should be universal. We should come in cranky and not ready to believe

anybody, right? It's like, check it out. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. Wait a minute. That's not going that far. I'm not skeptical of my mother saying she loves me. I just talked to her last night. And she, she, I, I, not, it never even occurred to me to question what Joyce Glauble says. Well, I hate to tell you, I talked to her too, and you might want to try poking some holes in that. You also said at, you go to Carlos Watson's sort of, you know, talk fest that he has every year, Ozzy Fest. I love Carlos Watson. He's such a great guy. But you said to him that you really think people should be more disagreeable. And my note in my outline reads, yay, because I feel like, yes, I'm nailing it.

I'm nailing it. But I know what you mean. I think I know what you mean, but I want you to define it. Well, disagreeable. So there's two meanings of that term. One is the colloquial meaning, which is obnoxious. And that's not what I mean. I don't think people should be obnoxious.

I think the opposite. But disagreeable, as it's defined by psychologists, is a disagreeable person is someone who does not require the approval of others in order to pursue what they intend to pursue, right? And I think that I don't want everyone to be that way, but I think that we underestimate how important that trait is, particularly in people who are trying to make our world better or pursue some new and innovative idea. If you are someone who can't move a muscle unless the world aligns behind you and pats you on the back, there's a limit to what you can accomplish. And so I've sort of made a kind of,

in my book, which book was it? There's been so many of them. Once I had, oh, I think it was my book, David and Goliath. I had a whole chapter on this doctor called Emil Freireich, who is the one who really, he's the guy who cures childhood leukemia and who really doesn't invent it, but he's the one who makes it possible from medicine to modern medicine to really start to pursue a combination chemotherapy. Basically, modern chemotherapy comes from this guy, Emil Freireich. And at the time he proposes this way of using drugs in combination to treat cancer, everyone, with the exception of his research partner, thinks he is not just wrong, but a

monster. And there's a period of years where people won't work with him, people denounce him, where people heckle him at research meetings, where he is ostracized by his peers. And he persists and persists and persists. And today, there are people listening to this podcast who are alive because of Emil Freireich. I mean, he is this extraordinary figure. And the reason, so I met with him on two occasions. He died just recently, actually, well into his 90s. I'm trying to figure out how is it that someone as a young professional was able to persist with an idea when everyone in the world thought he was a monster? And the answer is that he was disagreeable. He is this big bear of a guy who could not, you know, didn't give a, I'm not

going to swear on your podcast, a hoot. Oh, you can, but yeah, I got you. Did not give a hoot what anyone thought about him. He was that kind of guy. And he was unpleasant. And he had an anger problem. And he was a bully. And the first time I met him, I was like, I can't stand this guy. I don't want to hang out with him. I was like, I got to get out of here. This guy's a monster.

And then I thought about it. And I realized, oh, that's exactly why he was able to follow through on these ideas and end up saving the lives of, I mean, the number of lives this man saved in the end. We're in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands. And it's because he was this difficult, he didn't give two hoots about what anyone thought of him, right? And it made me realize, you know, that our, first of all, our initial, my initial reaction to him was wrong. I thought he was a jerk. And then I realized, oh, no, that's the most important part of him. I need to get over my little, my little kind of precious response to his difficult personality because his difficult personality is why he is so important to the world, right? The fact that I was offended by him did not matter.

It's just my understanding that your own response in that situation is not just irrelevant, but it's, it is, and beside the point, it's counterproductive, right? The easiest thing to do for me as a journalist would have been to write a chapter of my book about what a, just a complete a-hole this guy is. That would have been the easiest thing, right? And that would have been, that would have completely missed the point of what made this man great. You know, I confess to you, I'm thinking, I know that you're not a Donald Trump fan, but I am thinking about him as you talk like that, because his strange personality and his approach to media and communication and problems definitely work to his advantage in getting some of his

initiatives through and just the way he governed. I mean, the one example I'm thinking about is when he took out Soleimani, right? The Iranian general and there was pushback, don't do it. And we're going to have a war with Iran. And he did it anyway. And he's just so impulsive and a risk taker and really doesn't care if the tide of opinion is going against him. He kind of goes on instinct. And we'll see. I mean, but so far that's worked out okay. We didn't go into a war with Iran. We got rid of a guy who

killed a lot of Americans or was responsible for it. Anyway, I love him or hate him. I see some parallels. Yeah, it's a useful trait in those who are trying to accomplish something difficult. I think that's the fairest way to say it now. So and when we confront people like that, what I'm saying is that our Our focus should be on the merits of their idea, not the difficulties of their personality. And yet we're going another way, right? I mean, today's society is much more, you need to be liked. Certain behaviors are not allowed. Certain words are not allowed. I think now more than ever, it just feels like we are too solicitous of other people's approval.

We're getting more risk averse because we live in cancel culture and so on. Yeah. Well, it becomes, can I tell you my rule for dealing with criticism? Which is, this is incredibly, I love these little rules of thought. People, I collect little rules of thought. People give me really good ones. My friend Bruce once gave me a great one about jealousy. He said, the way to deal with jealousy is you can never be jealous of a single characteristic of someone else's life.

If you want to be jealous of them, you have to be jealous of their entire life. So you can't just say, oh, I dislike him because he's richer than I am. You have to say, okay, do you dislike him? Would you rather have his life than yours? Every single part of it? That is useful. It's a good one. Here's what I do for criticism, which is that if you sell 10 books, let's assume for the sake of argument that 90% of the people who read your books or listen to your television show like you and 10% don't.

That would be a, that's a really, really, really good ratio, right? You and I can both agree that's amazing if that was true. Let's stipulate that. If 10 people listen to your show or watch your show or read your book, that means that you have nine fans and one detractor. That will seem like you're doing great. Those nine fans are going to say, hey, Megan, love you. You're never going to hear from the one detractor. If a million people read your book, you have 900,000 fans and 100,000 detractors. Right? So 100,000, that's like the size of a medium-sized city who hate you. You're going to hear from them all the time.

That's like, I mean, you have to remember, you have to remember you just think the number of your critics is simply a uh a um a constant uh uh um it is a function of the number of your size of your audience the more people who like you the more people who will also hate you right because of this rule so like if you if you go on your Twitter mentions and just read an avalanche of people saying all kinds of nasty things, just keep in mind that that's because there's a whole massive, much larger universe of people out there who like you, right? It means your audience is big. It's good. I like that. I'm going to hold on to this tonight and every night. Remember that rule. And also the people who, you know, you're much more likely to speak up if you dislike something.

You don't hear from your fans. I think it's one of those situations. You know how some of the corporations will say for everybody who writes a letter or picks up the phone and calls, either with a compliment or a complaint that they assume they represent a much larger group, right? Because it takes a lot to pick up the phone and call a company about a product, good or bad. And I feel that too. If somebody actually picks up the phone to call me and say, okay, I really appreciate what you did on this. It's very meaningful to me, even if it's a friend, because my friends, they don't call me up and say, hey, great segment or great show. So if they do, it means way more to me than, than a Twitter attack or something like that. And then I always know that person represents a lot, a lot of others who are out there feeling

the same, who just, they don't know how to reach me or, you know, I try, I try to remember that because I'm in media, which is definitely more left than I am. And Twitter is more left than I am. So that's not really the healthiest, the most emotionally healthy place for me. But I still think it's important to engage with people who are not ideologically aligned with me. You know, I want to do that, but it's not always the most pleasant experience. Twitter is not, I would amend your statement about Twitter. It's not full of people who are to the left of you. It's full of people who are a lot more obnoxious. It's just as if Twitter is just a sort of a cesspool of like a lot of nasty people saying nasty things. I, you know, I, it's why I try to limit myself on Twitter to like,

always say something positive, retweet really great cat videos whenever possible. That's what's useful about Twitter. I get more, you know, like funny. There's like the thing, the thing I've retweeted yesterday to a friend of mine, not retweeted, I sent to a friend of mine was if you haven't seen this, do you remember Mary Carrillo who used to, I think she still does. Yes. Have you seen, have you seen the Mary Carrillo badminton thing? Oh my God. It's the greatest thing ever. I've played a lot of badminton with my kids. By the seventh shot, this thing's up in

the tree. Okay. So then what does your kid do? She says, mommy, I'll get it down. Throws a racket up in the tree. Now your racket's up in the tree. She says, don't worry, I'll get that down. So now your kid goes into the garage and goes and gets the red rubber ball, which should come as standard equipment in any kind of backyard badminton set. Throws that in. That immediately gets impaled. So she goes to get something else to get one of these things down, okay? Now there are kids from all over the neighborhood that have come into your backyard,

and they're emptying out your garage, throwing stuff at your tree. Somehow mothers from all over the neighborhood hear that badminton is being played at Mary's house. They're dropping off their kids. They know it's an all-day affair. They know it's going to involve 17 other sports. They're dropping off their kids. They're leaving skid marks, okay? Sharing the joy of the Mary Carrillo Babington rant is exactly why Twitter was invented. And as long as you remember that, it's what it should be for.

Exactly. I love it. Did you see it for the first time yesterday? Yeah. Yes, I had never seen it before. Somebody on one of my favorite news websites, Mediaite, posted it. And I watched the whole thing.

I'm like, this is the most brilliant thing I've ever seen. So true as a mother, I can totally relate to all of it. No, wait. Now, here's my question to you as a TV person. That wasn't extemporaneous. No, I don't think so.

No, no way. No way. She wrote it. I think so, yeah. At a minimum bullets, you know, that you followed because it was too good. It was too long. She is brilliant, so you never know. She is brilliant.

But I don't, I almost like it better if it was prepared because i like the fact i was thinking about this i was like first of all there's a slight chance she did it off the top of her head but i don't think she did but i don't think so i like it more because i like that she sat down and said okay i am going to finally tell the world but it's like 2 a.m in the morning morning. Like, you know, it was like, no, you know, she's like, OK, I got I got I got an hour of dead space. I'm I'm going to finally put pen to paper and describe my problem with backyard. It's so true. Up next, we'll get into why you should be disagreeable right after this.

So let's talk about the many unpopular positions you have had as a contrarian and someone who likes to be disagreeable, both of which I am. So I relate to you. I really do. I think I would definitely say you're more beloved universally than yours truly, but I'm more political than you are in this.

So it comes with the territory. But yes, you've defended people like you don't do politics. I know. And I like that. I think that that must be wonderful. And that's why you're such a successful author, right? Because it's like everybody would buy a Malcolm Gladwell book. You don't have to be a Republican. You don't have to be a Democrat. So it's smart. Okay. You got in trouble for defending Joe Paterno of Penn State. I read the whole thing. I understand your point on him. Well, I'm going to go with you. Okay. Did I get in trouble? I don't think I got in trouble. You just got criticized. Yeah. Yeah. But I, uh, but just to my point, I got criticized because lots of people read that book and, but, but how did the, of the people who read that chapter and thought about it, what percent, I mean, maybe agree with me is too strong, came away with a deeper understanding of that case?

I think the overwhelming majority. So most of the people I heard from about that chapter were like, oh, okay, that kind of makes sense. You know, now that you've laid out how difficult that case was and simply asked the question, now remind me again, what Joe Paterno did wrong? Like, I mean, he did exactly what he was supposed to do. He informed his superiors the minute he was, somebody came to him with an allegation. I, to this day, I'm completely baffled. Let me just remind the viewers what we're talking about about or the listeners, just in case they don't remember this. It was Paterno was the head of the football team there. And Jerry Sandusky who'd been his assistant coach for many, many years was accused of molesting was of being a serial molester. But the, um, the allegation was made that it was brought to his attention by, by another 20 year old. I don't know if he, I can't remember what,

whether that guy, Mike McQueary was a coach or what he was, but he brought it to Paterno's attention that he had heard, uh, Sandusky in a locker room and, um, that he thought it was something like fondly, the testimony was definitely problematic. Yeah. Seen something that didn't seem right. It wasn't as explicit as the prosecution later alleged in court. And that upset McQueary because basically the prosecutor said McQueary went in the locker room and saw Sandusky in the process of rape with a young child. And McQueary came out later saying, what are you saying? That's never been what I've said that I saw. I heard sounds that sounded sexual.

I got disturbed and I left. Anyway, your point was Paterno had enough reason to sort of question it that he did bring it to his superiors, but his critics say he should have gone to the cops, right? That's where the critics, I think, would come in. Well, the critics, that's not what the, you know, there's a Penn State, like many institutions, has a kind of manual, a rule book, I don't know what the right phrase is, that lays out the procedures that employees, officials of the school are supposed to follow in the face of those kinds of allegations. And he was supposed to inform the athletic director, his boss, when confronted with that kind of information.

He did exactly what he was supposed to do. You know, Megan, you do not want to get me going on Penn State because the way they have hounded the president, this makes me even angrier. He's- Graham Spanier, was it? Graham Spanier, who's now being sent to prison. I mean, I just, I don't go down this road.

I have something better I want to talk to you about, but I'll let you make your point. But I want to make one small point, which is the point of that book, Talking to Strangers, my second last book, where I discuss that case in detail. And for those who want to know more about this case, I would recommend they read the chapter of that. Because one of the things I discovered in writing the chapter on the Penn State case is that it became very clear to me that the majority of journalists who wrote about the Penn State case knew nothing about the Penn State case. They had not read the trial transcript. many thousand pages of it. And you realize when you do that, and that the kind of popular conversation about the case had nothing in common with the actual facts of the case, because nobody was doing their homework. And don't even get me started on this. It's your job as a journalist to do your homework. That is why you are paid what you're paid. And that's why you're given the privileged position you are given in society, to have a platform.

And if you're going to sound off about a case and you haven't done your homework, that's malpractice. Now, I'm not asking people to agree with me in my interpretation of that case. I don't care whether you agree with me or not. Just do your homework. But there's a set of facts. Know the testimony. Know what's been alleged and what hasn't been alleged. Yeah. Argue with my interpretation out of it based on your knowledge, your unequal knowledge of the case. Anyway, when people don't do that and they think there's some kind of shortcut to writing about complicated cases, it drives me insane.

No, I agree with you. I agree with you because I saw it. I mean, more recently than that, we saw it in the case of Brett Kavanaugh and the allegations getting thrown around about him. And it was like, have you done anything? I mean, what have you done to assure yourself that you understand the facts even being alleged and half of them never even should have made air? You know, they weren't journalistically sound for reporting. As we saw, I will say, NBC did an interview with the one woman, Julie Swetnick, and there was a debate internally about whether we should air it because she just fell apart on national television. I mean, it was just Kate Snow demolished this woman just by asking questions. And in the end, I think it was the right call to put it on the air because then the public got to see for themselves that there was no credibility in any of this. But yet you do have to you got to go beyond the lawyer. In that case, it was Michael Avenatti.

And what they're saying, right, as a journalist, you have to take your skeptical mind, look at the evidence for yourself, and then you're right. We disagree on interpretations, but the facts are right there. Okay, so, but that's what brings me. This is all a long windup to Jeffrey Toobin, who we have to discuss. I totally disagree with you on him. I know you said something like, is he like, he's got, he's gotten canceled for, you know, following Catholic doctrine or the Catholic doctrines, doctrines being followed against him.

That's a joke. I know, I know, I know. But you worked, you, I think still work at the New Yorker, but you've been there since 1996. And he's that he was at the New Yorker got fired for, you know, now we all know, you know, masturbating on a zoom call. And I let me let me ask you why you don't think he should have been canned, because I've definitely got strong thoughts on this one. Well, I have many reasons. I'll give you the kind of high level reason why I felt compelled to say what I said to the New York Times. I am an explanations junkie. I, and it's gotten worse as I've gotten older. If someone wants to do something, even something I disagree with, or ask me to do something, even something I don't

want to do, I am perfectly happy to entertain that particular request. But I require an explanation, right? You got to tell me why. You can't just say, oh, I want to do X, or you should do X. No, tell me why. So my problem with Condé Nast was, Jeff Toopin is an employee of Condé Nast. If you would like to fire him for whatever reason, that's your prerogative, right? He's your employee. It's none of my business what you want to do with one of your employees, but you got to give a reason. Some guys work for you, done a high level quality work for however many, 25 years. And you want to turn around one day because there's a report in the news media about them and say, you're out. Tell me why. Okay.

They did not say why. And that really, really bothered me. And I am now, you know, I have started this company with my best friend a couple of years ago, Jacob Weisberg and Pushkin Audio. We now have all kinds of people working here. And I think it is exceedingly important that people in positions of leadership in organizations abide by this principle. I wanted to make it clear to anyone who works with me that if there is ever an issue about whether you should continue to be employed at our company, and if we decide to let you go, we will tell you why, right? We will make it absolutely clear and transparent. And if we cannot tell you why, we should not be firing you. If you can't articulate why and tell the world why,

you have no business introducing, you have no business getting rid of somebody. Just say why. They couldn't say why. Well, we do why. You ever hear the saying, pictures speaks a thousand words? No, no, no, no, no. Well, we do. Why are you ever here? The saying speaks a thousand words. No, no,

no, no, no. Just somebody hit play. You can't rewind. No, no, Megan,

Megan. I know. Okay. You can say we knew why. Well, no, wait a minute. That's not true.

They, we have, I mean, you, you and I can sit here and come up with explanations for why they might've been upset, but it is incumbent on them to spell it out. Right. Don't leave.

I think it was plain as the nose on your face, or you could go further South if you really want to take it into tube and land. and also I, you know, I also think that whether an act is in, I happened to, and I know this,

I read this really interesting piece on this and I realized we're getting into very deep and interesting ethical territory. But I am one of those people who believes that there is a clear ethical difference between an intentional and an unintentional act, harmful act. And I am inclined to be far more forgiving of, and I, you know, this, what he did was completely unintentional. And that makes a big difference. Maybe. And also- I've heard it posited that it may have been intentional because it was so reckless to

the point where it's possible he enjoyed that, that it's possible, I realize he protests otherwise, but that he was actually looking to be an exhibitionist. Megan, that would have been a really good thing for Condé Nast to have investigated and informed us, right? Yeah. Well, that's true. But I don't think they cared about motive. I think you're right. But I think even if they didn't think it was intentional, we could all see how reckless it was. We could see how it was. Yeah. You you masturbate. You know, half your your colleagues have seen your penis because you masturbated in the middle of a work Zoom call in the middle of the day while

you're rehearsing for the election coverage, something that's serious with gravitas, which you are supposed to be too. In his role in particular, he needs to have the respect of the newsroom, gravitas, a sense of, I don't know, just dignity. And it was lost in that moment because he took an incredibly reckless risk. And the downside of that risk materialized, which I'm sure caused some of his colleagues trauma that, you know, you don't need an internal investigation to see the obvious revulsion of the women who had to look at that while they're just trying to talk about what Biden wins, what if Trump wins? You don't need an investigation for everything. Some things are just obvious. And so I just think.

But you do need that. It's not an investigation. I'll just make one other point, then I'll give you so I just think that plus his history, because he had a history with women that was problematic. I think for them, it was the last straw. I mean, CNN went a different way, right? They suspended him and then brought him back. But what do you make of that? Well, there's a difference between investigation and explanation. So I don't think it was necessary to do an investigation, although they did, by the way, but of course didn't inform us what the investigation came up with. I'm asking for explanations. And I think it's very useful. You know, this is not going to be the first time this kind of issue will come up, right? These are ongoing issues in this, particularly as we're in a period where we're navigating

this weird thing about working from home and working from the office. In a world where we all go into the office every day, that meeting pre-pandemic, that meeting would have taken place in the New Yorker offices and none of this happens. So we're in this gray area where people are at home, where they're stressed out, where God knows what's happening. And they're working on an unfamiliar technology, which introduces all kinds of complications in communication that didn't exist before, whatever. And the world going forward is going to be a little different than the world that was pre-pandemic. It would be very useful for us to figure out a set of ground rules for this new working environment. How do we do that?

Don't jerk off in the middle of a work call. Muting the camera is not an excuse. There's not an exception to this rule. Okay. But it would be very useful. Very useful. Remember, I'm not necessarily quarreling with the outcome here. I'm quarreling with the process. Now, I happen to believe he should not have been fired, but that's a separate issue. We're not debating this at the moment. We're talking about the most prestigious magazine in the world. Surely they can give us an articulate, thoughtful explanation of what exactly. Okay. Wait, let's move on. He's still got his job on CNN, so it's

not like he's unemployed, but no longer with the New Yorker. Okay. So let's talk about cancel culture and the crackdown on free speech in our society right now, because I know you signed the Harper's letter that your friend in mind, Thomas Jettison Williams, put together. Love him. He's been on the program. And I know you've spoken out about I mean, the letter itself speaks about how we're we're seeing we're seeing norms of open debate and toleration weakened right now. And instead, we're going toward ideological conformity, demanding ideological conformity. And to me, it's deeply disturbing. I've devoted my professional life over the past year, at least, since this whole thing began to trying to fight back against that. And the more you tell me I can't say something, the more I want to say it. It's just the way I'm, I'm built. So I was cheering the letter. I loved the letter, but why did you

think, why did you think it was important? Uh, well, to be perfectly honest, I didn't spend a lot of time at the time I signed the letter thinking about the issue. It just struck me. The letter struck me as being very kind of uncontroversial. And I mean, I was very puzzled by the kind of subsequent. Although, was it that much? I'm trying to think back to that moment. But it was just like a, you you know i thought it was a very straightforward commonsensical statement of um of how uh free speech is important subsequently of

course you know this whole issue has gotten more and more um uh uh heated um i will say can i indulge in a little bit of self-promotion here? Please. Okay. Go for it. One of the episodes of my podcast this season is essentially an allegory about this. And I'll tell you, I'll give you a little preview of it, which is a good, I think, a good way to explain where my thinking has landed on this. So I did an episode, I think it's the ninth episode this season.

Oh no, I'm sorry. It's the one that just aired. It's called, it's about a woman named Helen Levitt. It aired last week before. And it's about a woman who was- Yeah, she was a Hollywood communist who was blacklisted during the McCarthy years. And she and her husband who were both writers in Hollywood, um, lost their jobs for, um, like many

others who were on the Hollywood blacklist and, um, struggled for, um, you know, many, many years. And then finally kind of crawled their way back into Hollywood. And she had given this extraordinary interview, um interview before she died. She died in, you know, many years ago now, but a long interview. And I basically did a whole episode where I played you this interview she had given about her life. And I asked you to judge her. And it's a super interesting topic because I am, when I was a kid, I was the most hardcore anti-communist known to man. So here is a woman talking about how she was a Stalinist in the 50s. Now, it's one thing to be a communist in the 30s, but to be a communist into the mid-50s, not just a communist, a Stalinist,

someone who is openly standing up and apologizing for Joseph Stalin, who by that point was revealed to the world as one of the truly nastiest human beings in human history, right? So every fiber of my being, you know, reacted to this woman and said, are you kidding me? How stupid and blind and intellectually bankrupt must you be to cling to the idea that Stalin is somehow a force for good in the world into the mid-1950s when you are living in the United States at a time when we are actively at war with it? I mean, you know, so on one sense, the idea that we went after people like Helen Leavitt and held them up for criticism and

opprobrium in the mid-50s makes sense to me on a moral level. But then the way the episode goes is she then describes the effect of that kind of the blacklist and how she lost her job and how none of her friends would talk to her anymore and how she was excluded from her world and the stances she took. I also don't believe that she should have been treated that way by people who disagree with her. In other words, I don't think that excluding people from society because they take positions that are morally dubious or outrageous or simply unpopular is correct. I think we need to find a way to engage with people whose views we have real problems with without casting them out of society. I think the penalty is too harsh, that there is something about being cast out that is the worst thing you can do to a human being. And the parallels to me are, you know, I've often felt that as a society, American society is way too cavalier about the

costs of social exclusion. We continue to practice, for example, in the prison system, what's the term? Solitary confinement. Solitary confinement. Solitary confinement is practiced all the time. It's torture. To cut someone off from all human contact for extended periods of time is torture. We are way too, I talk about it in the episode. We, you know, there's a huge amount of data on school suspensions that they do more harm than good. That the fastest way to push a kid towards criminality,

juvenile delinquency, prison, all those kinds of things, is to suspend them from school for doing something wrong. There's got to be a better way, in other words, to punish or to ring a bell or whatever some kid who does, who screws up in school, then kicking them out of school. There's all of these things that we do in a society to push people to the fringes of society, to ostracize them, that are, I think, wrong and dangerous and really, really, really painful to the people that we're punishing. So that's the context in which I view cancel culture. It's fine to say I disagree with you. It's fine to say you have a set of views that are morally reprehensible.

It's fine to stand up to a Stalinist in 1955 and say, why are you a Stalinist? Are you kidding me? Like a Stalinist, the man who's responsible for killing millions of his own people, like to wake up, like it's fine to say that. It's like being a Hitlerist. It's like being a Hitlerist. It's, but it is not, it is not fine to cast someone out of society. I just don't, I, Part of me really, really. But what do you mean by that? What do you mean by out of society? Because I think, and my listeners know I'm very, very anti-cancel culture, and I think

most of the people who listen to the show are too. But I understand the point of the other side here would be accountability, they would say. And I'm removing from this discussion people like Harvey Weinstein. That's not cancel culture. That's a monster who got what was coming to him. But let's take somebody like Chris Harrison, you know, of The Bachelor, who said something controversial in defense of a candidate. I mean, a contestant on the show who went to some sort of a party that celebrated the

old South. And he defended her saying, you know, was it wrong when she did this party in 2018? Or is it just wrong by 2021 standards? You know, and he's kind of railed on cancel culture. Done. This guy was beloved. He hosted the show from the beginning. Sweet guy.

Chris Harrison isn't a controversial dude, but stripped of his role, publicly humiliated. To me, that's cancel culture where he said one thing that was deemed too controversial for him to, but, but he, what he still has his family, you know, like it's not like a Helen thing where no one can associate with Chris and he, you know, so what is, what do you mean cut being cut off? Cause losing of the job, the other side would say, well, he was a racist and so he had to go right. And that's, and he suffered an appropriate penalty, which by the way, he's not

racist, but that's what they say. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess I would say going back to the example of Helen Levitt or a kid who is I had a friend whose child was suspended from school for some extended period of time for something dumb he did. And he was kid, you know, he's, you know, uh, in his early teens. And my friend talked about, um, how incredibly painful in a way that she, she was, you know, in a way that neither she nor her husband ever anticipated how painful it was for their son to be suspended from school. She said it was hell. Forgive me for using these kinds of examples, but I think they're easier to make sense of than adults doing something wrong. Somehow in the system, the person who made the decision to kick this kid out of school for doing something dumb underestimated the pain that would cause, the suffering it would cause. Or didn't care.

Or didn't care. And I think that's where, to my mind, one of the first questions we should ask when we think about how to punish someone for something they've done that's wrong is how much suffering is the punishment going to cause? Now, on this, I will freely admit that I am way, way, way, way, way to the, I don't know what direction of most Americans. You know, I don't even, I don't really believe in prison. I'm a, I'm a kind of a prison abolitionist. So I'm, you know, I don't expect, but also, no, no, it's also, you know, I am my family now is I come from a very religious background and my family are now all part of the Mennonite church, which is a church that takes the idea of forgiveness very, very seriously. And I wrote about this actually in one of my books

at a chapter about a Mennonite woman whose daughter was abducted and killed by a monster, sexually abused and killed by a monster, and how even before he was caught, the monster was caught, she forgave him, publicly forgave him. You said this is what gave you your faith back. Yeah. That example has stayed with me very strongly, and I believe that we are called on as human beings to forgive. And forgiveness is meaningless if we only reserve that privilege for the easy cases, right?

It's only meaningful if we use it in instances where it's really, really hard to forgive. And that's why I wanted to do that episode on hell and love it. It's really, really hard for me to forgive someone who was a Stalinist in 1955. Really hard for someone who was as fervently anti-communist as I was as a growing up. And so I guess I would ask in these cases, you know, what is the role for forgiveness when people say things that are genuinely horrendous, or not even horrendous, but you know, no one disputes in many of, controversial. In many of these council council cases,

people are saying things that are truly problematic. And I would say, let's ask, maybe the first question we should ask is, before anything happens is, is forgiveness appropriate here? Well, I was looking at it just this morning because the head of the Olympics, you know, the Olympics are now underway in Tokyo. And the head of the Olympics opening ceremony, well, I guess, you know, they're going to have the opening ceremony, but they're getting underway. Got canned because it turned out he made a joke 20 years ago. And it was apparently he said something like, let's play Holocaust in this comedy routine he did, which sounds like a stupid joke to me.

I mean, I like the guy's now been fired from his, he's, he's put together the whole opening ceremony and they're like, we're, we're revamping the entire opening ceremony, you know, to make sure there's no, I guess, hints of the Holocaust Holocaust. And I was like, come on that to me, that seems like a perfect example of a guy who should say, I'm sorry, that was a dumb ass joke. 20 years ago, we were, you know, like it was a joke, move on, you know, not everything has to be a Cardinal sin. And, and to me malcolm it boils down to something you put your finger on in talking to strangers which is um that we are so

confident in our own complexity but we wrongly believe that others are simple strangers who we don't know at all totally simple i've got him pecked. He's, I guess, an anti-Semite or he's a bigot. He's something, whatever they're saying about this guy or Chris Harrison or whomever. And this has been one of my beefs too, that I always quote my therapist, people are complicated. They're complicated.

They are, we've forgotten that. We have forgotten all about that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wonder whether there is, I've thought about this, We have forgotten all about that. Yeah, yeah. That allow for apologies to be given, for forgiveness to be granted, for rehabilitation to be undergone and seen as kind of credible. I mean, I'm remembering years ago, my mom told me about, my mom's a therapist, and she told me about a case involving someone in the Mennonite community. This is the old order Mennonite community. This is the old order Mennonite community. I grew up in this part of Ontario with a lot of traditional Mennonites, people who drive horse and buggy like the Amish

and don't participate in the 20th century. And she was working on a case with someone who had committed a crime. And she talked to me about how the community chose to deal with this man's transgression. And they had a ceremony. And they all gathered in the church, and the man stood up, and he was required to publicly confess to his sin and to apologize in view of the entire congregation towards the person to whom he had, the person he had wronged. And there's much more to it than that. It was embedded in an entire kind of religious ceremony that talked about biblical ideas of forgiveness and what Jesus teaches us about the importance

of forgiveness and all kinds of things. But I'm not saying that that's obviously not appropriate for the secular world we're living in. But it was interesting to me. I remember she told me, I was a kid at the time she told me this. I've always remembered that because it was an example of a community that had thought seriously about what do we do when someone says something or does something that's deeply wrong, right? How do we cope with that? Right. What does the justice system look like outside of the courts, right? The moral sort of societal justice system. And ours right now is so upended and cruel. I mean, it's just really- Yeah. The word I would use, I agree. It is also impoverished. It's like there must be more than one way to deal with this.

And we have to get away from the idea that right now we have this notion that if you settle for anything less than the maximum response to a transgression. You are somehow condoning the transgression. That's where I have an issue. I can be every bit as outraged as anyone else by what someone has said or done, but that doesn't mean that I think they should receive the maximum penalty. Up next, we're also sure of our own judgment, especially when we use it against other people. Why the lesson of Harry Markopoulos should give us some pause. And then we're going to get into Little Mermaid. But before we get to that, I want to bring you a feature we have here on the MK show called You Can't Say That.

Yes, it's time for another edition of one of our favorite features. You can't say that or think that or do that or be that. Oh, wait, this is America. Today, we're talking about UFC, Megan Fox and Donald Trump. And the fact that apparently now you can get canceled for making a true statement. But you already knew that, didn't you? The actress Megan Fox was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week when she talked about attending the big Conor McGregor UFC fight in Vegas the weekend before. Among the stars in the crowd that night, Justin Bieber,

Addison Rae, and former president Donald Trump. Fox relayed this story. Take a listen to how she told it. I was in a row with Bieber and Trump was also in my row. Oh. And yeah. And I've never seen Secret Service in person before. So we had like 30 Secret Service with him. And he was a legend. That arena like was very supportive of of Trump when he came in. A legend. How dare she? Well, you won't be surprised to learn that Twitter was outraged with calls for her to renounce her statement. How pathetic is Twitter? Fox, to her credit, stood her ground and fired back. Quote, I do not align myself with any political party or individual politicians.

She wrote on Instagram saying her comment about Trump being a legend was an observable fact, not my opinion. Well, only some observable facts are allowed to be said these days. Quote, really loving this uneducated medieval pitchfork carrying burn a witch at the stake mentality, she wrote. Has she been on Twitter? Kind of it's bread and butter. Well, now she knows. Next time you make an observation about something you witnessed in a way that reflects a Republican politician in a positive light. Well, you better pause because you can't say that. Oh, wait, this is

America. And back to Malcolm Gladwell next. You know what's happening in today's day and age, it's not even always genuine outrage or it's manufactured or it is outrage, but it's total, it's an overreaction, right? Let's let sort of, we're so tribal that if somebody who's not in your tribe commits quote a sin, you just want the person's head on a stake. It's not really about justice. It's about a war and, you know, taking down as many people on the other side as possible. And that's how we're looking at one another. But what, what strikes me is, you know, back, back to some of what you've written, the hubris that we have in thinking we can assess another's character without knowing more, without digging, without

allowing for complexity. In talking to strangers, you make a very compelling case that you look at our history when it comes to assessing public figures and how bad we are at it. And you would think we would have emerged a little humbled when it comes to our abilities. And to the contrary, I think we're more emboldened than ever unjustifiably. And I want you to talk, if you don't mind, a little bit about Harry Markopoulos and Bernie, because I love this case. I've talked about Harry Markopoulos many times. He's like, where's the crappy green suit? It's not a nice suit. His hair is always messed up. His tie is always crooked when you see the old B-roll of him testifying before the SEC or what have you. And no one is listening to Harry. He just doesn't look the part. Bernie Madoff, on the other hand, looked the part of

the distinguished Wall Street guy. He had run the SEC. It's like whoever heard of Harry, nobody. And this is such a great lesson. And you may not know all you think, you know, in assessing other people, Harry Markopoulos and the men like him and women, they may, they may have the real answers and you may know nothing. So I'll give you the floor. Yeah. Yeah. It was an interesting case to me about, um, I devoted a chapter of, uh, talking to strangers to the Madoff case and Markopoulos, as you say, was a forensic accountant who is the guy who tries to blow the whistle on, on Bernie Madoff going way, way back. He fingers him appropriately as running a Ponzi scheme years before Madoff turned

himself into the authorities. And Madoff, Markopoulos repeatedly tries to convince the SEC and others that Madoff is a crook and nobody will listen to him. In part because, as you say, Markopoulos, the very thing that makes him very good at sniffing out villains, makes him not very good at convincing others of his findings. He's not smooth. He's not compelling. He comes across as a bit of a nut. When he was Attorney General of

New York, Markopoulos tries to give Eliot Spitzer a file on Madoff with all of his findings. And instead of just having a meeting with Spitzer, he puts on a disguise and wraps his findings in three different envelopes and sidles up to Spitzer's aid. You know, it's like, he just comes across as a nut. And of course people don't listen to him. But at every, you know, when you look at that case, what you find is that at every turn, people are getting everyone else wrong, right?

We're getting Madoff wrong. Markopoulos is misunderstanding the people he needs to convince. I mean, it's just like, and it's just this humbling reminder of the fact that our impressions of our first impressions of people, not just first impressions, the way in which we make sense of strangers is just not very good. And when you realize that, it ought to powerfully, I think, discipline your conclusions about others. You've got to keep in mind when you reach a conclusion about someone that you're engaged in an exercise at which human beings are not very good, right? And to bring it back once again to my Helen Levitt show, um, the thing that was so interesting about the Helen Levitt case was she gives this six hour,

seven hour interview. Um, and in the first hour you learned that she was a communist. In the second hour, you learned that she defended Stalin, even in the 1950s. So you hate her in the second hour and you think she's a moral monster. And then she starts to talk about her life and you start to have sympathy with her about her because you learn how much she suffered. And then in like hour six, you learn about all the other things she did over the course of her career and how she was someone with an enormous heart who did all kinds of other things for other people and who worked for all kinds of causes that we

do believe in and who helped people who needed help. And you understand that she was a complicated, nuanced, multifaceted person. And if all you do is listen to the first hour of that seven-hour interview, you see a piece of her, but not the whole Helen Levitt. And you're inclined to be far more judgmental of her than if you take the time to go through all seven hours. And that is a beautiful illustration of what I'm talking about, is that maybe as we consider these cases of people, one another question we should ask ourselves as when we consider these cases of people who do do things that are genuinely harmful, hurtful, immoral, whatever, we need to ask ourselves, are we seeing the whole person? At least, you know, I'm picturing more like my war analogy, because the tribes consider

themselves at war. Democrats, Republicans, woke, non-woke, whatever, however you want to divide them. And that's like to me saying to a soldier, before you take a shot at that guy on the other side who's got the gun on you, right? This is how they would see it. You should know a little bit about his childhood. You know, what brought him here? Why is he trying, right? Whereas like soldiers in a war say, I'm just pulling the trigger. It's me or him. We're fighting to the death. You sides, there was more humility when a reason all these well-heeled people suspected made off a little kind of like went halfway on their investments or withdrew some, but not all because he looked the part and he was the former head of the SEC and everybody else was investing with him. saw it and you get into Harry's dad owned an Arthur Treacher's. Are they still around?

I don't know. I don't know. And he saw grift. He saw people stealing. And so he had a different background that really worked for him. It inured to his benefit. It let him see things that the rest of us either didn't see or chose not to understand. It's hard for everybody to live like that. You know, you make the point we'd be in a difficult society. We were all as suspicious as Harry is. But you need Harrys of the world. And I do think that the main point to me of that whole discussion, whether it was on Amanda Knox or the spy Anna, who, you know, they suspected, but they never turned her in, have humility in assessing somebody else's character.

You never know. And you really should have humility in your own judgments because you're not perfect either. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's true, I think. So that leads me to The Guardian and the question you answered in April of 2021. If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose? And your answer, I love. The Cold War. The Cold War. A permanent, stable crisis is much

more appealing to me now than a permanent, completely unpredictable one. I was having a little bit of fun with that one. You know, I mean, one enemy, you know, one, it was kind of nice to think, like, in the Cold War, we had a nice stretch where we only had, we really just worried about, like, you know, one half of the world, one enemy, one, we knew what the danger was, nuclear weapon. I mean, there was something kind of comforting. I will say that when I was answering the question, I was deep into... I was working on my book, The Bomber Mafia, which came out a couple months ago,

which is all about the Second World War. And so I was in the world of clearly defined conflicts. And the thing that's so wonderful in thinking and reading about the Second World War is its clarity, right? Like, you really couldn't say, I don't know whether we should be fighting this Hitler guy. No, we were all behind that. And it's just like thinking back to a moment when absolutely everyone, except complete nutjobs,

in 1942 in the United States or 43, there's no, we're not having arguments about the moral correctness of this fight, nor were they having those arguments in London during the Blitz. And just like I had a kind of nostalgic moment for the idea that we could all be united around a common cause. I relate. I get it. I felt what you felt when you said it, like just and not divided inside.

You know, it's easier. I'm thinking now about Miracle on Ice and the story about how Herb. What's his last name? Brooks. Brooks. Thank you. Herb Brooks brought that team together. The American team. Sorry to defeat the Canadians.

To defeat the Russians. Oh, yeah. Yes. Never mind. It was in Canada. So you're on my team. Yeah. To defeat the Russians.

Thank you. And how he made himself the common enemy, right? The guys were all divided. They came from different regions. They came from different schools. And so he needed to give them a common enemy so they could bond amongst each other. And that's sort of what you're saying. We've been in places post 9-11, World War II, Cold War, where we as Americans were together.

And there was a common enemy outside. I say this with the Olympics coming up. You know, every now and again, whenever there's this moment where we actually do have a common cause, typically the Olympics is a good example. And then there's always a little pushback, like Americans are too rah-rah about cheering for their side in the Olympics. I was like, actually, no, I think we need more of that. Can we have, can we like Bill Simmons, my friend Bill Simmons, who, you know, the sports does the ringer. He has this great idea for the, for hockey, which is that national hockey league should be divided into two conferences, the Canadian conference and the American conference. And every single year, the best Canadian team should play the best American team for the Stanley Cup.

And the reason I love that idea is we desperately need more examples, opportunities where the entire country can cheer for one thing, right? This is a muscle that you have to exercise. And we need to exercise a lot more. I love the women's soccer for the same reason. Like, sadly, they lost the other day. Yeah, not looking so good. Those were moments when we could all get behind. Or what about like Mary Lou Retton? We've had such great moments in individual gymnastics, you know, where, oh, what's the name of the young gal?

She stuck the landing even though she got her carry strug carry strug and her remember and she hurt the and she stuck the landing it was like yay anyway they're that's that's what's fun about the olympics let's hope they go off because every day there's another covid threat this that or the other thing all right now i've got i i i don't want to um miss because we got a few minutes left like 20 minutes but we got to talk about the little mermaid as a mother of three children i had to wait patiently now not only have you done an in-depth study on this but three episodes three episodes on the little mermaid now why is this why

is this so important to malcolm gladwell well so many reasons, Megan. I can't. But wait, do people call you MK? Should I be calling you MK? You're allowed to call me MK. My staff calls me MK. People who know me well call me MK. Yes, you're in. Please call me MK. Kind of like MK.

Kind of like MK. Yeah, go for it. I like it too. So first of all, I'm going to say something that is going to blow your mind and also the minds of all of your listeners. I had never watched a Disney animated movie until March of 2021. Never. The whole thing passed me by. No idea.

I, first of all, didn't have a TV growing up. So no example of ever like and then you know i don't know didn't have kids so didn't have like an example that makes it more understandable so then i i read i read this essay written by this total totally brilliant woman um who's a law professor at Northwestern in which she talks about, her name is Laura Beth Nielsen. And by the way, if you ever want to have a fantastic guest on your show,

just call up Laura Beth Nielsen. She's the most hilarious, brilliant. And in the first episode, of my Little Mermaid trilogy, it's really the Laura Beth Nielsen show. And she just, she talks about how she was, she had two young boys and she watched Little Mermaid and she's a lawyer, a law professor. She's like, wait a minute, what's going on here? Like the notions of the law that are being represented in the story are all crazy like and this is kind of a hilarious example which i i went back i talked to her then i went back and i watched it and i was

like oh my god she's so right this is nuts there's so many problems that i'll start with laura beth nielsen's critique she points out among other things she's got a whole series of critiques, but the notion of the whole Disney, Disney's Little Mermaid, the crucial plot point is that Ariel signs a contract with Ursula in which she gives up her voice in return for a shot at being a human, right? Because she wants to fall in love with Prince Eric. And the contract cannot be broken, right? If she fails to get Prince Eric to fall in love with her, then she has to permanently give up her voice

and become basically a slave in Ursula's garden. And once she's signed, then there's no way for this contract to be revoked. Even King Triton, with all of his powers, cannot revoke this contract. And the only way the contract can be invalidated is that Ursula has to be murdered by Prince Eric at the end of the movie. And as Laura Beth Nielsen pointed out, that's not how contracts work. The whole point of contracts is that if they are, they do an enshrined justice. If they are immoral, the law has an elaborate mechanism for revisiting the contract.

This is a contract signed with a minor involving the sale of a body part. It absolutely can be invalidated. In fact, there's nothing the law does better than reexamine. That's why we have people who studyexamine. That's why we have people who study contract law. That's why we have law firms. We know this. And she's like sitting, so you imagine, there's Laura Beth Nielsen, this brilliant legal mind, sitting with her two like six-year-old boys, whatever, I don't know how old they were. She's watching, and she's just losing her mind. She's like, are you kidding me? Why are you teaching my six-year-old something, a fact about the law? Fundamentally false. And also, on a more serious level, what she's saying is what you're teaching my child is that the law does not embody justice. Rather, the law is a separate arbitrary instrument that evil people use to further their evil ends.

She's like, no, it's not. The whole point of the law in a democracy like the United States is it embodies justice. It's the mechanism, the beautiful mechanism we have created to ensure just outcomes in the world, right? Look how excited you are. And the fact, I am so excited about this. And the fact that it works and it works by the way for all the facts that you know this is a lawyer we grumble about legal mechanisms all the time

but i it they work really well in this country you know they do really well perfectly no i read so you said the little mermaid is a vigilante picture it's an animated dirty harry it's it's worse than that think Think about it. So we have this problem created by the fact that Ariel signs a contract which cannot be broken, which falls. And the only way they can break it is that she engages her boyfriend, Prince Eric, in an act of extra legal execution. He murders Ursula at the end of the movie in order to get her out of the contract. What kind of message is that sending? That's nuts. This is a movie for children in which we sanction an extra legal execution as a way of resolving

a legal problem. Do you understand why I pick on the little mermaid? There's so many movies you could do this to, right? It's like in, in a, what is it tangled or is it the tangle? They keep, they keep her up in a tower. The evil mother keeps her up in a tower. It's imprisonment. And, uh, and you know that in Snow White, that the evil queen, you know, she can't actually make herself into an old lady with the poison apple, right? Like that doesn't, I can't act, the mirror doesn't act. Like we're

not reality based in any, that's why they call them fairy tales. Hold on. First of all, first of all, you suggest that I'm done. Who says I'm done? Secondly, secondly, secondly, aren't you, you should be ashamed. You're a lawyer. You know as much as Laura Beth Nielsen. You sat and watched The Little Mermaid with your children, did you not? I did. I confess. And did you, trained in the law, did you turn to your children and say, no, wait a minute. Guys, this is not the way the law works.

No. No, because we knew it was fake. No, because in this instance, and only in this instance, I'm going to question your parenting skills. You have a responsibility to say to your kids, this is not the way the law works. And because you failed at that task, I realized I had to do a podcast episode about it. No, I've got to let them listen to it. You can do the cleanup in aisle seven that I created. I will say when I read them some fairy tales, I'll say. You know, I've got to let them listen to it. You can do the cleanup in aisle seven that I created. I will say when I read them some fairy tales,

I'll say, you know, because they constantly focus on the looks of the little girls or the Cinderella and everything. So I don't think

there's anything wrong with complimenting a woman's looks, but I'll always add, like I'll say, and she was incredibly smart. She was strong and happened to be beautiful.

Right. I'll throw in a few adjectives. Well, they'll come over and look and say, huh? But I understand all the messaging in these fairy tales is it is deeply problematic. Wait, do you have do you have girls or boys?

What do you have both? What do you have? I have two boys and a girl. Oh, I see. Now I've got it all. You've got it all. Now, is your little is your girl youngest or older? Where is she in the middle?

She's in the middle. So they're right now they're 11, 10, and my little guy turns eight on Friday. So 11, 10, and eight, and she's the 10-year-old. MK, I think the damage has been done. I think it's too late. It's too late. I think your failure to exercise appropriate parenting when it came to these fairy tales has given your kids a distorted version of what the law is going to.

By the way. God only knows where this is going to go. Not thought so that's just episode one then we dig into it further in episode two and you know here's what we're interested here's what we're interested in well uh here's what we're interested in episode two tell me go so i got brit marling who's this brilliant screenwriter and uh in Hollywood, who's a friend of powerful and really important message that I think women everywhere can appreciate and understand, right? You are required. I mean, think, right. You know this. And so back to our original point, when you speak, you better be saying all the right things.

Exactly. So it begins with this beautiful idea and then Disney drops the ball. Right. Because how does the movie is about how does she get her voice back? And in the Disney's Little Mermaid, the way this girl who tragically is required to give up her voice in order to achieve what she wants in the world, the way she gets her voice back is that a guy gets it back for her. Yeah, right. Always, in every Disney film. Now, in modern day, they're doing less of it, but yeah, the classics, for sure.

Wait, do I need to call up your daughter and just say to her, look, you weren't told the truth about The Little Mermaid. I'm going to, you have to make... Let me take you down a road right there because I know you said, I laughed when I saw this. I'm like, okay, have to make. Let me take you down a road right there because I know you said, I laughed when I saw this.

I'm like, okay, Malcolm definitely doesn't watch my show, listen to our show because you said, when Meghan Markle in the Oprah interview said, oh, that's what happened to me. And you said,

did we roll our eyes? No, we said, oh my God, she's so right. And I laughed because that is definitely not what I said. I was like, oh, please give me a break. Here's why. Because she was empowered.

Meghan Markle knew what she was getting herself into. Nobody thinks joining the royal family will be an opportunity to express all of your free speech rights. And my then six-year-old daughter, because I was going off to cover the royal wedding, said, and I played the tape when Piers Morgan came on, said, why would anyone want to marry into the royal family? She made the point. It's like you can't eat with your right hand. You have to eat with your left. They make you. And someone else makes your choices. I was like, yes. So I did my job, Malcolm. She knew. She knew before Meghan Markle knew. She should have

consulted. But no, I'm actually more impressed by your daughter at this point than you. That's actually dead on. She's the one that's actually dead on she's the one who pinpoints she's absolutely right why the only reason if to join the royal family is if you want to play dress up for the rest of your life and that's right 100 like that's that's right what it's about that's why the other girls who didn't want to marry harry pick up a crescent off that's she's all she's on the record saying like i didn't want to live like that who could blame her i'll tell you one other story um my one friend is a lawyer she's a That's she's all, she's on the record saying like, I didn't want to live like that. Who could blame her? I'll tell you one other story. Um, my one friend is a lawyer. She's a woman and she's a female lawyer in New York and she's kick-ass. And they went to Disney with her

daughter and her son and her daughter was around eight. And the Cinderella fairy godmother came over and said to the daughter, um, and who is your fairy godmother and the little girl said i i don't have one and the fairy godmother said well who makes all your wishes come true and the little the little girl looked up to her up at her and my friend the mom leaned in and said where we come from we make our own wishes come true the fairy godmother disney's like oh good list what have you brought me i love it well i love that you're doing important work like this because there is a problem with those disney fairy tales although i still read them and tell them and make small modifications

i don't know i feel like it turned out okay notwithstanding but i could be wrong they could actually be the source of all of my the internet tells me I have internalized misogyny. This is why Malcolm, we've gotten to the bottom of it. Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds. I want to end with something practical since I do have three children and they will be moving up the ranks. They're all, you know, middle school and elementary school, but someday they're going to be going to high school and applying to colleges. And I want, I want you to explain why the last resource we should use in choosing a school is U S news and world reports ranks of quote top colleges. Cause that's another thing you've been focused on in the way only you can with your forensic diagnosis of how these things work and whether we should rely on them or not.

And you've been taking our look at that and have landed on not. Yeah, we did two episodes of Revisionist History on what's wrong with the U.S. News rankings. And I'm going to get even as much worked up about this as I did about the Little Mermaid. So many problems. Basically, though, they use an algorithm to determine how to rank a college, which is itself an audacious act that you could come up with an equation. in the US News rankings. Yeshiva University in New York City, Gonzaga University in Washington, and Brigham Young in Utah. So a Jewish school, a Mormon school, and a Jesuit school. And a school where sports is everything, a school where sports is everything, a school where sports is nothing, a school where people do

drink lots of beer, a school where people don't drink beer at all, a school, I could go on. Like, you couldn't imagine more, three more different schools in America than Yeshiva, Gonzaga, and Brigham Young. And U.S. News purports to tell you that those three schools are roughly equal. How is that even possible? That's nuts. If I'm someone who's Catholic and living in Long Island and really wants to live in the Northeast or Northwest, Gonzaga is not equal to Brigham Young, is it? No, if I'm someone who wants to go to a small urban school and study

Talmud, how can you say that Yeshiva is equal to Gonzaga, right? I mean, just that. So the whole enterprise is flawed. But one thing I dig into is the most important thing they use to generate the ranking is what they call the reputation score. And that is generated by asking every college president in the country to rank every other school on a scale of one to five. And the question I asked was, if you are, so you're given, if you're a college president, a list of hundreds of schools and you give each one of them a grade. And my question was, this is the most important thing in their entire algorithm. How does a college president possibly grade every other school in

the country? On what basis do they make that judgment? How do they even know? Like, if you're the president of Gonzaga, how do you know what grade to give yeshiva do you go to yeshiva did you attend it do you go and ask people so i mean you this is just the beginning it gets worse and worse and worse and worse but the whole point is it's crazy that's that idea and so then i actually had a i got a this hilarious woman named laura rob who's a a senior at reed college I got her to do a little statistical exercise where she simply said, can we break down and see what factors correlate the most with these reputation scores that U.S. News thinks are so important? It turns out you

can figure out a school's reputation just by looking at how high its tuition is, how much money it has in the bank, and what percentage of its undergraduate population is white. That's all you need to know. You know those three facts. So like, that's not, you know, no college student in the, no high school student looking to go to college in this country should be at all basing their decision about where to go to college what should they be basing it on what if parents are going through this right now what's the alternate right because it's super competitive they've all read outliers and their kids have been getting their 10 000 hours of soccer and lacrosse and they are ready

no that's not your fault don't blame me it's not your fault but it is a thing now everybody's having babies in january because of your book pointed out the Canadian hockey teams. The ones born in January do better than the ones born in late December because of the age difference. All that stuff has manifested. I live it. I see it. I'm like, oh, damn, Malcolm. Although I didn't.

I didn't. I had babies in all the wrong times of the year. So it's okay. I don't blame you. So, yeah, what should they consult? Like, what should they be doing? Well, they should ask the question, where will I be happiest and where will I be most engaged? I mean, the simple truth about, you know, the overwhelming majority of American colleges is that they're all really good if a

student, if the student is engaged. You know, if you take advantage of the opportunities that college offers, if you get out of your dorm room, if you have interesting conversations with people, if you meet up with your professors, if you do the reading you're supposed to be doing, if you go to the, you know, the play that's being put on, if you do all those kinds of things, you'll get a great education. The problem isn't that people get bad educations not because they go to quote unquote bad schools, but because they go to schools and they don't take advantage of the opportunities that are offered by those schools, right? There's 200.

And by the way, the people who teach the professors at these schools, they all have great educations. They all get PhDs from the same places. They're all passionate. Not all, but it's like you don't go into that. You don't want to be a professor unless you like students and want to teach them. I mean, it's not like there's a shortage of good teachers out there, but the last thing you should be using to make your decision is how nice the school looks. I went earlier in Provisions History a couple of seasons ago, I did this whole thing about Bowdoin College and how they were boasting about how good the food was in their dining hall. That's not a reason to go to college, to pick a college, right?

Especially given the tuition these days. Yeah. And you know what? Honestly, I've lived this myself. I went to Syracuse undergrad, but I went to Albany Law School, which is, you know, to be charitable, it's at best a third tier law school. And it worked out fine. I threw myself into it. I loved every moment. I joined everything. I did moot court and I did law review and I studied, studied, studied. My brain was fired up. I loved it. I enjoyed it. And I got into one of the best law firms in the country. And then I transferred into literally one of the top 10 law firms in the country. It works out fine. People are so obsessed with pedigree. And I know you've made the point, we're ruining our kids' high school years, this time of life that should be wonderful for them, coming of age, first loves, socialization at its peak when you really need your friends, and social clubs. My high school time, that period and that way was wonderful. My parents

put zero pressure on me. We didn't even understand that VSAT was coming. And I just think people need to remember, you don't have to get junior into the quote perfect school on paper. You have to worry about juniors' happiness, well-being, well-roundedness. And we need to remind students, kids, that it's not about the institution, it's about you, right?

It's about your own enthusiasm, motivation, interest level. And these are fundamentally, It's about your own enthusiasm, motivation, interest level. And these are fundamentally, when you go off to college, your college experience is a test of your own character. That's what it is. And people will do everything in their power to duck that realization. They'll want to say, no, no, everything will be fine if I just go to X, Y. No, no, no. It's about you. What do you do when you're, and the number of people who squander what should be, you know,

one of the most important four-year stretches of your life, they squander it because they're indifferent or they're unmotivated or they smoke a lot of pot and play a lot of video games. Why would you go to, why would you go all the way off to college and spend all of that money and be surrounded by all of that wonder and learning and be sitting in your dorm room smoking pot? Yeah, and totally burnt out from a high school that was jam full of stuff you didn't really want to be doing.

All right, I'll leave it with this. The other thing you said to the Guardian in April of 2021, the trait I most deplore in others is, and your answer was, people who deny the extent of their privilege. I love that because you're very anti-elitism and I can relate to you on that. And you do a thing in one of your books on Jeb Bush

saying like, I'm self-made. I don't think so. I don't think so. And so I just wanted to say, I've never met you before. We've never talked, but it has been my privilege to sit here getting to know you and hear your take on everything. Everything. What a broad conversation. I've enjoyed this too, MK.

Now I'm calling you MK. I'll see you soon, MG. I hope I will. I hope I see you at Ozzy. And if not before, it's been great. Good. Thank you. Well, that was a fun time. I really enjoyed that interview. I hope you did too. If you did, go ahead and subscribe to the show right now and give us a download and a review and do it now because you're not going to want to miss Monday's episode. Ben Shapiro is back with us, one of my favorite people,

and I can't wait to talk to him about everything. In the meantime, have a great weekend. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.