The Megyn Kelly Show - Smug CNN, Silencing Speech, and Misguided Biden, with Daniel Cameron, Erik Wemple, and Todd Rose ｜ Ep. 254

00:00:00.560 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.960 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:14.960 We have a lot to get to today, but I want to start with CNN,

00:00:18.780 which was at one time known as the most trusted name in news.

00:00:23.160 Where has all that trust and integrity gone?

00:00:25.920 Today, that network is facing a boatload of questions and criticism following the sudden resignation of its president, Jeff Zucker.

00:00:33.100 His demise linked in part to the debacle related to the Cuomos and one of the worst kept secrets in the news business,

00:00:39.860 that he had long been involved with a subordinate, much longer than they are claiming now.

00:00:46.000 This, as Jeff Zucker's CNN, had turned into a network of smug, moralizing, and sanctimony.

00:00:52.980 Yes, under his leadership, he took a bunch of anchors who did have credibility,

00:00:59.360 had them activate their opinion side, which was reflective of Jeff Zucker's opinion, we were told by many,

00:01:08.820 to lecture America on its morals and with judgments at every turn over the past five years.

00:01:15.380 The hypocrisy couldn't be more obvious. Take a look.

00:01:19.140 Our task is, quite simply, to keep alive the spirit of American democracy.

00:01:25.100 Trump, again, comparing it to the flu. And where did he get that from?

00:01:29.680 Fair, balanced, and unafraid to be dangerously ignorant. 0.98

00:01:33.700 If you voted for Trump, you voted for the person who the Klan supported. 0.98

00:01:39.520 The man he called Little Marco, you know, Mr. Bible Boy.

00:01:44.920 You know, he's got a Bible quote for every moment.

00:01:47.160 This country needs a trust injection, a trust infusion. And maybe it starts right here.

00:01:53.880 All right, here is the official re-entry from the basement, cleared by CDC. 0.96

00:02:00.640 So we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men. 0.66

00:02:08.800 And it's stunning. And they're going to go back, you know, to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn that they're staying at in the Garden Marriott. 0.77

00:02:16.600 And they're going to have some drinks and they're going to talk about the great day that they had in Washington.

00:02:20.860 And they really did something and stand up for something. And they stood up for nothing.

00:02:25.180 The media must challenge power and the media must stay on the side of the truth.

00:02:29.340 Because we should have worn masks more. We should have social distanced more.

00:02:33.760 I think we have to stop coddling people when it comes to this and the vaccine saying, oh, you can't shame them. 1.00

00:02:40.600 You can't call them stupid. You can't call them silly. Yes, they are. 1.00

00:02:44.040 And they'll say, well, I'm not racist. I just voted for him because, you know, I didn't like Hillary Clinton.

00:02:50.300 If you support somebody who does racist things, that makes you racist.

00:02:53.400 OK, there you have it. So we need a trust infusion as a country that the media must challenge power and stay on the side of truth.

00:03:06.800 Tell it to your own leaders, CNN. Start at home.

00:03:10.800 Eric Wemple is one of the few reporters who's been willing to report the truth about CNN for a long, long time.

00:03:16.680 He is a media critic at The Washington Post, and he joins me now with the latest on this scandal and its fallout.

00:03:23.860 You you are one of the only ones to challenge this notion that they are they are on the side of truth, that they do speak truth to power, that they will challenge power unless it's internal, Eric.

00:03:38.100 In which case they will ignore and blame others as they've been doing all along, right up to and including the firing of Chris Cuomo as if he was the only person to blame for what happened in connection with his interviews and his connection to Andrew Cuomo, the then sitting governor of New York.

00:03:57.720 Right. So last year, when all this scandal sort of broke, Chris Cuomo was taking 90, 100 percent of the blame for having crossed the line with respect to helping his brother.

00:04:13.760 And, you know, I just I know basically how closely all those people work together and I know how closely Jeff Zucker was a hands on boss at CNN.

00:04:25.440 And it just didn't make any sense to me that there was that great a gap between what Chris Cuomo was doing and what Jeff Zucker knew.

00:04:36.320 So I, you know, I said, you know, this needs to be investigated.

00:04:40.020 This needs to be there needs to be some some honesty and some some transparency around this.

00:04:45.160 And and so I kept poking around and, you know, it turns out that the original sort of sin, if you will, the original journalistic sin, which was the Cuomo and Cuomo interviews back in the spring of 2020.

00:04:59.220 I mean, the top ranks of CNN were very, very much personally involved in getting making that happen.

00:05:06.520 And now there's a question of exactly what did Jeff Zucker say to Andrew Cuomo at the time?

00:05:12.200 What was Alison Gullist, Jeff Zucker's affair partner?

00:05:15.660 What was her role in speaking to Andrew Cuomo?

00:05:18.060 What did they say to Andrew Cuomo to secure the interviews?

00:05:21.420 What kind of advice did they give to Andrew Cuomo themselves behind the scenes?

00:05:25.540 Never mind, Chris Cuomo, they're very quick to point the finger at Chris and what Chris did was wrong.

00:05:31.580 But how about these two who are now playing holier than thou?

00:05:35.780 You know, now we know that they're playing holier than thou and ultimately wound up turfing Chris Cuomo, all while concealing what they had been doing behind the scenes.

00:05:45.840 Well, they weren't forthcoming about this, right?

00:05:47.620 I mean, basically what you have is Alison Gullist and I hear Zucker as well, although the CNN denies that he was directly involved in trying to book the former governor.

00:05:59.100 But basically calling this guy and saying, please come on our air, please come on Cuomo primetime.

00:06:05.980 You know, I would say in most contexts, that's not a huge problem because news networks commonly deploy all kinds of people to get interviews.

00:06:14.420 And I think that that can be a healthy and perfectly fine sort of thing.

00:06:19.100 But in this case, they were deploying personally their top staffers, their top executives, I should say, to get interviews that were blatantly in contravention of their own journalistic standards.

00:06:32.900 So, hey, let me go and really hustle to get this interview that that violates journalistic ethics.

00:06:39.700 I mean, and here's what I want to know. Here's what I want to know. What was said?

00:06:43.680 What was said by Alison, who worked for Andrew Cuomo and was said to be close to him?

00:06:48.300 What was said by Jeff Zucker specifically in any conversations he had with Andrew Cuomo was advice given on how to handle any particular issue.

00:06:57.980 How far did he go? Right.

00:06:59.040 Because we already had Donald Trump suggesting that Jeff Zucker had been guiding him or trying to, to the extent anybody can guide Trump, had been guiding him with respect to Trump's interviews.

00:07:09.080 Totally inappropriate. So so did Jeff Zucker do that for Andrew Cuomo?

00:07:13.080 I mean, how intimately involved was he? Because that would be an ethical stain as well.

00:07:18.060 That would be. That would be. I don't I don't have anything reportable on that just yet.

00:07:24.760 But obviously there were there was there was talk. Right. There was conversation.

00:07:28.820 So and people people chat, blah, blah, blah.

00:07:32.000 I do think that your investigative focus there is well played because Lord knows that everybody gets hammered for crossing the line.

00:07:40.620 And Chris Cuomo took it on the chin, as you say correctly, for crossing the line in over into helping the executive chamber of Andrew Cuomo or at least providing advice to the executive chamber on how to handle the governor's sexual harassment crisis.

00:07:57.320 So I don't think that you can then turn around and have it revealed that that that there was something more than just just straight up journalistic business on these calls.

00:08:07.460 So exactly right. And what what of her relationship with him?

00:08:12.600 You know, I want to know more about how many times they spoke and how many times she utilized that connection, because if they're going to fire Chris Cuomo for, you know, stepping over that ethical line, then they need to be honest about what ethical lines they may have crossed and just how far over they went.

00:08:31.240 That's correct. And that's correct. And a germane fact here is that Alison Gullis did serve for a brief period, I believe, in 2012 as the communications director for Andrew Cuomo.

00:08:42.700 And so she had, you know, familiarity with with him and they were they were tight.

00:08:47.920 And so and then she went back, she went she was at NBC and then went back with Zucker when Zucker became the boss of CNN in January 2013.

00:08:58.980 So so there is that sort of revolving door aspect of this, which I think is always kind of questionable, sleazy, you know, problematic, because, you know, at some point these people lose sort of perspective on what profession they're in.

00:09:15.580 You know, are they in politics or are they in journalism?

00:09:19.380 And I think that, you know, if you're a reporter covering this particular story, you want to keep those boundaries in mind and impress these people on precisely what was discussed.

00:09:30.280 Can I ask you? So it is it's been widely reported now by many sources that several people within CNN are calling B.S.

00:09:40.140 on this claim by Zucker and Gullis that it only started recently, the affair that that it happened, as she claimed, during covid.

00:09:47.760 This my my own reporting during covid, yeah, yeah, my own reporting in my sources tell me that's a lie.

00:09:56.180 That's 100 percent untrue that this affair has been going on for years.

00:10:01.020 Katie Couric alluded to it in her book, suggesting it may have been going on back when her daytime series was being executive produced by Jeff Zucker, which was prior to 2013.

00:10:10.760 When he took over CNN, they were both divorced in or around 17 and 18 from their respective spouses.

00:10:17.900 This would mean that they were they were cheating on spouses with one another at the office place.

00:10:22.280 And it would also suggest that there's a reason why they don't want to admit that if it had been going on for that long, Eric, then it means he promoted her up the ranks several times while he was her boss and sleeping with her.

00:10:36.480 That's what it means. What's the reason for saying it only started recently? That's the reason.

00:10:40.820 That's that's what I have deduced. The reason you don't want to say it's been going on for years is because they don't want people to know she got promoted time and time again while she was sleeping with the boss.

00:10:50.900 If that's true, she needs to go as well.

00:10:55.060 Oh, well, that's very heavy. And I've heard a lot of, you know, the discussion of this, that it was common knowledge that it predated that.

00:11:02.980 I've also heard a little pushback that, you know, no, this is relatively recent.

00:11:06.980 I would say that the statement from Gullis was was was was very carefully couched.

00:11:13.420 Right. She said that the relationship changed in the middle of COVID.

00:11:17.900 I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I don't think that you're off base in inferring from that statement that it turned romantic at that time.

00:11:28.180 So I do think that that maybe they're trying to be lawyerly or technical there.

00:11:33.620 Maybe they're trying to say they broke up during COVID because they they have been together for years.

00:11:37.480 I mean, for years. And it's been an open secret in the industry and maybe not even a secret, depending on who you ask.

00:11:42.980 That's Soledad O'Brien, who used to work at CNN, was tweeting that out the other day. 0.98

00:11:46.900 I have several sources inside of CNN and connected to CNN.

00:11:49.480 And I have some impeccable sources who are telling me that this is the case, that they've been together for years.

00:11:54.400 They can deny it. The truth is going to come out.

00:11:56.420 It always does. If you get caught in something like this, it's just better to show your cards.

00:12:01.180 You know, just don't just try not to dodge because the truth will always come out.

00:12:06.660 And if he'd been doing this, then it is a very big deal.

00:12:09.240 And that's what I've been trying to say when I see people like Alison Camerata on TV yesterday.

00:12:14.140 I mean, almost in open tears watching this guy go down.

00:12:17.760 I'll show the audience the clip and the folks at home can listen to it or watch it back on our YouTube channel later.

00:12:22.600 But to me, completely insensitive to, for example, other people in the PR shop who may now be wondering why they didn't get promoted over and over and did not wind up executive vice presidents who didn't happen to be sleeping with the boss.

00:12:37.260 Here's Camerata yesterday.

00:12:38.320 I feel it deeply personally, but also I think I speak for all of us and our colleagues.

00:12:44.460 This is an incredible loss.

00:12:46.320 It's an incredible loss.

00:12:47.660 Jeff is a remarkable person and an incredible leader.

00:12:52.320 He has this uncanny ability to make, I think, every one of us feel special and valuable in our own way,

00:13:01.080 even though he is managing an international news organization of thousands of people.

00:13:06.220 I just know that he had this unique ability to make us feel special.

00:13:11.020 And I don't think that that comes around all the time.

00:13:14.160 And I think, again, it's an incredible loss.

00:13:16.500 And I just think it's so regrettable how it happened.

00:13:20.660 If what you're reporting is true, these are two consenting adults who are both executives that they can't have a private relationship feels wrong.

00:13:32.820 Except she wasn't always an executive.

00:13:35.160 And who promoted her?

00:13:36.480 He did.

00:13:37.360 And Allison does not speak for all of CNN staff, current and former.

00:13:41.600 I can tell you that for sure.

00:13:42.700 And there's a real question about about whether he did make everyone feel special, including the other people in the PR shop who were passed over for promotions while Allison Golis kept moving up the ranks, Eric.

00:13:57.560 Well, I think that, you know, I think you're asking the right questions.

00:14:01.200 I do think, you know, if you if you did the rewind on CNN a few years, they would be all talking about power imbalances.

00:14:08.560 Right. And the importance of, you know, disclosure and, you know, workplace power imbalances.

00:14:16.420 You know, if a boss has a relationship with a subordinate, that's a problem in and of itself.

00:14:23.580 It's on their website.

00:14:25.100 Right. It is.

00:14:26.000 And so for CNN to be taking a different position on air is really kind of eye opening.

00:14:30.860 It suggests that there's just there's a circumstantial or, you know, just a sort of random randomness to their principles.

00:14:38.560 I can't imagine. Can you?

00:14:40.380 Yeah, exactly.

00:14:41.780 But I do think, you know, there may be an argument there that that this is just a perfectly consensual and not a problematic sort of thing.

00:14:51.820 But if we are to get to that point, there needs to be a lot more disclosure.

00:14:55.320 My sense is that that it is it is problematic and that it's true that he violated these companies standards and practices.

00:15:03.680 And he admitted that I think that perhaps the accent should be placed on that.

00:15:09.280 There's reason why those disclosure rules are in place.

00:15:12.220 And the reason they're in place is for reasons that CNN throughout Me Too has been very, very vocal in broadcasting.

00:15:21.040 If you understand what I'm saying.

00:15:22.720 I do. I totally understand.

00:15:24.100 And I will say there's another shoe to drop in this story.

00:15:26.160 This is not the full story.

00:15:27.160 We're going to get more on their relationship and we're going to get more on the bigger picture, I predict, over the next week.

00:15:32.980 But here's what they said when they when they fired Chris Cuomo.

00:15:36.680 And you reported this at the time, Chris had come back and said through his representatives, oh, there was there were no secrets between Chris Cuomo and Jeff Zucker about what Chris was doing with respect to Andrew Cuomo.

00:15:48.760 No secrets at all.

00:15:49.620 And CNN came out and made a statement, quote, Chris has made a number of accusations that are patently false.

00:15:56.800 This reinforces why he was terminated for violating our standards and practices, as well as his lack of candor that he was fired for, in part, his lack of candor.

00:16:09.340 OK, so let's see whether Jeff Zucker and Alison Gullist in particular will be held to that same standard.

00:16:16.400 Your lack of candor gets you canned at CNN, the most trusted name in news.

00:16:21.560 You were pointing out during the whole pandemic from the Cuomo brothers show forward that they were violating their own standards and practices and this attempt to blame it all on Chris Cuomo.

00:16:34.400 I want to quote you exactly because you really you nailed it, you said.

00:16:38.900 And I quote the scale of Chris Cuomo's misdeeds should not be diminished.

00:16:45.500 They were certainly lapses on a grand scale.

00:16:48.300 But make no mistake, he had accomplices.

00:16:52.860 Yeah.

00:16:53.980 Oh, I do think that I definitely do think that.

00:16:56.900 And it's very clear that the more the deeper you get into this, that's true.

00:17:01.820 I mean, it's sort of ironic that Chris Cuomo fell in part or mainly because of his his line crossing with his brother, which was basically, you know, enabled, promoted and even executed by his bosses.

00:17:19.480 So there's a complete vacuum of authority, of ethical authority here.

00:17:24.840 You know what I mean?

00:17:25.480 There's a there's there's no ethical authority in the organization at all regarding this particular journalistic principle.

00:17:33.060 And so I think that's a huge problem for CNN.

00:17:38.720 And, you know, that isn't to excuse what Chris Cuomo did.

00:17:42.940 I think Chris Cuomo acted unwisely and unethically.

00:17:47.580 And he should have just taken like a leave of absence to help his brother.

00:17:53.800 And, you know, as a side note, it's clear from the transcripts in that investigation, in the AG's investigation into Andrew Cuomo, it's clear from all those transcripts that nobody was particularly listening to Chris Cuomo either.

00:18:06.020 So he threw his career or at least his job away for almost no impact on this pushback operation.

00:18:13.820 That's so true.

00:18:14.600 They weren't really listening to him.

00:18:16.060 Well, let's not forget the other piece of this.

00:18:17.840 So when Chris Cuomo's more extensive efforts to help his brother came out, thanks to the attorney general investigation, it wasn't just the on air interviews.

00:18:26.980 It was behind the scenes advising.

00:18:28.600 It was oppo research on the women way beyond the pale and on and on it went.

00:18:34.080 But originally, Jeff Zucker stood by him and everyone wondered why.

00:18:39.400 Is that just because they're friends?

00:18:40.760 Well, now this new revelation adds a whole new layer of reasons to question.

00:18:45.280 Was it because he he was ethically compromised and he knew it and therefore wasn't in a position to fire Chris Cuomo, who had the goods on him and appears to now be using them?

00:18:56.460 Right. Is that why Jeffrey Toobin is still there?

00:18:59.280 Is that why Don Lemon never faced any repercussions for the public allegations against him?

00:19:03.960 And then in a lawsuit that's going to trial this summer, it it raises real questions about whether Jeff Zucker's been compromised for a long time and making decisions out of self-interest as opposed to protecting the most trusted name in news.

00:19:19.020 You know, it's a good question.

00:19:21.020 You know, it's a good question.

00:19:21.660 I don't know the answer.

00:19:22.600 It sort of requires more knowledge than I have at this point.

00:19:27.180 But what I would say is that it may be difficult to it may be difficult to distinguish between whether he was compromised and how close he was with those with his talent.

00:19:42.240 He was known for being extremely close to all of his producers and his hosts.

00:19:50.440 And they you know, the sentiment that Alison Camerata expressed yesterday on CNN was by no means a minority position, at least among the top ranks.

00:19:59.840 You know, Zucker did a tremendously diligent job of keeping in touch with them, texting them constantly, you know, sort of heating their emotional and and their and their intellectual needs and so on and so forth.

00:20:12.800 He was very, very well, that was obvious when you looked at Brian Stelter's reporting.

00:20:18.280 I mean, can I just ask you before I let you go?

00:20:19.680 What about him?

00:20:20.580 Because he came out.

00:20:21.880 I mean, he's been reporting on this all along more like he is their press secretary.

00:20:25.460 Right. Like he he's like their stenographer as opposed to their in-house media watchdog.

00:20:32.260 And what of him and his apparent unwillingness to stay on what's happening within his own shop?

00:20:40.060 Well, I mean, I have a little bit of a different viewpoint on that.

00:20:43.160 For the most part, I think that Stelter and his people in the media operation there have, at least for the expectations of people in-house, have done pretty good in covering CNN controversies on this particular thing.

00:21:00.120 I have dinged Stelter a couple of times because I do feel that he fell prey to that problem that you just cited, which is becoming a sort of an in-house propagandist for CIA and maybe not propagandist, but excuse maker.

00:21:14.220 Like when of course, when when all this stuff flared last year, Brian said, I believe on air that there's no guidebook for a situation like this.

00:21:22.340 You know, there's no page, no page in the ethics handbook for Chris's behavior.

00:21:26.320 That was absurd. That was outrageous. And Brian, I think, really went off the rails there.

00:21:31.500 As I say, I usually think that he does a pretty good job of holding his people to account.

00:21:35.720 But that was a gross, gross.

00:21:37.380 Well, but here's the other thing, Eric, if this really was an open secret within the halls of CNN, that you've got the CEO of the company having an affair with an executive vice president whose promotions he oversaw and whose employment he oversaw at a minimum.

00:21:49.940 There will be questions about whether Brian Stelter should have been more interested in reporting on that because he certainly has reported on other intra-office affairs, liaisons, potential harassment situations.

00:22:03.980 Who knows? Right. Who knows? Especially in any scenario, she was under Jeff Zucker in any scenario.

00:22:08.620 I agree with your analysis, but I would also say that those same questions need to fall on people like me and anybody else who covers the media because we had heard it, too.

00:22:20.560 Maybe he was a little closer to it, but I think that I should be held accountable for that just as much as he does.

00:22:26.420 And all of us who are in the media covering industry or niche, I should say, because I feel that, you know, it's a ball that I appear to have dropped or obviously dropped.

00:22:36.840 Well, but you've already proven your independence. I will say that you've already proven your independence.

00:22:41.720 And what's happened in this industry is too many people want to be on CNN and other channels like it, and they don't want to cross somebody like Jeff Zucker.

00:22:50.240 Thankfully, you've never been one of those people. You've fired, you know, off barbs against Fox, against even me, against CNN.

00:22:58.640 And I appreciate it. While it's never pleasant to be on the receiving end of it, I appreciate the fact that you will report on anybody without fear or favor, as they say.

00:23:08.280 Eric, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for for having me on.

00:23:12.320 Yeah, you bet. Before we move on to the tease, I've got to tell the audience something.

00:23:15.980 Um, the guys at Ruthless, you know, we love them. They're hilarious. So I listen to their podcast whenever I can. And this morning I opened it up and I hear these three guys, you know, we love them.

00:23:27.120 And do you know how they opened their podcast? They opened their podcast, but this is them singing. Okay, listen to it.

00:23:35.980 One floor below me. You don't even know me. I love you.

00:24:05.120 Oh, my God.

00:24:07.120 Oh, my darling. Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me.

00:24:13.300 Hmm, twice on the pipe. If the answer is no.

00:24:20.720 Oh, my sweetness. Means you'll meet me in the hallway.

00:24:26.820 Oh, my God.

00:24:28.060 Oh, twice on the pipe. Means you ain't gonna show.

00:24:35.120 You gotta appreciate a little little moment to laugh in the midst of this crazy scandal because, you know, of course, the reporting is that she lived one floor above him with her husband and her three kids or however many kids.

00:24:50.560 And he was married at the time and she was married at the time and he had four kids.

00:24:54.620 And weirdly, they wound up living in the very same building together, one floor away at a time in which my sources tell me they were very much having an affair.

00:25:04.360 Okay, guys at Ruthless, thank you for the morning smile and for giving us a chance to laugh in the midst of all this aggravation.

00:25:12.120 Up next, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron is here.

00:25:16.560 Very excited to talk to him about COVID crime as Joe Biden finally makes it to New York.

00:25:21.800 Oh, one day after the funeral of the fallen cops and much, much more.

00:25:26.440 Thank you, Megan.

00:25:56.420 Act and arrest of a bad guy who's also dead now, thanks to the bullet of a third rookie cop who was with them, 22-year-old and 27-year-old cops.

00:26:04.640 The streets of New York filled with police in a way I've never seen before.

00:26:08.020 It was it was really stunning.

00:26:09.880 It was chilling and it was very emotional.

00:26:13.500 And so Joe Biden comes to town.

00:26:15.160 He could have made it to the funeral of Officer William Mora.

00:26:18.600 He didn't.

00:26:19.020 He decided to wait and come today.

00:26:21.240 And he says he's coming now to because he wants to highlight New York.

00:26:27.080 And I'm quoting now as a great example of a city successfully deploying a strategy to fight violent crime.

00:26:35.920 What?

00:26:37.080 You tell me what is what is he saying?

00:26:39.200 How could he say that on the heels of what just happened here?

00:26:42.340 And of course, 2021 was the deadliest year for law enforcement ever.

00:26:46.840 And New York is facing record crime rates right now.

00:26:49.620 Yeah, Megan, it's, you know, Joe Biden.

00:26:52.700 The president sounds like Johnny Cun lately on this.

00:26:55.500 Um, we saw in 2021, uh, the Democratic Party spent most of the year talking about defund the police, uh, and the consequences of the defund the police sort of idea or vision or mindset, uh, is what you're seeing play out all across this country, a rampant increase, uh, in violent crime.

00:27:16.360 And it's so disappointing to have leadership in the Democratic Party, uh, that talks about defunding the police.

00:27:23.340 Again, they are now, Johnny, come lately to the party of wanting to highlight, uh, violent crime, but your viewers, your listeners, folks all across America recognize and have recognized that this is an issue.

00:27:36.540 Uh, and so, uh, the president is slow to address it.

00:27:40.200 I know there's been, uh, Republican leadership and, and men and women of law enforcement that have been craving the attention and the help.

00:27:48.400 Um, you know, a lot of folks, again, I've talked about defunding the police.

00:27:52.920 Uh, it's my view.

00:27:54.720 And I think the view of a lot of common sense Americans and folks, again, that are listening and watching it, that we need to take every opportunity to, uh, encourage, uh, to, to speak encouragement into our law enforcement community, but also put money where our mouth is and help support them.

00:28:12.680 Um, however we can, and again, I think it's disappointing, uh, that the president and a lot of his party, uh, have been Johnny come lately's on this.

00:28:21.120 You know, that their main focus is guns.

00:28:25.200 That's, that's the only thing that they are focused on guns, guns, guns, gun violence. 0.71

00:28:29.920 They don't, they're not actually focused on fighting crime.

00:28:32.460 They're focused on just getting guns off the street, which I mean, okay, but there are over 400 million guns in America and they're not going to get the guns off the street, even if they could do it.

00:28:44.240 Right. And so now you've got a situation where, um, they're saying, okay, we'll do, we'll do gun reform.

00:28:50.080 And even Al Sharpton is out there saying, all right, we'll work on crime just as long as it's, it's about guns.

00:28:54.840 That's, that's all I want to hear.

00:28:56.180 I don't want any, you know, tougher on crime policies is basically what he's saying.

00:29:00.680 And Joe Biden indeed is proposing none.

00:29:02.980 So you tell me whether anything changes in New York, in Chicago, in Philly, in, in San Fran and LA.

00:29:09.060 And I don't know how things are in Kentucky.

00:29:10.520 I hope better unless we get rid of these soft on crime DAs for one example.

00:29:15.920 Yeah.

00:29:16.200 Well, I'll say here, uh, in Kentucky, our largest city in Louisville, um, saw a record number of homicides last year in 2021, but that was preceded by a record high number in 2020.

00:29:27.560 Last year we had over 180, uh, homicides, uh, in Louisville.

00:29:32.060 And so we are seeing a lot of, uh, bad guys, violent criminals emboldened, uh, by this view that it can be open season on our law enforcement community and open season on a lot of, uh, members in our community are just trying to go about there every day and provide for their families and come home and be safe.

00:29:52.740 Uh, so it, again, uh, the only way that something is going to change, uh, albeit, or with related to this administration is if we change the administration, uh, that is in the current, in the white house right now, because, uh, I think they feel hamstrung and, and are not willing to say what the problem is, which is there are bad people out here.

00:30:14.140 Uh, we've got to make sure that our law enforcement community feels emboldened to go after those folks, um, and, and fight crime the way it needs to be fought.

00:30:23.460 And it's also true that while I think there's a strong contingent of center lefties who don't want these soft on crime policies, they, they, they're not in favor of this.

00:30:31.440 Um, there is a definite contingent on the left, the sort of established capital at left that doesn't like cops, that doesn't feel particularly sympathetic when the cops get shot.

00:30:44.860 Um, and they, they're not, when, when crime rises, they see it as some sort of a social statement, uh, about how bad America is and not as something to be targeted with more cops or laws or prison time.

00:30:57.360 Susan Sarandon might be an example of that.

00:30:59.660 You and I look at the, the swaths of police officers covering the sidewalks in Manhattan, uh, yesterday.

00:31:06.000 And then earlier last week on the, in the first funeral of the first fallen officer and think, oh my gosh, I mean, any normal human is moved by that.

00:31:14.700 She tweeted something out saying, this is what fascism looks like fascism.

00:31:20.540 And then she added, um, in her own captions.

00:31:23.180 So if all these cops weren't needed for crime that day, doesn't that mean they aren't needed any day?

00:31:28.040 How does the president deal with that contingent of the left and how do the rest of us deal with them?

00:31:34.660 Because so far a lot of cities have been kowtowing to them.

00:31:37.880 Um, well, I think that's what I was alluding to earlier is that in, in large part, I don't know if the president will.

00:31:43.680 I think, um, he's in many ways hamstrung by, uh, that faction of the left of his party that, um, is adamantly opposed, uh, to, to law and order, to the law enforcement community and makes, uh, just disparaging comments like that.

00:31:59.280 And I, again, Megan, to your point, you see those images out of New York and just know how powerful those images are, uh, and how somber that day was.

00:32:08.700 I know here in Kentucky recently, we had an officer that was ambushed, um, and, and killed.

00:32:14.600 Uh, these are, uh, trying and, and unbelievable, unbelievably difficult times, uh, for our law enforcement community all across the country.

00:32:24.580 And I think as leaders, uh, particularly on, on my side of the aisle, we have to be able to speak empowerment into our law enforcement community.

00:32:33.280 We have to encourage them.

00:32:34.920 And again, to your point, there are a lot of folks that perhaps are not center right or not, uh, but our center left that know and see what is happening in this country and, and recognize the importance of having a law enforcement community that feels empowered to do their jobs, uh, to make sure that, you know,

00:32:54.520 all of us can, uh, exist and live safely in our homes.

00:32:59.520 You see that we put up a picture of, uh, officer Morris grieving mom, receiving the flag.

00:33:04.960 His family pointed out that he, even in death, he saved people.

00:33:09.860 They donated five of his organs.

00:33:12.040 This, I mean, 27 year old guy with everything in front of him and see the pain on his mother's face.

00:33:17.360 And you see people like Susan Sarandon, or there's been like this teacher who took a shot at them.

00:33:22.220 And I could go on with a list of lefties who have attacked the cops for mourning and think there's no getting through to them.

00:33:31.060 There's no humanity there.

00:33:32.240 There's no, like, they just see the cops as one big racist mob that has to be stopped.

00:33:37.940 And then I look at them and say, you're the mob that must be stopped because you've got little kids.

00:33:42.660 You've got seven year old girls. 0.98

00:33:43.780 And for what it, for what it's worth, you know, to them, girls of color, brown and black girls getting shot in the head and dying. 0.98

00:33:51.700 They don't care. 0.99

00:33:53.060 They, they don't care.

00:33:54.560 You know, the obsession with skin color stops when you get to the streets of Chicago, right?

00:33:59.880 Like if it's, if it's black on black crime in that circumstance, they don't care. 0.98

00:34:04.000 It's so frustrating. 0.94

00:34:05.220 I'm sure it is to you because certainly as a, as a black Republican, you've had race thrown in your face many, many times.

00:34:10.240 We talked about that the last time you were on.

00:34:12.740 Yeah.

00:34:13.200 I mean, it is frustrating that, you know, a lot of times that the narrative in, in the media or the narrative in the national conversation revolves around the idea that there are a lot of bad cops out of here that don't like folks of color. 0.64

00:34:30.740 Don't like black people. 1.00

00:34:32.360 Don't like black Americans. 1.00

00:34:33.820 Uh, that is, uh, disappointing to say the least, uh, about this national narrative, because there are a lot of, uh, folks within the black community. 0.98

00:34:43.140 I dare say the majority of the folks in the black community.

00:34:45.760 And I think there's some polling on this, that the idea or the notion that we would defund the police, the police that are trying to make sure that our communities are kept safe, uh, is anathema to a lot of, uh, black Americans who, uh, just want to make sure that they're able to provide for their families and be safe in their homes and in their communities.

00:35:07.320 Uh, and unfortunately you have comments made like, uh, that of Mr. Randon who, uh, again, disparage, uh, the idea of law enforcement, disparage the idea of law and order, but that image that you, you showed of, uh, uh, uh, again, New York and, um, just the outpouring of support there.

00:35:26.520 Um, that's really encouraging.

00:35:28.520 And again, I, I think that, um, after an entire year spent by the democratic party of talking about defunding the police, um, I think they are seeing the ramifications of that, the consequences of that.

00:35:43.860 Um, and it's going to take, again, I, to my, to the point I was making earlier, it's going to take, uh, you, me, uh, a lot of, uh, folks of goodwill speaking, uh, truth and power, uh, into our law enforcement.

00:35:56.460 The community and talking about the good things they do to protect all our communities across this country.

00:36:03.300 The rhetoric from groups like black lives matter, uh, hasn't helped. 0.98

00:36:06.880 And now they're in the news.

00:36:09.140 Now the, the one time head of this group, she was the founder, Alicia Garza.

00:36:14.500 Boy, oh boy.

00:36:15.480 She came after you, uh, as just to remind our audience, uh, you were in charge of, uh, of the investigation into what cops, if any, would be charged in connection with the Breonna Taylor death.

00:36:25.020 Breonna Taylor was shot, uh, and killed by police officers who went into her house and they had announced themselves, but her boyfriend drew a gun and shot one cop in the femur and they returned fire, killing Breonna.

00:36:39.920 And you declined to, well, you brought to a grand jury, but you didn't recommend charges against those cops because they, they were shooting in self-defense, except for one guy who's actually about to go on trial this week for just randomly shooting into a bunch of apartments.

00:36:53.520 He's going to face justice.

00:36:54.520 Uh, so Alicia Garza came after you as did so many within the black lives matter movement and connected to it saying, um, basically comparing you to bull Connor, um, you know, ripped on you for being a black man who wasn't as she thought loyal enough to your skin color, as opposed to the need for justice.

00:37:12.120 And now we find out that black lives matter is in a whole host of legal trouble of its own. 0.97

00:37:19.320 Um, there is a report today, uh, and yesterday, a couple of them from the daily mail, Indiana attorney general slamming BLM as a falling house of cards, uh, before the activist group shut down all of its fundraising websites.

00:37:32.680 Late, late Wednesday, they've been forbidden from collecting donations in California and Washington due to their lack of financial transparency, but reportedly they continue to do so.

00:37:42.680 The Indiana attorney general, um, that who I mentioned, he compared them to an illegal enterprise following a pattern of financial scheming.

00:37:51.520 And then today it came out that more about the California letter threatening to hold the founders and the leaders personally liable if they failed to disclose the financial records about their 60 million in donations within the next two months, um, saying you may not be a charity at all.

00:38:09.220 If you can't produce the facts about where this money went, you as an attorney general in the state of Kentucky, what do you make of it?

00:38:14.920 Well, um, you know, I've had, um, my concerns about the, the black lives matter movement organization itself, uh, simply because I think a lot of what they preach or espouse is the breakdown of, uh, the, the family, uh, in the destruction of the core of our society, which is, uh, a mother and a father and children. 1.00

00:38:39.820 I, I know as, uh, uh, uh, uh, a dad now who, uh, uh, has a son, how important it is for that nuclear family.

00:38:47.780 And so a lot of what black lives matters, the organization espouses is, uh, the breakdown of, uh, our traditional values here, uh, in the country. 0.89

00:38:58.640 And a lot of what I think is being, um, articulated, whether it be, uh, Todd Rokita, the attorney general in Indiana, or some of the information that is coming out.

00:39:09.600 And some of the allegations that are being made is that a lot of this is a ruse that the financial or the funds that have been given to this organization are not for any beneficial purpose other than to line the pockets of some of the leadership of that organization.

00:39:27.180 So that's obviously disappointing to hear those allegations. But again, to my primary point, the Black Lives Matter organization is about the destruction of the American family and some of the views that, again, they espouse related to something that looks different from and not at all related to the democracy that we have enjoyed here and that was put forth at our founding.

00:39:57.560 They seek to destroy what is, again, the traditional values of this country. And that's why I've been concerned about the organization. And obviously, some of these things that we are hearing now shine a better light on on just some of the behind the scenes dealings that are happening with that organization.

00:40:17.320 Yeah, they're in a whole host of legal trouble of their own right now. All right. You heard General Cameron mention his new little baby, only a couple of weeks old now, Theodore.

00:40:29.240 We're going to get into what fatherhood is like. And he also used to work for Mitch McConnell, who's being attacked now for not having any female black staffers.

00:40:38.080 I don't know what's happening, Daniel, but more with Daniel Cameron on all of that right after this break.

00:40:44.000 Let's start with Mitch McConnell. It's kind of a cool story. You did you do like an internship like you were you had a connection to him when you were young, like a scholarship or something.

00:41:01.680 And then you went back and worked for him. That's right. I was what's called a McConnell scholar at the University of Louisville here in Kentucky.

00:41:09.640 It's a program that he established with the help of a few other folks a long time ago to keep keep Kentuckians in Kentucky and give them a sort of a world class education at the University of Louisville.

00:41:21.240 I got to know him through that program. Of course, I think some of your viewers know this.

00:41:27.000 I I played football at UofL. Now, that's generous to say I played. I was on the bench a lot, but he's an avid he's an avid UofL football fan.

00:41:34.980 And so we we struck up a friendship based on that and realized that our political philosophies were aligned.

00:41:41.080 And so I had an interest in interning for him and actually did that while I was in undergrad and then did it again while I was in law school.

00:41:49.280 I clerked or interned for his then legal counsel. And then I said, you know, I don't know if I want to go back to D.C. necessarily, but if I get an opportunity to do that job, I will.

00:42:00.320 And of course, I was fortunate to be his legal counsel for a period of time before coming back to Kentucky and working at a firm and running for attorney general.

00:42:11.080 Well, he got put in the crosshairs. The question of, you know, Joe Biden saying, I'm going to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court has been bounced around on both sides.

00:42:19.680 And he got the question put to him this week by Latino rebels correspondent Pablo Menriquez as follows. Take a listen.

00:42:29.660 How many black women do you have on staff and how are they informing your decision to move forward with this latest nomination? 1.00

00:42:35.760 Yeah, actually, I haven't checked. We don't have a racial quota in my office.

00:42:41.080 But I've had a number of African-American employees, both male and female, over the years in all kinds of different positions, including speechwriter.

00:42:51.160 What do you make of it? They're clearly trying to paint him as, you know, not not committed to diversity.

00:42:56.860 And thus, who is he to criticize Joe Biden's pick?

00:42:59.720 Yeah, it's a it's a it's an absurd notion, making, you know, that The New York Times a few years ago did a whole profile on Mitch McConnell's commitment to civil rights.

00:43:11.640 And like most things that occur from the Democratic Party, it's a matter of political expediency.

00:43:19.400 And so they're trying to make him into something that he's not.

00:43:24.540 His comment about having hired folks that that look like me is is very true. 0.92

00:43:29.400 His speechwriter was a gentleman named Justin Jones.

00:43:32.420 Alex Jenkins is somebody that's working in the office currently.

00:43:36.560 I've obviously worked there. This is, again, something that the left is trying to do to sort of paint a picture that is simply not true.

00:43:49.060 And so it disappoints me to see the left try to use this.

00:43:54.240 But this is this is how they this is a lot of times how they operate is try to dive into identity politics.

00:44:01.880 And if you don't agree with them, you're you're either a racist or a bigot.

00:44:07.320 And so it's it's not an uncommon playbook.

00:44:10.880 I've obviously, as you noted, had things of this guilt happened to me here in Kentucky from sort of the liberal side of of the aisle.

00:44:20.480 But you just put your head down and you keep doing the work.

00:44:23.760 And Mitch McConnell, in all the years that I've known him, just keeps doing the work and keeps getting the job done for the men, women, children here in the Commonwealth and then for the nation.

00:44:34.520 And I think a lot of that has been seen with the Supreme Court and the the folks that are on the judiciary in our federal system, but also in being helpful in legislation that has been passed in his time there in Washington.

00:44:50.980 But this is a nothing story. The left will continue to try to gin this up over the course of of this nomination process.

00:44:59.460 Absolutely. I mean, once he actually selects the black woman, any criticism going her way will be blamed on sexism or racism or what have you. 1.00

00:45:08.420 So you're going to have to have, you know, steely spine to see this through.

00:45:12.840 And of course, the non sexist, non racist thing to do is to criticize whoever the nominee is just the same way as you would anybody else and not treat.

00:45:20.680 I can speak for women, at least us like we need to be coddled like we can't take, you know, it's like that it's so absurd the place to which we've gotten.

00:45:29.460 I want to shift gears to something happier. Now you have become a father and you tell me whether that has me because last time I was really encouraging you to run for president.

00:45:38.560 You tell me whether this has encouraged you at all. I know maybe you'll go for Kentucky governor at some point.

00:45:44.860 But, you know, we could use great talent. You're now of legal age.

00:45:48.340 You just have to be thirty five to aspire toward bigger office to make his life an even better place.

00:45:56.460 Well, look, he is the joy of of our hearts and our in our eyes.

00:46:05.360 You know, it changes your perspective.

00:46:07.140 You know, I obviously I talk a lot about the pro-life movement and how important that is to me, but you become keenly, keenly invested in the pro-life values.

00:46:22.060 When you have your own son or own daughter, you hear that ultrasound or hear that heartbeat for the first time.

00:46:29.640 You see those ultrasound images becomes all the more real for you.

00:46:33.260 So, you know, well, Mackenzie and I will have a conversation about, you know, the what our future looks like in terms of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

00:46:41.740 But right now we're just trying to get to get Theodore on a routine or a schedule.

00:46:48.620 And, you know, we've you know, it's it's one thing to sort of watch the videos and listen to and read the books.

00:46:57.300 It's another thing to have a child in your home, a newborn.

00:47:01.460 I've often told people that, you know, as attorney general, a lot of my problems stop at midnight with Theodore.

00:47:07.060 Or he's just getting started. So you're welcome to Parenthood.

00:47:10.700 Oh, look, I'm so happy for for both of you. Congrats on it.

00:47:14.100 By the way, congrats on your big win in challenging the vaccine mandate handed down by the Biden administration, too.

00:47:19.620 You did that one and look forward to continuing the discussion another time.

00:47:23.560 All the best. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Megan.

00:47:26.260 Coming up. Why does it seem there are so many bad decisions being authored or being made these days?

00:47:30.360 One author has dug into the science and he's next.

00:47:37.060 We've talked a lot on this episode about bad decisions made by a variety of people.

00:47:42.540 But what is it that drives bad decision making?

00:47:47.060 Bestselling author Todd Rose has done the research and his new book, Collective Illusions,

00:47:53.100 Conformity, Complicity and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions is out this week.

00:47:57.820 Todd, hi. How are you?

00:47:59.400 I'm well. How are you doing?

00:48:00.740 I'm great. First of all, can you just give us the thumbnail on your background?

00:48:03.800 Because it's fascinating. You went to Harvard and taught at Harvard, but it didn't begin like that.

00:48:11.040 No, it really didn't. Yeah. So I I I actually was a high school dropout and it's actually worse than that.

00:48:17.320 I filled out with a 0.9 GPA, which I think you have to work really hard to do that poorly.

00:48:23.180 And not too long after getting kicked out, my girlfriend, who's still my wife today, found out she was pregnant.

00:48:31.260 So we started our adult lives without a high school diploma, ended up on welfare, did a bunch of men waves jobs and then had to claw our way back.

00:48:40.480 But ended up being able to live the American dream.

00:48:43.240 It's amazing. It's like how did you get into Harvard with a 0.9?

00:48:47.240 Well, I, you know, I I ended up going, got my GED and went to night school at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, open enrollment, $800 a term and found myself there and figured out who I was and ended up graduating with a 397 in pre-med and psychology and then went to Harvard.

00:49:07.380 OK, but this would be a great boon to you, these beginnings, because you would look at Harvard, at academia, at the criteria that we use to admit people and decide who's going to be a success and who's not with a much more skeptical eye than probably most people who go there and teach there or other institutions like it.

00:49:27.400 And one of the things that jumped out at me was you left Harvard because you felt like it's it's a lie.

00:49:32.520 Like, I'm not living my values. I don't agree with the way they're doing this. What do you mean?

00:49:39.000 Well, look, I mean, I really enjoyed my time there and just wonderful people.

00:49:44.480 Just I enjoyed it. But the structure of higher education in general, you know, I believe that everyone has something to contribute.

00:49:51.740 And we're all better off when we're betting on everyone in America to pursue a good life and make a contribution.

00:49:57.400 And any system that is about false scarcity, right, where quality equals how few people you can actually educate, seemed counter to my values.

00:50:07.740 And so while I love the people, I felt like the longer I stayed in that institution, the more of a hypocrite I would be.

00:50:14.580 And so me and my co-founder left Harvard and we started our own think tank, Populous, and it's been just wonderful.

00:50:20.200 Hmm. All right. So now before we get on to a collective illusions, which are basically social lies and it's fascinating, I want to ask you about because I'm now in this and I have three kids and they're still little.

00:50:30.960 But I hear the parents of teenagers obsessing, obsessive over college and where where's junior going to go?

00:50:38.680 And, you know, junior is going to get rejected from most of the colleges because that's just the way the acceptance rates work.

00:50:43.920 So what do you want those parents to know about junior and his chances for success when he gets rejected from every Ivy League school?

00:50:52.340 Look, I actually spent a lot of time studying this and looking at success and how people achieve it.

00:50:58.920 And what we know for sure is that this idea that we all have to go to one of, you know, 10 schools like privately in America, the overwhelming majority of people don't believe that.

00:51:10.800 But back to these collective illusions, they are absolutely convinced that everybody else agrees this is the only path to success.

00:51:17.620 And so when push comes to shove, they end up taking their child and instead of cultivating their unique gifts and helping them make a great contribution to society, we funnel them into this standard path and end up having them compete to be just like everybody else.

00:51:31.960 And my my my the thing I would say to these parents is there's really not a future in that.

00:51:36.840 Like if you want to do right by your kid, you teach them good values.

00:51:40.360 You teach them to know who they are, figure out what they're passionate about and what they're good at and help turn that into a contribution.

00:51:47.220 And there are a thousand schools that are phenomenally good at doing this at a good price point.

00:51:53.000 You don't have to break the bank. And the cachet that comes with that elite brand isn't really all it's cracked up to be.

00:51:58.760 I promise you, you know, it's particularly good if you can figure out what city you want your kid wants to be in or generally because if you go to a great institution in or around the city or the state that you want to wind up in, they'll respect that university, maybe even more than a Harvard or Yale, etc.

00:52:15.420 Okay, so let's talk about collective illusions or social lies.

00:52:20.860 So what what what does it mean?

00:52:23.500 I know in the book you talk about the 1930s Elm Hollow slash Mrs. Salt academic study.

00:52:28.940 What is that and how does it help us understand why collective illusions are a problem?

00:52:33.300 Yeah, well, let me let me let me tell you what they are. And then let's we can circle back to Elm Hollow.

00:52:38.240 So like, like, simply collective illusions, you said are social lies, and they happen in situations where a majority of people in a group end up going along with something that they don't privately agree with, only because they incorrectly believe that most other people in the group actually agree with the idea.

00:52:56.180 Right. And as a result, an entire group can end up doing things that almost nobody really wants.

00:53:01.480 And like, you know what I mean, right? Like, we've all had those moments where we thought we're the only ones in the room who hold a certain view.

00:53:09.180 Right. And so rather than speak up, we just say nothing. Right. We go silent and we're not alone.

00:53:15.080 You know, research shows that right now in America, two thirds of all Americans admit to self silencing.

00:53:22.260 And you can see the problem here, right? If most people self silence and then the loud fringe is the only voice that people hear and the results of collective illusion.

00:53:31.660 And that's exactly what's going on in America today.

00:53:34.300 So what does this study prove to us? Just that it's a phenomenon, that it is a thing?

00:53:38.540 Well, here's the thing, like you would imagine that that kind of like rampant misunderstanding would be rare, but it turns out it's not like not today.

00:53:47.840 We've known about collective illusions in research for about 100 years, all the way back to this Elm Hollow we can talk about.

00:53:54.340 What's different today is how easy social media allows us to create them and scale them.

00:54:00.840 And so what we're seeing now is rather than a one off phenomenon, basically, you name anything that matters in society today and it's a coin toss whether you're wrong about the group or not.

00:54:12.300 We're very bad at figuring out how other people actually feel, but we think we're very good at it.

00:54:18.180 Yeah. Well, this is the heart of collective illusions, right?

00:54:20.980 People think, well, maybe it requires like a bad actor or biased media or something to create that misunderstanding.

00:54:27.480 But it's actually just part of how our brains are wired.

00:54:30.080 So our brains crave conformity.

00:54:32.880 I mean, we are wired to be with our group, not against it, right?

00:54:36.360 Everybody prefers to be with the group.

00:54:38.740 The problem is, is that we are actually spectacularly bad at guessing group consensus because our brain takes a really weird shortcut.

00:54:47.560 This is no kidding.

00:54:48.540 Your brain assumes the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority.

00:54:53.880 So you can see the problem, right?

00:54:55.720 And in today's society, it was one thing when we interact with each other face to face.

00:55:00.080 But on social media, right now, we know from research that say on Twitter, 80% of all content is created by 10% of the users.

00:55:09.900 And according to Pew Research, that 10% isn't remotely like the rest of the country.

00:55:14.820 They are extreme on almost every social issue.

00:55:18.360 But the problem there, right, is if 10% of people hold an opinion, but you think it's 80%, then your brain will assume it's the majority.

00:55:27.200 And you'll be convinced that that's true.

00:55:29.260 And if you don't want to go against that majority, you'll just self-silence, right?

00:55:33.640 And if enough of us do that, then the fringe view is the only view people here, and the results are collective illusion.

00:55:40.400 I'm trying to remember the story.

00:55:42.760 And I can't remember whether it was Reagan or whether it was the Russians.

00:55:46.740 My facts are sort of melding, but it was a story about how somebody wanted to win over the crowd and didn't have enough supporters in the crowd and therefore placed like three.

00:55:57.400 They only had like three supporters and placed them at strategic locations in the crowd and just made sure that they clapped the loudest and yelled the loudest and effectively convinced the crowd that the crowd was on said person's side.

00:56:11.860 Are you familiar with this?

00:56:13.580 Absolutely.

00:56:14.360 And I talk about this in the book about ways that we can get duped into just blindly conforming to what we think is the majority when it's like a fringe.

00:56:23.800 And that term is called the clackers.

00:56:25.840 And it was actually invented all the way back in Rome with Nero, who, you know, besides being a crazy emperor, thought he was like really great actor and musician.

00:56:34.560 He wasn't.

00:56:35.520 But, you know, he wanted everyone to think that.

00:56:37.880 So he brought people and placed them in the audience and had them applaud wildly anytime he did something.

00:56:44.240 So people are like, wow, I guess this is what we do.

00:56:46.640 And that was used all the way through like French theater.

00:56:49.900 And it's still used today.

00:56:51.120 If you think about it, why do sitcoms use a laugh track?

00:56:54.660 That's right.

00:56:55.500 It makes us feel like it must be funny.

00:56:57.660 And so we can get caught up in the emotion of a few well-placed people speaking up, in this case, applauding.

00:57:04.440 And you can create it.

00:57:05.660 And by the way, just for fun, I actually tried this.

00:57:08.680 Just do this.

00:57:09.360 If you're at some event and someone's speaking, just applaud when they're done and just watch how many people will just go along with you.

00:57:16.100 It's pretty funny.

00:57:16.680 So it's kind of sad.

00:57:19.500 I feel like it's a little bit of a sad commentary on how needy we are for approval and to feel like we belong to the group, that we're not really forming our own opinions, that we go into a room or we turn on a show or we go on the Internet.

00:57:31.140 And we're so easily manipulated by the fringes and then get swept up in the need to belong that at the end of the day, do we even know?

00:57:40.040 Do most of us even know what we really believe?

00:57:43.340 Well, what's so interesting is that, you know, we do a lot of private opinion research at my think tank, Populous, which is get around the effects of social pressure, get at what people privately value.

00:57:53.620 And it turns out people have a reasonably good sense for what they care about and prioritize.

00:57:58.880 But to your point, because we're hardwired to be a social species, that sense of belonging can override our own values if we're not careful.

00:58:07.320 I mean, it's remarkable in the neuroscience research that I've done in the past and others have done.

00:58:12.260 It is unbelievable.

00:58:13.320 You put someone in a scanner and you ask them questions about something as subjective as like whether you think someone's good looking.

00:58:20.240 Seriously, someone got paid to do that kind of research.

00:58:22.060 But when when I tell you that your subjective opinion is the same as the group, you get a reward, a dopamine reward response, the same kind of response that hard drugs create.

00:58:35.060 So we are wired to be part of a group that that does not mean blind conformity.

00:58:39.680 It just means, right, it's better together.

00:58:42.100 But what we've lost right now as a society is that sense of independence, that sense of ability to hold our own judgment.

00:58:48.420 We are so we so need to belong.

00:58:51.500 And all that's left are these large, like national groups like our politics that we're clinging to rather than actually holding a sense of who we are and what really matters to us.

00:59:01.100 You know, it's fascinating as I was just talking to somebody, a friend of mine, and she was saying she she was never really political before Trump, but she went to a Trump rally and it was like the greatest thing she'd ever done.

00:59:11.220 She felt a sense of belonging.

00:59:13.400 She felt love.

00:59:15.200 She felt uplifted.

00:59:16.260 She felt like she was doing something that mattered.

00:59:18.220 And I was getting it, you know, I was understanding the affinity she instantly developed for sort of the MAGA crowd, not not not even just Trump, just like the MAGA crowd and being part of something she felt mattered.

00:59:33.980 Right.

00:59:34.160 And we all need some of that.

00:59:35.980 Right.

00:59:36.160 And one of the things we've lost in society and, you know, the scholar Robert Putnam talks about this and in bowling alone, we used to be a society that had a nice middle layer of civic organizations.

00:59:47.520 We belong to a lot of things, our churches.

00:59:50.020 Right.

00:59:50.460 Even like our bowling leagues.

00:59:51.860 And that gave us a lot of meaningful groups to be a part of.

00:59:55.540 That's gone.

00:59:56.820 Right.

00:59:57.120 That's that's disappearing.

00:59:58.340 And what's left, again, is everything's been centralized.

01:00:01.940 Power is all at the federal level.

01:00:03.640 We've gotten away from our core founding ideals of decentralization.

01:00:07.780 And one of the consequences is now it's just identity politics.

01:00:11.020 Right.

01:00:11.620 And I don't blame people for needing that sense of belonging.

01:00:14.760 But, boy, there's got to be more than that.

01:00:16.960 And right now, with collective illusions, this adds a new wrinkle to the problem.

01:00:21.280 Right.

01:00:21.740 It's bad enough to give up your own judgment just to go with the group.

01:00:25.900 It's a whole nother problem when you were wrong about the group to begin with.

01:00:29.880 So your conformity, your need to belong, is literally destroying the group because it is not what the group actually wanted.

01:00:37.660 But now we see so much pushing back on it.

01:00:40.280 You know, now you see people saying, I just to take a few examples, I will not be silenced on my belief that COVID started in a lab.

01:00:49.580 I that's what I believe.

01:00:50.840 And I'm going to talk about it even if I would be silenced by social media.

01:00:55.260 Right.

01:00:55.420 Which you would have before.

01:00:56.560 Or, you know, in the case of, let's say, trans men and women, you see people saying, no, I know there.

01:01:03.900 It's not birthing people. 0.92

01:01:06.000 It's birthing women. 1.00

01:01:07.340 Right.

01:01:07.780 No, you cannot shame me out of my belief that women are the only ones who can get pregnant and give birth to a baby.

01:01:16.000 And you can shame me about language all you want, but no, I know what I believe, even if I'm standing in a room of collectively the Internet that's telling me I'm a bad person for holding on to this thing that we all believe forever up until about a year ago.

01:01:28.200 So you're seeing more and more people push back on it.

01:01:31.700 Why is that?

01:01:32.400 Well, look, I think we're starting to feel the consequences of the betrayal of our own values.

01:01:39.120 And, look, we know every time we act incongruently, right, when our public selves are different than our private selves, it takes an enormous toll on our mental health, our well-being, and our sense of purpose in life.

01:01:50.980 And so we're rightly reacting to that.

01:01:53.500 What I will say is what we all have to recognize is it's less about whether I'm right or you're right.

01:02:00.740 A free society needs healthy conversation.

01:02:04.060 And the funny thing about the fringe, right, is sometimes they're right.

01:02:08.140 Sometimes it actually helps the group improve.

01:02:11.400 But you never convince someone by silencing them.

01:02:14.440 And so any attempt to socially sanction, you know, get someone to lose their job or whatever, just because we disagree with them, it doesn't just hurt them, it hurts everyone, right?

01:02:25.360 And to me, like, there is one way out of this problem of collective illusions because it is leading to false polarization.

01:02:31.880 It is leading to and it will become real.

01:02:34.840 We have to find the moral courage to be honest with each other about what we think.

01:02:39.660 And we've got to have the civic courage to make it safe for other people to do so as well.

01:02:44.480 That's right.

01:02:45.340 To find the courage to be honest with each other about what we think.

01:02:48.080 I mean, that is one of the joys, I will say, as an aside of doing the job I'm doing now.

01:02:51.720 It's glorious.

01:02:52.780 It's wonderful to be on the other side, you know, to be not part of those two-thirds of people who are afraid to say what they think.

01:02:58.760 I love being able to say what I think.

01:03:00.300 It's so liberating.

01:03:01.640 And it has led to way more happiness in my life.

01:03:04.720 And I see people who are stuck on the other side.

01:03:07.060 And I really want to go rescue them.

01:03:08.660 I'm like, come over, find a way.

01:03:10.380 I know you have these jobs where you can be fired for saying what you really believe and so on.

01:03:14.460 But find a way because it's so liberating over here and it's happy over here.

01:03:19.520 Let's talk about authority, though.

01:03:20.920 Can we talk about authority, Todd?

01:03:22.060 Because you write in the book about how we're even worse on this problem when it comes to doctors, academics.

01:03:32.260 And we've seen some of that, too, in COVID.

01:03:34.560 There's an example in your book about doctors and nurses from a 1966 incident that sort of illustrates how deferential we are to authority.

01:03:44.000 Yeah, so look, part of being human is you never quite know whether your private knowledge is correct.

01:03:50.860 And so our brains are designed to take in social information.

01:03:54.660 And sometimes the rest of the group does know more than you.

01:03:58.040 I promise you if I'm in some faraway land and I don't know what berries are poisonous, I'm going to look to what the locals are doing.

01:04:04.640 And it doesn't matter if red berries are fine here.

01:04:07.140 If they're not eating them, I'm not eating them, right?

01:04:09.320 So the problem is that we tend to not realize that we defer not just to the crowd, but to people we think are in authority in part because we think they know better, right?

01:04:20.840 And we will do crazy things just because, like the study you're referencing, I mean, just having a doctor that they never met say to nurses that they needed to give almost lethal doses of a drug.

01:04:34.200 Like a shocking percentage of the majority of them actually went along and did it.

01:04:39.500 And the thing is, is we just assume these people must know something we don't.

01:04:43.840 And my argument in the book is we shouldn't ignore proper authority.

01:04:49.500 We shouldn't ignore other people's wisdom, but we cannot ever allow that to displace our own judgment, right?

01:04:56.520 We have to take that information.

01:04:58.140 We have to take our own values, our own experience, and then make a decision ourself.

01:05:01.520 And every time we abandon our own judgment, bad things happen, not just for us, but for everybody.

01:05:07.940 So what kind of a person, you know, because we do have contrarians, even before the social media phenomena or different viewpoints are being cracked down upon.

01:05:18.100 We've always had contrarians who don't do this, who do not need approval of the crowd, who will jump up and down with a different point of view,

01:05:26.380 no matter what the crowd says, who may kind of enjoy being on the other side.

01:05:31.040 So are their brains wired differently?

01:05:33.980 Yeah, it's so fascinating.

01:05:35.320 So if you look across the population in our brains, so we all want to belong and we all want what we call self-expression,

01:05:43.460 being true about ourselves, like speaking our own truth.

01:05:46.260 We all differ on a curve, like how much we need one or the other.

01:05:52.000 And so there are people who have really low levels of need to belong and super high levels of self-expression.

01:05:58.140 And they get a lot of reward just being themselves.

01:06:01.060 Some people that I know get a lot of reward just going against the crowd.

01:06:04.360 And it turns out you need all kinds of people, right?

01:06:07.340 If we were a culture of all contrarians, there'd be no social learning and we'd all have to learn things the hard way. 1.00

01:06:13.660 But if we're all like need to belong and lemmings, then we all go off a cliff with one bad idea.

01:06:19.380 So the trick here is to recognize that it's not just being a contrarian, right?

01:06:25.560 It is the obligation to say, look, I owe you the truth as I understand it.

01:06:32.460 I'm not saying I'm right.

01:06:33.580 I owe you my own opinion.

01:06:35.400 And what I think is really fascinating, and you alluded to this, everyone's afraid right now that everyone else is so sensitive and that if I offend them, like the two-thirds of Americans who are self-silencing, the number one reason that they are doing it is out of decency, not out of fear.

01:06:53.400 They just, they don't want to hurt people's feelings.

01:06:55.760 But what we find in our private opinion research is the overwhelming majority of Americans are like, listen, everybody else is way too sensitive.

01:07:03.120 I'm not.

01:07:03.700 And I bet you've seen this.

01:07:05.900 Like when you actually are honest about your views, it's pretty remarkable the kind of respect that that engenders, you know?

01:07:12.160 And so getting back to our core value.

01:07:14.140 I'm laughing, Todd, because I've had a lot of situations in which, you know, I'm somebody who's more center-right, who has immersed herself for my 50-plus years in mostly liberal, considerably liberal circles.

01:07:27.460 So I'm more used to espousing my views and seeing this, like, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm.

01:07:33.540 And then I just keep blathering and blathering because I don't really care.

01:07:38.400 I'm not looking for acceptance.

01:07:39.600 I'm looking to spread my ideas.

01:07:41.340 Keep going.

01:07:42.480 Yeah.

01:07:42.940 No, this is great.

01:07:43.940 Now think about everyday folks sitting around our kitchen table.

01:07:48.420 We've been through two years of isolation where we're not meant to be this isolated, where most of our social interactions are really happening online, which, again, is this fun house of mirrors.

01:08:00.240 It is a guaranteed distortion of what the majority really believes, the way it's structured.

01:08:06.080 And as we're coming out of this, like, we have to remember that we can't trust our brains anymore to tell us what our groups think, and we can't allow social media to dictate the ways that we treat each other in real life.

01:08:18.580 The thing I would tell every listener and viewer, like, listen, have the conversations, because right now we are so convinced as an American public that we are being torn apart by division and polarization and that the other side, whatever that is, doesn't share our values.

01:08:35.980 I promise you it is not true by and large, but because we believe it is, it becomes true.

01:08:41.580 But have the conversations.

01:08:43.040 You'll be surprised.

01:08:44.440 Right.

01:08:44.600 So you won't be hashtag part of the problem.

01:08:46.180 OK, and there are other real tips in Todd's book that will help you not be manipulated so easily, whether it's online or in your real life or just in general as an American.

01:08:58.840 And we're going to get to some of those right after this.

01:09:07.300 The Internet is a cesspool.

01:09:09.100 We all know that.

01:09:09.840 What many people may not know is something like one in five interactions we're having on there are not even with real people.

01:09:19.380 We're getting aggravated by by bots.

01:09:23.420 Isn't that incredible?

01:09:24.500 Yeah, it is incredible.

01:09:26.000 So here's the thing.

01:09:27.220 This is what's so important as people think about this, that we're engaging online.

01:09:31.440 It already tricks our brain into thinking that fringes can be majorities.

01:09:37.420 But now you look at something like bots.

01:09:41.020 So bots are being weaponized, right?

01:09:42.840 These social bots.

01:09:44.100 We know, for example, research from Clemson shows that both Russia and China are use these bots and they go into, say, conservative Twitter and liberal Twitter.

01:09:53.900 And rather than spread lies, what they do is they identify the most fringe views and they retweet the hell out of them, just amplify them.

01:10:02.400 And then suddenly, if I say I identify as a Republican, I'm like, wait, is this what we believe?

01:10:07.840 And meanwhile, they're doing the same thing on the left.

01:10:10.900 And what happens is, is the groups start to go to the fringe, right?

01:10:14.380 And it's pretty crazy.

01:10:15.880 Research shows that you only need about 5% of interactions online to be with bots, where the bots can end up dictating group consensus.

01:10:24.460 Okay?

01:10:24.880 Just 5%.

01:10:25.740 We know that 19% of all interactions on social media are actually with bots, whether you realize it or not.

01:10:33.200 Well, how can it be if, you know, you know who you follow?

01:10:36.620 You're saying that these are fake people?

01:10:38.200 Yeah, so if you have a tight control of you only let people in that you absolutely know, you might be okay.

01:10:46.180 But here's the problem.

01:10:47.460 You even get insights that end up getting fed back into you, whether you're following people or not, or other people retweet things that you don't realize.

01:10:55.800 But it's just, it's pretty crazy.

01:10:57.520 It's, it's one of those things where it would be so, it was, it's clever if it weren't so damaging that, that these foreign adversaries have recognized that they can do more damage to our country this way by understanding collective illusions on the cheap, allow us to destroy ourselves from the inside out. 0.85

01:11:16.160 And that's for me is why, quite honestly, why I wrote the book is I feel like if the American public doesn't understand this phenomenon, we're not going to solve this and it's going to destroy us.

01:11:25.040 And I want to say a word to my audience because we've, we've realized that the Russiagate, Russiagate, you know, nonsense that was peddled by the mainstream media and by the left during Trump's presidency was nonsense.

01:11:35.740 But that does not mean Russia is not trying to sow discord in America. 0.54

01:11:41.460 And I learned this firsthand when I was getting ready to go over and interview Putin one of the times that we had officials from the highest levels of government former come in to prep me.

01:11:51.740 And they showed me, they showed me the actual graphs of how a tweet would be sent out and the bots and where they're located across the world and how they could see the amplification that the bots automatically would do on said tweets because, and they don't care.

01:12:04.840 They take the pro BLM side, they take the anti BLM side, they pick your issue.

01:12:09.820 They take both sides and they amplify the craziest voices over because their mission is to sow discord.

01:12:16.060 And you can times that by 10 for the Chinese, you are being manipulated when you go online.

01:12:21.800 Yes, by big tech, which loves to, to stir up anger and to keep you just focused on the screen for as long as possible.

01:12:28.480 So they amplify too, but by the underlying actors, which are taking the craziest stuff and trying to get it in your face to make you think it's mainstream.

01:12:36.520 And now, and now, and now, you know, like, given that this isn't just about willpower or intelligence, our brains use this shortcut to estimate group consensus.

01:12:46.640 So you will intellectually think you're like, Oh, I know this isn't everybody, but you will feel like it is.

01:12:52.860 And your brain will treat it as such.

01:12:54.660 And if you feel the need to belong, you will engage in behaviors and say things that align to what you think the group wants.

01:13:01.960 And so look again, there's no real fix, right?

01:13:04.380 You're not going to shut down social media.

01:13:05.920 We want people to have voices.

01:13:07.920 What we have to recognize is now more than ever, we have to commit to those founding American ideals, including protecting free speech and seeing it as a civic obligation to ensure that we have healthy conversations in this country.

01:13:22.780 What do you make of what's happened this week to Joe Rogan?

01:13:27.300 Right.

01:13:27.560 I mean, day by day, we see more artists pulling their podcasts and their music.

01:13:33.640 This week, Mary Trump pulled her podcast. 0.99

01:13:35.980 Whoa, whoa.

01:13:37.900 Just say Joe Rogan or Mary Trump.

01:13:41.160 Anyway, I'm just saying this is a guy who's trying to have heterodox conversations, who's trying to be unafraid.

01:13:47.820 And he's so powerful that he's become a very big target.

01:13:51.260 Yeah, look, I like Joe Rogan.

01:13:54.340 I listen to him.

01:13:55.760 I can't wait to talk to him.

01:13:57.520 I also disagree with him on a bunch of stuff.

01:14:00.040 But here's the thing.

01:14:01.140 We've known since the founding of this country that silencing someone, even when you know they're wrong, actually does more damage to society than having healthy, open, honest conversations.

01:14:13.060 So let's just pretend that Joe Rogan is wrong on everything.

01:14:17.580 He platforming him doesn't solve any problem.

01:14:21.140 All it is is a head on a pike that tells everybody else. 1.00

01:14:24.260 Wow, if Joe Rogan can't share his view, even if he's wrong, I better not say anything.

01:14:30.440 And that is the ultimate weapon of a fringe that knows they're a fringe, right, is get everyone to shut up.

01:14:36.540 And we'll do all the heavy lifting for him.

01:14:39.040 So for me, like, even when I disagree with Joe Rogan, I still want to hear from him.

01:14:43.720 Because guess what?

01:14:45.040 There's always a chance he's right and I'm wrong.

01:14:47.200 And I need to have that humility.

01:14:48.900 And the only way that we're ever going to get smarter together is to hear from each other.

01:14:53.560 Well, complicity, that's one of the words in your title, right, just to read it again.

01:14:59.140 It's collective illusions, conformity, complicity, and the science of why we make bad decisions.

01:15:05.200 The outrage mob that takes people down on Twitter, online, and so on.

01:15:11.060 I've said for a while now, the best thing you can do when the mob starts is speak up against the mob.

01:15:16.640 But the next best thing you can do is don't join the mob.

01:15:21.520 That is complicit.

01:15:23.620 Right.

01:15:24.300 So this is the worst part, and I cover it in my book.

01:15:27.000 There's two ways that we become complicit.

01:15:29.220 The worst is in what economist Tim McCurden calls preference falsification.

01:15:33.840 We literally lie about what we think just to belong, and we become enforcers of the very ideas we don't want.

01:15:40.460 That's all.

01:15:41.700 Yeah, the second way we become complicit, it doesn't feel like it's the self-silencing.

01:15:47.480 You think, well, I'm not lying.

01:15:49.660 I'm just not saying what I think.

01:15:51.720 And look, there'll be times when you might not be able to.

01:15:53.860 Your life might be on the line, you know, whatever.

01:15:55.700 You might actually get fired.

01:15:57.000 Most of us do it for a lot less.

01:15:58.460 But now that you understand about collective illusions and you realize that by removing your voice from the conversation, you have doubled the sound of the fringe, right?

01:16:09.420 And if enough of us do that, it distorts the view of consensus for everybody, and the entire country can end up doing things that almost nobody really wants.

01:16:17.920 That's so powerful.

01:16:19.600 You've doubled the size of the fringe.

01:16:21.160 You've doubled the voice of your adversary or the person with whom you disagree by remaining silent.

01:16:26.520 And you write in the book, I wrote it down, quote, compromising personal integrity for the sake of belonging wears away at one's self-esteem.

01:16:34.700 So not only are there consequences to you and your worldviews in you remaining silent, like you might lose the argument, your own sense of self is being eroded by doing that.

01:16:48.780 You know, it's one of the best predictors of low self-esteem, which is I behave in public in ways that are different than I am in private.

01:16:56.740 So I talk about in the book that the term congruence, like we have to commit to this.

01:17:01.900 We have to recognize that being true to ourselves and true about ourselves to other people isn't just good for us.

01:17:09.160 It is.

01:17:09.820 It may be the most important thing you can do to the group that matters most to you.

01:17:15.240 Congruence.

01:17:15.780 So when you say, you know, you're...

01:17:17.920 Your public, the public you and the private you need to match up.

01:17:21.240 You're not talking about like Jeff Zucker's having an affair at CNN while he's going out there lecturing us.

01:17:26.420 You're talking about something more every day in the way we approach and interact with pretty much everyone.

01:17:32.260 Can you can you expand on it?

01:17:34.100 Yeah, look, it's so interesting, right?

01:17:36.920 We've gotten to a place in society in part because of things like cancel culture and in part just because we're decent people in this country.

01:17:43.480 We don't want to offend people.

01:17:45.980 That's not our job.

01:17:47.000 And we shouldn't go out of our way to try to hurt people's feelings.

01:17:49.760 But that has led us to a place where we say, you know what?

01:17:53.220 It's just not worth it.

01:17:54.360 I'll just keep it to myself.

01:17:55.900 I'll talk to my close family, maybe my best friends.

01:17:59.260 But now there's no real conversation, no healthy debate in the public.

01:18:03.240 And what's worse, again, is that it is distorting what we think most Americans believe in, right?

01:18:09.700 And so what happens under those collective illusions and why it's such an urgent issue for me is we now live in a country that like probably the most common thing I've heard from people from my libertarian friend to my progressive friends is some version of this.

01:18:24.900 Am I crazy or did the entire country go crazy almost overnight?

01:18:29.380 Like it just they can't there's like what is going on?

01:18:32.120 And like people are like, I thought we shared some basic values.

01:18:35.220 I know we disagree on some things, but it feels like we don't.

01:18:39.100 Right.

01:18:39.380 And I'm telling you, we have more private opinion data on the American public than anybody.

01:18:44.100 And I'm telling you, it's not true.

01:18:46.300 But now we have the added problem with big corporations and sports and so many industries sort of going along with the most hysterical when it comes to speech.

01:18:56.360 You know, like you can't say certain things.

01:18:58.460 You have to have certain opinions.

01:18:59.700 And I agree with you.

01:19:01.500 They have most Americans thinking, well, I feel differently, but I'm not going to say anything because I've seen this one get fired and I've seen that one get fired and I need my job.

01:19:09.820 And, you know, it's all great for you, Todd Rose and Megyn Kelly to tell me I need to speak up.

01:19:14.600 But no, you're not going to employ me if I get fired.

01:19:16.980 Yeah, this has been the place where I've been the most disappointed is a failure of leadership, right?

01:19:22.600 Because, you know, most people, okay, share your views with each other, right?

01:19:27.900 Most people don't have a lot of control over other people's lives.

01:19:31.060 But the reality is, is that CEOs control the incentives for hundreds and thousands and millions of people, right?

01:19:37.600 And what's interesting is that they are under the same illusions as everybody else.

01:19:43.200 So they may think rather than pushing their own agenda, they're just responding.

01:19:47.460 And I promise you, I've talked to plenty of CEOs about this.

01:19:50.240 And they say, look, I don't really believe this, but I'm trying to respond to the public, giving them what they want.

01:19:55.240 So I take a stand on something that I don't even agree with, because I think it's what everybody thinks, same, under a collective illusion.

01:20:01.300 The problem is, is then everybody below you is like, well, got it, right?

01:20:05.300 Because I don't want to get fired, or at least I don't want to get overlooked for a promotion.

01:20:09.100 And so we all fall into line, and then it just makes the illusions even stronger.

01:20:13.380 I will tell you, we did one of the largest private opinion studies recently on what people want out of work.

01:20:20.000 And this looks at trade-offs.

01:20:21.860 Really, not just what you care about, but what you sacrifice.

01:20:24.260 Here's what's really funny.

01:20:25.240 One of the biggest illusions that we found there is that the vast majority of people across all demographics, any way you cut the data, want leaders of companies to stop going public on every social issue.

01:20:38.740 But they are convinced that most Americans want them to be public, right?

01:20:42.940 So if we're under that kind of illusion, CEOs will continue to behave this way.

01:20:46.740 It will create perverse incentives for us to self-silence, and we will be mired in these illusions until they harm us for good.

01:20:53.760 What about – one of the points you made in the book resonated with me before we went to Christmas break.

01:21:01.320 My last episode had a little bit about, you know, just remember the humanity of, quote, the other side.

01:21:06.480 Don't demonize everyone just because they don't share your political views.

01:21:09.680 And in particular, remember, as we fight on all these issues – and for me, it can be COVID masks or what have you – there are allies on the other side.

01:21:19.460 There are people who share your goals and your views. 0.97

01:21:22.240 And it's really kind of pointless to demonize an entire half of the country as useless or stupid because that's not really true. 0.98

01:21:30.080 I have enough friends in my life on both sides of the aisle that I know what's real. 0.98

01:21:34.660 I know there's reason, right, on both sides.

01:21:37.740 And there's craziness on both sides, too.

01:21:40.300 But – and I want to get to that because one of your solutions, I know, is increase your identity complexity, which we'll get to.

01:21:44.520 But can you just speak before we get to that about the, like, the importance of the truth, which is that we agree more than we disagree and that when you really press people, you know, to sort of prioritize their values, they wind up having more unity than disunity.

01:22:03.780 Yeah, listen, and I'm not trying to find good news.

01:22:07.500 Like, if we were really this divided, it's important that we say so, right, because we've got to find good solutions.

01:22:13.300 But I'm telling you, like, let me give you one example.

01:22:15.980 We did – we spent a year doing this survey of people's private views for the future of America.

01:22:22.840 What are the tradeoff priorities you want most for this country?

01:22:26.380 And before we gave thousands and thousands of people this instrument, we just asked them, okay, are we more divided or united as a country?

01:22:35.680 And not surprisingly, 82% said we're more divided.

01:22:39.480 Half of those people said we are extremely divided.

01:22:41.720 And when you cut it by who you voted for in the last election, a majority of both sides said the other side no longer shares their values for the country, right?

01:22:52.400 Okay, so that's the setup.

01:22:53.960 And then we gave those exact same people this private opinion instrument that you can't fake, that makes you make tradeoff decisions for the country.

01:23:03.000 And what emerges is shocking amounts of common ground.

01:23:06.700 I mean, shocking.

01:23:07.920 Like, there's some division.

01:23:09.320 For example, we are privately divided on immigration.

01:23:11.600 That's a fact, right?

01:23:12.640 There's a couple of places.

01:23:13.740 But what was most interesting to me, and I think will be heartening for your listeners, is what it is we agree on.

01:23:20.700 Like, across all demographics, like by race, gender, even the kind of job you do, where you live, the things that we care about most are nothing less than core American values.

01:23:31.260 The ones that feel like they're slipping away, but they're not.

01:23:33.860 For example, people care a lot about individual rights on both sides of the aisle.

01:23:37.720 It doesn't seem like it sometimes, but they do.

01:23:40.020 It is a top priority, right?

01:23:41.740 They want to be treated equally, right?

01:23:44.160 Not equal outcomes.

01:23:45.740 They want to be treated equally.

01:23:47.060 And they want to have a fair shot at the American dream, right?

01:23:50.820 And they also recognize that there are things we owe each other that make that fair shot real.

01:23:55.020 Things like health care, education, and a criminal justice system that operates without bias.

01:24:00.100 What they don't want is top-down control.

01:24:03.440 They are so fed up.

01:24:04.580 In fact, the dead last priority for everyone was having the federal government make decisions for communities and people.

01:24:11.220 The problem is, okay, so that's the truth of the American character, right?

01:24:15.900 A lot of common ground anchored in our core American values, updated for modern times.

01:24:21.520 And yet, when we ask them, what do you think most Americans would say?

01:24:25.060 You get a completely different picture.

01:24:26.940 So we think we're divided.

01:24:28.960 We think the other side doesn't share our values.

01:24:31.880 And so we think that they're going away.

01:24:33.680 And we think we have to fight to preserve them.

01:24:35.960 And I'm telling you, it is an illusion.

01:24:38.000 And the way out of an illusion is not fighting.

01:24:40.380 It is being honest with each other and making the space for other people, treating them with the respect that they deserve to be able to voice their own opinion.

01:24:49.220 If we do that, I promise you, we will reveal our shared values.

01:24:52.680 We will build back social trust and we will get somewhere better together.

01:24:56.860 What about the fact that, you know, you take polling, let's take free speech, for example.

01:25:01.680 You do polling of the American people on free speech.

01:25:03.960 And the young people, the young people don't feel the way we do.

01:25:07.740 You know, the kids in their 20s, 18, whatever, they're like, hate speech is unconstitutional.

01:25:12.580 And yes, I do want to see people silenced to say offensive things.

01:25:15.480 And I want them to get in trouble and I want them to lose their jobs.

01:25:17.620 That is a real divide between the young and the old.

01:25:19.520 And how would you explain that? 1.00

01:25:21.300 Or is that maybe I just haven't been paying attention and that's something that, you know, when you're young, you're kind of dumb. 0.99

01:25:27.280 You get older, you get wiser. 0.99

01:25:30.420 Yeah.

01:25:30.880 So two things about that.

01:25:31.860 So number one, you're partially right there, right?

01:25:33.700 So there is an age difference where people are more willing to pile on and say someone should lose their job for who they voted for even or they have the wrong thing, right?

01:25:42.380 There's a little bit of the Marxist stuff that's emerging there that I think is a little dangerous for society.

01:25:47.380 But here's what's the most interesting.

01:25:49.760 The illusions around free speech are the strongest with young people because they spend the most time online.

01:25:58.140 So I believe most of that behavior, that willingness to jump in and try to cancel people and silence them is less driven by personal ideology and more driven by the fact that they believe this is what they're supposed to do, right?

01:26:12.240 So I believe you start with the illusions, you shatter them, and then we'll deal with folks that still think it's okay to go ahead and ruin people's lives because you disagree with them.

01:26:22.580 And the way we'll deal with them is not by ruining their lives, but by treating them the way that they're unwilling to treat other people with respect and listening to their views.

01:26:30.320 You could have called your book Deluded.

01:26:32.900 That could have been an alternate title.

01:26:34.540 All right, now I only have a couple minutes left and I want to get to this solution of increasing your identity complexity.

01:26:40.300 What does that mean?

01:26:40.900 So here's what's really fascinating.

01:26:43.380 I was so interested in terms of neuroscience of conformity and looking at ways that like, how do we reduce the pressure groups can put on us?

01:26:52.020 And it turns out in the book, I actually study, I talk about cults a little bit and how they, how they work to get complete control over you.

01:26:59.420 Well, there's been some really great research on identity complexities of the call, which is if you only have one group that you belong to, it has cult-like power of you.

01:27:09.480 I don't care how much you like that group.

01:27:11.260 You are going to be very unwilling to go against what you think the consensus is.

01:27:15.480 But it turns out that if what you do is have at least three groups that matter to you, and they don't have to be huge.

01:27:22.120 So let's say you're a diehard Republican.

01:27:23.880 This is part of your identity.

01:27:25.140 It can be a church group, which is pretty big, but it can literally be like a football fan, like a team, right?

01:27:32.020 As long as it matters to you, it turns out that when you have those different groups that matter, if you feel pressure from one, all you have to do is literally in your head, think about your identity as tied to the other group.

01:27:43.880 And it reduces your brain's response to conformity.

01:27:47.680 So it's such an easy workaround.

01:27:49.840 But most of us have reduced our groups to very small numbers, and it leaves us very susceptible to conformity and complicity.

01:27:57.020 Because we will still feel like we're part of something.

01:27:59.760 And like if we get kicked out of the first group, it won't hurt as bad.

01:28:03.000 And therefore, we'll be more bold about expressing our ideas.

01:28:07.660 Yep.

01:28:07.800 And given that it's a coin toss, whether you're wrong about the group anyway, this is how it allows you to still speak up when you can and make sure that these illusions don't end up destroying the group that actually matters to you.

01:28:21.160 So interesting.

01:28:22.020 Gosh, it's crazy how we are being so manipulated at every turn today.

01:28:25.960 But I love having some tools to minimize it and, you know, being aware that it's happening and who and how is more than half the battle.

01:28:35.980 Todd, what a pleasure.

01:28:37.040 Thank you so much.

01:28:38.680 Thanks for having me.

01:28:39.920 All right.

01:28:40.140 Again, the name of the book is Collective Illusions, Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions.

01:28:49.400 Tomorrow we got Jason Whitlock.

01:28:51.140 Love him.

01:28:52.020 Coming back.

01:28:52.680 Don't miss that.

01:28:53.780 See you then.

01:28:55.960 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

01:28:58.260 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - February 03, 2022

Smug CNN, Silencing Speech, and Misguided Biden, with Daniel Cameron, Erik Wemple, and Todd Rose ｜ Ep. 254

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