The Megyn Kelly Show - Malcolm Gladwell on Gender Identity in Kids, Becoming a Dad, and Working From Home | Ep. 392

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author and host of the "Revisionist History" podcast, to talk about unintended consequences of his book "Outliers," how parents are hurting their kids by holding them back, parents trying to "game" the system, whether kids should specialize early or try lots of different activities, introverts vs. extroverts, gender identity in kids and nature vs. nurture, the truth about the power of parents, "desirable difficulty," the need for kids to overcome obstacles, becoming a dad and raising his daughter, the power of Hollywood, who has influence in today's society, the need for shared experiences and a shared space, the military in today's culture, trans activists alienating allies by focus on sports, the isolation of "work from home," backlash to Gladwell's comments about working from home, what's causing unhappiness in our society today, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find 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. My guest today for the full show, the one and only Malcolm Gladwell. But before we dive into our discussion with him, I want to remind you, tomorrow I'm going to be sending the very first edition of my new weekly conversation with you called American News Minute. Every Friday, you will get the top stories and the must see moments from the week straight to your inbox. Maybe some personal news depends on depends on what's going on. It's basically all the news you need in one minute or less. And then if you want to keep going on for highlights of the week, you can. To sign up, go to megankelly.com, enter your email address,

and you will receive the first one tomorrow. We've had such a great response from all of you. Thank you so much for signing up. And I'll be sending you my first email tomorrow. Again, it's megankelly, M-E-G-Y-N,.com. And then just shoot me your email address and I will send you an email tomorrow. Now to Malcolm Gladwell. As many of you know, he is the author of five massive bestselling books,

but it's actually what's great about them is, yes, they're bestsellers, of course, but it's the influence that they've had on our culture. You don't realize how many fingerprints Malcolm Gladwell has left on our society in profound ways in books like The Tipping Point and Outliers. He's also the host of a great and very popular podcast called Revisionist History, which I highly recommend to you. In his new episode released today, Malcolm revisits a controversial argument that he made in the book Outliers, one with which you may be familiar as belonging to Malcolm or not, but I'm sure you've heard of it. We'll get to it. And he wonders if he is responsible for creating one of the first steps that dads and moms take on their way to becoming neurotic helicopter parents. You are, Malcolm. You are. We're always going to talk about backlash you got for saying

it's really not in your best interest to work only from home. You might want to like swing by the office from time to time. Malcolm Gladwell, thank you so much for coming back on. Great to see you. Thank you, Megan. It's my pleasure. So I love that you revisited this theory in Outliers as the mother of three young children, ages 9, 11, and 12. I read Outliers, and I'm one of those parents that got swept up in it, couple of things in there. And I love that you take this hard look at it. Did I write a primer for neurotic middle-class helicopter parents. And then you make the point, stop the tyranny of birthdays. If you were somebody who was, quote,

red-shirted your child because he was born or she was born in the second half of the year, it may be because of this book. So I think it's hilarious that you went back and took this self-critical look at yourself and your theories. Good for you. Doesn't mean you were wrong,

but you kind of think people may have taken it in the wrong way. Explain. Yeah. So in outliers, one of the, one of the arguments that I make is how much your birthday matters in terms of sports achievement and academic achievement. And there's no, there is no question. It's a huge issue. If you've got a room full of 10 year olds and one kid is born in january and one kid is born in december the kid born in january has been around for 10 their life is 10 longer that's huge and we look at when we look at evidence of of things like um you know not just grades but how likely are you as a kid to be diagnosed with a learning disorder or disciplined or suspended or, you know, categorized with, you know, painted with some

kind of like dark brush. And what we find overwhelmingly is that kids who are relatively the youngest in their class are hugely proportionately overrepresented in those kind of categories and underrepresented in things like gifted and talented programs. And so it's clearly an issue. The question is, what should you do about it? And when I wrote my book, what I wanted was for schools to come up with thoughtful solutions to this problem, right? So, you can imagine, for example, an elementary school might say, oh, if there's such a big difference between an eight-year-old born in January and one born in December, let's divide our classes by birth month. Let's have all the January, February, and March kids in one class, and the

April, May, and June kids in another class and the April, May, and June kids in another class and so on, right? That would be one thoughtful response. That's not what happened. What happened was parents just held their kids back if they were the relatively youngest in the class. That doesn't solve the problem. That just creates another class of kids who are suddenly at the bottom of the barrel,

right? So it's like, I was like, this is not what I intended to happen. I wanted, this was like, this is not what I intended to happen. I wanted, this was a call, this was a cry for institutional change, right? For, you know, if you, I use the example of hockey, that if you look at hockey and lots of other sports, the older kids have this huge advantage and they end up being hugely overrepresented at kind of elite levels. The solution to that is for coaches and scouts to get smarter about adjusting for the fact that a younger kid, relatively younger kid is going to look like he or she is not as talented when they're very young. And it's not about talent. It's about

their age, right? We've got to get smarter about recognizing what talent is. We shouldn't just be holding everybody back, right? Which doesn't solve the problem. So I did this episode of my podcast, giving examples of ways to solve the problem, thoughtful ways of solving the problem, as opposed to just everyone leaving it on parents. We shouldn't be leaving this responsibility of giving your kid a fair chance to the parent, right? That's nuts. Design a system that's thoughtful and intelligent. But here's a question for you. And I loved your episode today. But my question is, at what point do the kids catch up? Because if you say to the school, okay, my eight-year-old now, there's a big difference between him and the kid who was born 11 months

earlier. I mean, doesn't that kid always have the advantage over my December baby? Or can you look at sports coaches and teachers and say, no, the data show by 11th grade, physically, all those advantages have evened out and you should be thinking about him as a future tennis or baseball or football star right now, just one who's going to come to life for you a year later than the guys you're looking at now. You're right. So eventually, of course, these initial differences even out. The problem is that we put in place systems which identify kids at a very young age.

And so that so, for example, imagine you have a gifted and talented program that you start in fifth grade. That gives the kids who are selected for it an advantage. So, they're now getting better quality instruction, access to different curricula. They're surrounded by the smartest kids. They're getting the best teachers. So, the other kids, they never catch up. They may catch up physically and biologically, but the kids who had that early advantage are getting the additional advantage of an institutional boost, right? That's probably

sports, right? You're on the touring, you're on the travel squad at the age of 10. And all of a sudden, you're playing twice as many games, better coaches, better, and you end up being better because of that early advantage. That's the, it's a real problem, Megan. I don't mean to diminish it. It's a serious problem. It just requires more thoughtful, to be more thoughtfully addressed. One of the things you point out is when we take these standardized tests on which so many schools base so many things, we don't account for birth date there either. So the third graders have to take the same test, you know, in New York State or Connecticut, where I am now, what have you, even though they may be almost 12 months younger than the kids sitting next to them.

And you were saying, what about having the kids who were born in September, take the standardized test in September, and the kids who were born in January, take it in January, like they don't do any of that. It's a good point. Yeah, this is a guy I was talking to this guy. So there are some, England is one of the countries that at least in the area of sports has taken, has thought about this problem most in the most kind of serious and profound way. So I was chatting with this English guy named Adam Kelly, who's deeply involved in trying to fix this problem in soccer. Because he thinks you leave a lot, he puts that you leave a lot of talent on the table when you don't adjust for these age differences at an early level.

Like there are all these kids who are the relatively youngest in their class. You think that they're slower and shorter and not as talented. And so they totally never get a chance to perform on the soccer field. Anyway, I'm chatting with this guy and he just makes this point. It never occurred to me. He's like, why on earth do we make middle school kids take a standardized test all at the same time? That's crazy, right? Why would you give that 12-month advantage for an 11-year-old?

That's nuts, right? And the idea that it's 2022. We've been doing this for, what, 100 years? And it has yet to occur to anyone that it's impossible to accurately compare 11-year-olds when some of them have a 12-month advantage over others. We haven't adjusted for this problem. And I can't believe it's taken a century and we're still twiddling our thumbs about how to address it. And this is, you acknowledge this in your podcast, that it's led people to make different choices, not just on when to put their child into the school system, because you can, quote unquote, redshirt them and keep them in preschool longer, what have you. But I will tell you this when going through IVF, which I used for my three kids, there were moms.

I just did it when I just wanted to have babies. And when I went to the doctor i did my best to have them um but there were moms i knew who were trying to game the birth of their children such that they would be born in january or february now i've got a september a july and april so you can tell i did not i did not game the system at all. But yeah, they actually hold on to my egg or my fertilized embryo until I can use it so that the baby comes in January or February. I mean, it's insane. Yeah.

I mean, it's just so easy for us to correct for this. It really is not that hard. There's this wonderful guy I talked to who's in Australia. Australia is also a country that takes this quite seriously. And he was the guy who's really into. Australia is also a country that takes this quite seriously. And he was the guy who's really into, Australia is obsessed with competitive swimming. And he was a guy, he looked at the sort of numbers

in competitive swimming and just noticed how the kids who were the relatively youngest in every age class were dropping out of the sport. They just, by the time you hit 13, 14 15 all the relatively young kids were gone because you know they start really early they got really discouraged and

they thought incorrectly they had no tennis talent and he has this idea that you can it's a very simple way to correct for that and that is you can figure out what a month or two months or six months of maturity advantage means for an 11 year old and then you could

just adjust the times at a meet. So you have two sets of times. You have the raw scores. And then you say, okay, we're going to do an age adjustment just so we can get a sense of maybe there's a kid here who's 12 months younger, but who's insanely talented. And if we gave him like a handicap in golf, just gave him a little handicap or her a handicap. We'd see, oh my goodness, that kid's really talented. You could do that with test scores. You could just do simple handicaps that just gave a couple extra points to the kids who are 12 months behind or 11 months behind. It's not that hard.

It's like, this is what drives me nuts. It's like, there are so many simple fixes to these kinds of problems that we don't do. And so instead, what we force parents to do is to do things like trying to gain their IVF or hold their kids back, you know, two extra years in high school. And if they're going to a private school, it's a hundred grand. This is nuts because we can't do a simple adjustment. And also, like, what are you doing to your kid if you're holding back two years? And he's now, I realize people are sort of just all holding back. And then it's like this. You point out, I think it was like genetic arms race or age arms race. You call it in your podcast. It's true. Because like, OK, well, I'm gonna hold my kid back. I'm gonna hold my kid back. And now the kid who was normally going to be the oldest is the oldest. Like he was just average because the other parents who had, you know, July babies or December babies, they held their kids back. So then the one who had the natural age advantage does it.

So, yeah, on and on and on it goes. Does nobody want to graduate from high school, Megan? Does nobody want their kids to leave the house? Is that what's going on? But don't you think if your kid's two years older than the kids in his grade because you're trying to game the system so much, that could cause a different set of problems that you might not want for him or her. Yeah. So this, I know I have friends with kids in high school and at a high school where there's been a lot of this holding back and it does create, there's such a wide disparity now in ages. So there are kids now who are, you know, who are shaving

in a class with kids who haven't hit puberty. And that's because the, you know, some parents have held the kids not just back one year, but back two years, they're coming, they're graduating from high school at 20. I mean, I was, I graduated from college at 20. Yeah, I was 17 when I graduated high school. This is inconceivable to me. So like Yeah, I was 17 when I graduated high school. This is inconceivable to me. So like that, and that creates, when you have those kinds of, it really messes with the kind of social cohesion of high school when you have these big disparities. At that age, when you're 16, 17, two years is a huge amount of time. And we're really kind of making the kind of social life of kids really difficult by having this kind of willy nilly, some parents hold back, some don't. Like I said, it's time for this. I could see how you could do a fair amount in academics

to even this playing field, but I'm not sure about athletics. I think about it. Even if I look at my son, September 09, baby, so he's 12 now. He is on the smaller side. He hasn't hit puberty yet. He's still scrawny. But there are kids in his grade who are his exact age, September, October babies, same year, who are bigger than he, who have already hit puberty, right? So like puberty is a factor. And if you're on the, you know, if you're eight months into puberty, you look a lot different than somebody who hasn't touched it yet. So like you're never going to be able to really eliminate that kind of factor. Yeah. All you can do. So you're right. You can't make it perfect, but at the very least, let's solve the problem of, let's solve the problem we can solve, which is, so here's a good example of an idea, a really wonderful idea that I talk about in the show. This only works for individual sports, although conceivably it could work for team sports. So imagine your kid

is a runner. And right now there's age class for running right and it's let's say the cutoff date is september 1st and on september 1st you graduate to the next age class what they're starting to do now in some sports in england in particular is you graduate on your birthday so everyone is moving up to the the next age class on their birthday, as opposed to on the same day. So everybody that, what that means is everybody has a couple of months as the youngest in their age cohort, a couple of months as the middle, and then a couple of months as the eldest. So everyone has an equal experience of being, you know, going through all three stages. And that's really important because

there are actually advantages to being the youngest in your age cohort. It forces you to be creative, to learn strategy, to figure out how to win when you don't have a natural advantage. There's also advantage to being the eldest. That's where you get confidence, right? So what you want is your kid exposed to both a period of being one of the youngest where they have to use their head and think and think about what it means to overcome a disadvantage. And you want them to have a period of being the oldest so they can get that boost of confidence. That's a very simple idea that we could that could really revolutionize a lot of age class sports.

You know, it got me thinking to my own upbringing. I was a November baby and I was not redshirted. So I was always one of the youngest in my class. And I had, you know, I didn't have parents who were pushing me academically. And then my dad died. And I know you just lost your dad too. So my condol when I was a sophomore in high school unexpectedly. And you know, you take the SAT about a year after that. My dad died in December of my sophomore year. So you take the SAT about a year after that. And literally, Malcolm, I showed up to take the SAT. My mom was a grieving widow who was 44 years old. My dad was no longer around. I was young for my class. And I had no idea the SAT was even that day. My friend was like, here, you need a number two pencil. I'm like, what for? She's like, it's the SAT today. Like what? Oh, that's important. Okay. So I sat and I just started filling in boxes and you'll be shocked to learn I didn't do that well. I was fine. I got around 80th percentile net, which I thought was fine given that. What are you just telling us at your SAT score right now, Megan? No, no. I bombed, bombed math, but I did well in English and verbal. That was basically how it wound up. But my point is that would set me on a track that would be very different than if I had aced the SAT.

And all these factors go into it, and you don't even think about it. As an adult, I'm just like, I guess I'm not as smart as the people who got into all these Ivy League schools. And I know how you feel about the ranking systems. I love that piece of your research. But you know, this whole body of research that you're responsible for has given a lot of us pause and reason to think back on, geez, my case, maybe I was too harsh on myself. Maybe a lot of us have been. Well, it's clear. So there's a really lovely book that was written by a friend of mine, David Epstein. And it's called Range. And in Range, he looks at all of the data on elite athletes. And the question he uses, he has this kind of paradigm. He says, Roger Federer and Tiger Woods, two of the greatest athletes of the last generation, both had profoundly different paths to greatness. Tiger played nothing but golf from the beginning. And Roger Federer played, you know, every sport under the sun and didn't really specialize in tennis until he was 15 or so. And David asked the question, which of those two very different models is more predictive of eventual success, elite status?

And the answer is the Roger Federer model. In other words, when it comes to sports like that, what you really want to do is to delay the moment when you specialize. And you want to get a really broad, I mean, Roger Federer played a lot of soccer, and you can see his soccer kind of skills in his tennis. He's got immaculate footwork, you know, the greatest footwork of any tennis player of his generation. You want a broad base, and you want to hold off on trying to decide what sports you want to specialize at for as long as possible. And that's a really interesting idea, and it should be, I think, applied in academics as well. We're rushing things. We're so caught up in the competition.

And we think you can tell at seven or eight or nine, or even at 17, what someone's potential is and what their path ought to be. The truth is, Megan, when you took the SAT at however old you were, 16 or 17, the world, you and the world, and your mom, had no idea what was in store for you, right? Like, no clue. And that should be, that's an important lesson. It's like, we're engaged in this fool's game of trying to make a prediction about human beings at this incredibly young age. And human beings are just more complicated than that. Well, you know, you're also responsible for the Tiger Woods phenomenon,

because chapter three of Outliers gets into the 10,000 hours. I don't know. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm defending myself here. So I make the observation in Outliers that 10,000 hours is a rough proxy for how much preparation you need to succeed. But I didn't say what the preparation should be. So it doesn't say to be a great tennis player, you need 10,000 hours of tennis preparation. It says to be a great tennis player, you need 10,000 hours of preparation. So what Roger Federer would argue correctly is that the best preparation he could do at the age of 11 for his career as a pro tennis player was to play soccer. Soccer was building the base and basketball and all these sports that gave him a wide base of skills that

prepared him beautifully for the specialization that took place when he was 16 and 17. Does it follow that you've got to do the exact thing you want to be great at for 10,000 hours? It means you have to prepare. It took me 10,000 hours of training to be a great journalist, but that wasn't all writing that was also reading and learning how to report and learning how to listen to people and learning how to organize my day and all those kinds of things fed into what it took to master my profession so i i will defend my i will i will defend myself on the chapter three i stand by no i you're right and i think about like on wall street my my husband's not on Wall Street, but most of his friends are. And a lot of these guys, you know, if you were a star lacrosse player,

you were going to get a great job on Wall Street, right? You know what I mean? Sort of, you know, that whole pipeline. And some people resented that fact. Some people benefited from that fact. But when I look around at the guys like his friends who have made it on Wall Street, that experience actually was not, it was not irrelevant to their success. Like learning how to handle life immersed in a bunch of competitive guys, learning how to be funny in that group, hang with that group without being weird or too outside the lines.

That actually is an important skill to survive in certain jobs on Wall Street. And you look at certain like great salesmen, maybe they, I don't know what the history could be, but maybe all those years, you know, hanging with their buddies playing streetball really helped. They learned a certain social system and a way of talking to people that would help them emote, relate, you know, sort of dazzle in a way those of us who are more introverted never learned, right? So like the 10,000 hours could be made up of all sorts of different things that you may not even realize are part of your 10,000 hours.

Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's absolutely right. That, that we need to, that's another thing. If I was revisiting, um, if I was rewriting my book Outliers today, I think I would have made that point more explicitly that, uh, we need to think about preparation think about preparation broadly and not narrowly. And you're absolutely right. There's a million jobs out there, you know, where there's a whole sort of set of soft social skills that are essential to success. You know, it's not just about, you think about being a doctor, you know, the way we select doctors for what would be doctors for medical school is to make sure they're cognitively capable, right? They have to have really high grades and test

scores and have mastered all these subjects. But that's only a fraction of what it means to be a great doctor. The doctors that really connect with patients are those who developed social skills, who are warm, empathetic, who can listen, who are curious, who have patience, all those kinds of... So it's like even there, when we say 10,000 hours of preparation is what it takes to be a great doctor, we're not talking about medical school. We're also talking about all of these kinds of social skills. I'm thinking about... I'm looking at my assistant, Abby, here, who's amazing with people. She's a great people person. She's an extrovert. She can handle any sort of personal issue. And that's that comes to her naturally. So she's put herself out there more in the world in terms of engaging with people. I notwithstanding this job and more of an introvert socially. And so it's better for me to have somebody like her dealing with people on my behalf. She'll do better. She'll get better results. You know, it's like, you never know what skill you're either secretly or openly developing that could really come back to help you. And it could be as simple as, I mean, in my

case, I have a fair amount of knowledge of like weird pop culture. Like I watch a lot of Brady Bunch. Well, I think that's helped me in my current job. I haven't, I can't exactly articulate how Malcolm, but I just have a gut feeling. Yeah. I love that you're an introvert. I consider myself one as well, but the definition of an introvert is someone for whom social interaction is taxing as opposed to energizing. So are both of us at the end of this just going to go and take a nap like and try and try and recover from all of this relentless socializing but this is different this this actually doesn't tax me at all because this is professional like in this in this forum i feel like i've got my superhero

cape on but socially like tonight i got to go to a dinner at my son's school it's beginning of the school year you go you meet every other parents that's stressful for me like i i feel stressed about i have to do it but i don't really want to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you take, you should take Abby with you. Oh my God. It would be so much easier. Slightly odd. She never goes anywhere without her assistant. I'll just lean into that. I'll be like, well, I'm a nice queen in case you hadn't read. I don't really speak to people any longer. Anyway. All right.

Let me pause it here. I'm going to take a quick break and so much more to discuss. I'm really enjoying this. Malcolm Gladwell, you're a genius. And I so appreciate everything you write and say much, much more with Mr. Gladwell,

Gladwell, or as he calls himself on his Facebook posting, it's like the competitor to sub stack. Oh, comma, M G get it Substack. O comma M.G. Get it? O.H. comma M.G. One of the things I love about you, Malcolm, is like yours truly, you're not afraid to touch the third rails. And I mean, the 30th of the 30 rails. I think it was talking to strangers. You took on the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State. You took a hard look at the Sandra Bland police involved shooting incident. And all well, it wasn't shooting. It was a very negative interaction that led to her taking her life. In any event, you don't care about touching the things that

are going to upset people. And you come at it from sort of a factual, hard, analytical angle, trying to usually, I think, give people the benefit of the doubt. So that brings me to your magic wand experiment that you're doing. You've got a couple of shows in season seven

released over the summer. If you had a magic wand and you went to scientists what experiment would you design that you cannot because of ethics you know those things like ethics so this is all imaginary just so that the audience understands people are no one's actually doing this stuff to feed to people but i did think a lot of these were fascinating including the one with a child psychologist dr joyce Benenson, who had a thought about gender, very timely, given the way we're talking about gender in today's day and age. So what did she want to do? I was calling up all these scientists, because i had this idea that every scientist must have in the

back of their mind uh what a magic wand an experiment they would love to do if they could wave away you know financial constraints laws of nature constraints ethical constraints they must have one that was my theory so i um i it turns out they all do. So everyone I called was like, oh, yeah, I got one. So I called up this woman who's one of the leading child psychologists in the country. And she said she wanted to do the following experiment. She wanted to take 1,000 baby boys and at birth do an operation on them so that they resemble girls, right? Make some anatomical changes.

And then she wants to do the same for the girls. Take the girls and change them magically so they resemble boys. So the parents of the boys think they're raising girls, and the parents of the girls think they're raising boys, right? And what she wanted to do is let the experiment run for 10 years and to figure out, would it make any difference? In other words, if your parents think you are a boy and you're actually a girl, does that have any impact whatsoever on the way you socialize, the way you turn out, the way you self-identify, the way you behave, and vice versa, right? And her argument was, she strongly believed that it would make no difference. In other words, the way parents treat children along gender lines

is ultimately irrelevant. A child is who a child wants to be. And the fact that a parent might dress you in a dress or take you to construction sites to watch front-end loaders or throw a ball at you or whatever, whatever things they do to you based on what they believe your gender to be is irrelevant in how you turn out. Now, I thought, do I know whether that's true? I have no idea. I thought it was super interesting that one of the leading developmental psychologists in the country thought this would be an interesting experiment to do.

And what was also interesting was that she said, you know, lots and lots and lots and lots of people would be upset by this experiment and would dispute it. And I thought that was interesting too, because I now have a daughter. Yeah, congrats. Thank you. And I sort of get it now. They are who they are. It doesn't really matter. I could dress her in boys' clothes and take her to football games and, you know, do whatever parents theoretically do with boys. She's going to be whoever she wants to be. I mean, I'm not sure I have much to do with it. My job is simply to kind of, you know, keep her, love her and keep her safe and

feed her and all those kinds of things. But like, in terms of how she turns out, in terms of her gender identification, I don't think I matter. You're not in control. Yeah, that's, I think, the argument that this researcher was trying to make, which is parents should relax a little. They're not, you know, it's not up to them how their children choose to identify later in life. I just thought that was interesting. This reminded me of that, you know, that case, the guy wound up going on Oprah. He was a twin, two boys, twins. They were five years older than I am, I think.

So they were born in 65. And they had to be circumcised. They weren't going to be circumcised. But then they had some sort of an issue with urination. And the parents brought them in to be circumcised. And they brought the one boy first. And there was a horrible accident. And they didn't have the second boy circumcised and then

they lived with it with the like the deformed penis for a while and they said oh my god we can't and they brought him they consulted famed sexologist money was his name money john money guy john money yeah money at hopkins what should we do and this guy was making his living on these types of theories and experiments about can you change gender or blah, blah, blah. And he said, the thing to do is to have a sex change operation performed on your baby, you know, basically give him a vagina and raise him as a girl. And these, you know, well-meaning parents, they were young. They had had the kids young and they might've been still in their teens even, and not particularly sophisticated, did it. So they have, it's such a weird situation

where they have the identical twin still in a boy's body, living as a boy. And his twin is now in a girl's body and they've chosen to raise her as a girl. And it's, and the whole, the long and the short of it is jumping to the, you know, the end. They couldn't, they couldn't do it. This boy who was being raised i wrote

down the name because i looked it up before today they raised him as brenda but he was bruce he was born bruce and brenda knew she was bruce brenda knew that she was not a girl brenda did all boy things brenda never felt like she fed in with the other girls and brenda became extremely depressed and by the time brenda hit adolescence around, they told the boys, both twins, what they had done. Brenda was relieved. Brenda was like, I knew it wasn't Brenda. And wound up actually going to David. I don't know.

She didn't like Bruce. I'm not sure what happened. But it wound up very sad. uh david now david got married tried to live as a man tried to sort of reclaim that you know his identity and so much damage had been done he wound up dying by suicide at age 38 so that's look that's not the definitive study because we don't do these studies and they're unethical but you know to the extent it has been done it has been done disastrously and one's true gender refused to go away you know in a setting where parents really did their level best to make it yeah no i mean i think that was the the point of the research i was talking to that's sure that's

the point she's trying to make that you know there was a point in our period in our history where like that guy john money he really thought that your sexuality something is as essential to you who you are as your sexuality could be created out of thin air by that way your parents dress you and the your gender your gender your gender yeah the the kind of identity that's kind of created for you by and his and is not true. We're dealing with things that are much more fundamental than that. But to my point, the broader point I was interested in was one that, it's sort of a theme that kind of runs through a lot of this season. It's that this is a reminder to parents about the limits on their influences

on their children, right? It's like parents need to be reminded. You're not in, you can, there's some things you can control, but you can't engineer the child that you want. It's wonderful to know. Yeah. Really, really important thing. And that also touches, you know, when we were talking about the before about holding kids, redshirting kids in a lot of the redshirting impetus is about the attempt by parents to engineer an outcome for their child. need a far more thoughtful and intelligent approach when it comes to red shooting, because it's not best practice.

We don't want parents having that notion in the back of their head that if only they pull this lever and this lever and this lever, they're going to spit out a perfect child or a successful child. You can change behavior. You can certainly teach manners. You can teach ethics. You can teach what's acceptable behavior in a polite society, but you can't change nature. You can teach what's acceptable behavior and, you know, a polite society, but you can't change nature. You can't change one's nature. You know, like the kid who's huge

energy and can't sit down is constantly going and going and going. You're never going to turn that kid into low energy, you know, and, and vice versa. You know, the kid who's relaxed, like it's better to lean into the nature that comes to you and help that kid figure out how they can make the most of that particular makeup. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah. So funny, you know, that as I'm a first time parent, so all of this stuff that I, you know, I used to kind of like, you know, wave my hands in the air and pretend that I knew what I was talking about when it came to parenting issues. Now I'm actually doing it. It's been quite a series of revelations. How old is she, Malcolm? She's like a year?

Just about a year. Yeah. Ah, so how about to about to walk? How has that? How's that been for you? Because it can be overwhelming. Oh, it's been fantastic. I mean, she's delightful. So I think, I think we got lucky. Um, but, uh, but I mean, I think all parents think their children are delightful, but, um, that's not true.

I hope your kids aren't listening. I mean, like periods of delight, but maybe not universally delightful. No, it's just been, I mean, the thing that goes, that I've been going through is the thing that every parent goes through, which is you discover all these things and you think, oh, I'm, you know, I've discovered some previously unknown truth about parenting. And of course, everyone else went through exactly the same revelation, right? So, you know, the big revelation that, oh, even at a year, I kind of can tell how this little creature is going to turn out, right? Like that's so weird that there's something essential already there, right? That is so true. All three of mine have the same personality now that they did when they were one year old. You could definitely project it. And I don't know. And it's not even necessarily like, oh, this one's Doug or this one's me. You know, it's not that either. Like they come fully formed with a totally different nature, personality. You know, they say that kids

inherit mannerisms, but they don't inherit personalities in most cases. So it's like, you may be dealing with something that's totally unfamiliar to you. I'm already bracing for it. So where are you living now? Are you still in New York City? I live upstate. Okay.

We moved up actually before COVID. And then that's from my work out of upstate uh upstate and yeah i sort of we've we've relocated those are my people upstate new york that's where i'm from first 10 years in syracuse and the rest in albany so i know that area well it's very beautiful upstate new york doesn't get enough credit for how gorgeous it is having spent a lot of time in the in the beautiful montana i feel like i can speak to this it's truly one of the most beautiful states in the U.S. I had not realized you started out in Syracuse. Mm-hmm. First 10 years, my dad taught at the university there.

And then he took a job at SUNY Albany, so we moved to the tundra farther east of Albany, New York. I've only lived in frigidly cold cities, except for like the year I did in virginia yeah yeah oh that's funny i didn't know that so what's the now at the risk of probing too far into your personal life are you is there a is there a spouse or a partner is that do i get to know like what the family situation looks like yes there is yes there is absolutely uh But no, you're not getting any more information on that. It's very private.

So I think I will respect that in a moment. But you guys are together and raising your baby together? Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh. Absolutely. Nuclear family.

Well, seriously, thank God, because it's a lot easier when you're on your own. And a lot of people do it by choice now, but a lot of people do it because a tragedy struck. It's I don't understand how those single parents do it. I have such respect for them're high strung, they're just going to be high strung. Or if they're, I don't know, like not that, like whatever it is, whatever thing you're beating yourself up on that you need to change, you need to change. Maybe you don't, maybe you just need a lot of support. Well, it reminds me, you know, when I was in my thirties, I used to go to see a therapist and of course they therapists do this therapist did what therapists like to do, which is to invite you to blame all of your problems on your parents. And it's awfully kind of enticing to do that because it's a convenient explanation for all the things you

don't want to take responsibility for. But now that I'm actually a parent, I sort of see how hollow that is. It was really unfair for me to blame things on my parents at that age. Not just me. Go ahead. And I was going to say, I was thinking about my own magic wand experiment. Like, what would I do? I'm not a scientist. But I talk a lot on the show about how it's somewhat facetiously that you need it. Your kids need to be somewhat damaged in order to be successful. This is my own personal hypothesis that if everything's too perfect, they're probably

not going to be that successful. There needs to be in order to create drive in a human being, something they need to overcome or feel like they got to do better on. And so to me, I like if I could do the magic wand, I'd have a version where, you know, trying to figure out how much damage is the right amount. You don't want to crush them, but you want to create a couple of issues that they need to overcome. This is why no one's hiring me to work in a lab. Well, there's a, the phrase that psychologists use to describe what you just talked about is called desirable difficulty. And the desirable difficulty, there's a whole kind of literature on that. And that is, the easiest way to think about this is in terms of learning. So is it useful, if you're trying to master a subject, to have some period of struggle at the beginning?

And the answer is it does seem to be useful. So I remember, for example, the first time they were teaching long division in public school. And my dad's a mathematician so i was i was uh ashamed when i struggled i remember i remember to this day sitting in class and looking at the at the blackboard and thinking i don't understand what's going on and this is awful because i should you know my dad dad is teaching math at the university. This is a problem, all this kind of stuff. And the result of that though was I took math really seriously. And it made me kind of work harder. It made me go and talk to my father about math.

All kinds of good things happened because there was that moment when I realized this wasn't going to come easy. That's a small example, but there's a whole literature pointing out how useful that kind of – Now, if the struggle is too great, then it's obviously a problem, right? If I was dyslexic and all the numbers were backwards, that's a very different kind of difficulty. If I can't see the blackboard because I should have glasses and no one's giving me glasses, that's another kind of problem. So you don't want the, that's why they use the phrase, desirable difficulty. It's to your point, it's figuring out how much,

what's the right amount of friction that we can introduce into a learning process that makes the learning process more meaningful to the learner? That's the question. Yes, that's exactly right. How much friction? And I'm not talking about just yelling at your kid. I'm talking about when something negative happens in their life. My first instinct is, of course, I don't want my child hurt, but by the very

quickly thereafter, I think, oh no, this is good. This is good. This is the fuel that he or she needs in order to a become wiser, but B maybe become more competitive or make better choices. I think back to this day, if I hadn't been so badly bullied at my seventh grade year of middle school, I don't think I'd be where I am today. I certainly would not have become a lawyer, which was instrumental in me becoming a journalist. I had shit to prove. I had things I was working out and probably still am to this day. And it's probably one of the things that makes me confront bullies pretty unmercilessly and for my whole professional life. So would I give it up? No. Do I want my child to be mercilessly bullied all of her seventh grade year? Absolutely not. But there's a piece of it where you're like,

how far can we get? How much bullying can they take where they get the, I used to say, desirable difficulty, but not so much that they can't recover. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the, I'm realizing, yes, you're, Megan, this is all, you're just preparing me for parenthood here. This is all very useful. Yeah. And your next book, which needs to be on your daughter and me. I think we can both learn what Megan taught me about parenting.

That's not a book anybody's going to write. Maybe Abby. She might. She has to listen to me all the time. Malcolm staying with us for the rest of the show. We're going to squeeze in a quick break. So fun to have you here. And don't forget, folks, while I have you, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel, 111, every weekday at noon

east. The full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. You can get the audio podcast, too, if that's your jam. Follow and download at Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you go there, you're going to find all of our archives, including the first time Malcolm was on. That was in July of last year. It was episode 133, just to make it easy on you. And one other thing you should know, go to megankelly.com if you would like to get a fun email from me on Fridays, which has the week, the week's news in one minute or less, not going to waste your time, but just the news of the week in one minute or less. And maybe some updates on our show on Strudwick and some on some other fun behind the scenes. Thanks. It'll be a good way for us to engage directly with each other without having to use Apple.

So, Malcolm, one of the things that you take on in revisionist history in the podcast is this is interesting. Mary Mitchell, gone with the wind and a star is born and how all these things may be connected. And drunk driving has a seam in the story as well. At first, I'm like, how on earth is this man going to tie all these things may be connected. And drunk driving has a seam in the story as well. At first, I'm like, how on earth is this man going to tie all these things together? But you do it. And what I love about the podcast is it's entertaining. It's well produced. You've got clips.

We hear from Mitchell. We hear from like clips from the movies. And you really set it up. And you have people who are experts on these eras and so on like weighing in so just give us like a a bird's eye view of that episode because i think people might be really interested in this so margaret it all started because years ago i read in some book on hollywood the fact that they changed the original ending of A Star is Born. So the script, Dorothy, Dorothy Parker, the famous, you know, comedian, New Yorker writer, wit, she wrote the one of the first drafts of that. And then at the last moment, they bring in these two kids and they completely rewrite the ending and one of the things they take out in the first stars one so this is stars one has been made four times

right the first one is 1937 i think then there's one in the 50s one of the fantastic one in the 70s with chris christopherson and barbara streisand and then of course, the great, yes, the great Lady Gaga one. So this is the first one. And in the original script, the male lead, who has all of the stars are born, the male lead, of course, is a guy who's got an aging actor with a drinking problem. He kills someone in a drunk driving crash. And what's interesting about that is that at the time in the 1930s, there was zero visibility or concern about drunk driving. It was an incredible social problem in the United States. Courts wouldn't convict people for drunk driving. Cops wouldn't arrest you half the time.

There was just no awareness or understanding that this was a major social problem, even though it was. So along comes a movie. It was like an overcorrection from the prohibition era, where it was like, now it's free for all. It was a free for all. And there were these horrendous cases of people who had killed multiple people in drunk driving crashes and were still driving their car and, you know, at large in society. So along comes this movie, which was a huge hit and such a powerful movie in the zeitgeist. It's made four times. And in this first version, it was going to make, it was going to have this drunk driving crash, where Hollywood would have, through the use of a motion picture,

alerted America to the idea that drunk driving has horrific consequences, potentially, right? It was one of those, if they had shot the movie the way it was originally written by Dorothy Parker, it would have had a social impact that I argue might have woken up America to the problem of drunk driving a generation earlier, or at least might have participated in a general movement towards an awareness of drunk driving. But instead, at the last moment, they changed the ending and they take that out. And instead, what you get is this kind of like saccharine ending to A Star is Born and no greater social impact at all. And what fascinates me about that is I've long been of the, and I explore this idea in other episodes this season, long been of the opinion, and many, many, many, many people smarter than me agree with this, that television and movies play a much, much larger role in shaping our concerns, our attitudes, our behaviors than we think. It really does. I do another episode on Will and

Grace. Did Will and Grace help win the battle for gay marriage? And I think the answer is absolutely yes. No question. And I think you can go, did Dragnet in the 60s and 50s fundamentally shape American attitudes towards law enforcement? Absolutely. I'm a huge believer in this notion that Hollywood is insanely powerful. And so here was a chance where hollywood could have made a statement it didn't and then as you later on in the episode i talk about the fact that uh that um mary mitchell who was the uh uh mary mitchell my my brian yeah i said mary but i meant mar. Margaret, who wrote Gone with the Wind, was killed by a drunk driver in 1948

or 7. I didn't even know that. Yeah. And to my point, she's got killed by a drunk driver and like people feel sorry for the guy who killed her. I mean, it's the weirdest thing.

I went back and read all the other kind of like newspaper coverage at the time. It's like this weird kind of, Oh, that's too bad. And Oh, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or Oh, that guy must feel bad. It was just weird. And you realize it was still in this era, you know, her here's, she's the most,

when she's killed by a drunk driver, she's the most famous author in America. She is gone with the wind is like, you know, the far and away, the biggest book of that era. And she's in, there's no contemporary equivalent to,

to the, I mean, to what, how big she was back then. She's killed by a drunk driver and everyone's like, oh, what a shame. And let's go on with our lives. And my point is, if the original Star is Born had kept that scene of someone dying in a drunk driving crash, maybe we would have felt differently about the death of Margaret Mitchell. Yeah, if the stigma had attached earlier. Yeah. And not to mention thousands

of other people who died in the interim before we kind of got serious about drunk driving. Wasn't it really mad, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, that successfully attached that stigma? I feel like I lived through that back in the the 80s where it was like it's not like people thought it was a good idea but it was much more prevalent until mad formed and started shaming people publicly and the billboards went up and then they got the states to raise the drinking age and sort of change the laws from state to state if if yeah it was i think that plays a really big and also there was an awareness you know i think uh if you go back to the 40s and 50s um uh this i'm gonna dig into breathalyzer here so right now if you if you if you have um a blood alcohol content that's greater than 0.08 we consider

you to be legally drunk the standard in the 40s and 50s was twice that. So what would get you in there? WI now. Yeah. I mean, you had to be so completely blottoed to get a DWI in the 1950s or 60s, 40s, 50s, 60s. That also was a huge part of it. It was like people realizing, wait a minute, like if you have four drinks or five drinks, you cannot safely drive a car. But that's, you know, it takes to get to blow 0.16, which was the standard back then. Do you know how drunk you have to be?

I mean, it's insane. How drunk do you have to be? Is that like, how many glasses of alcohol is that? That's probably, I mean mean it depends on how big you are and all those kinds of things but we're talking about many many many martinis to get there i mean even getting to 0.08 you have to like yeah you gotta have three drinks in quick succession i think to get i'm sort of it's you know it's these are these are yeah i'm but these are these You're spitballing. Yeah. But these standards are, to hit them, you've got to really kind of be pounding some serious stock all.

Now, when you say that Hollywood is enormously influential, do you mean, certainly I agree yesteryear, do you still feel that way even today? Well, this weird thing's happened, of course, which is that we've now so kind of fractured the media landscape that one show can't have the impact that it used to. So I mentioned Dragnet before, and it's funny, in a book I'm working on, I have a whole chapter on how Dragnet, Dragnet was a show, you know, about the LAPD, where the cops were professionals who always got their man, right, who solved every crime. And when Dragnet was on the air and was popular in the 1950s, everybody in America watched it as a famous, you know, it might be as high as like 30 or 40% of the people of the American households would be watching Dragnet when it was on. You could walk down the street, Megan. Someone told me this story. It's fantastic.

In 1955, if you walked down the street on whatever night Dragnet was on, if you took your dog for a walk on a summer night, you could follow the show because you would walk by your neighbor's house and they'd have the TV on and the window open and you'd hear a bit of dialogue. And then you'd walk to your next neighbor house and they'd have the next bit of dialogue. You could just walk your dog around the neighborhood and you could look in the window and catch up on whatever scene was on the television. So these shows back then were powerful because they reached everyone. And of course, that's not true anymore so it's hard for hollywood to exert the same pull and influence that it did in the 60s and 70s and

even through the uh 80s i mean i did an episode on will and grace like i said will and grace is one of the last sitcoms that really had a wide audience. You could say, you know, when Will & Grace was at its peak and you were a young adult, you watched Will & Grace on Thursday nights. I mean, you watched Friends and then you watched Will & Grace. I mean, there was no, that was, and today there's no show. You know, you could go, I remember going to the office and you would just start talking to anyone about what was on Will & Grace or Friends the previous night and they would know what you're talking about. You cannot do that today.

Even with something as popular as Game of Thrones, not everybody watched it. Like a huge collection watched it, but not everybody the way it was with shows like that and Seinfeld. Yeah. Growing up. Yeah. Well, I thought this was interesting because I know you're not a fan of Tucker Carlson. He's a friend and I like Tucker, but I thought your point was interesting

because you felt comforted by the fact that even though Tucker's got the number one show on cable news, he and the Five split that victory week to week, that he's only got about three million people watching him and i that raised something for me so when i was at fox that's about what i had watching my show it would depend on the night and i remember saying to roger ailes like how did i become well known with only like three million people you know why if i walk down the street do most people seem

to know me if i only have three million people watching me every night, you know, it's such a small percentage of the American electorate. I don't totally get it. And he did explain it to me. And he was saying, because it's a different 3 million every night. And it's not the same 3 million who are watching you from nine at 9 PM as are watching you at 9.59. People channel surf, they see a little. So way more than 3 million people see you in the course of that hour and way more than 3 million people see you over the course of five nights, et cetera, expanded out to the year. So I do think, because I know in the same way you felt comfort that Tucker has 3 million a night, I will tell you, this is why people in cable news who have the ratings that he has.

And, you know, you could say the same of Rachel Maddow on the left. It's at one point her ratings aren't there now, but. That's why they have such influence, because it's way bigger than three. And that's why they drive national conversations. And as you know, as being a journalist, the media is lazy. So they're kind of exciting to cover. So you just cut a clip or write about a clip. You'll get clicks.

It'll go viral. You know, like the sort of the after effect of network, pre-cable, when Roger Cronkite would have had, I mean- Walter Cronkite. Walter Cronkite would have had half of American households watching every night. I mean, so it's like- You can't compare. You can't.

We're in a different era. Literally, it would have been almost impossible in America in 1968 to find an adult who did not know who Walter Cronkite was, who couldn't recognize him on site, who couldn't. But Tucker Carlson could walk down a lot of streets in this country and people wouldn't necessarily know who he was. Yeah. Or any- Is this a good thing that Hollywood and media, our industries have been dissipated somewhat in terms of the power centers? I don't know. It's a really interesting question. I think it hurts us and it harms us and helps us.

It hurts us in the following way. And this is an argument that I, in my episode on Will and Grace, I talk about. It's a fascinating argument, which is that if you go back to the 60s and 70s, when everyone's watching one of three or four major networks, in those years, three major networks, and where you do have shows that are getting 30% of the American viewing audience on a given night. What happens is what they call mainstreaming. And what they noticed was that the best predictor of someone's political beliefs was how much

TV they watched in that era. And the more TV you watched, the more you tended to move towards the center. In other words, so television had what they called a mainstreaming effect. And it was two parts. It was because television shows to be successful had to appeal to so many Americans. If you know out of the gate that to be successful, you got to reach 50 million Americans, you're going straight down the middle, right? You're not taking some kind of wild, controversial stand. And similarly, when everyone's watching the same thing, it's possible, easier for us to reach consensus.

So I use the example of Dragnet. You know, that's a period in the 50s and 60s where most Americans had a very positive attitude about their police department. And it's because, in part, because they were watching these shows which portrayed, all of us were watching these shows that portrayed police departments in a very positive light. Same thing with, like, remember Marcus Welby, MD, you know? Oh, yeah. Now you're really going back.

The kindly family doctor. And we all, and I wasn't because I was too young, but an entire generation, everyone watched that show. Everyone was. And it's very hard to have polarized views about family doctors when everyone's watching Marcus MD once a week, right? Right. So that's what's and that's part of I kind of think that part of the reason for the polarization, just part, not the whole reason of American political life is that we don't have these unifying experiences in the same way. I mean, we have football and that's there's really very little else that we all watch together. That's one of the things, that's one of the reasons why people objected when football got political somewhat, you know, it was like, whatever your feelings are, we don't want it in our sports. You know, we just, same way people got upset about the Academy Awards getting political. It's like, could you please keep politics out of these things that used to be

untouchable when it came to politics? You know, we don't have that many things that will bind us together that where we don't have to watch it like with the blink, blink, blink eyes. Like I know they're going to punch me in the face any second now on my core beliefs or something. You know, it's sad because, you know, we grew up at a time when you didn't have to worry about that.

There were certain venues you could go to and just enjoy yourself. And you didn't have to get, you know, a lecture on how much America sucks or how bad this group is or that group, the other, something political, a political message. And those days are gone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are these kinds of shared, um, having a kind of national conversation about, um, can we re can we, can we reimagine shared spaces again can we kind of you know there's a you know one of the reasons for example that i think that the army and the the um uh the military

has remained so high in public esteem even as other institutions have tumbled is that uh the armed forces are a shared experience. You know, not a perfectly shared experience, but they are a place where people from every corner of the country go and engage in a, it's not an ideological, you know, partisan thing. It's on a very, very simple mission to serve the country and protect it. I mean, that's a shared space and a kind of neutral shared space. And that's why we continue to hold the military in high esteem in this country, because they have been very good and very careful about occupying that kind of common neutral ground.

Some musicians have done the same thing, I think, to great. I would agree with you for the most part, but I would say the rank and file of the military, that's true. But some of these generals have gotten pretty outspoken, Milley and what he was doing with Trump. I mean, I've had the people on the show, military guys, famous military guys who were just appalled that he would weigh in on politics at all. Like, just don't say anything, even though there may be within his circles, cachet and saying Trump's bad. And I called the leaders and I told him he's not insane. Like, be quiet. You don't you don't know what you're the earth that you are rattling right now. You're changing. There's a seismic shift happening under your feet that you do not have the privilege or the invitation to make. That's not what you were put there to do. And I personally still have resentment toward him for doing that. It's like, just be quiet.

Whatever you did, whatever you feel, I get it. You're entitled to it. Stop broadcasting it because you speak for an enormously important group. Yeah. Yeah. Although I think, you know, the institution of the military is large enough and grounded enough and rooted enough that, you know, we've always had generals who, General MacArthur in the 50s or Curtis LeMay in the 60s, who, you know, have been outspoken and kind of stepped outside of this, but you know, that, that can't, you can't rattle an institution as large and as powerful as the military with a couple of.

Have you seen the recruiting problems they're having? Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I taught a class at some years back at back at West Point. And I have to say, it's the most impressive group of young people I've ever met. Yeah. Extraordinary. And then when I was doing my book, Bomber Mafia, I spent a lot of time with some Air Force folks, pretty senior people at the Air Force, and thought they were uh i just came away in awe of that institution i mean just like first class people devoted to this country um built a a true meritocracy you know the cream rises in those institutions and they they, and, you know, I just, I just think they're doing something right. And it's going to take a lot to shake my kind of my confidence in those institutions. I wish I felt the same. I really do. Because, you know, I grew up revering them and certainly

covered so many of their stories during the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War while at Fox. And I've just talked to so many of these guys now who are angry at the way they're recruiting now, what they're prioritizing, what the messages have been from these top guys. Not to mention the massive losses we've taken while they've lied. They've lied about the progress in Afghanistan. So again, I think it's a problem not with the rank and file, who we should all be thanking day to day. But, you know, something's going on with our generals and why we don't we don't win these wars anymore. And we're misled people getting more political. It needs to stop. I don't know what the solution is. I don't know what leader you get in, in terms of, you know, commander in chief, who could stop it. But somebody needs to some good man or woman needs to get in there and stop it because you're right. That's one institution we cannot afford to have fail or get tribal or politically divided. So yeah.

Think about it this way. When an institution is that large, it's like a family. Imagine a big family. You could love the whole family while you understand that Uncle Ted's a little crazy cousin. Uncle Ted is chairman of the Joint Chiefs. No, no, no. The point is, when a family gets big enough, by definition, it's going to include some people who are, you know, a little strange or a little wacky. But that doesn't mean you turn your back on the family. You understand that, like, you know, when families, if you got, like, you know, five kids and their kids and cousins and all coming over for Thanksgiving dinner, it's going to, you know, not everything's going to go your way, but it's fine. I hope you're right. I hope you're right. I mean, I talking to you, listening to you, it always brings about sort of a peaceful effect on

me because I think in general, I don't know if you, if you would describe yourself as an optimist, but you have a way of being like, it's going to work out. Let's calm down. Don't freak out. And I'm more in the business of daily news where it's like, oh shit, more bad news on all the fronts I care about. And I would also describe myself as generally sunny. I mean, I don't think I'm a news person,

so there's only so sunny you can be. But I feel like you are just more like, big picture, zooming out, we're good. Is that true of you? I mean, yes, I am an optimist. But I'm also much, I think by, and I suspect you're the same way, but I'm most interested in people's intentions. So my first question is always, are that person or that institution, are their intentions good? Now, I may disagree with the direction they're going or with the result of their actions. But if I believe their intentions to be pure, then I'm inclined to say it's all going to be fine. If you have a country... So to go back to the military,

for example, I firmly believe that the intentions of the leadership of all the branches of the military are pure. I have no doubt whatsoever, they absolutely have the best interests of the country at heart. Now, they have a very difficult problem, which is they have to make those intentions real, every person of my generation has difficulty figuring out the, you know, how the youngest generation motivates them, how they think, how they behave. It's no different for them. They're facing the same issues that every leader in this country is facing. But are their intentions good? And the answer is, yes, they are. I mean, you don't, every one of the military leaders could make 10 times more money if

they went into the private sector. And they chose to stay where they are and to do what they do. And, you know, that gives me enormous faith and confidence in what they do. What do you make of, I know you had a panel that you moderated recently at MIT on transgender people in sports, and in particular particular transgender women in women's sports. Just to be clear, that's somebody who was born a biological male who then transitioned and said that they were female and then competed against biological females. So this is obviously a big issue. You know, that's a situation where, and maybe you weren't using it this broad brush, but intention, I don't think intention does matter there, right? There it's like, is the process fair or isn't it? When I read your own thoughts about your MIT panel, I thought you had a more nuanced view

on this, but your overall message was kind of like, take a deep breath, calm down. And I would say, definitely, I've been living more in the camp of do not calm down, fight this. We shouldn't allow this. We should find a fair and equitable solution for everyone, including the trans athletes, but not at the expense of girls, which is just in my experience, Malcolm, it's always the girls who lose. And if women like me don't stand up to say, no, stop this, they're going to continue to lose. Yeah. Well, I guess I would say another thing. I mean, the point I made when I wrote about this in my bulletin was there are a whole long list of

very serious issues, problems, challenges facing the trans community. And I don't think participation in sports is at the top of the list. In competitive sports, it's at the top of the list. I think there's, you know, if you look at- For them, for their issues and their groups. For their issues, suicide rates, social acceptance. I mean, rates of depression and mental, I mean, all these kinds of things are hugely elevated in this community. They have a really rough time of it. And my advice to the community, I mean, I realize it shouldn't, well, it's the wrong way to say it. But when I was thinking about this problem, I thought, you know, that there was undue attention being focused on this question of participation in elite sports, and not enough attention being focused on much more serious issues that affect

a lot more people. The bottom line about elite sports is the number of trans people who are competing at the elite level is really, really, really small. It's tiny. It's's like you know it's a handful of people it's like leah thomas was at who was a trans swimmer who swam in the ncaa's uh a biological male who uh transitioned to uh and and competed as a woman in the and in ncaa swimming it's not like there's 50 people like that there was one, right? So the question was, we were spending a lot of time and energy as a country arguing about one case. Now, will there be other cases?

Yes, there will. But I wanted to put it, I think the most important first thing to do is to put it in perspective. If we're going to have an argument or a discussion as a society about trans issues, let's talk about the fact that these kids have a really rough time of it and they're depressed and they're being bullied and they're committing suicide at rates that dwarf other kids. Those are real, serious, profound issues that ought to engage the empathy of all of us.

Somebody wants to compete as a woman in the NCAA swimming. I mean, I just, it doesn't belong in the same conversation. And second, who's putting it like, what are you saying? Are you saying that the trans community should stop entering those races, which makes it their issues fade away. There's other issues fade away and the sports thing becomes number one. Are you saying the women should just deal with Leah Thomas and be quiet because the trans community has a lot of problems?

Uh, no, I mean the former. So my concern was that in making the issue of trans participation in elite sports front and center, um, the trans community was losing a lot of potential allies. They were angering and alienating people who would otherwise 100% be on their side. And this is a time in the life of that community where they need allies. They should not be pushing people away by pursuing a marginal issue. If you look back at every outsider group that is trying to win the respect of a mainstream society has had to make very hard tactical and strategic choices. I've read a lot about the civil rights community

in the sixties, they made choices like this every day, right? What are we going to fight? And what are we not going to fight? When are we going to fight? I'm going to be not going to fight, right? We can't do it all at once. And we can't, we can't get everything we want in one go. And we're going to need the support of, of a wide base of Americans, if we're going to succeed. And maybe that's going to take 10 or 20 years. Those were the calculations people like Martin Luther King made in the 1950s, and that's how they managed to succeed as well as they did. And I just think that kind of strategic and tactical consideration ought to enter into the way we think about trans participation

in elite sports as well. I just don't think this is the time to be pushing this. That is a very good point. It's been a dramatic and remarkable turnaround in the way we talk about trans issues and trans people from just 12 years ago to now. I mean, I remember cause I have somebody who's trans in my family and, um, what two, two people with my husband's family in mind. And, um, I remember being on the air, like trying to get people to be a little kinder in the way that they were talking about trans people, like Chaz Bono came out, that was one person, and just trying to like slow people down and say, no, this really is a thing. There are some people who know, but from the time they're two, and so on. And I think people were coming along in terms of being accepting and being kinder

and being, you know, just more generous and understanding. And then it went like overnight to, they're going to be in the, in the locker room with your teenage daughter and they're going to be in the same bathroom and they're going to be on the same sports team. And they're going to be, and if you better shut the hell up about it, if you have a problem and you better use the proper pronouns, or you could actually in places like Canada, as you know, be arrested. It was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That just makes everyone retreat and say, I'm out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I don't think we'll look back on this and say that, yeah, the way this thing has been, this whole issue has been handled on all sides has not been exemplary over the last, um, uh, over the last. And it's like, yeah, I'm, I'm going to, yeah, I think that's,

I think that's fair. I'm going to pause it here because Malcolm got in trouble because he thinks it's a good idea for some people to go to the office sometimes. Another one of his radical ideas. Um, and we'll talk to him about why he believes that and the, the response to him saying that. You stepped in it in a way I'm sure you never thought you're going to be stepping in it by

saying, as I understand it, Malcolm, you went on the podcast with Stephen Bartlett, who hosts Diary of a CEO. It's not in the best interests for collaborative or creative workers to work from home and suggested that being physically present in the office allows creative workers to work from home and suggested that being physically present in the office allows for workers to obtain a sense of belonging and diminished. Oh, and said, it's really not a good idea to just sit in your pajamas all day to work. So the stay-at-home crowd lost its mind and took offense. And I'll just give you one example because this is kind of a fun one. Someone online named Theodorable writes, I have never felt part of something or a sense of belonging working in a corporate office. Working from home and getting distance from that toxic environment is a blessing. Malcolm Gladwell can go fuck himself, especially because he also works

from home. Then he goes on with another not nice word. So that was kind of funny. Been there. So what was your point and what did you make of the backlash? Well, it was this weird thing. First of all, I don't work from home. But at the height of this whole thing

was a hilarious example of our contemporary social media. At the height of this, the Daily Mail, we have an office, Pushkin Upstate, where about eight of us or so work. And when we moved in, I tweeted a picture of my office. The Daily Mail found that picture that I tweeted of my office and said, this is a picture of Malcolm's home office that he works from. He works from home. I was like, no, it's not. It's a picture of my office where I go every day.

So I think a lot of the reaction was people who mistakenly thought that I was not practicing what I preach. There was a time in my life, 20 years ago, when I didn't go into an office, but that was because I didn't have an office. I was a freelance writer. And, you know, so there was nowhere to go, even if I wanted to. I really like offices. I didn't, I don't have, you know, the other thing that happened was this weird thing was I went on this podcast and the host of the podcast has very strong feelings about,

he was the guy talking about it. And I was like, yeah, you know, for, and I was just talking about my experiences that when we're doing creative collaborative stuff, it's a lot easier when we're all together. That's really my point. And it, which doesn't mean that everyone has to go into the office every day. I mean, there's a lot easier when we're all together. That's really my point. And it, which doesn't mean that everyone has to go into the office every day.

I mean, there's a lot of work that you do when you're doing solid. When I'm writing, which I do some portion of the time. Does it matter where I am? Not particularly. If you're doing some people on our team, this whole chunk of the work that's solitary,

they should be free to do it wherever they want. But when we're doing stuff where we're working together, it's just easier and more fun when we are physically together. That was my point. I don't think there's anything controversial about that. There isn't. A lot of people, and there are some people who have jobs where there legitimately isn't much collaboration.

Right. And I, those people, and they've been going into offices for no reason and are resentful about it, rightly. And I'm, I think it's working for a moment for those kinds of people. Totally. Like, why would you spend two hours a day commuting if there's no function, no purpose to being in an office with people? But there usually

is some purpose i mean that's the thing people have stayed at home because of the pandemic and now they don't want to go back and i think they they lash out and anyone who suggests they must or should or it would be in the best interest of themselves their town etc and you got swept up in that for some ridiculous reason. I will say this, it's having a real effect, people staying at home, people not going back to the office. New York City Mayor Eric Adams and San Francisco Mayor London Breed

urging workers and sectors of tech and finance to please return to the office, saying we need it to help the small businesses that rely on all the office foot traffic. Latest stat, New York's office occupancy right now, 36% have returned. 36. That's too low. In San Francisco, two-thirds of the city's workforce has returned.

San Fran officials said remote work cost it 400 million in tax revenues last year. I could see it in New York as business after business closed up without Wall Street being there, without the law firms being there, without a lot of the media being there. You know, lunch, but you can't go out to lunch in New York anymore. It's like half the places in the city are gone. Even institutions, the 21 Club and the Panera Bread, you know, like just drying up, going away, never to return. Yeah, they may. I mean, Megan, I think there's there is an important point here, and that is that a lot of employers, not a lot, there are employers who took their employees for granted and who had workplaces that weren't functional, that were

toxic, that weren't collaborative, fun places to go. And asking someone to go on a lengthy commute to join in an experience that's not meaningful is ludicrous. You can't. And so I think that there's a possibility here of a real valuable wake-up call, which is that this is a kind of an opportunity for a lot of employers to kind of fix what was wrong. And if they can fix what was wrong, people will happily, I think, not every, like I said,

not everyone has to come back, but some people, if they can find value in coming back, will come back. So I think the best way to say this is to kind of frame this is not to blame employees for not following demands,

but to ask employers to rethink the way they structure their workplace environments. I mean, I will say I work from home now. I have a studio in my home. And when I launched this show, I hired all employees who could work from their homes. You know, it was virtually all of them can do most of the work from their homes other than when we're live in the air and they might have to move during those two hours.

And I like being able to offer that to my staff i mean i i think it's a perk of this job where i'm not watching you and i don't i just trust you to get your work done um but i do believe in the time-honored tradition of office buildings and people coming together and you know i miss i would love to have a work environment where my entire team was with me. Unfortunately, I hired people who work in Canada. They work in Dallas. They work all over the country. So it's like it's not going to happen unless I want to fire everybody.

And don't worry, team, I don't. But I think we are losing something if we shift to this sort of remote work is the default. And the office is only important if you must be seen. I don't know. I think we're already so isolated as a society. The iPhone's torn us apart. The bowling leagues are gone. And now we're going to get rid of in-office time together. I don't think this is going to have a good effect. Yeah. Well, I mean, certainly I read the most interesting thing I read about this was

an observation by the guy who runs Gallup. Gallup has been doing polls on people's happiness, satisfaction with their life for decades. What they've noticed over the last 15 years or so is that it used to look, if you could have asked people to rank their quality of life, zero to 10, 10 is great, zero is bad. It used to look like a bell curve, right? Most of us were in the middle, five, six, seven, some people on the fringes. And what they've noticed now is that the number of people who say 10 out of 10 has doubled. And the number of people who say zero out of 10 has tripled. So there's no,

it's not a bell curve anymore. Now there's a portion of people are really, really happy with the way their lives are going. And a portion of people are very unhappy. And that's what we should be concerned about. We should be asking, who are the happy people? What are they doing that's working for them? And how can we help them continue they doing that's working for them? And how can we help them continue to do what's working for them? But way more importantly, who are the unhappy people? These people who are at zero. And what do they need from us? And if it's the case that we can move people who are zero, maybe they would be happier in a social environment of an office, if that office was socially, was kind of a meaningful place to work.

I don't know. But I think that the right question is to sort of talk to those two groups and figure out what's going on. Because you can't have a functional society where a huge proportion of your workforce says, calls themselves, says that they're zero out of 10 on life satisfaction. I mean, that's crazy, right? That's completely non-sustainable. I wonder if it's real. There's a trend socially, especially for the younger set, to sort of lean into everything's miserable and I suffer from all these afflictions and

somebody needs to solve it. You know, I don't know the stiff upper lip approach of your, the country of your birth. We've kind of lost touch with that here in America. So I, I do wonder what, what's in that zero out of 10 attitude. Yeah. But I mean, it's hard to believe that nothing's going on, right? I mean, it's such a striking change. I admit, yeah, there may be different kind of contemporary ideas about how you represent your emotional state that are feeding into this. But in the other hand, we have lots of other data that says about rising levels of psychological distress and unhappiness and loneliness and all those kinds of things. So I think something real is going on. And I would like, like I said, before we kind of make these kind of strict policies about where we should or shouldn't be working or how we should or shouldn't be working. I'd like to investigate the unhappiness more and just ask the question, well, how can I make you happy?

How can I make people like that happier? And then, and work from that observation. I think that's the right way to go. Do you think on a wider scale, it is possible for someone to become happier? Like, do you think we have a base level of happiness that can be adjusted meaningfully up or down? Yeah, I think, totally do think that. I think there are, there are, let me give you two examples. If I took your, you take someone, I, you know, I'm Canadian and I'm very aware there's a highway that runs across the bottom of Ontario called the 401. If you commute, if you live outside Toronto, which many people have to do because Toronto is incredibly expensive,

and you have to work in Toronto, you commute on the 401, it's hell. You could spend an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half at night, or you don't even know. It could be two hours one day. It could be three hours one day. It could be three hours one day. And if we were to create a work life for somebody where they no longer had that hellish commute, that would make them happier. Absolutely.

Three more hours with their family. Another hour of exercise. I mean, you can just list all the reasons that would. There are things where somebody who has anxiety about their health insurance, that's keeping them up at night. If you can resolve that anxiety, can you make them happier? Yes, you can. I mean, you can't solve deeper existential questions about, you know, those are things people have to work out with their loved ones and their, you know, pastor or whoever their therapist which you can solve as a society we can solve

these kinds of of uh nuts and bolts questions about how people's lives are organized and asking you know you know this the the the unaffordability of housing forced many people to live miles and miles and miles from their jobs. And that made them unhappy. It totally did. I mean, that's why many didn't want to come back to work. And I, you know, don't blame them one iota. Money issues are a stress that is tough to, I mean, like there's only one solution to those and it's to somehow solve them.

Like that is a sickness in the pit of your stomach that you must address in order to get rid of that stress. But on the commute and other things, you know, I remember my old pal, Dr. Phil saying, your life is the way it is because you set it up that way. And we all, we do have choices and you know, it's like you can get another job, you can find another place to live. I've done it. I did the terrible commute from Baltimore into DC for a year of my life and don't recommend it. But, yeah, you're empowered.

You're empowered. And if your employer won't give you what you want, you're empowered to find another job. There's never been a better time. Malcolm, it's such a pleasure. Good luck with your beautiful daughter. Enjoy Upstate. And I hope we talk again. Me too.

Thanks, Megan. All the best. I want to tell you we have another fascinating thinker joining us on Monday. Russell Brand will be on the show for the first time. That's exciting. I interviewed him one time at NBC and halfway through the interview, he goes, I don't know why people say the things they say about you. You're quite enjoyable. So naturally, I wanted to meet him again. We'll be speaking live in person at Sirius XM headquarters on Monday.

In the meantime, download the show, youtube.com, and check out megankelly.com to hear from me personally tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.