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

00:00:00.540 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:12.040 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, and happy Friday.

00:00:16.440 Oh, do I have a Friday gift for you. Malcolm Gladwell. I love his books, and I love him,

00:00:22.840 and so will you when you listen to this interview. He's the author of many hugely successful

00:00:28.000 influential books, at least five of which have been New York Times bestsellers. Outliers,

00:00:33.460 The Tipping Point, Blink, Talking to Strangers, all of which you should read. They're easy,

00:00:37.360 quick reads that will really enrich you. They'll leave you feeling enriched.

00:00:41.260 He also hosts a great podcast called Revisionist History, where he goes back and looks at

00:00:45.640 interesting stories or people and takes a sort of a fresh look at them. And he co-founded a podcast

00:00:51.500 company called Pushkin, which is doing really well. He's also been writing for The New Yorker

00:00:55.580 since 1996. He once was a Washington Post journalist, which he'll talk about a reporter.

00:01:01.320 And we get into everything. He did great work recently, sort of blowing the lid off of U.S.

00:01:06.100 News and World Report and how we rely on them for the college rankings and what BS it is.

00:01:11.160 He has also blown the lid off The Little Mermaid. And it's probably the best part and maybe most

00:01:16.860 contentious of our interview, where he actually questions my parenting skills. And we will get into

00:01:21.460 that. We get into the importance of being disagreeable in today's day and age, the importance

00:01:26.340 of forgiveness and whether his being a contrarian, which is that's my word. We'll see whether he

00:01:32.940 agrees with it, is a good thing or a bad thing. It's so chock full of goodness, this interview.

00:01:38.760 You're going to love it. He's coming up one minute away.

00:01:41.820 Malcolm Gladwell. Thank you so much for doing this.

00:01:50.160 Not at all. I'm happy to be on your show.

00:01:52.600 I'm excited for many reasons. I'm your fan. I've read your books. I've proselytized a lot

00:01:57.860 of your messages. I feel like I'm living some of the core theses espoused therein. And also

00:02:03.960 because I am married to a writer. And so that's kind of where I want to kick it off. He's been

00:02:10.980 writing fiction. His latest work is nonfiction. So he's moving more into the Malcolm Gladwell

00:02:15.600 world. But what is your process? You know, I watched my husband write. He writes long form

00:02:21.240 on legal pads. Then he types in the book, like into his laptop himself, which is his editing

00:02:27.720 process. You know, he edits while he does that. He's in a book club with some great, great authors

00:02:32.760 who you would know very well. Nelson DeMille and oh, gosh, yeah. Amor Tolles. And one

00:02:40.940 of the authors in there, the guy who, gosh, I'm blanking on his name. He writes the Jack

00:02:44.840 Reacher series. Oh, my God. Lee Child.

00:02:47.380 Lee Child. Yes. I'm obsessed with Lee Child. I've read every single Lee Child book.

00:02:52.860 No, he's amazing. So, but he writes stream of consciousness, chain smoking cigarettes,

00:02:57.780 and then just hands it in. He doesn't edit. So I'm always fascinated when I meet successful

00:03:03.220 authors about what their process is. Oh, well, you know, the actual writing doesn't

00:03:11.820 take very long. What takes a long time is the thinking and the arranging. And so I'm actually

00:03:19.220 and I was an old newspaper guy. So I spent my first 10 years at the Washington Post and

00:03:23.980 being a newspaper person permanently cures you of any kind of preciousness about the writing process.

00:03:33.740 You someone. So at the age of 23, I'm at the Washington Post and basically they put a gun

00:03:39.400 to your head and they say, OK, this is the story you have to write. It's now 11 a.m.

00:03:44.100 We need it by four or, you know, so I was they used to call me at the Washington Post Picasso

00:03:52.220 because I was, you know, when I got there, I was like, you know, a great, you know, I thought

00:03:58.620 deep thoughts and took my time and created beautiful paintings. That was I was all gone

00:04:05.000 about two months. So I don't have any I can, you know, I can I write really quickly and without any

00:04:12.180 kind of must and fuss. But I do spend I'm a runner and I will, you know, on my long runs,

00:04:18.280 I will spend time thinking through everything I'm doing. And I sort of arrange it all in my head

00:04:24.000 before I sit down at the computer. I do not write on yellow legal pads and have not done so since the

00:04:31.720 1990s. That's just Doug's thing. And you'd think Doug was, you know, 70 years old. He's not. He's 49.

00:04:38.640 He just refuses to advance. Does he use a BlackBerry? I mean,

00:04:42.180 how many different ways is he? He would be if I hadn't insisted that he'd upgrade to the iPhone,

00:04:48.640 I think he still would be on the on the BlackBerry. It works for him. But I know what you mean. You

00:04:53.180 can't have any of your little darlings, right? Was it Hemingway who said that it's so hard to get

00:04:57.320 rid of your little darlings pretty quickly. And yeah, but that was the best. The best thing that

00:05:04.780 ever happened to me as a writer was spending 10 years at the Washington Post. I learned everything.

00:05:09.440 And I got, by the way, their patience with me. I arrived there not knowing how to do a single

00:05:15.360 thing related to journalism. God knows why they hired me. I did not know to this day why I was

00:05:20.760 hired. It's like a mystery. No one ever answered this question. I didn't know what I was doing.

00:05:24.940 And they sat with me and worked with me. And I finally kind of put it together.

00:05:29.700 I can relate to that, though. I'll tell you, my first job in television, I had zero TV experience.

00:05:34.860 I had just I was still practicing law and just an unhappy lawyer trying to try my hand at something

00:05:40.040 else. And there was a breaking news story and it was a slow day. So they didn't adequately staff the

00:05:45.600 newsroom. And that's why they chose me to go out and cover it. So I went. It was it was it was

00:05:51.380 actually a school shooting. Nobody was hurt. It was an attempt. Yeah. And so I get on scene and they say,

00:05:57.480 OK, you know, you're gonna be live at the top of the six. We need a donut. We'll see it in five

00:06:02.380 minutes. I'm like, I got it. Of course, I look at my team like, what the hell is a donut?

00:06:06.640 What is it? What is a donut? It means you're live in the intro to the piece. Then you go on tape

00:06:13.160 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

00:06:18.660 like a sandwich. You know, I don't know. So even the term they use to describe it is not the right term.

00:06:24.700 So that's even more baffling. Yeah. But you were a you were a lawyer. Now I'm going to I'm going to

00:06:30.920 I'm going to quibble a little bit. So you were not unprepared. Being trained as a lawyer is actually

00:06:37.980 a really good preparation for being a non-air journalist. Right. Yeah. You're trained to think

00:06:43.240 on your feet to deal with to process a lot of information pretty quickly. I was not a lawyer when

00:06:48.680 I started to watch. I didn't know anything. What have you been doing? I had been working.

00:06:55.740 Well, you know, I my first job was with a magazine called The American Spectator.

00:07:00.860 Oh, yeah. Sure. Conservative magazine out of Indiana. Still around. I like them. Still around. And

00:07:05.360 I would write these. I was an editor there, but I was like I started there when I was 20 and I made

00:07:11.920 $9,500 a year. And I would write these like book reviews for them from time to time, which would

00:07:19.820 take me like eight months. So it's like I was this. That's all I did. And then I I moved to I got fired

00:07:26.540 from that job, moved to Washington, D.C., worked at a think tank for a while and I continued to

00:07:32.280 freelance. But I wasn't it was the opposite of newspaper writing. You know, it was this kind of

00:07:37.980 I would toil away on these things for months and months and months. So I didn't know what how to do

00:07:43.980 the thing that I was being asked to do at a newspaper, which was five hours. I knew five months.

00:07:48.920 That's what I knew in the law. We used to say if I had a longer time, I would have written a shorter

00:07:52.780 brief. And that's that's the frustration of newspaper writing and television writing, too, because there are

00:07:58.380 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

00:08:02.720 of space. And and yet it takes a while to get really clear, concise, tight writing. It takes

00:08:08.240 practice, really. So coming into it green, it must have been frustrating. I know it was for me.

00:08:13.320 Yeah. Yeah. No, I survived. They they did not fire me contrary to my expectations. So I said I

00:08:20.880 survived to write another day. And you you got your 10,000 hours in right as a journalist, as a writer.

00:08:26.440 Sure. Well, you know, I was 10,000 hours equates to 10 years of kind of and that's I was at the

00:08:33.120 Washington Post for exactly 10 years. And I I left when I left, I was like, I think I learned

00:08:38.820 everything that I need to learn from this place. But it took 10 years to learn what I needed to learn.

00:08:44.900 I understand that I actually felt one of the reasons I left Fox was I felt like I had learned

00:08:48.740 everything I was going to learn. And I had there was no more there was not one more muscle to grow.

00:08:52.540 You know, I just felt like there's no more growth available to to me here, which is one of the many

00:08:58.440 reasons. But that was one of my concerns. I wanted to go someplace where I could grow and grow. I did

00:09:01.880 at NBC for all my complaints about how my relationship there ended. I definitely grew as a journalist and

00:09:07.180 still use some of those skills. One of the things I've by the way, the 10,000 hours thing is a reference

00:09:13.820 to you. People may not know that comes from you. That's from outliers. Right. And right. Was it

00:09:19.600 outliers? I get them confused. It was outliers where I popped. Yeah, that was a notion that had

00:09:23.440 been floating around. No, it wasn't. It was yours. You are the one who made it famous.

00:09:30.100 I've made it famous. But I, you know, I didn't invent it. I it's very clear. I have to be very

00:09:34.460 clear that I yes, I was a popular. I'm a popularizer, Megan. That's my that's my job.

00:09:40.060 Well, it was fascinating, because I do think and I'll get to this with you in a little bit. But I think

00:09:44.060 you've changed the world. I really think you calling attention to some of these things,

00:09:48.740 you've changed certainly my own experience in this world and schools. And I don't know,

00:09:54.160 just people pay attention to what you write, and then they start doing things differently. And that's

00:09:57.780 power. You have real power. But here's where I want to start. I know you were born in England,

00:10:02.720 you were raised in Canada. And unlike most Canadians, I feel like you are a contrarian

00:10:08.560 by nature. But you probably disagree. No, I am. I'm totally contrarian by nature. In fact,

00:10:16.180 I remember once in grade school, when we were taught that the world was round, and I derailed

00:10:23.520 the entire lesson that day. This is like third grade. I was like, well, how do we know? How do

00:10:28.600 we know it's round? I hadn't sort of understood the thing that you can watch the earth from space. You

00:10:33.320 know, I was like, how do you know? How do you know there's not like a little, a little like bump in

00:10:37.260 the earth or in Africa somewhere. And I just would not accept the teacher's explanation of the world

00:10:43.260 was round. So yeah, it goes back a long way. I am a little and as you're right, it's not a

00:10:48.060 Canadians are not by nature, disputatious. And we are, but I'm not a Canadian. Now, I will say I'm a

00:10:56.980 Canadian, but I, you know, I was, I am an immigrant to Canada. So I have, I came from from England when I

00:11:04.360 was six. So I have, I have so many different like little cultural tendencies floating around inside

00:11:11.060 of me that I feel like I, I, there's a good reason why I'm not the most perfect Canadian.

00:11:18.900 So I wonder if being a contrarian has made your life better or worse, more difficult, or just more

00:11:28.300 exciting and successful. Uh, well, it's very useful. I mean, journalists should be contrarians

00:11:35.940 in a sense that our, our job is to, um, is to be, um, the kind of first line of skepticism,

00:11:44.120 particularly to those who are in power. So, um, in that sense, it served me, um, very well. And the

00:11:51.220 other thing that being a contrarian does is that it forces you, uh, to, to keep updating your own

00:11:58.540 beliefs, right? You, the really good contrarian is not just a contrarian about what others say,

00:12:03.620 but it's also a contrarian about, um, what he or she believes, right? So that's, those are two very

00:12:12.660 useful things. Does it make my life easier? Well, who knows? Um, does it make me happier? Uh, no idea.

00:12:21.220 Does it, but does it suit my professional life? Yes, very much.

00:12:27.220 Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I love what you said about journalists needing to be

00:12:30.640 skeptical. And I do feel like it's being forgotten. You know, the democratic, the more

00:12:34.860 left-leaning press, very, very skeptical of Trump, um, and Fox and the conservative media,

00:12:40.660 the opposite. And now with Biden, Fox is full of skepticism and the left-leaning press, the opposite,

00:12:47.100 but it should be universal. You know, we should come in cranky and not ready to believe anybody.

00:12:53.900 Right. It's like, check it out. If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

00:12:58.160 Wait a minute. That not going that far. I'm not skeptical of my mother saying she loves me.

00:13:03.660 I just talked to her last night and she, she, I, I not, it never even occurred to me to question

00:13:09.560 what Joyce Glabal says. Well, I hate to tell you, I talked to her too, and you might want to try

00:13:14.840 poking some holes in that. Um, you also said at, um, you, you go to Carlos Watson's sort of,

00:13:22.420 you know, talk fest that he has every year, Aussie fest. And I love Carlos Watson. He's such a great

00:13:27.180 guy, but you said to him that you really think people should be more disagreeable. And I, my note

00:13:34.240 in my outline reads, yay, because I feel like, yes, I'm nailing it, right? I'm nailing it. But I

00:13:40.160 know what you mean. I think I know what you mean, but I want you to define it.

00:13:42.860 Well, disagreeable. So there's two depth, two meanings of that term. One is the colloquial

00:13:48.480 meeting, which is obnoxious. And that's not what I mean. I don't think people should be

00:13:52.240 obnoxious. I think the opposite, but disagreeable in this, as it's defined by psychologist is a

00:13:58.400 disagreeable. Someone is a person is someone who does not require the approval of others in order

00:14:05.200 to pursue what they intend to pursue. Right. And I think that I don't want everyone to be that way,

00:14:11.600 but I think that we underestimate how important that trait is, particularly in people who are

00:14:17.360 trying to make our world better or pursue some new and innovative idea. If you are someone who

00:14:25.960 can't move a muscle, unless the world aligns behind you and pats you on the back, there's a limit to what

00:14:32.100 you can accomplish. And, um, so I've, I've sort of made a kind of, I, in my book, which book was it?

00:14:39.820 There's been so many of them. Once I had, oh, I think it was my book, David and Goliath. I had a

00:14:43.900 whole chapter on this, um, doctor called Emil Freireich, who was the one who really, and he's the guy who

00:14:50.780 cures childhood leukemia and who really doesn't invent it, but he's the one who makes it possible from

00:14:56.600 medicine to modern medicine to really start to pursue, um, a combination chemotherapy. Basically

00:15:04.460 modern chemotherapy comes from this guy, Emil Freireich. And at the time he proposes this way

00:15:11.880 of using drugs in combination to treat cancer, everyone with the exception of his research partner

00:15:18.160 thinks he is not just wrong, but a monster. And there's a period of years where people won't work

00:15:27.200 with him. People denounce him, where people heckle him at research meetings, where he is ostracized by

00:15:32.960 his peers and he persists and persists and persists. And today there are, there are people listening to

00:15:39.540 this podcast who are alive because of Emil Freireich. I mean, he is this extraordinary figure. And the

00:15:46.140 reason, so I, I met with him on two occasions. He died just recently, actually, um, well into his

00:15:52.440 nineties and trying to figure out how is it that someone as a young professional was able to persist

00:16:00.380 with an idea when everyone in the world thought he was a monster. And the answer is that he was

00:16:07.420 disagreeable. He is this big bear of a guy who could not for the, you know, didn't give a, I'm not

00:16:15.780 going to swear on your podcast. Oh, you can, but yeah, did not give a hoot what anyone thought about

00:16:22.280 him. He was that kind of guy. He was, and he was unpleasant and he had a anger problem and he was

00:16:29.500 a bully. And he was first time I met him, I was like, I can't stand this guy. I don't want to hang

00:16:35.680 out with him. I, I was like, I got to get out of here. This guy's a monster. And then I realized,

00:16:41.020 I thought about it and I realized, oh, that's exactly why he was able to follow through on

00:16:45.720 these ideas and end up saving the lives of, I mean, the number of lives this man saved in the

00:16:52.520 end, we're in the, we're in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands. And it's because he was

00:16:57.780 this difficult, he didn't, he didn't give two hoots about what anyone thought of him. Right.

00:17:02.960 And it made me realize, you know, that our, first of all, our initial, my initial reaction to him

00:17:10.300 was wrong. I thought he was a jerk. And then I realized, oh no, that's the most important part

00:17:15.920 of him. I need to get over my little, my little kind of precious response to his difficult personality

00:17:23.600 because his difficult personality is why he is so important to the world. Right. The fact that I was

00:17:29.560 offended by him did not matter. It's just my, and understanding that your own response in that

00:17:37.900 situation is not just irrelevant, but it's, it is, and beside the point, um, it's counterproductive.

00:17:46.860 Right. The easiest thing to do for me as a journalist would have been to write a chapter of my book about

00:17:52.300 what a, just a complete a-hole this guy is. That would have been the easiest thing. Right.

00:17:57.740 Right. And that would have been, that would have completely missed the point of what made this man

00:18:05.060 great. You know, I'm, I confess to you, I'm thinking, I know that you're not a Donald Trump fan,

00:18:10.640 but I am thinking about him as you talk like that, because he, he def, his strange personality and his

00:18:18.920 approach to media and communication and problems definitely worked to his advantage in getting some

00:18:26.920 of his initiatives through and, and just the way he governed. I mean, the one example I'm thinking

00:18:31.680 about is when he took out Soleimani, right? The Iranian general, and there was pushback, don't do

00:18:38.400 it. And we're not going to have a war with Iran. And he did it anyway. And he's just so impulsive

00:18:42.680 and a risk taker and really doesn't care if the, if the, if the tide of opinion is going against him,

00:18:50.860 he kind of goes on instinct and it will see. I mean, but it, so far that's worked out. Okay.

00:18:55.560 We didn't go into a war with Iran. We got rid of a guy who killed a lot of Americans or was

00:18:59.440 responsible for it. Anyway, I love him or hate him. I see some parallels.

00:19:05.620 Yeah. It's a useful trait in those who are trying to accomplish something difficult. I think that's the

00:19:13.580 fairest way to say it now. So, and when we confront people like that, uh, what I'm saying is that our

00:19:20.380 focus should be on the merits of their idea, not the difficulties of their personality.

00:19:30.580 And I think we're going another way, right? We, I mean, today's society is much more,

00:19:35.900 you, you need to be liked. Um, you know, certain behaviors are not allowed. Certain words are not

00:19:40.440 allowed. You know, you, I think now more than ever, it just feels like we are too solicitous

00:19:45.360 of other people's approval. We're, we're getting more risk averse because we live in cancel culture

00:19:51.160 and so on. Yeah. Well, it becomes, do you want to, can I tell you my, my rule for dealing with

00:19:56.700 criticism, which is, uh, this is, you know, this is incredibly, um, I love these little rules of

00:20:04.240 thought. People, I collect little rules of thought. People get me really good ones. My, my friend,

00:20:07.980 Bruce once gave me a great one about jealousy. He said, the way to deal with jealousy is you can

00:20:13.060 never be jealous of, um, um, a single characteristic of someone else's life. If you want to be jealous

00:20:19.640 of them, you have to, you have to be jealous of their entire life. So you can't just say,

00:20:24.940 Oh, I dislike him because he's richer than I am. You have to say, okay, I, do you dislike him? Would

00:20:32.500 you, would you rather have his life than yours? Every single part of it, right? That's it. Anyway,

00:20:37.400 that's useful. It's a good one. Here's what I do for criticism, which is that, um, if you sell 10

00:20:46.260 books, let's assume for the sake of argument that 90% of the people who read your books or listen to

00:20:52.760 your television show, like you and 10% don't, that would be a, that's a really, really, really good

00:20:59.320 ratio, right? You and I can both agree. That's amazing. If that was true, let's stipulate that.

00:21:03.560 If 10 people listen to your show or watch your show or read your book, that means that you have

00:21:10.300 nine fans and one detractor that will seem like you're doing great, right? Those nine fans are

00:21:19.240 going to like say, Hey, Megan, love you. You're never going to hear from the one detractor. If a

00:21:24.600 million people read your book, you have 900,000 fans and a hundred thousand detractors, right?

00:21:34.020 So a hundred thousand, that's like the size of a medium-sized city who hate you. You're going to

00:21:39.060 hear from them all the time. That's like, I mean, you have to remember, you have to think the number

00:21:42.920 of your critics is simply a, uh, a, um, a constant, uh, uh, um, it is a function of the number of your

00:21:54.000 size of your audience. The more people who like you, the more people who will also hate you,

00:21:59.980 right? Because of this rule. So like, if you, if you go on your Twitter mentions and just read a

00:22:06.700 avalanche of people saying all kinds of nasty things, just keep in mind that that's because

00:22:11.880 there's a whole massive, much larger universe of people out there who like you, right? It means

00:22:17.480 your audience is big. It's good. I like that. I'm going to hold this, hold on to this tonight and

00:22:22.860 every night. Remember that rule. And also the people who, you know, the, you're much more,

00:22:29.120 you know, there's the, you're much more likely to speak up. If you dislike something, you don't hear

00:22:33.440 from your fans. I think it's one of those situations, you know, how some of the corporations

00:22:38.780 will say for everybody who writes a letter or picks up the phone and calls either with a compliment or

00:22:42.980 a complaint that they assume they represent a much larger group, right? Cause it takes a lot to pick

00:22:47.820 up the phone and call a company about a product, good or bad. And I, I feel that too. If somebody

00:22:53.180 actually picks up the phone to call me and say, okay, I really appreciate what you did on this.

00:22:57.960 It's very meaningful to me, even if it's a friend, because my friends, they don't call me up and say,

00:23:02.380 Hey, great segment or great show. So if they do, it means way more to me than, than a Twitter attack or

00:23:08.460 something like that. And then I always know that person represents a lot, a lot of others who are

00:23:14.040 out there feeling the same, who just, they don't know how to reach me or, you know, I try, I try to

00:23:18.320 remember that because I'm in media, which is definitely more left than I am. And Twitter is

00:23:24.440 more left than I am. So that's not really the healthiest, the most emotionally healthy place

00:23:28.820 for me, but I still think it's important to engage with people who are not ideologically aligned

00:23:33.480 with me. You know, I want to do that, but it's not always the most pleasant experience.

00:23:36.940 Twitter is not, I would amend your statement about Twitter. It's not full of people who are

00:23:42.900 to the left of you. It's full of people who are a lot more obnoxious. It's like, it's just as

00:23:48.900 Twitter is just a sort of a cesspool of like a lot of nasty people saying nasty things. I, you know,

00:23:54.740 I, it's why I try to limit myself on Twitter to like always say something positive, retweet really

00:24:01.460 great cat videos whenever possible. Those that's, what's useful about Twitter. I get more,

00:24:07.420 you know, like funny. There's like, the thing, the thing I've retweeted yesterday to a friend of

00:24:13.460 mine, not retweeted, I sent to a friend of mine was, if you haven't seen this, do you remember

00:24:17.380 Mary Carrillo who used to, I think she still does commentary. Have you seen, have you seen the

00:24:23.140 Mary Carrillo badminton thing? Oh my God. It's amazing. It's the greatest thing ever.

00:24:27.040 I've played a lot of badminton with my kids. By the seventh shot, this thing's up in the tree.

00:24:32.900 Okay. So then what does your kid do? She says, mommy, I'll get it down. Throws a racket up in

00:24:37.360 the tree. Now your racket's up in the tree. She says, don't worry, I'll get that down. So now your

00:24:42.160 kid goes into the garage and goes and gets the red rubber ball, which would come as standard

00:24:46.600 equipment in any kind of backyard badminton set. Throws that in, that immediately gets impaled.

00:24:52.540 So she goes to get something else to get the bed, to get one of these things down. Okay.

00:24:56.240 Now there are kids from all over the neighborhood that have come into your backyard and they're

00:25:00.660 emptying out your garage, throwing stuff at your tree. Somehow mothers from all over the

00:25:06.040 neighborhood here, that badminton is being played at Mary's house. They're dropping off their kid.

00:25:10.900 They know it's an all day affair. They know what that's going to involve 17 other sports.

00:25:14.520 They're dropping off their kids. They're leaving skid marks. Okay.

00:25:18.620 Sharing the joy of the Mary Carrillo badminton rant is exactly why Twitter was invented.

00:25:25.160 And as long as we remember that, it's what it should be for. Exactly. I love it. Did you,

00:25:30.280 did you see it for the first time yesterday? Yeah. Yes. I had never seen it before. Somebody on

00:25:34.640 one of my favorite news websites, media, I posted it and I watched the whole thing. I'm like,

00:25:38.480 this is the most brilliant thing I've ever seen. So true as a mother, I can totally relate to all of

00:25:42.160 it. No, wait, no. Here's my question to you as a TV person. That wasn't extemporaneous.

00:25:47.280 No, I don't think so. No, no way. No way. She wrote it. I think so. Yeah. At a minimum bullets,

00:25:54.620 you know, that you follow because it was too good. It was too long. And she is brilliant. So you never

00:26:00.100 know. She is brilliant. But I don't, I almost like it better if it was prepared because I like the fact

00:26:08.500 I was thinking about this. I was like, first of all, there's a slight chance she did it off the top

00:26:12.160 of her head, but I don't think she did, but I don't think so. I like it more because I like that

00:26:17.120 she sat down and said, okay, I am going to finally tell the world, but it's like 2 AM in the morning.

00:26:25.520 Like, you know, it was like, no, you know, she's like, okay, I got, I got, I got an hour of dead

00:26:29.640 space. I'm going to, I'm going to finally put pen to paper and describe my problem with backyard.

00:26:36.260 So true. Up next, we'll get into why you should be disagreeable right after this.

00:26:47.060 So let's talk about, um, the many unpopular positions you have had as a contrarian and

00:26:52.040 someone who likes to be disagreeable, both of which I am. So I relate to you. I really do. I

00:26:57.020 think I would definitely say you're more beloved universally than yours truly, but I'm more

00:27:03.300 political than you are in this. So it comes with the territory, but yes. Um, you've defended people

00:27:07.520 like you don't do politics. I know. And I like that. I think that that must be wonderful. And

00:27:11.420 that's why you're such a successful author, right? Cause it's like everybody would buy a Malcolm

00:27:15.220 Gladwell book. You don't have to be a Republican. You don't have to be a Democrat. So it's smart.

00:27:19.000 Okay. You got, you got in trouble for defending Joe Paterno of Penn state. I read the whole thing.

00:27:22.800 I understand your point on him. Well, I'm in a good way. Okay. Did I get in trouble? I don't think

00:27:29.020 I got in trouble. You just got criticized. Yeah. Yeah. But I, uh, but just to my point,

00:27:34.740 I got criticized because lots of people read that book and, but, but how did the, of the people who

00:27:42.720 read that chapter and thought about it, what percent, uh, not, I mean, maybe agree with me is

00:27:48.840 too strong, came away with a deeper understanding of that case. I think the overwhelming majority.

00:27:54.240 So most of the people I heard from about that chapter were like, Oh, okay. That kind of makes

00:28:01.160 sense. You know, now that you've laid out how difficult that case was and simply ask the

00:28:07.200 question now, remind me again, what Joe Paterno did wrong. Like, I mean, he did exactly what he was

00:28:14.680 supposed to do. He informed his superiors. The minute he was, somebody came to him with an

00:28:20.100 allegation. I, to this day, I'm just, let me just remind the viewers what we're talking about,

00:28:24.500 the listeners, just in case they don't remember this. It was Paterno was the head of the football

00:28:28.840 team there. And Jerry Sandusky, who'd been his assistant coach for many, many years was accused

00:28:33.740 of molesting was of being a serial molester. But the, um, the allegation was made that it was brought

00:28:40.260 to his attention by, by another 20 year old. I don't know if he, I can't remember what, whether that

00:28:44.720 guy, Mike McQuarrie was a coach or what he was, but he brought it to Paterno's attention that he'd

00:28:50.260 heard, uh, Sandusky in a locker room and, um, that he thought it was something like fondly.

00:28:56.440 The testimony was definitely problematic. Yeah. Seen something that didn't seem right.

00:29:04.580 It wasn't as explicit as the prosecution later alleged in court. And that upset McQuarrie because

00:29:09.520 basically the prosecutor said McQuarrie went in a locker room and saw, saw Sandusky in the process of,

00:29:14.300 of rape, uh, with a young child. And McQuarrie came out later saying, what are you, what are you

00:29:19.160 saying? That's not, that's not, it's never been what I've said that I saw. I heard sounds that

00:29:24.280 sounded sexual. I got disturbed and I left. Anyway, your point was Paterno had enough reason to sort

00:29:29.740 of question it, that he did bring it to his superiors, but his critics, his critics say he

00:29:35.000 should have gone to the cops, right? That's where, that's where the critics I think would come in.

00:29:39.260 Well, the critics, uh, that's not what the, you know, there's a Penn State, like many institutions

00:29:45.860 has a kind of manual, a rule book. I don't know what the right phrase is that, that lays out the

00:29:51.720 procedures that employees, officials of the school are supposed to follow in the face of those kinds

00:29:57.560 of allegations. And he was supposed to inform the athletic director, his boss, um, when in the, in,

00:30:04.640 in, when, when confronted with that kind of information, he did exactly what he was supposed

00:30:08.660 to do. You know, I, Megan, I don't, you do not want to get me going up Penn State because they,

00:30:15.120 the way they have hounded the president, this is, makes me even angrier. He's Graham Spanier,

00:30:21.460 Graham Spanier, who's now being sent to prison. I mean, I just, I, I don't go down this road,

00:30:27.180 but I have something better. I want to talk to you about, but I want to make one small point,

00:30:32.340 which is the point of that book, talking to strangers. My last, my second last book where

00:30:38.400 I discussed that case in detail. And for those who want to know more about this case, I would

00:30:42.520 recommend they read the chapter of that because one of the things I discovered in writing the

00:30:46.280 chapter on the Penn state case is that it became very clear to me that the majority of journalists

00:30:51.940 who wrote about the Penn state case knew nothing about the Penn state case. They had not read the

00:30:56.740 trial transcript. I sat down and read all, however many thousand pages of it. And you realize,

00:31:02.340 when you do that, and that, that the, the kind of popular conversation about the case had nothing

00:31:09.700 in common with the actual facts of the case because nobody was doing their homework. And don't even get

00:31:14.160 me started on this. It's your job as a journalist to do your homework. That is why you are paid what

00:31:23.100 you're paid. And that's why you're given the privileged position you are given in society to have a

00:31:29.000 platform. Right. And if you're going to sound off about a case and you haven't done your

00:31:33.620 homework, that's malpractice. Now, I don't, I'm not asking people to agree with me in my

00:31:40.020 interpretation of that case. I don't care whether you agree with me or not, just do your homework.

00:31:44.840 But there's a set of facts. Know the testimony, know what's been alleged and what hasn't been

00:31:48.640 alleged. Yeah. Argue, argue with my interpretation out of it based on your knowledge, your, on an equal

00:31:55.360 knowledge of the case. Anyway, when people don't do that and they think they could, there's some

00:32:00.100 kind of shortcut to writing about complicated cases, it drives me insane. No, I agree with

00:32:05.760 you. I agree with you because I, I saw it. I mean, more recently than that, we saw it in the case of

00:32:09.300 Brett Kavanaugh and the allegations getting thrown around about him. And it was like, have you done

00:32:13.040 anything? I mean, what have you done to assure yourself that you understand the facts even being

00:32:16.800 alleged and half of them never even should have made air, you know, it was, they weren't

00:32:20.640 journalistically sound for reporting. As we saw, I will say, um, NBC did an interview with the one

00:32:26.600 woman, Julie Swetnick, and there was a debate internally about whether we should air it because

00:32:30.380 she just fell apart on national television. I mean, it was just Kate Snow demolished this woman just by

00:32:35.980 asking questions. And in the end, I think it was the right call to put it on the air because then

00:32:40.240 the public got to see for themselves that there was no credibility in any of this, but yet you do have

00:32:43.740 to, you got to go beyond the lawyer. In that case, it was Michael Avenatti. Uh, and what they're

00:32:48.340 saying, right? As a journalist, you have to have, take your skeptical mind, look at the evidence for

00:32:52.880 yourself. And then you're right. We disagree on interpretations, but the facts are right there.

00:32:57.040 Okay. So, but that's what brings me though. Um, this is all a long windup to Jeffrey Toobin,

00:33:02.600 who we have to discuss. I totally disagree with you on him. I know you said something like,

00:33:08.460 is he like, he's got, he's gotten canceled for, you know, following Catholic doctrine or the Catholic

00:33:14.760 doctrines, doctrines being followed against him. I know, I know, I know, but you worked at you,

00:33:19.520 I think still work at the New Yorker, but you have, you've been there since 1996 and he's at,

00:33:23.220 he was at the New Yorker, got fired for, you know, now we all know, you know, masturbating on a zoom

00:33:26.960 call. Um, and I, let me, let me ask you why you don't think he should have been canned. Cause I've

00:33:32.760 definitely got strong thoughts on this one. Well, uh, I had many reasons. I'll give you the kind of

00:33:40.240 high level reason why I felt compelled to say what I said to the New York times. Um,

00:33:49.360 I am an explanations junkie. Um, I, and it's gotten worse as I've gotten older. Um, if someone wants to

00:33:59.980 do something, even something I disagree with, or ask me to do something, even something I don't want to

00:34:06.520 do, I am perfectly happy to entertain that particular request, but I require an explanation,

00:34:15.060 right? You got to tell me why you can't just say, Oh, I want to do X or you should do X. No,

00:34:21.480 tell me why. So my problem with Conde Nast was you, Jeff Tupin is an employee of Conde Nast. Um,

00:34:29.880 if you would like to fire him for whatever reason, that's your prerogative, right? He's your

00:34:36.360 employee. I, I, I, you know, I, it's not, not, none of my business, what you want to do with one

00:34:40.500 of your employees, but you got to give a reason. Some guys work for you done high level quality work

00:34:47.940 for however many 25 years. And you want to turn around one day because there's a report in the

00:34:53.940 news media about him and say, you're out. Tell me why. Okay. They did not say why. And that really,

00:35:03.260 really bothered me. And I, I am now, you know, uh, I've started this company with my best friend a

00:35:10.780 couple of years ago, uh, Jacob Weisberg and Pushkin Audio. We now have all kinds of people working here.

00:35:15.080 Um, I think it is exceedingly important that people in positions of leadership, um, in organizations

00:35:24.220 abide by this principle. I wanted to make it clear to anyone who works with me that if there is ever

00:35:32.000 an issue about whether you should continue to be employed at our company, and if we decide to let you

00:35:37.360 go, we will tell you why, right? We will make it absolutely clear and transparent. And if we cannot

00:35:43.600 tell you why, we should not be firing you, right? If you can't articulate why and tell the world why

00:35:51.360 you have no business introducing, uh, you have no business like, uh, uh, uh, getting rid of somebody,

00:35:58.780 right? Just say why they couldn't say why, right? Well, we do. Why are you ever hear the saying?

00:36:04.880 No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just somebody hit play. You can't rewind. No, no, no. Megan,

00:36:11.020 Megan, Megan. I know. Okay. You can say we knew why. Well, no, wait a minute. That's not true.

00:36:18.060 They, we have, I mean, you, you and I can sit here and come up with explanations for why they

00:36:22.960 might've been upset, but it is incumbent on them to spell it out. Right. Don't leave. Don't leave.

00:36:29.100 I think it was plain as the nose on your face, or you could go further South if you really want to

00:36:33.120 take it into tube and land. I, and also I, you know, I also think that whether an act is in,

00:36:38.940 I happened to, and I know this, I read this really interesting piece on this and I realize

00:36:43.520 we're getting into very deep and interesting ethical territory, but I am one of those people

00:36:48.080 who believes that there is a clear ethical difference between an intentional and an

00:36:52.780 unintentional act, harmful act. Um, and I am inclined to be far more forgiving of, and I,

00:36:59.040 you know, this, what he did was completely unintentional and that makes a big difference.

00:37:06.100 Maybe. Um, and also I've, I've heard it posited that it, it may have been intentional because

00:37:10.840 it was so reckless to the point where, um, it's possible. He enjoyed that, that it's possible.

00:37:15.940 I realize he protests otherwise, but that he was actually looking to be an exhibitionist.

00:37:21.140 Megan, that would have been a really good thing for Condé Nast to have investigated and informed us.

00:37:25.520 Right. Yeah. Well, that's true, but I don't think they cared about motive. I think you're right.

00:37:29.380 But I think even if they didn't think it was intentional, we could all see how reckless it was.

00:37:34.020 We could see how reckless it was. You, you, you masturbate, you know, half your,

00:37:38.960 your colleagues have seen your penis because you masturbated in the middle of a work zoom call in

00:37:44.160 the middle of the day while you're rehearsing for the election coverage, something that's serious

00:37:48.740 with gravitas, which you are supposed to be too. And his role in particular, he needs to have the

00:37:53.900 respect of the newsroom gravitas and sense of, I don't know, just dignity. And it was lost in that

00:37:59.660 moment because he took an incredibly reckless risk. And the downside of that risk materialized,

00:38:05.840 which I'm sure caused some of his colleagues trauma that, you know, you don't need an internal

00:38:09.900 investigation to see the obvious revulsion of the women who had to look at that while they're just

00:38:14.980 trying to talk about what Biden wins, what if Trump wins, you don't need an investigation for

00:38:20.100 everything. Some things are just obvious. And so I just think, but you do need that plus is not an

00:38:25.080 investigation. I'll just make one other point, then I'll give you the point, but that plus his

00:38:27.920 history. Cause he had, he had a history. Yeah. It has a history, um, with women that was problematic.

00:38:32.520 I think for them, it was the, it was the last straw. And I mean, CNN went a different way,

00:38:36.340 right? They suspended him and then brought him back, but what do you make of that?

00:38:40.040 Well, there's a difference between investigation and explanation. So I'm not, I don't think it was

00:38:45.900 necessary, um, uh, to do an investigation, although they did by the way, but of course didn't inform us

00:38:54.300 what the investigation, um, uh, came up with. I'm asking for explanations and I think it's very

00:39:01.340 useful. You know, this is not going to be the first time this, uh, kind of issue will come up,

00:39:08.800 right? These are ongoing issues in this, particularly as we're in a period where we're

00:39:14.340 navigating this weird thing about working from home and working from the office in a world where

00:39:20.360 we all go into the office every day, that meeting pre pandemic, that meeting would have taken place

00:39:26.140 in the New Yorker offices and none of this happens. So we're in this gray area where people are at home,

00:39:31.000 where they're stressed out, where God knows what's happening. And they're working on a, on a, uh, an

00:39:37.840 unfamiliar technology, which introduces all kinds of complications in communication that didn't exist

00:39:42.840 before, whatever this, and the world going forward is going to be a little different than the world

00:39:47.980 that was pre pandemic. It would be very useful for us to figure out a set of ground rules for this new

00:39:55.680 working environment. How do we do that? Don't jerk off in the middle of a work call. Muting the camera

00:40:01.740 is not an excuse. There's not an exception to this rule. Okay. But it would be very useful. Very useful.

00:40:07.580 I, I'm not, I'm not, remember, I'm not necessarily, um, uh, I'm not quarreling with the outcome here.

00:40:15.540 I'm quarreling with the process. Now I happen to believe he should not have been, uh, fired,

00:40:20.640 but that's a separate issue. We're not debating this at the moment. We're talking about the most

00:40:24.400 prestigious magazine in the world. Surely they can give us an articulate, thoughtful explanation

00:40:31.560 of what exactly. Okay. Wait, let's move on. Um, he still got his job on CNN, so it's not like he's

00:40:38.940 unemployed, uh, but no, no longer with, with a New Yorker. Okay. So let's talk about cancel culture and the

00:40:45.080 crackdown of free speech in our, in our society right now. Cause I know you signed the, the Harper's

00:40:49.700 letter that, um, your friend in mind, Thomas Chatterjee Williams put together, love him. He's

00:40:54.340 been on the program. And I know you've spoken out about, I mean, the letter itself speaks about how

00:41:00.020 we're, we're seeing, um, we're seeing norms of open debate and toleration weakened right now.

00:41:09.240 And instead we're going toward ideological conformity, demanding ideological conformity.

00:41:15.700 And to me, it's deeply disturbing. I, I've devoted my professional life over the past year,

00:41:22.400 at least since this whole thing began to trying to fight back against that. And the more you tell me,

00:41:25.800 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

00:41:30.640 the letter. I loved the letter, but why did you think, why did you think it was important?

00:41:34.600 Uh, well, to be perfectly honest, I didn't spend a lot of time at the time I signed the letter

00:41:42.900 thinking about the issue. It just struck me, the letter struck me as being very kind of, um,

00:41:48.120 uncontroversial. And, um, I mean, I didn't, I, I, I was very puzzled by the kind of, um,

00:41:56.340 subsequent, although was it that much of, I'm trying to think, like, I'm trying to think back to that

00:42:00.720 moment. It, it, it, that it was just like a, you know, I thought it was a, a very, a straightforward,

00:42:06.400 commonsensical statement of, um, of how, uh, free speech is important. Subsequently, of course,

00:42:13.280 you know, this whole issue has gotten more and more, um, uh, uh, heated. Um, I will say,

00:42:22.020 can I indulge in a little bit of self-promotion here?

00:42:24.620 Please. Okay. Go for it. Um, one of the episodes of my podcast this season

00:42:32.840 is essentially an allegory about this. And it's, and I'll tell you, I'll, I'll give you a little

00:42:37.760 preview of it, which is a good, I think a good way to explain where my thinking has landed on this.

00:42:43.780 Um, so I did an episode, I think it's the ninth episode this season. Um, uh, oh no, I'm sorry.

00:42:50.660 It's the one that just aired. Uh, it's, um, it's called, it's about a woman named Helen Levitt.

00:42:55.940 It aired, uh, last week, uh, before, um, and it's about a woman who was, yeah, she was a Hollywood

00:43:02.660 communist who was blacklisted during the McCarthy years. And she and her husband, who were both

00:43:07.700 writers in Hollywood, um, lost their jobs for, um, like many others who were on the Hollywood

00:43:13.880 blacklist and, um, struggled for, um, you know, many, many years. And then finally kind of crawled

00:43:20.040 the way back into Hollywood. And she had given this extraordinary interview, um, before she died,

00:43:26.020 she died in, you know, many years ago now, but, um, a long interview. And I basically did a whole

00:43:30.960 episode where I played you this interview she had given about her life. And I asked you to judge her.

00:43:37.780 And it's a super interesting topic because I am, I, when I was a kid, I was the most hardcore

00:43:46.880 anti-communist known to man. So here's a woman talking about how she was a Stalinist in the

00:43:53.840 fifties. Now it's one thing to be a communist in the thirties, but to be a communist into the

00:44:00.620 mid fifties, not just a communist, a Stalinist, someone who is openly standing up and apologizing

00:44:06.180 for Joseph Stalin, who by that point was revealed to the world as one of the truly nastiest human

00:44:12.260 beings in human history. Right. So every fiber of my being, you know, reacted to this woman and said,

00:44:20.920 are you kidding me? How, how stupid and blind and, and intellectually bankrupt must you be to cling to

00:44:31.520 the idea that Stalin is somehow a force for good in the world into the mid 1950s. When you are living

00:44:39.340 in the United States at a time when we are actively at war with it, I mean, you know, so on one sense,

00:44:45.940 the idea that we went after people like Helen Levitt, um, and, and held them up for criticism

00:44:53.580 and opprobrium in the mid fifties makes sense to me on a moral level. But then the way the episode goes

00:45:01.380 is she then describes the effect of that kind of, of the blacklist and how she lost her job and how

00:45:08.460 none of her friends would talk to her anymore and how she was excluded from her world and how she

00:45:14.080 suffered alone. And, and I just thought as much as I am angry with her politics and the stances she

00:45:22.320 took, I also don't believe that she should have been treated that way by people who disagree with

00:45:30.820 her. In other words, I didn't think, I don't think that excluding people from society because they take

00:45:36.320 positions that are, um, morally dubious or outrageous or simply unpopular is correct. I think we need to

00:45:46.220 find a way to engage with people whose views we have real problems with without casting them out of

00:45:54.260 society. I think the penalty is, doesn't, is too harsh that there's something about being

00:46:00.500 cast out. Um, that is, that is the, that is the worst thing you can do to a human being. And

00:46:09.720 the parallels to me are, you know, I've often felt that, um, as a society, American society is way too

00:46:19.340 cavalier about the costs of social exclusion. We continue to practice, for example, in the prison

00:46:25.960 system. Um, uh, uh, uh, what's the term? Solitary confinement. Solitary confinement. Solitary confinement

00:46:34.900 is practiced all the time. It's torture to cut someone off from, um, all human contact for extended

00:46:41.320 periods of time is torture. Um, we are way too, I talk about it in the episode. We, uh, you know,

00:46:47.760 there's a huge amount of data on, um, on school suspensions, um, that they do more harm than

00:46:54.100 good, that the fastest way to push a kid towards criminality, juvenile delinquency, prison, all

00:47:01.240 those kinds of things is to suspend them from school for doing something wrong. There's got to be a

00:47:05.420 better way. In other words, to punish or to ring a bell or whatever, some kid who does, who screws up

00:47:11.560 in school, then kicking them out of school. There's all of these things that we do in a society

00:47:16.180 to push people to the fringes of society, to ostracize them that are, I think wrong and, um,

00:47:25.280 dangerous and really, really, really painful to the people that we're punishing. So that's the

00:47:31.640 context in which I view cancel culture. I, I, it's fine to say, I disagree with you. It's fine to say

00:47:38.600 you have a set of views that are morally reprehensible. It's fine to stand up to a Stalinist

00:47:42.600 in 1955 and say, why are you a Stalinist? Are you kidding me? Like a Stalinist, the man that was

00:47:49.480 responsible for killing millions of his own people. Like you wake up, like it's fine to say

00:47:54.740 that. It's like being a Hitlerist. It's like being a Hitlerist. It's, but it is not, it is not fine to

00:48:01.040 cast someone out of society. I just don't, I, part of me really, really.

00:48:05.700 What do you mean by that? What do you mean by out of society? Cause I think, and you know,

00:48:09.140 my listeners know I'm very, very anti-cancel culture. And I think most of the people who

00:48:13.120 listen to the show are too, but, but I, I understand the point of the other side here

00:48:18.100 would be accountability. They would say, and I'm removing from this discussion, people like Harvey

00:48:23.960 Weinstein, that's not cancel culture. That's a monster who got what was coming to him. But let's

00:48:29.520 take somebody like Chris Harrison, you know, of the bachelor who said something controversial

00:48:33.420 in defense of a candidate. I mean, a contestant on the show who went to a,

00:48:38.440 I have some, some sort of a party that celebrated the old South and he defended her saying,

00:48:42.760 you know, was it wrong when she did this party in 2018 or is it just wrong by 2021 standards?

00:48:48.700 You know, and he's kind of railed on cancel culture done. This guy was beloved. He hosted

00:48:53.000 the show from the beginning. Sweet guy. Chris Harrison, isn't a controversial dude, but stripped

00:48:58.880 of his role, publicly humiliated. To me, that's cancel culture where he said one thing that was

00:49:04.260 deemed too controversial for him to, but, but he, what, he still has his family, you know, like

00:49:08.680 it's not like a Helen thing where no one can associate with Chris and he, you know, so what

00:49:12.820 is, what do you mean being cut off? Because losing of the job, the other side would say, well,

00:49:18.360 he was racist and so he had to go. Right. And that's, and he suffered an appropriate penalty,

00:49:22.560 which by the way, he's not racist, but that's what they say. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess I would

00:49:27.520 say that going back to the example of Helen Levitt or a kid who is, I had a, uh, a friend whose child

00:49:35.620 was, um, suspended from school for some extended period of time for something dumb he did. And he

00:49:43.960 was kid, you know, he's, you know, uh, in his early teens. And my friend talked about, um, how

00:49:51.700 incredibly painful in a way that she, she was, you know, in a way that neither she nor her husband

00:49:58.940 ever anticipated how painful it was for their son to be suspended from school. She said it was hell.

00:50:07.540 Um, and, uh, it's so forgive me for using these kinds of examples, but I just think they're easier

00:50:17.320 to make sense of then adults doing something wrong. It's where that. So somehow in the system,

00:50:24.760 um, the person who made the decision to kick this kid out of school for doing something dumb,

00:50:30.900 um, underestimated the pain that would cause the suffering it would cause or didn't care or didn't

00:50:37.740 care. Um, and I think that's where, to my mind, one of the first questions we should ask when we

00:50:44.140 think about how to punish someone for something they've done that's wrong is how much suffering

00:50:49.820 is the punishment going to cause now on this, I will freely admit, um, that I am way, way, way,

00:50:57.560 way, way to the, I don't know what direction of most Americans, you know, I don't even, I don't

00:51:05.100 really believe in prison. I'm a, I'm a kind of a prison abolitionist. Um, so I'm, you know,

00:51:10.140 I don't expect, but also, no, no, it's also, you know, I am, uh, my family now is, uh, I come from

00:51:19.080 a very religious background and my family are now all part of the, um, the Mennonite church,

00:51:26.160 which is a church that takes the idea of forgiveness very, very seriously. And I wrote

00:51:32.860 about this actually in one of my books about a, I had a chapter about a Mennonite woman whose

00:51:37.000 daughter was, um, abducted and killed by a, uh, uh, uh, by a monster, um, sexually abused and killed

00:51:46.680 by a monster and how even before he was caught, the monster was caught. She forgave him publicly

00:51:52.400 forgave him. That's you said, this is what, this is what gave you your faith back. Yeah. That that's

00:51:57.320 that example has stayed with me very strongly. And I, I believe that, uh, we are called on as human

00:52:03.280 beings, um, to forgive and forgiveness is meaningful, meaningless if we only reserve that privilege for

00:52:10.500 the easy cases, right? It's only meaningful if we, if we use it in, in, in instances where it's

00:52:18.040 really, really hard to forgive. And that's why I wanted to do that episode on hell and love it.

00:52:22.680 It's really, really hard for me to forgive someone who was a Stalinist in 1955, really hard for someone

00:52:28.260 who was as fervently anti-communist as I was, um, as a, as a growing up. Um, and so I guess I would

00:52:35.500 ask in these cases, you know, what is the role for forgiveness when people say things that are

00:52:40.340 genuinely, um, horrendous or, or not even horrendous, but you know, no one disputes in many,

00:52:49.700 controversial in many of these cancel cancel cases, people are saying things that are truly problematic.

00:52:57.480 Um, and I would say, can, let's ask for maybe the first question we should ask is for anything

00:53:05.060 happens is, is appropriateness forgiveness forgiveness is forgiveness appropriate here.

00:53:09.900 Um, well, I was looking at it just this morning because the, the head of the Olympics, you know,

00:53:15.440 the Olympics are now underway in Tokyo and the head of the Olympics opening ceremony. Well, I guess,

00:53:20.680 you know, they're going to have the opening ceremony, but they're, they're getting underway.

00:53:23.300 Yeah. Got canned because it turned out he made a joke 20 years ago. And, um, it, it was,

00:53:31.400 apparently he said something like, let's play Holocaust in this comedy routine. He did,

00:53:36.820 which sounds like a stupid joke to me. I mean, I like, I, the guy's now been fired from his, he's,

00:53:42.680 he's put together the whole opening ceremony and they're like, we're, we're revamping the entire

00:53:47.020 opening ceremony, you know, to make sure there's no, I guess, hints of the Holocaust Holocaust.

00:53:51.680 And I was like, come on that to me, that seems like a perfect example of a guy who should say,

00:53:56.400 I'm sorry, that was a dumb ass joke. 20 years ago. We were, you know, like it was a joke.

00:54:01.640 Move on. You know, not everything has to be a cardinal sin. And, and to me, Malcolm,

00:54:06.060 it boils down to something you put your finger on in talking to strangers, which is, um, that we

00:54:11.480 are so confident in our own complexity, but we wrongly believe that others are simple

00:54:19.740 strangers who we don't know at all. Totally simple. I've got impact. He's, he's, I guess,

00:54:25.820 an anti-Semite or he's, uh, he's a bigot. He's, you know, something, whatever they're saying about

00:54:29.480 this guy or Chris Harrison or whomever, whomever. And this has been one of my beefs too, that I always

00:54:34.960 quote my therapist, people are complicated. They're complicated. They are, we've forgotten that

00:54:40.080 we have forgotten all about that.

00:54:42.120 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I wonder whether there is, I've thought about this, that we, what we need

00:54:48.440 is to going back to this idea of forgiveness. Um, there, there has to be, um, uh, um, social

00:54:56.660 mechanisms that allow us to, that allow for apologies to be given for forgiveness to be granted for

00:55:05.860 rehabilitation to be undergone and, um, seen as kind of credible. I mean, I'm remembering years

00:55:14.120 ago, my mom told me about, my mom was a therapist and she, um, she told me about a case involving,

00:55:20.600 um, someone in the Mennonite community. This is the old order Mennonite community. So this is,

00:55:25.940 I grew up in this part of Ontario with a lot of, uh, traditional Mennonites people, you know,

00:55:30.920 who don't, who, who drive horse and buggy like the Amish and don't participate in the 20th century.

00:55:36.860 And, and she was working on a case with someone who had committed a crime. And she talked to me

00:55:43.960 about how, um, the community chose to deal with this, um, man's, um, transgression and they had a

00:55:53.700 ceremony and they all gathered in the church and the man stood up and he was required to,

00:56:00.920 to publicly confess to his sin and to apologize in view of the entire congregation, um, towards the

00:56:07.860 person to whom he had, um, uh, the person he had wronged. And there's much more to it than that.

00:56:14.740 It was embedded in a, uh, an entire kind of, um, religious ceremony that talked about biblical ideas

00:56:21.760 of forgiveness and what Jesus teaches us about, um, the importance of forgiveness and all kinds of

00:56:27.660 things. But I, you know, I'm not saying that that's obviously not appropriate for the secular

00:56:31.680 world we're living in, but it was interesting to me. I remember she told me, I was a kid at the time

00:56:36.580 she told me this. I've always remembered that because it was an example of a community that

00:56:40.340 had thought seriously about what do we do when someone says something or does something that's

00:56:46.560 deeply wrong, right? What does the justice system look like outside of the courts, right?

00:56:51.540 The moral sort of societal justice system. And ours right now is so upended and, and cruel.

00:56:57.660 I mean, it's just really, it's important. The word I would use, I agree. All it is also impoverished.

00:57:04.120 It's like, there must be more than one way to deal with this. And, and we have to get away from the

00:57:10.340 idea that right now we have this notion that if you settle for anything less than, um, the maximum

00:57:19.320 response to a transgression, you are some, somehow condoning the transaction, the transgression.

00:57:26.040 That's where I have an issue. I can be every bit as outraged as anyone else by what someone has said

00:57:33.700 or done, but that doesn't mean that I think they should receive the maximum penalty.

00:57:39.680 Up next, we're also sure of our own judgment, especially when we use it against other people.

00:57:46.280 Why the lesson of Harry Markopoulos should give us some pause. And then we're going to get into

00:57:51.900 Little Mermaid. Um, but before we get to that, I want to bring you a feature we have here on the

00:57:56.720 MK show called you can't say that. Yes. It's time for another edition of one of our favorite features.

00:58:02.340 You can't say that or think that or do that or be that. Oh wait, this is America. Today,

00:58:08.160 we're talking about UFC, Megan Fox and Donald Trump. And the fact that apparently now you can get

00:58:14.020 canceled for making a true statement, but you already knew that, didn't you? The actress Megan

00:58:19.180 Fox was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel live last week when she talked about attending the big Conor McGregor

00:58:24.380 UFC fight in Vegas the weekend before among the stars in the crowd that night, Justin Bieber,

00:58:29.180 Addison Rae and former president Donald Trump. Fox relayed this story. Take a listen to how she told

00:58:35.900 it. I was in a row with Bieber and Trump was also in my row. Oh, and yeah. And I've never seen secret

00:58:44.140 service in person before. So we had like 30 secret service with him and he was a legend. That arena

00:58:49.000 like was very supportive of, of Trump when he came in. A legend. How dare she? Well, you won't be

00:58:56.480 surprised to learn that Twitter was outraged with calls for her to renounce her statement. How pathetic

00:59:03.600 is Twitter. Fox, to her credit, stood her ground and fired back. Quote, I do not align myself with

00:59:10.080 any political party or individual politicians. She wrote on Instagram saying her comment about

00:59:15.160 Trump being a legend was an observable fact, not my opinion. Well, only some observable facts are

00:59:21.900 allowed to be said these days. Quote, really loving this uneducated medieval pitchfork carrying

00:59:27.220 burn a witch at the stake mentality. She wrote, has she been on Twitter? It's kind of it's bread and

00:59:32.540 butter. Well, now she knows. Next time you make an observation about something you witnessed in a way

00:59:37.300 that reflects a Republican politician in a positive light. Well, you better pause because you can't say

00:59:44.040 that. Oh, wait, this is America. And back to Malcolm Gladwell next. You know what's happening in today's

00:59:55.820 day and age? It's not even always genuine outrage or it's it's manufactured or it is outrage, but it's

01:00:02.620 total it's an overreaction. Right. Let's let sort of we're so tribal that if somebody who's not in your

01:00:07.860 tribe commits, quote, a sin, you just want the person's head on a stake. It's not really about

01:00:12.800 justice. It's about a war and, you know, taking down as many people on the other side as possible.

01:00:19.120 And that's how we're looking at one another. But what what strikes me is, you know, back to sort of

01:00:24.400 some of what you've written, the hubris that we have in thinking we can assess another's character

01:00:29.800 without knowing more, without digging, without allowing for complexity. You're in in talking

01:00:36.200 to strangers. You make a very compelling case that, you know, you look at our history when it

01:00:41.140 comes to assessing public figures and how bad we are at it. And you would think we would have emerged

01:00:47.920 a little humbled when it comes to our abilities. And to the contrary, I think we're more emboldened than

01:00:53.240 ever unjustifiably. And and I want you to talk, if you don't mind, a little bit about Harry Markopoulos

01:00:58.000 and Bernie, because I love this case. I've talked about Harry Markopoulos many times. He's like,

01:01:03.240 where's the crappy green suit? It's not it's not a nice suit. His hair is always messed up.

01:01:08.400 His tie is always crooked. When you see the old B-roll of him testifying before the SEC or what have

01:01:13.840 you. And no one is listening to Harry. He just doesn't look the part. Bernie Madoff, on the other

01:01:19.740 hand, look the part of the distinguished Wall Street guy. He had run the SEC. It's like whoever

01:01:25.380 heard of Harry. Nobody. And this is such a great lesson. And you may not know all you think, you

01:01:31.620 know, in assessing other people. Harry Markopoulos and the men like him and women, they may they may

01:01:38.520 have the real answers and you may know nothing. So I'll give you the floor. Yeah. Yeah. It was an

01:01:43.800 interesting case to me about I devoted a chapter of talking to strangers to the Madoff case. And

01:01:51.420 Markopoulos, as you say, was a forensic accountant who is the guy who tries to blow the whistle on

01:01:58.240 on Bernie Madoff going way, way back. He fingers him appropriately as running a Ponzi scheme years

01:02:06.080 before Madoff turned himself into the authorities. And Madoff, Markopoulos repeatedly tries to

01:02:14.080 convince the SEC and others that Madoff is a crook and nobody will listen to him. In part because,

01:02:22.080 as you say, Markopoulos, the very thing that makes him very good at sniffing out villains makes him

01:02:30.460 not very good at convincing others of his findings. He's he's he he's not a he's not smooth. He's not

01:02:41.020 compelling. He comes across as a bit of a nut. When he was attorney general of New York,

01:02:47.340 Markopoulos tries to give Eliot Spitzer a file on Madoff with all of his findings. And instead of like,

01:02:55.000 just having a meeting with Spitzer, he like puts on a disguise and like wraps his findings in like

01:03:02.780 three different envelopes and sidles up to Spitzer's aid. You know, it's like he just comes

01:03:09.380 across as a nut. And of course, people don't listen to him. But at every, you know, when you look at

01:03:16.180 that case, what you find is that at every turn, people are getting everyone else wrong, right?

01:03:22.320 We're getting Madoff wrong. Markopoulos is misunderstanding with people he needs to

01:03:27.780 to convince. I mean, it's just like and it's just this humbling reminder of the fact that our

01:03:33.860 impressions of our first impressions of people, not just first impressions, the the way in which we

01:03:39.700 make sense of strangers is just not very good. And when you realize that it ought to powerfully,

01:03:46.300 I think, discipline your conclusions about others, you've got to keep in mind, you know,

01:03:53.000 when you reach a conclusion about someone that you're engaged in an exercise at which human beings

01:03:59.640 are not very good. Right. And the that to bring it back, once again, to my Helen Levitt show,

01:04:07.640 the thing that was so interesting about the Helen Levitt case was, she gives this six hour,

01:04:14.440 seven hour interview. And in the first hour, you learned that she was a communist. In the second

01:04:20.600 hour, you learned that she defended Stalin, even in the 1950s. So you hate her in the second hour.

01:04:25.080 And you think she's a moral monster. And then she starts to talk about her life. And you start to

01:04:31.260 have sympathy with her because you about her because you learn how much she suffered. And then in like

01:04:36.980 hour six, you learn about all the other things she did over the course of her career and how that how

01:04:43.240 she was someone with an enormous heart who did all kinds of other things for other people and who

01:04:48.260 worked for all kinds of causes that we do believe in and who helped people who needed help. And I think

01:04:54.320 and you understand that she was a complicated, nuanced, multifaceted person. And if all you do is

01:05:02.840 listen to the first hour of that seven hour interview, you see a piece of her, but not the whole

01:05:08.880 Helen Levitt. And you're inclined to be far more judgmental of her than if you take the time to go

01:05:14.660 through all seven hours. And that is a beautiful illustration of what I'm talking about is that

01:05:20.840 maybe as we consider these cases of people, one another question we should ask ourselves as when

01:05:27.620 we consider these cases of people who do do things that are genuinely harmful, hurtful, immoral,

01:05:34.280 whatever. We need to ask ourselves, are we seeing the whole person? At least, you know,

01:05:39.500 Malcolm, I'm picturing more like my war analogy because the tribes consider themselves at war,

01:05:45.680 Democrats, Republicans, woke, non-woke, whatever, however you want to divide them.

01:05:49.320 And that's like to me saying to a soldier, before you take a shot at that guy on the other side,

01:05:54.520 who's got the gun on you, right? This is how they would see it. You should know a little bit about

01:05:58.960 his childhood. You know, what brought him here? Why is he trying to write where it's like soldiers

01:06:03.700 in a war say, I'm just pulling the trigger. It's me or him. We're fighting to the death. You know,

01:06:09.020 we're fighting for the most, the deepest principles one can fight for. And there's no interest in

01:06:14.260 understanding one's quote adversary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a, um, I don't know. It's just,

01:06:21.600 it's just a call for, I wish that on both sides, um, ideological sides, there was more

01:06:28.380 humility when it comes to these kinds of situations. I mean, just, well, what I love

01:06:32.820 about your book is that you get into how, you know, you may have the perfect pedigree academic

01:06:38.300 or what have you quote unquote perfect. It doesn't make you any better at this game. And, you know,

01:06:42.940 there's a reason all these well-heeled people suspected made off a little kind of like went

01:06:48.840 halfway on their investments or withdrew some, but not all because he looked the part and he was the

01:06:55.360 former head of the sec and everybody else was investing with him and somebody like Harry saw

01:07:00.840 it. And you get into Harry's dad owned an Arthur treacher's. Are they still around? Arthur treacher's

01:07:07.900 and he saw grift, he saw people stealing. And so he had a different background that really

01:07:16.060 worked for him. It inured to his benefit. It let him see things that the rest of us either didn't see

01:07:22.280 or chose not to understand. It's hard for everybody to live like that. You know, you,

01:07:26.560 you make the point, we'd be in a difficult society. We were all as suspicious as Harry is,

01:07:30.720 but you need, you need Harry's of the world. And I do think that the main point to me of that whole

01:07:35.120 discussion, whether it was on Amanda Knox or the spy, Anna, who, you know, they suspected,

01:07:41.220 but they never turned her in, um, have humility in assessing somebody else's character. You never know.

01:07:46.780 And, and you, you really should have humility in your own judgments because you're not perfect

01:07:51.880 either. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's true. I think. Um, so that leads me to the guardian and the,

01:07:59.300 the question you answered in April of 2021, if you could bring something extinct back to life,

01:08:05.260 what would you choose? And your answer, I love the cold war, the cold war,

01:08:10.720 a permanent stable crisis is much more appealing to me now than a permanent, completely unpredictable one.

01:08:21.880 I was having a little bit of fun with that one. Uh, you know, I mean, one, one enemy,

01:08:29.520 you know, one is kind of nice to think like in the cold war, we had a nice stretch where we only had,

01:08:35.660 we really just worried about like, you know, one half of the world, one enemy, one, we knew what

01:08:41.160 the danger was, nuclear weapon. I mean, it was, there was something kind of comforting. I was,

01:08:46.300 I will say that as I, when I was answering the question, I was deep into, um, uh, uh,

01:08:54.260 I was working on my book, the bomber mafia, which came up a couple months ago and, um, which is all

01:09:00.700 about the second world war. And so I was in the world of clearly defined conflicts. And the thing

01:09:08.020 that's so wonderful in thinking and reading about the second world war is its clarity, right? Like,

01:09:16.980 yeah, you really couldn't, you really couldn't say, I don't know whether we should be fighting

01:09:22.020 this Hitler guy. No, it was, uh, we were all behind that. Like, and it's just like thinking back to a

01:09:27.580 moment when absolutely everyone except complete nut jobs, um, in 19, you know, 42 in the United

01:09:36.380 States at 43, there's no, we're not having arguments about the, uh, the moral correctness

01:09:42.400 of this fight, nor were they having those arguments in London in during the blitz or, and just like I

01:09:49.060 had a kind of nostalgic moment for the idea that we could all be united around a common cause.

01:09:56.580 I relate. I get it. I, I felt what you felt when you said it, like just, and not divided inside,

01:10:03.000 you know, it's, it's easier. I I'm thinking now about, um, miracle on ice and the story about how, um,

01:10:09.580 Herb, what's his last name? Brooks Brooks. Brooks. Thank you. Herb Brooks brought that team together,

01:10:15.080 the American team. Sorry to defeat the Canadians to defeat the Russians. Oh yeah. Yes. Nevermind.

01:10:20.680 It was in Canada. So you're on my team. Um, yeah. To defeat the Russians. Thank you.

01:10:24.780 And how he made himself the common enemy, right? They, the, the guys were all divided. They came

01:10:29.680 from different regions. They came from different schools. And so he needed to give them a common

01:10:33.640 enemy so they could bond amongst each other. And that's sort of what you're saying. Like we were,

01:10:37.480 we've been in places post nine 11, world war two cold war, where we as Americans were together

01:10:42.880 and there was a common enemy outside. I say this with the Olympics coming up, you know,

01:10:47.740 every now and again, whenever there's this moment where we actually do have a common cause,

01:10:52.280 typically the Olympics is a good example. And then there's always a little, some little pushback,

01:10:56.380 like Americans are too raw, raw about like cheering for their side in the Olympics. I was like,

01:11:02.100 actually, no, I think we need more of that. Can we have, can we like Bill Simmons, my friend,

01:11:07.180 Bill Simmons, who, you know, the sports does the ringer. He has this great idea for the, for hockey,

01:11:13.160 which is that national hockey league should be divided into two conferences,

01:11:16.680 the Canadian conference and the American conference. And every single year, the best Canadian team

01:11:23.840 should play the best American team for the Stanley cup. And the reason I love that idea is we desperately

01:11:29.340 need more examples, opportunities where the entire country can cheer for one thing, right?

01:11:37.740 This is a, this is a muscle that you have to exercise. And we need to exercise a lot more.

01:11:43.620 I love the women's soccer for the same reason. Like, sadly, they lost the other day, but, you know,

01:11:49.980 those are there, those were moments when we could all get behind.

01:11:55.380 Or what about, what about like Mary Lou Retton? We've had such great moments in individual

01:12:00.020 gymnastics, you know, where, oh, what's the name of the young gal? She stuck the landing,

01:12:04.780 even though she got her, Carrie Strug. Carrie Strug got hurt, remember? And she hurt the,

01:12:08.960 and she stuck the landing. It was like, yay. Anyway, there, that's, that's, what's fun about

01:12:13.280 the Olympics. Let's hope they go off because every day there's another COVID threat, this,

01:12:17.360 that, or the other thing. All right. Now I've got to, I, I, I don't want to, um,

01:12:21.820 miss cause we've got a few minutes left, like 20 minutes, but we got to talk about the little

01:12:25.540 mermaid as a mother of three children. I had to wait patiently now.

01:12:30.360 Not only have you done an in-depth study on this, but three episodes, three episodes on

01:12:37.040 The Little Mermaid. Now, why is this? Why is this so important to Malcolm Gladwell?

01:12:41.600 Well, so many reasons, Megan. I can't, but do people call you MK? Should I be calling you MK?

01:12:48.920 You're allowed to call me MK. My staff calls me MK. People who know me well call me MK. Yes,

01:12:52.920 you're in. Please call me MK. Kind of like MK. Yeah, go for it. I like it too.

01:12:56.760 So, um, first of all, I'm going to say something that, um, is going to blow your mind. Um, and also

01:13:02.420 the minds of all of your listeners. I had never watched a Disney animated movie until March of 2021.

01:13:12.960 Never. The whole thing passed me by. No idea. I, first of all, didn't have a TV growing up. Um,

01:13:21.140 so no, no example of ever like, and then, you know, I don't know, didn't have kids. So didn't

01:13:31.360 have like an example. That makes it more understandable. So then I, I read, I read this

01:13:39.120 essay written by this total, totally brilliant woman, um, who's a law professor at, uh, um,

01:13:46.960 at, at Northwestern in which she talks about, um, her name is Laura Beth Nielsen. And by the way,

01:13:53.920 if you ever want to have a fantastic guest on your show, just call up Laura Beth Nielsen. She's the

01:13:58.480 most hilarious, brilliant. And in the first episode, it's yes. We're of the, of my little

01:14:04.760 mermaid trilogy. It's really the Laura Beth Nielsen show. And she just, she talks about how she was,

01:14:10.980 she had two young boys and she watched little mermaid and she's a lawyer law professor. She's like,

01:14:16.080 wait a minute, what's going on here? Like the notions of the law that are being represented

01:14:22.700 in the story are all crazy. Like, and this is kind of a hilarious example, which I, I went back,

01:14:30.040 I talked to her. Then I went back and I watched it and I was like, Oh my God, she's so right.

01:14:33.640 This is nuts. There's so many problems. And I'll start with Laura Beth Nielsen's critique.

01:14:38.100 She points out among other things, she's got a whole series of critiques, but,

01:14:41.220 uh, uh, the notion of the whole Disney Disney's little mermaid, the crucial plot point is that

01:14:50.320 Ariel signs a contract with Ursula in which she gives up her voice in return for a shot at being

01:15:01.040 a human, right? Cause she wants to fall in love with, um, with, uh, Prince Eric. And the contract is in

01:15:09.440 cannot be broken, right? If she fails to get Prince Eric to fall in love with her,

01:15:13.440 then she has to permanently give up her voice and become basically a slave in Ursula's garden.

01:15:18.640 And once she's signed, then there's no way for this contract to be revoked. Even King Triton

01:15:26.420 with all of his powers cannot revoke this contract. And the only way the contract can be, um,

01:15:32.240 in, uh, uh, uh, can be invalidated is that Ursula has to be murdered by Prince Eric at the end of the

01:15:39.140 movie. And as Laura Beth Nielsen pointed out, that's not how contracts work. The whole point

01:15:44.560 of contracts is that if they are, they do an enshrine justice. If they are immoral, the law has

01:15:50.400 an elaborate mechanism for revisiting the contract. This is a contract signed with a minor involving

01:15:57.040 the sale of a body part. It absolutely can be invalidated. In fact, there's, there's nothing the

01:16:02.860 law does better than re-examine. That's why we have people who study contract law. That's why we have

01:16:07.900 law firms. We know this. And she's like sitting. So you imagine there's Laura Beth Nielsen, this

01:16:12.340 brilliant legal mind sitting with her two, like six-year-old boys, whatever. I don't know how old

01:16:16.760 they were. She's watching and she's just losing her mind. She's like, are you kidding me? Why are

01:16:21.940 you teaching my six-year-old something, a fact about the law, fundamentally false. And also more on a more

01:16:30.140 serious level. What she's saying is what you're teaching my child is that the law does not embody

01:16:37.640 justice. Rather, the law is a separate arbitrary instrument that evil people use to further their

01:16:44.600 evil ends. She's like, no, it's not. The whole point of the law in a democracy like the United States

01:16:51.840 is it embodies justice. It's the mechanism, the beautiful mechanism we have created to ensure just

01:16:58.340 outcomes in the world. Look how excited you are. I am so excited about this. And the fact that it

01:17:04.120 works, and it works, by the way, for all the facts that, you know, this is a lawyer. We grumble about

01:17:08.120 legal mechanisms all the time, but they work really well in this country. You know? They do.

01:17:15.120 Really well. Not perfectly. No, I read it. So you said the Little Mermaid is a vigilante picture.

01:17:20.140 It's an animated, dirty Harry. It's worse than that. Think about it. So we have this problem

01:17:26.720 created by the fact that Ariel signs a contract, which cannot be broken, which falls. And the only

01:17:33.160 way they can break it is that she engages her boyfriend, Prince Eric, in an act of extra legal

01:17:43.380 execution. He murders Ursula at the end of the movie in order to get her out of the contract.

01:17:50.500 What kind of message is that sending? That's nuts. This is, this is a movie for children in which we

01:17:57.740 sanction an extra legal execution as a way of resolving a legal problem.

01:18:05.500 Do you understand why I'm racist to say this?

01:18:07.460 Why pick on the Little Mermaid? There's so many movies you could do this to, right? It's like in,

01:18:11.720 in, uh, what is it? Tangled? Or is it Tangled? They keep, they keep her up in a tower. The evil

01:18:15.800 mother keeps her up in a tower. It's imprisonment. And, uh, and you know, that in Snow White, that

01:18:20.700 the evil queen, you know, she can't actually make herself into an old lady with the poison

01:18:25.260 apple, right? Like that doesn't, I can't act, the mirror doesn't act like we're not reality based

01:18:28.940 in any. That's why they call them fairy tales.

01:18:30.860 Hold on. First of all, first of all, you suggest that I'm done. Who says I'm done?

01:18:34.360 Look at him. Look at him.

01:18:36.240 Secondly, secondly, secondly, aren't, aren't you, you should be ashamed. You're a lawyer. You know,

01:18:44.340 as much as Mary, as, as, as, as Laura Beth Nielsen, you sat and watched a little mermaid with your

01:18:49.840 children. Did you not? I did. I confess.

01:18:52.720 Did you train in the law? Did you turn to your children and say, no, wait a minute, guys,

01:18:59.100 this is not the way the law works. No, because we knew it was fake.

01:19:04.880 No, because in this instance, and only in this instance, I'm going to question your parenting

01:19:09.680 skills. You, you have a responsibility to say to your kids, this is not the way the law works.

01:19:15.780 And because you failed at that task, I realized I had to do a podcast episode about it.

01:19:21.400 You know, I've got to let them listen to it. You can do the cleanup in aisle seven that I created.

01:19:26.740 I will say when I read them some fairy tales, I'll say, you know, because they constantly focused on

01:19:30.920 the looks of the little girls or the Cinderella and everything. So I, I don't think there's anything

01:19:35.500 wrong with complimenting a woman's looks, but I'll always add, like, I'll say, and she was incredibly

01:19:39.400 smart. She was strong and happened to be beautiful, right? I'll throw in a few adjectives. Well,

01:19:43.840 they'll come over and look and say, huh? Um, but I understand all the messaging in these fairy

01:19:47.940 tales is, is it is deeply problematic. Yeah. Wait, do you have, do you have girls or boys? What do

01:19:52.460 you have both? What do you have? I have two boys and a girl. Oh, I see. Now I've got it all.

01:19:57.740 You've got it all. Now your, is your little, is your girl youngest or older? Where is she in the

01:20:02.480 middle? She's in the middle. So they're right now they're 11, 10 and, um, my little guy turns

01:20:07.420 eight on Friday. So 11, 10 and eight. And she's the 10 year old. MK, I think the damage has been

01:20:12.680 done. I think it's, I think it's, I think it's too late. It's too late. I think your, your failure

01:20:17.080 to exercise appropriate parenting when it came to these fairy tales has given your kids a distorted

01:20:22.920 version of what the law is good at. What do we, God only knows where this is going to go.

01:20:26.960 Not just the law. So that's just episode one. Then we dig into it further in episode two,

01:20:32.360 and you know, here's what we're interested in. Here's what we're interested in episode two.

01:20:38.740 Tell me. So I got Britt Marling, who's this brilliant screenwriter and, uh, actor in Hollywood,

01:20:46.240 who's a friend of mine to rewrite the little mermaid, to create an ending that actually works.

01:20:50.340 And her big point, which is super interesting is the point of the little mermaid story is about a

01:20:56.680 young woman who must give up her voice in order to be accepted by society and get what she wants,

01:21:02.240 which is a beautiful and powerful and really important message. Um, that I think women

01:21:09.340 everywhere could appreciate and understand, right? You are required. I mean, think, right. You know,

01:21:14.480 this, and sort of back to our original point when you, and when you speak, you better be saying all

01:21:19.060 the right things. Exactly. Um, so it begins with this beautiful idea and then Disney drops the ball,

01:21:26.100 right? Because the, how does the movie is about how does she get her voice back? And in the Disney's

01:21:34.480 little mermaid, the way this girl who tragically is required to give up her voice in order to achieve

01:21:40.960 what she wants in the world, the way she gets her voice back is that a guy gets it back for her.

01:21:46.700 Yeah. Right. Always in every Disney film. Now in modern day, they're doing less, but yeah,

01:21:52.640 the classics for sure. Wait, do I, do I need to call up your daughter and just say to her,

01:21:56.920 look, you weren't told the truth about the little mermaid. I'm going to, well, let me,

01:22:02.480 let me take you down a road right there. Cause I know you said, I laughed when I saw this. I'm like,

01:22:06.660 okay, Malcolm definitely doesn't watch my show. Listen to our show. Cause you said when,

01:22:10.060 when Megan Markle in the Oprah interview said, Oh, that's what happened to me. Yes. And you said,

01:22:14.600 do we, did we roll our eyes? No, we said, Oh my God, she's so right. And I laughed because that

01:22:19.080 is definitely not what I said. I was like, Oh, please give me a break. Here's why. Because

01:22:23.320 she was empowered. Megan Markle knew what she was getting herself into. Nobody thinks joining the

01:22:27.060 Royal family will be an opportunity to express all of your free speech rights. And my then six year

01:22:31.620 old daughter, cause I was going off to cover the Royal wedding said, and I played the tape when

01:22:35.520 Piers Morgan came on said, why would anyone want to Royal marry into the Royal family? She, she made the

01:22:42.420 point. It's like, you, you can't eat with your right hand. You have to eat with your left. They

01:22:47.460 make you and someone else makes your choices. I was like, yes. So I did my job, Malcolm. She knew,

01:22:55.100 she knew before Megan Markle knew she should have consulted. But no, I'm actually more impressed

01:23:00.300 by your daughter at this point than you. She's the one that's actually dead on.

01:23:04.220 She's the one who pinpoints. She's absolutely right. Why? The only reason if to join the Royal

01:23:11.700 family is if you want to play dress up for the rest of your life. And that's right.

01:23:15.380 A hundred percent. Like that's, that's right.

01:23:16.860 What it's about. That's why the other girls who didn't want to marry Harry,

01:23:19.660 the Cressida that she's all, she's on the record saying like, I didn't want to live like that.

01:23:23.700 Who could blame her? I'll tell you one other story. Um, my one friend is a lawyer. She's a woman

01:23:28.620 and she's a female lawyer in New York and she's kick-ass and they went to Disney with her daughter

01:23:33.560 and her son and her daughter was around eight. And the Cinderella fairy godmother came over and said

01:23:40.240 to the daughter, um, and who is your fairy godmother? And the little girl said, I don't have one. And the

01:23:47.180 fairy godmother said, well, who makes all your wishes come true? And the little, the little girl

01:23:52.480 looked up to her, up at her and my friend, the mom leaned in and said, where we come from, we make our

01:23:57.580 own wishes come true. The fairy godmother Disney's like, oh, good lord. Dissed. Dissed.

01:24:05.880 What have you brought me? I love it. Well, I love that you're doing important work, I guess,

01:24:11.440 because there is a problem with those Disney fairy tales, although I still read them and tell them and

01:24:15.040 make small modifications. I don't know. I feel like it turned out okay, notwithstanding, but I could be

01:24:19.060 wrong. They could actually be the source of all of my, the internet tells me I have internalized

01:24:23.440 misogyny. This is why Malcolm, we've gotten to the bottom of it.

01:24:27.580 Don't leave me now. We've got more coming up in 60 seconds.

01:24:36.220 I want to end with something practical. Since I do have three children, and they will be moving up

01:24:40.160 the ranks, they're all, you know, middle school and elementary school, but someday they're going

01:24:44.020 to be going to high school and applying to colleges. And I want, I want you to explain why the last

01:24:48.980 resource we should use in choosing a school is U.S. News and World Report's ranks of, quote,

01:24:55.220 top colleges. Because that's another thing you've been focused on in the way only you can with your

01:24:59.440 forensic diagnosis of how these things work and whether we should rely on them or not. And you've

01:25:03.940 taken our look at that and have landed on not.

01:25:07.800 Yeah. We did two episodes of Revisions History on what's wrong with the U.S. News rankings. And

01:25:12.860 I'm like, I'm going to get even as much worked up about this as I, as I did about the little

01:25:18.360 moment. So many problems. Basically, though, they, so they use an algorithm to determine how to rank

01:25:25.820 a college, which is itself an audacious act that you could come up with an equation. And I give the

01:25:33.940 example in the episode of, you know, there are three schools that are ranked roughly equally in the U.S.

01:25:41.040 rankings. Yeshiva University in New York City, Gonzaga University in Washington, and Brigham Young

01:25:51.920 in Utah. So a Jewish school, a Mormon school, and a Jesuit school. And a school where sports is

01:26:02.920 everything. A school where sports is nothing. A school where people do drink lots of beer. A school

01:26:13.340 where people don't drink beer at all. A school, I could go on. Like, you couldn't imagine more,

01:26:19.160 three more different schools in America than Yeshiva, Gonzaga, and Brigham Young. And U.S. News

01:26:25.700 purports to tell you that those three schools are roughly equal. How is that even possible? That's

01:26:34.200 nuts. If I'm someone who's Catholic and, you know, living in Long Island and really wants to live in

01:26:41.860 the Northeast or Northwest, Gonzaga is not equal to Brigham Young, is it? No. If I'm someone who wants

01:26:49.640 to go to a small urban school and study Talmud, how is that? How can you say that Yeshiva is equal

01:26:59.360 to Gonzaga, right? I mean, just that. So the whole enterprise is flawed. But the thing I dig into is

01:27:05.440 the most important thing they use to generate the ranking is what they call the reputation score.

01:27:11.080 And that is generated by asking every college president in the country to rank every other

01:27:16.800 school on a scale of one to five. And the question I asked was, if you are, so you're given, if you're

01:27:22.940 a college president, a list of hundreds of schools and you give each one of them a grade. And my

01:27:27.580 question was, this is the most important thing in their entire algorithm. How does a college president

01:27:33.980 possibly grade every other school in the country? On what basis do they make that judgment? How do they

01:27:40.200 even know? Like, if you're the president of Gonzaga, how do you know what grade to give Yeshiva?

01:27:46.800 Do you go to Yeshiva? Did you attend it? Do you go and ask people? So, I mean, you, this is just

01:27:52.920 the beginning. It gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. But the whole point is, it's

01:27:56.360 crazy. That's that idea. And so then I actually had a, I got a, this hilarious woman named Laura

01:28:02.200 Robb, who's a senior at Reed College. I got her to do a little statistical exercise where she simply

01:28:07.920 said, can we break down and see what factors correlate the most with these reputation scores that

01:28:14.800 U.S. News thinks are so important? It turns out, it turns out you can figure out a school's reputation

01:28:20.380 just by looking at how high its tuition is, how much money it has in the bank, and what percentage

01:28:26.680 of its undergraduate population is white. That's all you need to know. You know those three facts.

01:28:31.640 So, like, that's not, you know, no college student in the, no high school student looking to go to

01:28:41.180 college in this country should be at all basing their decision about where to go to college.

01:28:47.420 What should they be basing it on? If parents are going through this right now, what's the

01:28:51.620 alternate, right? Because it's super competitive. They've all read Outliers and their kids have been

01:28:56.080 getting their 10,000 hours of soccer and lacrosse and they are ready. No, that's not your fault.

01:29:00.680 Don't blame me.

01:29:01.040 It's not your fault, but it is a thing. Now everybody's having babies in January because

01:29:06.080 of your book pointed out the Canadian, yeah, the Canadian hockey teams, the ones born in January

01:29:10.560 do better than the ones born in late December because of the age difference. All that stuff

01:29:13.620 has manifested. I live it. I see it. I'm like, oh damn, Malcolm. Although I didn't, I didn't,

01:29:19.060 I had babies in all the wrong times of the year, so it's okay. I don't blame me.

01:29:23.000 So yeah, what should they consult? Like, what should they be doing?

01:29:26.080 Well, they should ask the question, where will I be happiest and where will I be most

01:29:31.880 engaged? I mean, the simple truth about, you know, the overwhelming majority of American colleges

01:29:38.740 is that they're all really good if a student, if the student is engaged. You know, if you take

01:29:48.520 advantage of the opportunities that college offers, if you get out of your dorm room, if you have

01:29:52.800 interesting conversations with people, if you meet up with your professors, if you do the reading

01:29:57.880 you're supposed to be doing, if you go to the, you know, the play that's being put on, if you do all

01:30:02.180 those kinds of things, you'll get a great education. The problem isn't that people get bad educations

01:30:07.580 not because they go to quote unquote bad schools, but because they go to schools and they don't take

01:30:12.340 advantage of the opportunities that are offered by those schools, right? There's 200. And by the way,

01:30:20.380 the people who teach the professors at these schools, they're all, they all have great educations.

01:30:27.040 They all get PhDs from the same places. They're all passionate. Not all, but you know, it's like,

01:30:33.660 you don't go into that. You don't want to be a professor unless you like students and want to

01:30:40.000 teach them. I mean, it's not like there's a shortage of good teachers out there, but

01:30:44.540 you know, the last thing you should be using to make your decision is how nice the school looks.

01:30:51.860 This, or, you know, I went earlier in Provisions History a couple of seasons ago, I did this whole

01:30:55.940 thing about Bowdoin College and how they were boasting about how good the food was in their dining

01:31:01.020 home. That's not a reason to go to college, to pick a college, right? Especially given the tuition

01:31:06.660 these days. Yeah. You know, I honestly, I've, I've lived this myself. I went to Syracuse undergrad,

01:31:11.400 but I went to Albany law school, which is, you know, to be charitable, it's at best a third tier

01:31:15.740 law school. And, uh, it worked out fine. I threw myself into it. I loved every moment. I joined

01:31:21.700 everything. I did moot court and I did law review and I studied, studied, studied. My brain was fired up.

01:31:26.920 I loved it. I enjoyed it. And I got into one of the best law firms in the country. And

01:31:31.000 then I transferred into literally one of the top 10 law firms in the country. It works out fine.

01:31:35.840 People are so obsessed with pedigree. And I, I know you've made the point, like we're ruining our

01:31:40.640 kids' high school years, this time of life that should be wonderful for them. Coming of age,

01:31:46.260 first loves, socialization at its peak when you really need your friends and social clubs. And it's,

01:31:53.740 it, my high school time, like that period in that way was wonderful. My parents put zero pressure on me.

01:31:58.600 I didn't, we didn't even understand that the SAT was coming. And, um, I just think people need to

01:32:04.000 remember, right. It's, you don't have to get junior into the quote, perfect school on paper. You have to

01:32:08.540 worry about juniors. It's happiness, wellbeing, well-roundedness.

01:32:12.800 And we need to remind students, kids that it's not about the institution. It's about you,

01:32:18.680 right. It's about your own enthusiasm, motivation, interest level. And this is a, this is a, you know,

01:32:27.420 these are fundamentally, when you go off to college, your college experience is a test of your own

01:32:33.080 character. That's what it is. And, you know, people will do everything in their power to duck that

01:32:39.160 realization. They'll want to say, no, no, no, everything will be fine. If I just go to X word,

01:32:43.620 no, no, no, no. It's about you. What do you do when you're, and the number of people who squander

01:32:49.700 what should be, I, you know, the, one of the most important four-year stretches of your life,

01:32:55.540 they squander it because they're indifferent or they're unmotivated, or they smoke a lot of pot and

01:33:01.660 play a lot of video games. Why would you go to, why would you go all the way off to college and spend

01:33:07.060 all of that money and be surrounded by all of that wonder and learning and, and be sitting in

01:33:14.160 your dorm room, smoking pot? Like, yeah. And totally burnt out from a high school that was

01:33:19.280 jam full of stuff you didn't really want to be doing. All right, I'll leave it with this. Um,

01:33:24.420 the other thing you said to the guardian in April of 2021, the trait I most deplore in others is,

01:33:29.700 and your answer was people who deny the extent of their privilege. I love that because you're very

01:33:34.500 anti-elitism and I can relate to you on that. And you do a thing in one of your books on Jeb Bush

01:33:40.540 saying like, I'm self-made. I don't think so. Um, and so I just wanted to say it, I've never met

01:33:51.560 you before. We've never talked, but it, it has been my privilege to sit here getting to know you

01:33:55.860 and hear your take on everything. Everything. What a broad conversation. I've enjoyed this too,

01:34:00.300 MK. Now I'm calling you MK. See you soon, MG. I hope I will. I hope I see you at Ozzy. And,

01:34:06.460 uh, if not before, it's been great. Good. Thank you.

01:34:14.420 Well, that was a fun time. I really enjoyed that interview. I hope you did too. If you did go

01:34:19.420 ahead and subscribe to the show right now and give us a download and a review and do it now because

01:34:24.120 you're not going to want to miss Monday's episode. Ben Shapiro is back with us. One of my favorite people

01:34:29.120 and, uh, can't wait to talk to him about everything. In the meantime, have a great weekend.

01:34:35.640 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:34:42.560 The Megan Kelly show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - July 23, 2021

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

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