The Megyn Kelly Show - 20221229_best-of-2022-memorable-moments-featuring-malcolm-g
Aired: 2022-12-29
Duration: 01:39:36


=== Regret and Hyper Promiscuity (14:10) ===

[00:00:16]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:27]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:29]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:31]  It is the very last show of 2022.
[00:00:34]  And we wanted to bring you some of the highlights of this past year.
[00:00:37]  So much goodness to choose from.
[00:00:38]  And we are so grateful that you were there for it all.
[00:00:42]  But with more than 200 episodes this year alone and 400 interviews, it is so hard.
[00:00:47]  It's hard to do a best of show, right?
[00:00:50]  It's like, who do you exclude?
[00:00:52]  There's so much goodness in any event.
[00:00:55]  So we're not going to say this is like the best ever because these people are amazing, but there were many others we could have used.
[00:01:00]  But there's, you know, time is limited.
[00:01:02]  So we are going to bring you some of six interviews over the past year that give you a flavor, a flavor of some of what the Megan Kelly show is all about.
[00:01:10]  A little sampling of what we do here and will continue to do in 2023.
[00:01:14]  Got to start with our pal, Bridget Fettesy's return to the show in episode 402.
[00:01:19]  I feel like this might be the second year in a row she's made like end of year highlight reel.
[00:01:24]  That's a credit to Bridge.
[00:01:25]  When Bridget was first on the show, when the Megan Kelly show was just a podcast, it was one of the most talked about interviews I did in 2020.
[00:01:32]  Well, a lot has changed in Bridget's life since then, and we talked about all of it: life after motherhood, and much, much more.
[00:01:42]  Your piece on Substack, entitled, I Regret Being a Slut, is, as Ben said, a beautiful and brave piece.
[00:01:51]  It really was.
[00:01:53]  And something near and dear to my own heart, because I've said this before on the show, I was in a much different place than you were, and our backgrounds are different, of course, too, but we're very aligned on virtually everything now.
[00:02:05]  But the one piece of advice I give everyone's daughter going off to college is the same, and it is: don't be a slut.
[00:02:11]  Don't be a slut.
[00:02:12]  Don't give it away so easily, girls.
[00:02:14]  Like, make them earn it.
[00:02:15]  Remember your value.
[00:02:16]  Like, it having sex, you don't have to be in love, but it should be something really precious.
[00:02:21]  And you don't just want any Tom Dick or Harry jumping on top of you, so to speak.
[00:02:26]  You are there too, but you got there through a much more traumatic road.
[00:02:31]  And I will just read this one piece of your amazing Substack piece to our audience.
[00:02:37]  You write, if I get really honest with myself, I'd say most of these usually drunken encounters left me feeling empty and demoralized and worthless.
[00:02:47]  I wouldn't have said that at the time, though.
[00:02:49]  At the time, I would have told you I was liberated, even while I tried to drink away the sick feeling of rejection when my most recent hookup did not call me back.
[00:02:57]  At the time, I would have said one night stands made me feel emboldened, but in reality, I was using sex like a drug.
[00:03:04]  You go on, the lie I told myself for decades was, I'm not in pain, I'm empowered.
[00:03:12]  Wow.
[00:03:13]  So, how did you come to that realization?
[00:03:17]  Like, how did you spend so much time in that dark place?
[00:03:20]  Was it sobriety?
[00:03:21]  Did that behavior continue after?
[00:03:23]  Like, what was it?
[00:03:26]  It was a lot of sobriety and a lot of therapy.
[00:03:29]  And I think, yeah, a lot of when I think about this, I know a lot of it is tied up with my drinking and drug use.
[00:03:38]  A lot of that behavior, I don't think I would have engaged in had I not been drunk or high.
[00:03:47]  And so those things are very connected.
[00:03:52]  Also post sexual assault, when I was pretty young, 18, I really felt dirty and ashamed.
[00:04:01]  And I felt like it was my fault because I was drinking underage and I felt like I was valueless now.
[00:04:10]  And it wasn't, it wasn't like I hadn't already lost my virginity, but I had really only just lost my virginity when this happened.
[00:04:18]  So I was still pretty early into my sexuality.
[00:04:24]  And then I responded to it by being kind of hyper promiscuous, which is very common for women who have experienced trauma.
[00:04:32]  They'll often just become hyper, they'll go into being more promiscuous.
[00:04:38]  And it's a way to try and take control back, at least it was for me.
[00:04:43]  And it was also just a way of, and, and at the same time, feeling like I had no value and ashamed and saying like, oh, I don't care.
[00:04:54]  I just don't care.
[00:04:55]  And so it's been a really, I mean, the emails I've received from women and men and gay men since I wrote that piece, I'm still getting them.
[00:05:04]  It is, it is incredible.
[00:05:06]  The stories people are telling me, the response, the, I think that there was a generation, Gen X, older millennials, and we were raised with that kind of girl power.
[00:05:18]  You can sleep your way to empowerment and you can unyoke your heart from sex with no consequence.
[00:05:26]  And a lot of those women are coming back saying, you know, it's a trap.
[00:05:31]  Don't, don't go that way.
[00:05:34]  I always felt like if I have sex with a guy, he's always going to have that over me.
[00:05:40]  That's kind of how, I don't know if that sounds weird, but I just felt like it has to be with somebody who I trust to never misuse it against me.
[00:05:51]  And, you know, who's not going to like, whatever, if I wind up being a lawyer, I wind up being a journalist who's not going to be able to sit there being like, I did her.
[00:05:59]  You know, I never wanted to give that power to anybody who I didn't really trust.
[00:06:04]  Maybe I was just paranoid at the proper age.
[00:06:06]  You know, I don't know what it was.
[00:06:08]  That's, that's interesting.
[00:06:09]  Where, where did you get your sex messaging from?
[00:06:12]  You know, well, I'm a Catholic like you, for sure.
[00:06:16]  But I don't know.
[00:06:17]  I wouldn't describe myself as prude.
[00:06:19]  It's not like I wasn't fooling around.
[00:06:20]  I just was monogamous and I was judicious and how many people I, you know, offered that to.
[00:06:29]  I guess, I don't know, Bridget, I thank God I never did suffer a sexual assault.
[00:06:35]  And I did have, you know, great messaging from my parents and an example of a very loving marriage.
[00:06:42]  And my dad died when I was 15, but prior to that, my parents were very much in love.
[00:06:47]  And I guess I just had a good foundation in this department.
[00:06:50]  I was built up in terms of my ego and all, you know what I mean?
[00:06:53]  Like not overly, but I think that is important.
[00:06:56]  And I know you talk very openly in this piece about how you had a very different experience.
[00:07:00]  You had a traumatic divorce in your family when you were young and an undiagnosed mental illness in your stepfather.
[00:07:05]  And things started to go south for you when you were on the same track I was on for a while there.
[00:07:11]  Yeah.
[00:07:11]  And I kind of get to the point at the end that you just said where I regret that those men can say they slept with me.
[00:07:19]  And that there's that's, I mean, I've dealt with that even after I went on Joe Rogan, the number of guys that reached out and were like, oh, nice to be able to say I like bang someone.
[00:07:30]  I was like, oh, this is so uncomfortable.
[00:07:34]  I hate that.
[00:07:35]  I hate this.
[00:07:36]  And moments like that have made me reflect on, you know, having to look at that, that feeling that comes up when I hear from a guy who's like, I got to say that I slept with someone who was on Rogan.
[00:07:49]  Just like, oh god, I feel you.
[00:07:51]  That's not the you're even dumber than I thought you were.
[00:07:54]  Yeah, but you know, in your case, I see it very differently because I feel like that was a younger me anticipating how you know I wanted my life to go and how I didn't want it to go.
[00:08:06]  But the older me looks at your life and says, There's zero point in regretting all of that.
[00:08:11]  You shouldn't regret all of that.
[00:08:12]  All of that went into making you this really thoughtful, wise, beyond your years person who, with this one essay, did so much good.
[00:08:22]  I mean, all the times I've said, don't be a slut, I haven't done anywhere near as good for women thinking about it or who might have been tempted to do it than you did with this essay.
[00:08:33]  But it's because I think partially and because I'm being honest about how I regret it.
[00:08:39]  And there's been a weird reaction to that word regret.
[00:08:42]  And I don't know if this is like an American thing where just kind of like YOLO and regret is almost a dirty word.
[00:08:50]  And people are like, you shouldn't, you know, one of the biggest feedback I get on this piece is the people reacting to me saying that I regret this.
[00:08:58]  And I think that, you know, I look at the arts and life is filled with regret.
[00:09:03]  I feel like that's an emotion that weirdly has become something we're not supposed to have.
[00:09:09]  And that's like a whole other piece that I could think about and consider because I do regret these things.
[00:09:16]  When I had those guys reach out to me and say, oh, I got to blah, blah, blah.
[00:09:23]  The feeling that I have is regret.
[00:09:25]  Like I regret giving that to you.
[00:09:27]  I regret not valuing myself enough.
[00:09:30]  And of course, I did the best that I could with wherever I was at and all that stuff.
[00:09:36]  But there was always an intuition that I was ignoring.
[00:09:39]  There was always, and that's really what I would say to young women: don't ignore that intuition.
[00:09:44]  And having the culture be so, I grew up during Sex in the City.
[00:09:49]  I hated that show and didn't watch it, but all my friends watched it.
[00:09:52]  And everybody, that the messaging there was like, have sex like a man.
[00:09:58]  You can.
[00:09:59]  And the double standard is something that really always bothered me.
[00:10:04]  And I'm not sure if I'm just now resigned to the double standard or I don't, I know that me getting naked and sleeping with men isn't going to change it.
[00:10:14]  Well, that's the thing.
[00:10:16]  So now we're getting to it.
[00:10:17]  Now we're getting to it because it's so what do you regret about it?
[00:10:22]  Like if it had worked for you, if you'd been working something out and you went to have sex with, you know, one night Sand or some guy you didn't know, and the next day you were like, I feel amazing.
[00:10:31]  That was awesome.
[00:10:32]  Peace out.
[00:10:33]  You wouldn't be having these feelings.
[00:10:35]  But so for those who think that that is the feeling you're going to get, you're sounding a different alarm.
[00:10:42]  Yes, I'm sounding a different alarm, but I'm also, you know, the book I want to write or somehow the essay I want to write, because there's a piece out there that anyone can access, which is what I learned from putting nudes online on Playboy.
[00:10:58]  And there's some stuff I read that piece before I posted I Regret Being a Slut.
[00:11:02]  And I, I, there's still some stuff in there that I don't disagree with in my, in my, what I learned from getting naked online.
[00:11:12]  And there have been moments where I felt like, yeah, you know, empowered by my own sexuality, but it was for the right reasons.
[00:11:23]  It was not because I was, I was weaponizing sex because there's a, there's a whole, you know, there, there's a whole man-eater kind of side to my persona that I leaned into pretty hard for a long time.
[00:11:39]  And to, I'd be lying if I said that at the time, I didn't think there was some fun in that.
[00:11:46]  And it's just that over time, I realized that a lot of that persona, it was like my party girl image, that it was just a lie.
[00:11:56]  And at the end of the day, I was feeling pretty empty.
[00:12:00]  So yeah, there's a lot to work out there.
[00:12:03]  And it's kind of a, there's a lot of at the time I didn't regret it.
[00:12:09]  I would have told you that I was killing.
[00:12:12]  Yeah.
[00:12:13]  And you write in your piece, there's a great line, the culture was right there to pick me up and dust me off every time you dealt with what you call the overwhelming shame.
[00:12:23]  And so I doubled down on being a proud slut, a proud slut, part of the divine feminine.
[00:12:29]  And then you write as follows, oh, this is so good.
[00:12:32]  Such a great writer.
[00:12:33]  You really are.
[00:12:33]  Thank you.
[00:12:34]  You write, the saddest realization is how low I set the bar.
[00:12:38]  A lifetime of allowing myself to be the other woman, taken for granted or treated like a doormat under the false pretense of being, quote, empowered, came to a head one night with the arrival of a text message from an on again, off again lover, quote, good night, baby.
[00:12:54]  I love you, it said, quickly followed by, quote, wrong person.
[00:12:59]  Rock bottom doesn't always look like losing everything or ending up in jail.
[00:13:03]  Sometimes it can be that sick feeling in your gut when you know emotionally you're done.
[00:13:10]  I was done.
[00:13:11]  I was that.
[00:13:12]  I remember that moment.
[00:13:13]  I remember, it's like I remember when I quit heroin vividly in my mind that moment, that the rock bottom, whatever you want to call it, I, it's the same kind of moment.
[00:13:23]  I vividly remember walking.
[00:13:26]  He was coming to my place to, I forget why.
[00:13:29]  It wasn't even like a booty call.
[00:13:30]  I forgot what, why he was coming over.
[00:13:32]  And then I had to walk out and like give him something after he came to my place.
[00:13:39]  After this text message, I had to look him in the eye.
[00:13:42]  And so it's actually way worse than I actually even express in the piece.
[00:13:49]  And I remember walking back into my house feeling so, you know, they say in the 12-step books, pitiful demoralization.
[00:13:57]  And that was the feeling that I had.
[00:13:58]  It was just pitiful demoralization.
[00:14:01]  And my life changed a lot after that.
[00:14:04]  I just was, I was like, I'm done.
[00:14:06]  I can't do this.
[00:14:07]  I can't pretend that I'm okay being the other woman or that I'm okay just being someone's sex doll, basically.
[00:14:17]  And it took a lot of therapy and a long time because there's so much shame.
[00:14:24]  It's just shame is really hard.

=== Healing from Sexual Shame (03:46) ===

[00:14:26]  And I think in women in particular, really shows up in our bodies.
[00:14:30]  And so there's just so much shame that I had to unpack and try and overcome.
[00:14:36]  And it still comes up.
[00:14:38]  I read the piece for YouTube and I hadn't read it since I had written it.
[00:14:42]  And I was getting, you know, fighting back tears the whole time.
[00:14:46]  There's still a lot of pain there.
[00:14:48]  Of course.
[00:14:49]  My God.
[00:14:50]  And that was there before and you were trying to heal it.
[00:14:53]  I mean, to a large extent, it was all about trying to heal pain.
[00:14:56]  And only once you realized, which many people don't, that that was not a cure, that in fact, that was an exacerbator, did you ultimately come to abandon it and try something else like love and taking care of yourself?
[00:15:10]  I think there's a real body count.
[00:15:12]  You know, I've heard from a lot of one of the emails that I read and the piece, when I read it, I talked about some of the responses I had received.
[00:15:20]  And one of the emails was from a man who said he had watched his mom deal with a lot of what I dealt with with drugs and alcohol and rotating cast of men.
[00:15:31]  And she died of an OD.
[00:15:33]  And I always get emotional.
[00:15:37]  Yeah.
[00:15:40]  I have a rule though, like don't ugly cry on the internet.
[00:15:45]  That's why I could cry on your last podcast because there's no video screen.
[00:15:51]  Yeah, I'm like, I don't need those screenshots.
[00:15:54]  Talk about shame.
[00:15:56]  It is hard.
[00:15:57]  Once it starts to come, it's really hard.
[00:15:58]  It's like a cough.
[00:15:59]  You almost have to let it out.
[00:16:00]  Otherwise, it's going to come out in an ugly way.
[00:16:03]  I know.
[00:16:04]  But this, the, I think that there's that expression there, but for the grace of God, go ahead.
[00:16:10]  And reading these stories from people about what I would say is kind of this body count to the sexual revolution.
[00:16:18]  It could have been me.
[00:16:20]  It easily could have been me.
[00:16:21]  Easily, easily, easily.
[00:16:24]  Had I not gotten sober, it's a miracle I was given the opportunity to get sober because in between getting sober for the first time and getting sober this time, I'll have nine years actually in a couple of weeks.
[00:16:38]  There was 15 years.
[00:16:40]  There was plenty of time for me to OD or die or worse.
[00:16:46]  And there were little moments where I think I was able to pull myself back off the cliff, but I'm not really sure why I had that clarity at those moments.
[00:16:59]  Yes, our audience should know that while you had straight A's and were destined to go to Georgetown or some other equally revered school, you, we've talked about this the last time, but you started smoking weed, drinking daily at age 12 to 13, eventually led to heroin, and you barely graduated from high school.
[00:17:21]  And you wound up getting drugged and raped, which we talked about as well the last time.
[00:17:26]  And then at 19 after high school, entered a state-funded halfway house in Minneapolis for seven months, by that point weighing just 89 pounds.
[00:17:35]  Well, you should have been at Georgetown and you were in a halfway house.
[00:17:38]  And so it really could have gone a different way for you.
[00:17:42]  I mean, the fact that you're sitting here telling your story and explaining the revelations you've had is in itself a miracle, but it's also a huge gift.
[00:17:51]  It's a gift to people who are following on that path without thinking, who are dabbling, dabbling on that path.
[00:17:58]  You know, you may have sort of path-adjacent people who are like, oh, that's not me, but there's a piece of it that sounds familiar.
[00:18:04]  One of the most talked about interviews we did this year was my two-part conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
[00:18:12]  We bring you some of that.

=== The Militarized Pandemic Response (13:11) ===

[00:18:13]  Stay tuned for this.
[00:18:14]  You'll love it.
[00:18:15]  Next.
[00:18:18]  In episodes 282 and 283, we accomplished something few thought was even possible.
[00:18:26]  An in-depth interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that tackled all the most controversial topics that remained uncensored on all platforms.
[00:18:36]  It was a feat.
[00:18:38]  And I am so proud that we were able to do it.
[00:18:40]  So much so.
[00:18:41]  It was so successful.
[00:18:42]  We brought him back on later in the year.
[00:18:45]  He knows his facts.
[00:18:47]  He is not part of the disinformation dozen, as the White House claims.
[00:18:53]  He's brilliant and he's devoted his life to helping us clean up our environment and hold bad guys accountable.
[00:18:59]  Here's part of our conversation on COVID censorship, as well as RFK opening up about his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, and the backlash she faced over him.
[00:19:11]  What do you think about the censorship you've endured?
[00:19:14]  Oh, I mean, to me, Megan, that's the most disturbing feature of this, you know, this kind of bewildering response to COVID that we've seen.
[00:19:27]  I, you know, first of all, I want to say this, that I'm accused of promoting vaccine misinformation, but nobody, not Instagram, not the White House, not anybody else has actually identified a statement that I've made that is incorrect.
[00:19:44]  There were no statements on Instagram.
[00:19:47]  I didn't even say that the virus came from Wuhan.
[00:19:51]  I just said it should be investigated because it would be weird if the guy who was financing those experiments and may have created the virus is now running the pandemic response.
[00:20:03]  And so these questions should be asked.
[00:20:05]  I didn't say it would happen because I couldn't at that point.
[00:20:08]  I have not made any inaccurate statements as far as I know.
[00:20:13]  If I did make one and it was identified, I would immediately apologize and withdraw it.
[00:20:20]  Instagram of Facebook acknowledges that it uses the term vaccine misinformation as a euphemism for any statement or assertion that departs from government proclamations, whether they're actually true or not.
[00:20:37]  So my crime was criticizing government policies.
[00:20:43]  It was not passing actual misinformation.
[00:20:48]  And that's a problem for our government.
[00:20:49]  You know, Adams and Madison and Jefferson said we put freedom of speech in the First Amendment because all the other rights are dependent on that right.
[00:21:01]  And if a government can silence criticism, it has a license to commit any atrocity.
[00:21:10]  And that's why it's, you know, when I was young, I supported the ACLU and others who were supporting the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, not because I, you know, I was repulsed by their ideology and by their statements and horrified by them.
[00:21:32]  But, you know, at the same time, we need to be able to be willing to die to protect their right to say those things.
[00:21:41]  And that's, you know, what they understood, our ancestors in the American Revolution.
[00:21:46]  And that's what generations of writers, of politicians, of respected leaders have warned against any government that tries to limit speech.
[00:21:58]  And now it's very strange living in this world where it's become, you know, it's become okay.
[00:22:06]  And my political party, I saw a Gallup poll recently.
[00:22:11]  It was either Gallup or Rasmussen that said that something like 70% of Democrats support government restricting the speech.
[00:22:23]  And, you know, it's almost explicable to me that we could be in that place right now.
[00:22:31]  I believe my political party was the party that would go to the mat to, you know, to protect people's right to say what they want.
[00:22:41]  And that's so critical for our democracy.
[00:22:43]  And, you know, it also is critical to public health.
[00:22:48]  Listen, I may be wrong about the things that I talk about, but why can't we debate them?
[00:22:54]  Why can't we hear these discussions about masks about masks?
[00:22:59]  Okay, you know what?
[00:23:01]  I've sued agencies for 40 years for failing to go through a regulatory process to have an environmental impact statement where it explains where, which has to explain the scientific basis for new regulations or actions, show the studies, and then do a cost-benefit analysis.
[00:23:22]  None of that happened.
[00:23:23]  It was, you know, we just suspended democracy.
[00:23:26]  We suspended due process.
[00:23:29]  And once they got rid of freedom of speech, they went after all the other, they closed a million churches, all the churches in this country for a year with no public hearing, no discussion of the science, no offering of, you know, a single scientific study to justify it.
[00:23:49]  They shut down a million businesses with no just compensate, no due process, no just compensation, a direct violation of our constitution.
[00:23:58]  They got rid of Seventh Amendment jury trials against any company that says that they're involved in providing a countermeasure.
[00:24:05]  If there's a vaccine company and you get injured, you have no rights to compensation, no matter how grievous your injury, no matter how reckless their conduct, no matter how negligent their conduct, you cannot sue that company.
[00:24:18]  And then, you know, they got rid of the prohibitions against warrantless searches and seizures with all this track and trace surveillance that we now have to give our private information and our private medical records to people to get into a bar to get on an airplane or whatever.
[00:24:37]  And, you know, there is no pandemic exception in the U.S. Constitution.
[00:24:43]  And by the way, it's not because they didn't know about pandemics, because there was a smallpox epidemic during the revolution that paralyzed Washington's Army of New England for a couple of months.
[00:24:58]  And there was another malaria epidemic that happened to the Army of Virginia.
[00:25:03]  So they knew very well what epidemics could do, and yet they did not say that this document is suspended.
[00:25:10]  These rights are suspended whenever there is an epidemic.
[00:25:14]  And they, you know, the disturbing part of this response was that it did not seem to be a public health response at all.
[00:25:23]  It was a militarized and monetized response.
[00:25:27]  We did things the opposite of what you would do if you wanted to stop a pandemic.
[00:25:33]  And ask yourself, and I, you know, I would ask any of my fellow Democrats who are supporting Tony Fauci, his record is the worst record of any record of any country in the world, arguably.
[00:25:50]  We had 4.2% of the global population here in the United States.
[00:25:54]  And I think we had something like 17 or 18% of the global COVID deaths.
[00:26:02]  The death rate in America was in the top 10 in the world.
[00:26:06]  So we had 2,800 people per million population die.
[00:26:12]  The African nations had an average of about 200.
[00:26:17]  Oh, Nigeria had 15 people per million population.
[00:26:22]  These countries, which Tony Fauci and Bill Gates, at the beginning of the pandemic, said Africa is going to get wiped out.
[00:26:29]  They need to get them all vaccines.
[00:26:32]  Nigeria has a vaccination rate of 1.5 for one vaccine, 1.5%.
[00:26:40]  Wow.
[00:26:41]  They had a COVID death rate that was about 1 1500th of our COVID death rate.
[00:26:48]  Wow.
[00:26:48]  And there's reasons, Megan, there's reasons for that that are non-medical.
[00:26:54]  One is that African countries have younger populations and COVID was a disease that killed elderly people, but that doesn't explain it anywhere near these huge disproportions.
[00:27:09]  One of the things that could explain it is that Nigeria has the highest malaria burden in the world.
[00:27:18]  27% of malaria cases globally come from that country.
[00:27:22]  Oh, everybody in the country is on hydroxychloroquine.
[00:27:26]  It also has the highest burden of river blindness.
[00:27:29]  A large part of the population is on ivermectin.
[00:27:33]  Is that what explains the you know this incredible record against COVID?
[00:27:39]  Well, we don't know, but shouldn't we be asking that question?
[00:27:44]  Isn't that the first thing Tony Fauci should be doing is saying, why is there this huge delta between COVID death rates and all these different countries?
[00:27:54]  And the countries that did worse are the ones that focus on the vaccines.
[00:27:59]  And the fact it's not just Fauci, as you well know, big tech has been completely supportive of this shutdown.
[00:28:05]  You can't, even just hearing you talk about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin sends just a little piece of my spine up, like, oh, Lord, this is, you know, YouTube, this is where they're going to jump in and try to censor us.
[00:28:17]  Nothing should be censored here.
[00:28:18]  This is a discussion about whether they work.
[00:28:20]  Should we have discussions about more discussions about that fact?
[00:28:24]  But that's what they've done to us because they'll take away your platform, as you well know.
[00:28:29]  You can't even talk about it.
[00:28:30]  They've jumped in on the silencing of discussion, and they're the ones who control the public information highway.
[00:28:37]  So it's really damaging.
[00:28:39]  I'm in news.
[00:28:40]  And to this day, I don't know what the truth is on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
[00:28:46]  And even talking about it makes even me feel like, it's insane.
[00:28:51]  It's un-American.
[00:28:54]  That's right.
[00:28:55]  And, you know, I completely not be wrong about anything.
[00:29:01]  Let's have the debate.
[00:29:03]  Let's have the discussion.
[00:29:04]  You know, that our democracy is based on the free flow of information with good notions and good ideas and good arguments triumphing in the marketplace of ideas.
[00:29:16]  And none of that stuff is happening.
[00:29:18]  And as you point out, you know, we need to ask ourselves, qui bono, who is benefiting from this?
[00:29:24]  Clearly, the pharmaceutical companies, but also the big tech platforms are.
[00:29:29]  And they, you know, there has been, this has been a war against the poor.
[00:29:34]  If you look at black neighborhoods, Compton, Harlem, had two or three times the death rates of Bel Air or Greenwich.
[00:29:44]  And, you know, you had the schools closed in those neighborhoods.
[00:29:49]  According to the Brown University study, children lost 22 IQ points during young children during the pandemic.
[00:29:58]  And, you know, and the mental illness went off the roof.
[00:30:01]  I think 51% of Black children had suicidal idiots.
[00:30:06]  You had the police go into those neighborhoods and close down the basketball courts.
[00:30:14]  And who benefited from all of this?
[00:30:17]  It was the, you know, the internet platforms.
[00:30:20]  It was Jeff Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, et cetera.
[00:30:29]  These, there's been, it was a transfer of wealth, the biggest in history, arguably $3.8 trillion from the global poor and from working people to this new class of oligarch billionaires.
[00:30:47]  And the same people who were benefiting were the ones who now control our communications, the Facebook, and all these platforms.
[00:30:56]  And they were using their control to suppress and to censor any criticism of the government lockdowns that were making them even richer.
[00:31:07]  And there's something really wrong with that.
[00:31:09]  And the government was allied with them and telling them what to censor and whatnot.
[00:31:16]  We have correspondence between Zuckerberg and Tony Fauci telling him about censoring people like me.

=== Totalitarian Controls on Speech (06:13) ===

[00:31:24]  Oh, it's not, you know, and I, and I, there's nothing I'd like more than to debate Tony Fauci or any of these people.
[00:31:31]  Oh, I'd buy a ticket to that.
[00:31:34]  What?
[00:31:34]  I would buy a ticket to that.
[00:31:39]  Listen, I, it's not just suppression.
[00:31:41]  That's what's scary.
[00:31:42]  It's also demonization, ostracization.
[00:31:45]  It's smearing, right?
[00:31:47]  And we've seen in the Fauci papers that have been collected by places like the Intercept, that's his MO.
[00:31:53]  They intentionally smeared several scientists and so on who weren't following the Fauci line.
[00:31:58]  They've definitely smeared you and some of the doctors that you just mentioned and tried to create this.
[00:32:03]  You know, they're freaks.
[00:32:04]  They're disinformationists.
[00:32:06]  You know, that's by design.
[00:32:08]  They don't want people listening to you.
[00:32:10]  And I, I, I wonder, I was thinking about it because, um, you know, the freedom rally that you went to that was anti-mandate and I'm anti-mandate too.
[00:32:20]  I am pro-vaccine for the for the record.
[00:32:22]  You probably gathered that.
[00:32:23]  So am I.
[00:32:24]  So am I.
[00:32:26]  Yeah, but I really am.
[00:32:28]  But I like the, I liked that.
[00:32:29]  I loved the anti-mandate rally and those who organized it.
[00:32:33]  And I thought it was great.
[00:32:34]  So you got in trouble when you were there.
[00:32:36]  I mean, I got your overall point.
[00:32:38]  People get upset when you compare anything to the Holocaust, but you were basically saying, I don't know, I have it in front of me, just so I don't get it wrong, but it was even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland.
[00:32:50]  You could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did.
[00:32:53]  Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.
[00:32:58]  Well, all hell rained down on you.
[00:33:00]  I mean, when the Auschwitz Memorial is responding to you on Twitter, you know, you've stepped in it.
[00:33:04]  They came out and said it's a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay.
[00:33:08]  So those people don't like you.
[00:33:10]  And some of them don't like you for political reasons.
[00:33:12]  But what did you make of your wife, Cheryl Hines, who, by the way, did not realize you were married to the wonderful Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm?
[00:33:20]  She came out and she gave it to you too.
[00:33:21]  She gave it to you right between the eyes and said, We should not be comparing the Holocaust to anything or anyone.
[00:33:28]  His opinions are not a reflection of my own.
[00:33:30]  And his reference to Anne Frank was reprehensible and insensitive.
[00:33:34]  So I know you said you were sorry for that comment, but what did you make of it?
[00:33:39]  Yeah, well, let me get to my wife in a minute and just make a couple of comments on that.
[00:33:45]  Number one, I regret making that analogy.
[00:33:48]  Number two, I was not comparing COVID policies to the Holocaust.
[00:33:53]  I never mentioned the Holocaust.
[00:33:56]  I was making a point.
[00:33:58]  I was comparing a number of totalitarian regimes, left-wing and right-wing.
[00:34:04]  So in that same, I think yearlier in that sentence or later, I talked about the communist regime of East Germany and that all of these totalitarian regimes have similar features and similar intentions, which is to control every aspect of human behavior.
[00:34:20]  And my point is that none of them have been able to do that in history.
[00:34:26]  That today, however, because of these new technologies, technologies like 5G, which allows a mass harvest of data and very, very intense surveillance, satellite, 415,000 satellite, low altitude satellites that are going to be able to look at every square inch of the earth every day, facial recognition systems.
[00:34:51]  We now have these AI systems that can look through walls and see people where they're hiding in buildings.
[00:34:57]  We have vaccine passports, which is a way of social control, digital currencies.
[00:35:04]  We saw what they did to the truckers in Canada, where they closed their bank accounts and denied the money.
[00:35:13]  There's all these new instrumentalities that make the rising, the emergence of totality.
[00:35:19]  what I call turnkey totalitarianism, where they're putting in place all of these instrumentalities now, or they are getting put in place.
[00:35:28]  Let me use the passive voice.
[00:35:31]  And it's going to give people who have those kind of ambitions a level of control over every aspect of our lives and makes dissent and resistance almost impossible.
[00:35:42]  That's the point I was going to make.
[00:35:45]  I made a big mistake by making any reference to Nazi Germany because of the sensitivities and because I know that what I say is going to be distorted by people who want to silence me and that you know I need to understand that and I need to be careful in what I say because there are people who have sensitivities about that epic in history that are legitimate,
[00:36:14]  that are, you know, that are horrific.
[00:36:18]  Oh, and you know, I apologize because I don't want to hurt anybody.
[00:36:22]  I have no, you know, desire to hurt anybody.
[00:36:26]  I would say this, that I do think that we need to find ways to be able to talk about our history.
[00:36:35]  Because if we can't talk about, you know, the and the history of the rise of the third Reich did not begin with death camps.
[00:36:44]  Death camps didn't come until 1941.
[00:36:49]  There was a whole system of totalitarian controls that were put in place.
[00:36:55]  And there were alchemies of demagoguery that were used that are common to all totalitarian systems over that 12-year period in which certain groups of people, and particularly Jews and Poles and Gypsies or Roma people, etc., were systematically dehumanized and robbed of their rights.
[00:37:17]  And it was a 12-year process.
[00:37:20]  And we need to, at some time, we need to figure out ways to be able to talk about that process without offending people.
[00:37:31]  That's what Gina Corrado got fired from ABC for from Disney.
[00:37:36]  For trying to talk about that.
[00:37:37]  It's a very tricky area.

=== Protecting Her Career (05:22) ===

[00:37:38]  And I should have known better to stay the hell away from it because it's just there's no winning for me.
[00:37:45]  People cannot hear my words.
[00:37:46]  They're going to hear from their feelings and their hearts and they're entitled to those feelings.
[00:37:53]  Yes, but you know, when your spouse is on the side of the other people, you know, you've done wrong, right?
[00:37:58]  Because your spouse is rooting for you.
[00:38:00]  I want to say this: I, you know, I encourage Cheryl to publish that statement.
[00:38:07]  In fact, I asked her to do a statement that was much tougher than that.
[00:38:12]  Really?
[00:38:13]  Which, yes, because, and I'm glad she didn't.
[00:38:18]  I'm very glad she didn't.
[00:38:20]  But I actually gave her language that was much, much tougher than that because she needed to distance herself from me.
[00:38:28]  My job as her husband is to protect her.
[00:38:31]  And the arrows and the bullets that were being slung at me were hitting her.
[00:38:38]  She was, you know, getting tremendous blowback from her friends, from her industry, from others.
[00:38:45]  And it was a terrible experience for me.
[00:38:50]  And she, you know, by the way, what she said, she believed.
[00:38:55]  So she wasn't saying something, you know, she is, she does not accept all of the things that, you know, that I believe about what's happening with the vaccines and the medical department.
[00:39:11]  We don't have to do that.
[00:39:12]  Yeah, you don't speak for her.
[00:39:15]  Yeah, I got it.
[00:39:16]  Yeah.
[00:39:17]  I don't need to convert her.
[00:39:19]  I don't need her to, you know, to be, I don't want her to.
[00:39:24]  She started reading my book.
[00:39:25]  She read all my other books.
[00:39:28]  And she started reading that book and she got on Fauci and she just made her depressed to read that, you know, she has an idealism and just a gentle heart and to read about these injuries to children and to read the government officials that are charged with protecting our health or compromised and corrupted.
[00:39:53]  It just, it was, it was, it was making her soul wither.
[00:40:02]  And I said to her, you got you, kiddie, you don't have to read that book and you should stop reading it.
[00:40:08]  Because let me just tell you something about Cheryl.
[00:40:14]  She is literally the best human being that I've ever met.
[00:40:17]  And when I, you know, I met her through Larry David and Larry brought her, who was my friend, and Larry brought her in 2002 to go skiing at a ski event I did up in Banff in British Columbia.
[00:40:34]  She was married then and I was married then.
[00:40:36]  And then she came back in 2011 and both of us were separated.
[00:40:44]  And I, you know, got a crush on her on that weekend.
[00:40:47]  So I knew I wanted to date her.
[00:40:51]  And I went, but I also knew that, you know, I went to basically to ask Larry's permission because Larry has a lot of rules that, you know, are not written down anywhere, but a lot of men understand them.
[00:41:04]  And one of them was, I know that even though it was his TV wife, they knew that it was, and I needed to get, you know, square with him before I might have been crossing a boundary.
[00:41:17]  I got it.
[00:41:18]  Exactly.
[00:41:19]  So I went and met him at the Carlisle Hotel around 11 o'clock at night.
[00:41:22]  I went up to his room and sat down with him.
[00:41:26]  It was like asking her parents to date, although, you know, he's never my age.
[00:41:31]  And I said, what do you think of that?
[00:41:33]  And he said, she is the best person, human being I've ever met.
[00:41:38]  And he said, she's the only person in this industry that is universally beloved.
[00:41:44]  She doesn't have a single enemy.
[00:41:47]  And she has a level of professionalism.
[00:41:49]  She's never late for an appointment.
[00:41:51]  She always knows her line.
[00:41:53]  She does what she's supposed to do.
[00:41:54]  And she really, you know, Cheryl came from total poverty.
[00:41:59]  And she was born in North Florida.
[00:42:01]  Her father lived in a trailer in Frostproof, Florida.
[00:42:06]  Cheryl slept in the same bed with her mother until she left high school.
[00:42:11]  She came out, she paid for her own way through college.
[00:42:14]  She put her way through waitressing and working as a joke teller on a telephone line.
[00:42:22]  And then she came out here in a, you know, Toyota turtle cell with 100,000 miles on it and worked for 15 years as a bartender and as a personal assistant before she finally got a break,
[00:42:37]  which, you know, she was working at the ground lanes and doing improv, but she didn't get a break in the industry until she got that job at Kerber Enthusiasm where they were looking for somebody who was not an actress.
[00:42:52]  And, you know, then her career took off.
[00:42:55]  She directs films and she has an incredible career that she put together single-handedly.

=== Kids Need to Be Damaged (07:52) ===

[00:43:01]  And the idea that my activities jeopardizing this thing that this incredible person put together was just I felt like my job is to protect her and I was doing the opposite of my job.
[00:43:19]  So my heart was breaking.
[00:43:23]  And I was, you know, I would have done taken any blow to make sure that she could distance herself from, you know, my grandfather, you know, my, my parents were all really good friends with leading figures of their time who had been terrible enemies of my grandfather.
[00:43:45]  And my grandfather used to always say, I don't want my enemies to be my children's enemies.
[00:43:51]  They can pick their own fights, but they don't need to fight mine.
[00:43:54]  And I don't want them to.
[00:43:56]  And I feel that way about my family too.
[00:43:58]  I, you know, I chose this life.
[00:44:02]  I chose this, you know, crusade.
[00:44:04]  And they need to figure out their own way.
[00:44:07]  My children and other members of my family have other things to do.
[00:44:11]  They're all doing valuable stuff.
[00:44:14]  When we come back, part of my conversation with mega best-selling author, Malcolm Gladwell.
[00:44:38]  Each time Malcolm Gladwell comes on the show, it's one of the most downloaded shows of the year.
[00:44:44]  Gosh, he's interesting.
[00:44:45]  He's so interesting.
[00:44:46]  Here, Gladwell opens up about a topic he rarely discusses, fatherhood.
[00:44:52]  You can certainly teach manners.
[00:44:54]  You can teach ethics.
[00:44:56]  You can teach what's acceptable behavior and, you know, a polite society, but you can't change nature.
[00:45:02]  You can't change one's nature.
[00:45:04]  You know, like the kid who's huge energy and can't sit down, is constantly going and going and going.
[00:45:10]  You're never going to turn that kid into low energy, you know, and vice versa.
[00:45:16]  You know, the kid who's relaxed.
[00:45:19]  It's better to lean into the nature that comes to you and help that kid figure out how they can make the most of that particular makeup.
[00:45:27]  Yeah, yeah, I agree.
[00:45:28]  Yeah.
[00:45:29]  So funny, you know, that as a, I'm a first-time parent.
[00:45:32]  So all of this stuff that I, you know, I used to kind of like, you know, wave my hands in the air and pretend that I knew what I was talking about when it came to parenting issues.
[00:45:41]  Now I'm actually doing it.
[00:45:46]  It's been quite a series of revelations.
[00:45:48]  How old is she, Malcolm?
[00:45:49]  She's like a year?
[00:45:51]  Just about a year, yeah.
[00:45:52]  Ah, so how about to walk?
[00:45:54]  About to walk.
[00:45:56]  How has that, how's that been for you?
[00:45:58]  Because it can be overwhelming.
[00:46:00]  Oh, it's been fantastic.
[00:46:01]  I mean, she's delightful.
[00:46:02]  So I think we got lucky.
[00:46:06]  But, but I mean, I think all parents think their children are delightful.
[00:46:09]  But no, they don't.
[00:46:10]  That's not true.
[00:46:13]  I hope your kids aren't listening.
[00:46:15]  I mean, like periods of delight, but maybe not universally delightful.
[00:46:21]  No, it's just been, I mean, the thing that goes that I've been going through is the thing that every parent goes through, which is you discover all these things and you think, oh, I'm, you know, I've discovered some previously unknown truth about parenting.
[00:46:34]  And of course, everyone else went through exactly the same revelation, right?
[00:46:40]  So, you know, the big revelation that, oh, even at a year, I kind of can tell how this little creature is going to turn out, right?
[00:46:49]  Yes.
[00:46:50]  That's so weird that there's something essential already there, right?
[00:46:54]  That that's that is so true.
[00:46:55]  All three of mine have the same personality now that they did when they were one year old.
[00:46:59]  Could, you could definitely project it.
[00:47:01]  And I don't know, and it's not even necessarily like, oh, this one's Doug or this one's me.
[00:47:06]  You know it's not that either like they come fully formed with a totally different nature, personality.
[00:47:12]  You know, they say that kids inherit mannerisms, but they don't inherit personalities in in most cases.
[00:47:19]  So it's like you may be dealing with something that's totally unfamiliar to you.
[00:47:24]  I'm already bracing for it.
[00:47:27]  So where are you living now?
[00:47:28]  Are you in?
[00:47:28]  Still in New York City?
[00:47:30]  I live upstate uh okay uh, we moved up actually before covet uh, and then um uh, that's from my uh, I work out of uh uh, upstate and yeah, I sort of we've, we've relocated.
[00:47:45]  Those are my people.
[00:47:46]  Upstate New York that's where I'm from, first 10 years in Syracuse and the rest in Albany.
[00:47:49]  So I know that area well.
[00:47:50]  It's very beautiful.
[00:47:51]  Upstate New York doesn't get enough credit for how gorgeous it is.
[00:47:54]  Having spent a lot of time in the in the beautiful Montana, I feel like I can speak to this.
[00:47:57]  It's truly one of the most beautiful states in the US.
[00:48:00]  I had not realized.
[00:48:00]  You started out in Syracuse first 10 years.
[00:48:04]  My dad taught at the university there and then he took a job at SUNY Albany.
[00:48:09]  So we moved to the tundra farther east of Albany, New York.
[00:48:15]  I've only lived in frigidly cold cities uh, except for like the year I did in Virginia.
[00:48:20]  Yeah yeah, that's funny, I didn't know that.
[00:48:23]  So what's the now?
[00:48:24]  At the risk of probing too far into your personal life, are you?
[00:48:28]  Is there a?
[00:48:29]  Is there a spouse or a partner?
[00:48:31]  Is a?
[00:48:31]  Do I get to know like, what the family situation looks like?
[00:48:34]  Yes, there is.
[00:48:35]  Yes, there is absolutely uh.
[00:48:38]  But uh no, you're not getting any more information that it's very private.
[00:48:42]  So I think I will respect that in a moment.
[00:48:46]  And but are you?
[00:48:47]  You guys are together and raising your baby together?
[00:48:49]  Yes, oh yeah, and it's family.
[00:48:55]  Well seriously, thank God, because it's a lot easier when you're on your own.
[00:48:58]  And a lot of people do it by choice now, but a lot of people do it because a tragedy struck it's.
[00:49:03]  I don't understand how those single parents do it.
[00:49:05]  I have such respect for them because it is so much work, so much work, and you do have a lot of responsibility.
[00:49:11]  So the the thought, to just round it out, that perhaps not everything that's going to happen with this child is actually on.
[00:49:18]  You know, perhaps if they're high strung, they're just going to be high strung, or if they're, I don't know, like not that athletic, whatever it is, whatever thing you're beating yourself up on that, you need to change.
[00:49:29]  You need to change.
[00:49:29]  Maybe you don't, maybe you just need a love and support.
[00:49:32]  Well, it reminds me, you know, when I was in my 30s, I used to go to see a therapist and of course they therapists, do this.
[00:49:39]  Therapist did what therapists like to do, which is to um, invite you to blame all of your problems on your parents, and it's, it's awfully kind of enticing to do that, because it's a convenient explanation for all the things you don't want to take responsibility for.
[00:49:54]  But now that I'm actually a parent, I sort of see how hollow that is.
[00:49:58]  Like it was really unfair for me to blame things on my parents at that age, for not just me.
[00:50:06]  I was gonna say I was thinking about my own magic wand experience experiment, like what would I do?
[00:50:10]  I'm not a scientist, But I talk a lot on the show about how, somewhat facetiously, but you need to, your kids need to be somewhat damaged in order to be successful.
[00:50:21]  This is my own personal hypothesis that if everything's too perfect, they're probably not going to be that successful.
[00:50:27]  There needs to be in order to create drive in a human being, something they need to overcome or feel like they got to do better on.
[00:50:36]  And so to me, I like, if I could do the magic wand, I'd have a version where, you know, trying to figure out how much damage is the right amount.
[00:50:45]  Like you don't want to crush them, but you want to create a couple of issues that they need to overcome.

=== Predicting Behavior with Data (15:16) ===

[00:50:53]  This is why no one's hiring me to work in a lab.
[00:50:56]  Coming up, we dig into the perilous world of social media with Tristan Harris.
[00:51:06]  One of the truly eye-opening and terrifying conversations I had this year was with Tristan Harris in episode 244.
[00:51:14]  Remember him?
[00:51:14]  He was a Facebook whistleblower and was part of the social dilemma.
[00:51:18]  We talked about social media addiction and much more.
[00:51:22]  On the other side of the screen, it's almost as if they have this avatar voodoo doll, like model of us.
[00:51:29]  All of the things we've ever done, all the clicks we've ever made, all the videos we've watched, all the likes, that all gets brought back into building a more and more accurate model.
[00:51:38]  The model, once you have it, you can predict the kinds of things that person does, where you're going to go.
[00:51:44]  I can predict what kind of videos will keep you watching.
[00:51:46]  I can predict what kinds of emotions tend to trigger you.
[00:51:49]  At a lot of these technology companies, there's three main goals.
[00:51:53]  There's the engagement goal to drive up your usage to keep you scrolling.
[00:51:57]  There's the growth goal to keep you coming back and inviting as many friends and getting them to invite more friends.
[00:52:03]  And then there's the advertising goal to make sure that as all that's happening, we're making as much money as possible from advertising.
[00:52:11]  Each of these goals are powered by algorithms whose job is to figure out what to show you to keep those numbers going up.
[00:52:19]  It's chilling.
[00:52:20]  And I love little Pete Campbell from Mad Men in the Background as the guy who's on computers.
[00:52:26]  But so it's not in fact like the algorithm is effectively the three people in that room.
[00:52:31]  It's not actual humans standing there, right?
[00:52:33]  It's like they figured out algorithms that can figure everything out in an instant.
[00:52:37]  Well, you see Google and Facebook figured out how to clone Pete Campbell, the advertising guy, and just sit him inside of the Google scene.
[00:52:43]  I'm kidding.
[00:52:43]  I'm just kidding.
[00:52:45]  No, I think people looked at this metaphor.
[00:52:47]  So in the film, In The Social Dilemma, which I really recommend everyone watches, it was the second most popular documentary, I think, in Netflix history, won two Emmy Awards.
[00:52:55]  And it really just lays this out in a way that I think everybody on all political sides can kind of understand as well.
[00:53:01]  And what we talk about in the film, as you said, Megan, is that, you know, behind the screen, you know, there's you, there's this piece of glass.
[00:53:08]  And when you scroll up with your finger, right, there's going to be another rectangle that comes up next.
[00:53:14]  Do you think that that rectangle that comes up next is just the next thing that one of your friends posted?
[00:53:20]  No.
[00:53:21]  What they do is they fork it off to that supercomputer, which is that Pete Campbell character.
[00:53:27]  And that character, which is like you said, you know, character embodiment, it's not actually like that.
[00:53:31]  It's just a computer and it's calculating a number and it looks at every possible thing it could show you next.
[00:53:36]  Like within the space of things it could show you.
[00:53:38]  It could show you something that'll outrage you politically.
[00:53:40]  It'll show you something that'll your ex-boyfriend or your ex-girlfriend, because that's what you clicked on last time.
[00:53:46]  It can show you a live video because Facebook wants to like dial up that live video.
[00:53:51]  It tries to calculate which thing would be most likely to keep you scrolling because obviously it doesn't want to show you the thing that will stop you from scrolling.
[00:53:58]  And it's a supercomputer pointed at your brain to figure out how to basically light up your nervous system.
[00:54:04]  And the voodoo doll idea, one of the reasons we use that metaphor is that if I talk about, hey, Megan, you know, they have your data, they have your data, and that where does that hurt you?
[00:54:14]  If you think about it just as a person, like there you are, you hear that phrase, they have my data.
[00:54:17]  It doesn't feel like what's the problem with that.
[00:54:20]  But if I say, look, that data is being used to assemble a model of you, a more and more accurate model that can be used to predict things about you.
[00:54:27]  And it gets more accurate the more information they have.
[00:54:30]  But it's like a voodoo doll.
[00:54:31]  So all the clicks you've ever made, that puts little hair on the voodoo doll.
[00:54:33]  So it's a little bit more accurate when I prick and try to figure out what would activate the voodoo doll.
[00:54:37]  If all the likes, all the watch time and all the videos you've ever made, that also makes the voodoo doll more accurate.
[00:54:43]  It adds little shirts and pants to the voodoo doll.
[00:54:45]  But then what the point is that as that data gets more and more accurate over time, and it looks at 100 other people who saw those same political enragement videos that you've seen, and it says, well, for people just like you, this is the thing that tends to keep them scrolling, watching, clicking, commenting, because all of that activity is engagement.
[00:55:04]  It's attention.
[00:55:05]  It's the thing that's sort of the parasite that makes these companies worth trillions of dollars.
[00:55:10]  And that's essentially the system that we're in.
[00:55:12]  But the problem is that it leads to basically all of these negative externalities that dumped onto the balance sheet of society.
[00:55:19]  We have shortening of attention spans.
[00:55:21]  We have more political polarization because affirmation is more profitable than information.
[00:55:26]  So giving us more confirmation bias of our existing tribal beliefs and why the other side is so bad.
[00:55:31]  Obviously, this trend existed in other kinds of media, but now you have a supercomputer that's like literally, you know, figuring out this is the next fault line in society.
[00:55:39]  And these keywords emerge and whether it's mRNA or masks or vaccines or, you know, no matter what it is, it finds the one that works on buckets of users just like you.
[00:55:49]  And it knows that you're going to click before you know you're going to click.
[00:55:52]  And I think some people hear that and they think that sounds like a conspiracy theory.
[00:55:55]  Like technology knows us better than we know ourselves.
[00:55:58]  But Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens, is a friend of mine.
[00:56:02]  He's gay and he jokes that his partner, Itzik, when he uses TikTok, it only took Itzik, you know, one or two clicks for TikTok to figure out exactly which rabbit hole to send his partner, Itzik, down.
[00:56:13]  And that's the thing about all of us is it knows exactly what works.
[00:56:16]  But the problem is what works on us isn't the same thing as what's good for society.
[00:56:21]  Or for us even or for us.
[00:56:24]  And that's why, I mean, honestly, Twitter came out with a thing.
[00:56:26]  I don't know if they do it every year or whatever, but they just popped up in the feed.
[00:56:32]  This is how many conservative sites you follow.
[00:56:35]  This is how many liberal sites you follow.
[00:56:37]  And it just sort of volunteered your information.
[00:56:40]  And on mine, I was very pleased that I had a 51, 49% ratio on my income incoming news and people I follow.
[00:56:48]  And that's important.
[00:56:49]  So it just makes me a little less easy to manipulate in the information game because you're definitely getting, you're getting propaganda from both sides, but at least, I mean, it's propaganda, but at least you're getting it from both sides.
[00:57:00]  You're a little less easy to manipulate.
[00:57:02]  Right.
[00:57:02]  So that's one step that definitely, I mean, that's, I actually had not seen that specific feature from Twitter.
[00:57:07]  It's obviously better for each of us to maintain more broad information diets.
[00:57:11]  But the second problem, Megan, is that the business model is we think of it like a parallel system of incentives to capitalism.
[00:57:18]  Instead of getting paid in money, you get paid in more likes, more views, more attention, more comments.
[00:57:23]  And when you say something that basically outgroups the other side and say, here's yet another example about why the other side is awful, we'll pay you more likes, more followers, because that was better for generating engagement for the machine.
[00:57:36]  Now, no one at Twitter or Facebook has a big long mustache and they're twirling it saying, gosh, how can we create the next civil war?
[00:57:43]  And drive this up as much as possible.
[00:57:46]  But that's the inadvertent side effect of a machine that's values blind.
[00:57:50]  All it knows is what increases people's likes, followers, and gets them to invite more people.
[00:57:55]  And the problem is that those things tend to be conflict.
[00:57:58]  So even if you have a broad diet and you're looking at information from both sides, quote unquote, information, what it really is, is basically people, you know, shit posting on the other side and building on the boogeyman.
[00:58:08]  So whatever your boogeyman is for you, like, oh, they're doing, you know, this next in my hometown, now you can sort of carry that to the worst next conclusion.
[00:58:17]  You can find evidence for every stereotype.
[00:58:19]  And in fact, one of the groups that we interviewed, we have a podcast called Your Undivided Attention.
[00:58:25]  We interviewed Dan Vallone, who runs More in Common.
[00:58:28]  And what it really shows is that we completely see the other side in stereotypes.
[00:58:33]  If you ask Democrats to estimate what percent of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year, they think more than a third of Republicans make more than $250,000.
[00:58:43]  I think the answer is more like 2%.
[00:58:45]  If you ask Republicans, what percent of Democrats are LGBTQ, you know, and they'll estimate more than a third of Democrats are LGBTQ.
[00:58:53]  The actual answer is 6%.
[00:58:54]  If you ask Democrats, what, you know, to estimate what percent of Republicans do they believe still believe racism is a problem in the United States, they think less than 25% of Republicans would believe that racism is still a problem.
[00:59:07]  The actual answer is something like 70%.
[00:59:09]  And so we're seeing ourselves with stereotypes.
[00:59:12]  And the second thing they found is the more you use social media, the worse you are at predicting what the other side believes, not the better, because the extreme voices on social media participate more often than the silent sort of calm, moderate majority, right?
[00:59:28]  Like the calm, moderate people, they don't actually say that much.
[00:59:31]  So that's really the problem that we're dealing with when we look at our, you know, our polarization ecosystem.
[00:59:36]  Wow.
[00:59:37]  This is reminding me that when we closed out the year, we went to Christmas break.
[00:59:40]  The last piece I did was on Democrats.
[00:59:44]  And, you know, a lot, I have a lot of Republican listeners.
[00:59:46]  I have some Democrats too, mostly people in the center.
[00:59:49]  But it was a reminder that, you know, the people who are trying to get everybody canceled and so on, they don't represent all of the left and that it's not, quote, the left that is the enemy of reason.
[00:59:58]  It's like activists who are pushing agendas.
[01:00:01]  Yes, we can fight on that.
[01:00:02]  But remember, your neighbor who's a Democrat is not your, is not your enemy if you're a Republican and is not necessarily against the things that you're against as well.
[01:00:11]  You tell me, Tristan, when I read them in the news, I'm like, well, that's very China, right?
[01:00:14]  To sort of take the big hand of government now controls.
[01:00:16]  But I was also like, yay, China, for the first time in my life, I was like, you know what?
[01:00:21]  Maybe we should consider the Chinese way.
[01:00:24]  Yeah.
[01:00:24]  Well, so I was meeting with a senator who's deep in the foreign policy world and he was meeting with his counterpart in the EU who said, you know, who does China consider to be the largest threat to its national security?
[01:00:38]  Who's its biggest geopolitical rival?
[01:00:40]  And of course, you would say the United States, right?
[01:00:42]  You would think that's the answer.
[01:00:44]  They said, no, they consider their own technology companies to be the biggest rival to the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party's power.
[01:00:53]  Now, why is that?
[01:00:54]  Because the technology that runs their society is really the new source of power, right?
[01:00:59]  It's controlling what kids are feeling, thinking, and believing.
[01:01:02]  It controls their identity, their educational development.
[01:01:05]  It controls loans that get made, Jack Ma, Alibaba.
[01:01:08]  So they're going after their billionaires.
[01:01:09]  They're doing all these things, but they're really realizing that technology is the power structure.
[01:01:14]  It's the brain implant that is guiding their society.
[01:01:17]  Now, I'm not trying to idealize it now, but here's a couple of things that you were mentioning that they're doing to deal with the problems of the social dilemma.
[01:01:24]  So let me give you a couple examples.
[01:01:26]  One of the things they do is on TikTok, their version of it called Doyen, when you're scrolling TikTok, if you're under the age of 14, you can only use it until 10 p.m. at night, and then it's closing hours.
[01:01:38]  It opens again at six in the morning.
[01:01:40]  They actually limit you to 40 minutes a day.
[01:01:43]  And when you scroll, instead of showing you videos of the best influencers, they show you science experiments, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, because they realize that TikTok is conditioning kids' behavior.
[01:01:54]  And now, I'm not saying that we should be doing Pledge of Allegiance videos into the United States on our version of that.
[01:02:01]  But what we have to also see is that China is controlling their number one adversary's children's TV programming education.
[01:02:08]  I mean, imagine in the Cold War, the Soviet Union controlled Saturday morning cartoons for its number one geopolitical adversary.
[01:02:15]  You know, I actually talk to people in our defense and national security apparatus quite a bit these days.
[01:02:20]  My concern is that our generals and our heads of the Department of Defense know everything about hypersonic missiles and drones and the latest tech, you know, physical advances in warfare.
[01:02:30]  But how much do they know about TikTok and how their own children are being influenced on TikTok?
[01:02:35]  And I'll give you a concrete example.
[01:02:36]  A TikTok insider told me this.
[01:02:39]  He says he said, the thing that people don't realize is that TikTok is an alternate incentive system to capitalism.
[01:02:45]  Instead of paying you in money, I can pay you in likes, followers, and attention.
[01:02:49]  I can give you a sense of boost of all those things.
[01:02:52]  So now let's say, and China is known to do this.
[01:02:54]  They have a national security strategy called borrowing mouths to speak.
[01:02:59]  So I want to borrow those Western voices who say positive things, whatever anyone in the West says something positive about China and the Uyghurs are not a human rights problem and it's all fine.
[01:03:07]  China can just say, we're going to dial up those people.
[01:03:10]  So they get paid in more likes, more followers, and more views.
[01:03:14]  Then other people on TikTok look at that and say, well, why are those TikTok influencers so successful?
[01:03:19]  And they start replicating their behavior.
[01:03:21]  So you're creating an alternative system of influence on top of your number one geopolitical adversary.
[01:03:29]  And you're being able to adjust those dials anytime you want.
[01:03:32]  And you don't even have to get them to trust the Chinese Communist Party's voices.
[01:03:37]  You can take Western voices who happen to be pro-China for whatever reason and just make them the ones that are heard the most, right?
[01:03:43]  And my colleague Renee Di Resta calls this amplifanda.
[01:03:47]  It's not propaganda.
[01:03:48]  It's amplification propaganda.
[01:03:50]  I'm taking your voices, but the ones that I want to hear.
[01:03:53]  And similarly, what we know that Russia did, you know, not just in our elections, but ongoingly, is they take the most divisive voices, especially the ones that focus on race, on guns, on immigration, these topics, and the ones who want to do civil war and secession movements and things like this, and they amplify those voices because they want to amplify propaganda, amplifaganda, the ones that are most divisive.
[01:04:13]  There is a World War III information war that Marshall McLuhan predicted in 1968 when he said World War III is a global information war that will make no distinction between civilian and military combatants because now we are in that war, but we don't really see it or feel it that way.
[01:04:29]  And I've heard you talk about in the past the difference between we have these huge oceans on both sides that make us a global superpower.
[01:04:35]  We have this physical, you know, kinetic, asymmetric position compared to our adversaries.
[01:04:40]  But those huge oceans and borders go away in the digital world.
[01:04:45]  We have Patriot missiles to shoot down a missile or a plane that comes in from Russia or China physically.
[01:04:50]  But if they try to fly an information bomb into our country, they're met with a white glove algorithm from Facebook or Twitter or TikTok that says, yes, exactly which minority group would you like to target.
[01:05:00]  And a recent MIT tech review article said that actually at the top Facebook pages, 15 pages that are for Christian Americans, all 15 of those Christian American pages are actually run by Macedonian troll farms.
[01:05:16]  Of the top 15 African American pages on Facebook, these are basically bots, right?
[01:05:21]  Of the top 15 African American pages, two-thirds of those African-American pages reaching something like 80 million Americans a month are run by Macedonian troll farms.
[01:05:30]  So we have to realize that, again, we're not even really living in a real reality.
[01:05:35]  The metaverse is a virtual reality, but even within that virtual reality, it's a virtual representation of our fellow citizens.
[01:05:41]  They're not even our fellow citizens.
[01:05:43]  So that's, and I just want to pause and underscore to the audience at home.
[01:05:46]  This is something different.
[01:05:47]  This is something Russia did do.
[01:05:48]  Okay, they did do this.
[01:05:49]  This is not Russia gate stuff.
[01:05:51]  This is not like the weird, this is totally different.
[01:05:53]  Russia did do this.
[01:05:55]  They used bots to amplify disinformation.
[01:05:58]  Does it come as news to anybody really that they're trying to solve?
[01:06:00]  You don't have to believe that this influenced the election to just know that what they're trying to do is drive up division ongoingly, right?
[01:06:07]  And that is part of a deep warfare strategy, right?

=== The 21st Century Influencer Economy (06:37) ===

[01:06:10]  Because we're falling over incoherently, constantly disagreeing with each other and then forced to see the more extreme perspectives of our society.
[01:06:17]  While these countries are not doing that, they're not faced with that problem.
[01:06:21]  And just to pick up on the other point you were making about how they limit the children's access to TikTok and so on in China, because they came out with a couple of sweeping reforms within the past few months along those lines, trying to stop the children from spending all their time and they're limiting some of the time on the apps to just the weekends.
[01:06:37]  Yes.
[01:06:37]  Gaming, they limit to 40 minutes a day and only on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday.
[01:06:43]  And TikTok, like you're saying, they also do only 40 minutes a day.
[01:06:47]  And like I said, they have opening hours and closing hours.
[01:06:49]  So at 10 p.m., it just shuts off.
[01:06:52]  And the reason for that, by the way, is that...
[01:06:54]  My thought in reading about that was, okay, so great, we've unleashed these unhealthy bombs on our children in their country, in our country across the globe.
[01:07:01]  But China has actually stepped in to try to stop that bomb from doing too much damage on its own children, whatever its motivations.
[01:07:07]  They do not want a bunch of missing the frontal lobe children to grow up addicted to technology.
[01:07:13]  Doesn't need to play their game, needing to play.
[01:07:15]  They want their kids to be smart and to be the next generation's leaders and so on.
[01:07:18]  Meanwhile, we left our kids twisting on the vine.
[01:07:21]  There's no attempt over here at all, as far as I can see, by big tech to protect our children in any way.
[01:07:29]  In fact, the more addicted, the better.
[01:07:33]  Exactly.
[01:07:33]  Exactly.
[01:07:34]  And this perhaps I think is one of also the major issues that in our country we can actually agree on, right?
[01:07:40]  I mean, who wants our children systematically warped and deranged with comeback emails that like a digital drug lord, when you stop using, I figure out how to more aggressively get you to come back?
[01:07:50]  And Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, people point to her credibility.
[01:07:54]  It's not her credibility that matters.
[01:07:55]  She was just leaking Facebook's own documents where, yeah, she had their own documents and they found that 13% for among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users trace their desire to kill themselves on Instagram.
[01:08:12]  And they said that we make body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls.
[01:08:17]  I know personally some Instagram insiders who actually left the company after seeing that research because they couldn't justify staying there, knowing that that's the case.
[01:08:26]  But this is all obvious because the whole business model is designed around this kind of predation on our kids.
[01:08:32]  But again, I think what we need to do, Megan, is instead of focusing on just these light reforms, like how do we make social media slightly more privacy protecting or 10% less toxic by removing the anorexia thing?
[01:08:44]  I worry that this is a competition of two systems.
[01:08:47]  We have democracy and we have authoritarianism.
[01:08:50]  And authoritarianism, that model, they're using the full suite of technologies to make a kind of super authoritarian, stronger sense-making environment.
[01:08:59]  They have many problems.
[01:09:00]  I don't admire it.
[01:09:01]  I don't want it to be the future.
[01:09:03]  But meanwhile, we can notice that our democracy is not employing all these technologies to say, how would we make democracy even better?
[01:09:10]  How do we do even more consensus-based decision-making?
[01:09:12]  How do we invite people?
[01:09:14]  There's actually a model of this in Taiwan, where instead of posting on social media, when you hate something about, say, the tax system or potholes or masks, when you post about something that you say, I want to fix in our democracy, instead of that just turning into a long comment thread that then gets shared more virally and the more clever, stubborn thing you can say, the more attention you get.
[01:09:34]  In their system, when you say, I want to fix the tax, the tax system has a problem, you get invited into a Zoom call, a stakeholder group that actually talks about how you would improve it.
[01:09:43]  And you actually get with other citizens and you're actually designing the improvement to that system.
[01:09:48]  And then that's taken to the digital minister to actually implement.
[01:09:52]  Have a whole basis of technology that's about strengthening our democracy.
[01:09:56]  And that's my concern about what we need to do.
[01:09:57]  We don't need 5% less toxic social media.
[01:10:00]  We need to sort of reinvigorate the values of the Declaration of Independence for a 21st century age.
[01:10:05]  So we're not antagonistic technology to technology.
[01:10:08]  We're using it to make a stronger democracy.
[01:10:10]  My gosh, it just makes me think.
[01:10:11]  I don't really like to crack down on alleged hate speech or what have you.
[01:10:15]  And I don't like big tech censorship.
[01:10:17]  And I never thought Mark Zuckerberg should have been pulled into that.
[01:10:20]  He was originally like, it's not my job to police the internet and conversations having.
[01:10:24]  And I was like, right on, that's the American way.
[01:10:26]  But then he did submit and so on.
[01:10:28]  But we're focused on the wrong stuff.
[01:10:30]  That's that is not the problem of big tech.
[01:10:33]  I mean, it's irritating, but it's not the problem.
[01:10:36]  Their sins are so much more nefarious and ingrained and deep and part of the business model than all that stuff, which is a noise distraction.
[01:10:45]  Exactly.
[01:10:46]  And in fact, Facebook, after Frances Haugen came out, we actually now know from Wall Street Journal reporting, they were consciously trying to frame.
[01:10:54]  So she released all this research about how much it's dividing and polarizing us and hurting kids.
[01:10:58]  And then Facebook actually used their PR department to sew stories saying that this was all about censorship, that what Francis wants is censorship.
[01:11:07]  Whenever they talk about censorship, they do that because they know it just creates more division because the conversation about free speech or censorship will never resolve.
[01:11:14]  It's the same 800-page, just like law textbook conversation.
[01:11:18]  Everyone brings up the same examples and it never yields any results.
[01:11:21]  It's not about freedom of speech.
[01:11:22]  We all want that.
[01:11:23]  In fact, we should have that.
[01:11:24]  We should have less censorship on that.
[01:11:26]  What we need is we have to be careful about reach.
[01:11:29]  We've decoupled power and reach from responsibility.
[01:11:32]  Typically, in the past, the greater the broadcasting capacity you would have, the more responsibility you would have.
[01:11:38]  Yes.
[01:11:38]  Because you're reaching a large number of people.
[01:11:40]  Now we have a single TikTok influencer.
[01:11:44]  There's actually an example in China.
[01:11:45]  You can, in one day, because you're reaching a billion people, you can actually create a billion dollars of sales.
[01:11:51]  There's actually an article in MIT Tech Review, I believe it is, that a single individual in China in one day generated a billion dollars in sales because when you say something and you reach a billion people, this could be a 15-year-old or a 16-year-old and increasingly, or a Kardashian, right?
[01:12:06]  But instead of the Kardashians, where it was only a few people in the past, in the 20th century, we had like a few big celebrities that could do it.
[01:12:12]  We're moving to a world where each tech company wants each of us to be a Kardashian.
[01:12:16]  They want each of your kids to be the influencer.
[01:12:19]  They want that to be the model for what being human and being a kid is about.
[01:12:23]  And when they do that, notice that has an effect on the other kids.
[01:12:25]  The other kids say, well, they're way more popular and successful and getting the attention and I want that attention.
[01:12:31]  And they're transforming the cultural basis for what our kids even want.
[01:12:35]  And again, you zoom out and you say, you know, China's playing chess.
[01:12:39]  And we're allowing these business models to collapse our ability to think and act well in the 21st century because we've got a lot of problems that we have to figure out.

=== Criminal Access to Firearms (09:12) ===

[01:12:48]  When we come back, a look at one of the great debates on the show this year.
[01:13:12]  We always like to bring you debates on this program, nuanced conversations with people from all sides.
[01:13:18]  So you're not getting spun, you're getting educated and entertained and titillated and all the good things that you expect from conversation.
[01:13:27]  In this clip from episode 248-248, we took a deep dive into the world of guns and gun control with guests on both sides of the debate.
[01:13:39]  We have brought together two of the best minds on gun rights and gun control.
[01:13:43]  Both men have broken countless stories while covering the gun beat.
[01:13:46]  Stephen Gutowski is founder of The Reload, and Mike Spees is a senior writer for The Trace.
[01:13:53]  Stephen and Mike, thank you so much for being here.
[01:13:56]  Hey, thanks for having me.
[01:13:57]  Thanks for having me, Megan.
[01:13:59]  All right.
[01:13:59]  So, Stephen, you are, the Reload is, I don't know, I don't want to say pro-gun exactly, but just for the audience to understand, Stephen, you're more sort of on the pro-gun.
[01:14:09]  And Mike, you're more on sort of the gun control beat and focused on what measures we could take to sort of roll back some of the problems we've been seeing.
[01:14:19]  So, let's just kick it off with this, some stats for the audience.
[01:14:23]  According to what I read, we had more than 45,000 people shot to death in America in 2020.
[01:14:32]  We had a spike in violence in 2021.
[01:14:35]  And the vast majority of those gun deaths were suicide.
[01:14:40]  So, it's not all homicide, but a fair amount of homicide too.
[01:14:43]  And America is the biggest gun country in the world.
[01:14:47]  And in particular, what keeps people talking about it is the mass shootings, right?
[01:14:51]  Like what we saw in Michigan, this kid, Ethan Crumbly, going into the school and shooting other teenagers.
[01:14:58]  His parents have now been arrested.
[01:15:00]  It's a fascinating case.
[01:15:02]  But we also see it when innocent civilians or police officers are shot to death by people who had no business having guns or the kind of gun that they had.
[01:15:11]  And that's where I'll kick it off because here in New York, overnight, the second police officer died, who was shot by that 44-year-old suspect.
[01:15:20]  He also died.
[01:15:20]  The suspect has died since.
[01:15:23]  But these cops were called to this house in Harlem by the suspect's mom.
[01:15:26]  They were walking down the hallway to go into his room and see what was wrong.
[01:15:31]  And he came out.
[01:15:32]  They didn't stand a chance.
[01:15:33]  He came out guns blazing, shot the cops, both of whom are now dead.
[01:15:38]  One was 22.
[01:15:40]  He was shot and killed.
[01:15:41]  And now we have, and his name, by the way, was Jason Rivera.
[01:15:44]  And then there's Wilbert Mora, just 27.
[01:15:47]  It's so awful.
[01:15:48]  It's just so awful.
[01:15:50]  And Stephen, I'll start with you.
[01:15:52]  As somebody who is used to sort of defending gun rights, a lot of people looked at that modification he had on his gun, which I understand was not lawful.
[01:15:59]  I don't know that that was the reason the cops died.
[01:16:02]  You know, he could have shot him just without that modification.
[01:16:04]  But should that guy have had a gun, career criminal?
[01:16:07]  And is there a gun law that could have prevented it?
[01:16:10]  Yeah, certainly.
[01:16:11]  I mean, there's a lot to unpack with a situation like that, domestic violence call that leads to the death of law enforcement officers.
[01:16:21]  It's a horrific tragedy.
[01:16:23]  And obviously, I think most people would question, well, how could this happen?
[01:16:26]  How can we prevent this going forward?
[01:16:28]  And there are a number of ways.
[01:16:30]  I mean, oftentimes in situations like that, what you'll find, and this is true for many mass shootings as well, some of the most famous ones that we know, the shooter was prohibited.
[01:16:44]  They weren't legally allowed to own guns in the first place due to their either mental health history or their criminal history, such as in this case.
[01:16:54]  And the question is, how do you keep somebody who is already prohibited from owning guns under federal law?
[01:17:03]  So in the entire country, from obtaining them.
[01:17:06]  And that's where a lot of the controversy comes in because there's different proposals that range from better information.
[01:17:15]  But let me just stop you there.
[01:17:17]  Let me just stop you.
[01:17:17]  Forgive my interruption, but I want to make sure we all stay on the same page.
[01:17:21]  So he should not, this 44-year-old man now dead, the shooter, should not have had a gun.
[01:17:26]  Why?
[01:17:27]  Well, if he had a criminal history that included either a felony conviction or a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction, then he shouldn't have been able to obtain it, or at least he wouldn't legally have been able to possess the gun in the first place.
[01:17:45]  So we see it all the time, though, with criminals.
[01:17:46]  We see it all the time with criminals who commit domestic violence or some other crime, some other felony.
[01:17:51]  They get out of jail.
[01:17:52]  It seems very easy.
[01:17:54]  Seems very easy for them to get a gun.
[01:17:56]  Am I wrong?
[01:17:57]  No, I mean, it can be very easy for people who are prohibited, people who are known criminals to obtain guns illegally outside of the current system that we have in place to buy guns through licensed dealers with background checks involved.
[01:18:15]  There's obviously proposals to expand that system to private sales as well.
[01:18:19]  That's where a lot of the controversy comes in with so-called universal background checks, because the idea there is that private sales should also have to go through the background check system like sales from licensed dealers do.
[01:18:34]  Although, of course, in this case, you're talking about New York, which has a law like that in place already.
[01:18:40]  And obviously, a lot of criminals just don't comply with it.
[01:18:44]  And they sell guns knowing that.
[01:18:46]  That's the problem.
[01:18:47]  And this gets right to the heart of it right off the top, right?
[01:18:49]  So it's like, Mike, we do have tough gun laws in New York City.
[01:18:55]  And yet, there was this guy sitting with this gun with this unlawful modifier on it.
[01:19:03]  Again, I don't think it wasn't the modifier that led to the death of the cops.
[01:19:06]  A regular old gun could have killed these cops just as easily.
[01:19:08]  But the point is just how easy it is, despite the fact this is a career criminal sitting there with a gun.
[01:19:15]  I don't know.
[01:19:16]  I'd love a real solution.
[01:19:18]  I would.
[01:19:18]  I'm not, I'm so open-minded on this issue.
[01:19:21]  I've been the victim of a crime and I've, so I appreciate guns with the good guys who protect us.
[01:19:27]  But I have three kids and I certainly worry about school shootings and the other stuff too.
[01:19:32]  So I'd love to see a gun reform that could actually stop the bad guys from getting the guns.
[01:19:37]  But we passed every single one of the gun reforms Joe Biden's pushing right now.
[01:19:41]  That guy still would have had this gun.
[01:19:43]  Yeah, I think the problem across the board in America is that we're pretty weak on accountability measures, which is what fuels the illegal gun market.
[01:19:51]  So for example, one thing, and this in some ways also in a different way relates back to the Michigan shooting that you were talking about, is we have pretty poor storage laws and regulation, especially when it comes to firearms dealers.
[01:20:06]  For example, it is, as investigations have shown that the traces done, there's no real requirement in federally licensed firearm dealers or places that sell guns to store them in such a way that they're not easily accessible, which is why these like these smash and grab situations where people basically just drive a car through the front door and take a hammer and break glass and remove all the weapons and run out or saw a hole through the ceiling and drop in and take all the guns.
[01:20:36]  Like that's it's a big, it's a gaping hole in our system that allows legal guns to be trafficked into an illegal market.
[01:20:47]  And I think until we're a lot more serious about regulating gun sellers, that's going to continue to be the pipeline.
[01:20:55]  And obviously the other issue, which we have to do.
[01:20:57]  How frequent an event is that, Mike, where people are doing this map.
[01:21:00]  We've been following the smash and grab of the Gucci bags, but how often does that happen with respect to the guns?
[01:21:06]  Well, I wish I could give you like a good statistic on that.
[01:21:09]  I mean, I think it's pretty, I mean, I think they are, they're recognized as pretty easy targets.
[01:21:14]  And definitely, you know, per the investigation that I was referencing, we have quite a lot of video showing the ease with which people were able to break into gun shops and steal a ton of weapons.
[01:21:26]  So let them jump.
[01:21:28]  I just wanted to make a quick point here.
[01:21:30]  These are, this is certainly a phenomenon that happens.
[01:21:33]  This is one way that criminals get their guns.
[01:21:36]  Mike's correct on that point, but I would sort of question the idea that it's easy because given the tactics that are often employed, like as Mike suggested there, literally crashing cars through buildings to get to the guns.
[01:21:49]  I don't know what, you know, that adding an extra safe after you're willing to knock down the wall of a building to get to the guns is going to be much more of a deterrent.

=== Crashing Cars for Guns (14:54) ===

[01:22:01]  We need a little levity, don't we?
[01:22:02]  Oh, who better to ask for that moment than Goldie Han, with whom we had an incredible, incredible time.
[01:22:30]  We are closing things out today with a super fun conversation, at times in-depth conversation, at times emotional, that I had with Goldie Hahn.
[01:22:38]  Okay, for the full thing, go to episode 245.
[01:22:40]  Here's just a bit of our great exchange on her incredible career and much more.
[01:22:49]  Your list of movies, it's too it's crazy.
[01:22:51]  I just went back and was looking like I've seen all of these.
[01:22:54]  Seems like old times, talk about private vengeance, swing shift.
[01:22:57]  I love that's where you and Kurt Russell met.
[01:23:00]  And it goes on and on.
[01:23:01]  Here's just a couple for people who need a refresher, like I did.
[01:23:04]  We'll get to Overboard in a second.
[01:23:05]  First Wives Club, Everyone Says I Love You.
[01:23:07]  That was the Woody Allen film, 1996.
[01:23:08]  Same rear.
[01:23:09]  Protocol, Wildcats, Burnt on a Wire, House Sitter, Death Becomes Her, The Out of Towners, Town and Country.
[01:23:14]  I could go on.
[01:23:15]  First Wives Club is, I hear, possibly making a sequel.
[01:23:18]  So we'll see about that.
[01:23:20]  But let's get to the main event, okay?
[01:23:22]  Let's talk of, let's talk turkey overboard.
[01:23:25]  1987.
[01:23:27]  I just learned in preparing for this interview, it was based on a real story.
[01:23:30]  There was an actual woman who fell off a boat or showed up on a Florida shore with amnesia.
[01:23:36]  And in the movie, which was apparently written with you and Kurt in mind, the premise is that the woman, your character, falls off of her yacht after being a real jerk to Kurt Russell's carpenter character.
[01:23:47]  And he decides after she threw all of his carpentry tools in the water that he's going to go claim this woman at the hospital and convince her that they're married and put her to work for him until she works off all the money she threw into the water.
[01:24:02]  It's so funny.
[01:24:03]  You could never make this film today, by the way.
[01:24:05]  You'd get hit for not appropriate, not PC, whatever.
[01:24:08]  So, you couldn't make a ton of those today.
[01:24:11]  You couldn't make any of them?
[01:24:13]  A lot of them, you know.
[01:24:14]  Yeah.
[01:24:14]  I mean, when you look at some of the films and the way they were and what they, it's just, you know, things have changed tremendously.
[01:24:21]  Interestingly enough, it has affected comedy quite a bit.
[01:24:26]  This, you know, basically being, you know, basically politically correct and so forth.
[01:24:32]  Because there's jokes were oftentimes made, you know, on all these different things that, you know, were sort of liabilities, right?
[01:24:40]  And, you know, I know with a lot of comics, I mean, it's sort of like they, you know, even when they go into universities, there's a lot of sensitivity to all kinds of stuff.
[01:24:50]  So it's really interesting to be a stand-up comic or understand what your subject matters could actually be without offending someone.
[01:24:58]  That's going to be so annoying to you.
[01:24:59]  You spent a whole career trying to make people laugh.
[01:25:01]  Like having to worry about the third rails.
[01:25:03]  You're supposed to step on the third rails if you're trying to make people laugh.
[01:25:06]  Well, you're supposed to start on what?
[01:25:08]  You're supposed to step on the third rails.
[01:25:09]  You're supposed to sort of poke the things that normal people wouldn't poke.
[01:25:14]  No, exactly.
[01:25:14]  I mean, Don Rickles, you know, was the killer on that.
[01:25:18]  No, that's sort of, you know, what you do.
[01:25:20]  I mean, it was, it was kind of like that.
[01:25:22]  You know, I mean, I don't know.
[01:25:25]  I remember one line I did on Wildcats.
[01:25:28]  And, you know, I told I told him off and, you know, I was really upset with him.
[01:25:32]  And this was Nipsey Russell.
[01:25:34]  And I was like, really this?
[01:25:36]  And I left there and I hot it up and I came back and I said, I forgot my purse.
[01:25:42]  So, and she went back, you know.
[01:25:44]  Now, today that would be a moment which is, it was funny, but is now it's sort of like, oh, you're just, I'm down, down deep.
[01:25:53]  I'm just a crazy female, you know.
[01:25:57]  So there's a lot of areas that maybe would not have been not.
[01:26:04]  You've been getting gut for doing this kind of thing for a long time.
[01:26:06]  I understand when you did Laugh In, that was sort of your first big, big thing.
[01:26:10]  I mean, laugh in back in the late 60s was, I mean, everybody watched it.
[01:26:14]  It was like one in four Americans was watching Laugh In, which was on Monday nights.
[01:26:17]  Everybody watched it.
[01:26:18]  That's where she like became a huge star.
[01:26:20]  And then your movie career launched right after that.
[01:26:22]  But I read that when you were doing that, because you sort of played up sort of the dumb blonde character in a funny way.
[01:26:30]  And I read that sort of the women's lib advocates kind of gave you a hard time saying, what are you doing?
[01:26:37]  You know, you're setting women back.
[01:26:38]  And you were like, well, I don't think we need to burn our bras necessarily to get ahead.
[01:26:42]  Like I'm kind of living the women's lib thing by paying my bills and working as an actress.
[01:26:48]  I don't like, is that true?
[01:26:50]  What I said to her was this.
[01:26:52]  She said, well, what about women's liberation?
[01:26:55]  And don't you feel bad?
[01:26:56]  Because, you know, you're basically showing off as a dumb blonde.
[01:27:00]  I said, really?
[01:27:01]  I said, you know, I'm already liberated.
[01:27:06]  And she looked at me like, what do you mean?
[01:27:11]  I said, well, liberation comes from the inside.
[01:27:15]  And I'm liberated.
[01:27:17]  And she, it was one of those moments really where I didn't even know what I was going to say.
[01:27:22]  You know, sometimes when people ask you questions and you're thinking, you know, and it just comes out.
[01:27:26]  Yeah.
[01:27:26]  You know, and it just came out is that, you know, I don't know what you're saying because I'm experiencing liberation right now.
[01:27:34]  Well, you would go on to live a life that showed it.
[01:27:36]  I mean, I think that some of the stuff we're talking about, producing the movie instead of just starring in it at a time when not a lot of women were doing that and standing up for yourself and not submitting and so on, taking a lot of bullshit from men.
[01:27:47]  So you navigate yourself to a place where you can do a movie like Overboard.
[01:27:52]  You currently that was a great role, by the way.
[01:27:57]  And I was also looking at wonderful roles.
[01:28:00]  I mean, she was, first of all, we did the movie, you know, where I played Annie first.
[01:28:07]  I didn't, we didn't do it in order.
[01:28:11]  Joanna was the rich bitch version of you.
[01:28:13]  And Annie was like the one he said, no, Annie's my wife.
[01:28:16]  You do all the cleaning, Annie.
[01:28:18]  Exactly.
[01:28:19]  So she was the one that I had to know who I was so I could play who I didn't know I was.
[01:28:25]  Does that make sense?
[01:28:27]  So it was it.
[01:28:28]  It was quite a challenge to tell you the truth.
[01:28:31]  There are one of the scenes I love the most, Goldie, is where you're, you're, you've had it.
[01:28:36]  You know, this woman who's really Joanna, who's being told she's Annie and a housewife who does all the chores, knows at some level that this isn't the right fit.
[01:28:45]  And he dumps you in this like sort of water barrel out in the front of the house.
[01:28:49]  And we have a clip in which you channel my every thought when I pick up a mop.
[01:28:55]  Here she goes.
[01:28:56]  Listen.
[01:28:58]  Come on, guys.
[01:29:07]  Feel better?
[01:29:09]  I don't belong here.
[01:29:11]  I feel it.
[01:29:13]  Don't you think I feel it?
[01:29:15]  I can't do any of these vile things and I wouldn't want to.
[01:29:21]  My life is like death.
[01:29:23]  My children are the spawn of hell.
[01:29:26]  You're the devil.
[01:29:35]  Baby, we like you.
[01:29:46]  Oh my God.
[01:29:47]  I mean, I haven't seen that in a long time.
[01:29:54]  I mean, that's like, I can't do any of these violent things that I wouldn't want to.
[01:30:01]  Like, children of the spawns of hell.
[01:30:05]  You're the devil.
[01:30:06]  Oh, my God.
[01:30:07]  I mean, there are things in that film that was so funny.
[01:30:12]  And it also was emotional because when she came out and said, I, how could you?
[01:30:22]  You know, how could you do this?
[01:30:25]  When she learns that he's been duping her, because they do fall for each other.
[01:30:29]  And then she learns he's been lying to her.
[01:30:32]  Exactly.
[01:30:33]  And then my real husband comes back in his limo and the kids were devastated.
[01:30:39]  And I was, I just didn't know what to do.
[01:30:42]  I remembered who I was finally.
[01:30:45]  And it was like, oh my God.
[01:30:47]  Now, in the middle of a movie that is hilarious, right?
[01:30:51]  That was a very dramatic moment.
[01:30:54]  And when she got in the car, the kids running after her, that was so sad.
[01:30:59]  So a movie where you can cry, laugh, you know, just have a lot of emotions to it.
[01:31:10]  We're really extraordinarily lucky to be able to play.
[01:31:16]  The end of the movie was one of my favorite endings because when we jumped in the water, because we were pining for each other, he was looking for me.
[01:31:26]  I was looking for him.
[01:31:27]  And we dove in the water together in the sea to get together.
[01:31:32]  The end of it, after they're all bundled up, he says, what can I give you that you don't already have?
[01:31:37]  Because she had the money.
[01:31:39]  And she looked at him and said, a baby girl.
[01:31:41]  Baby girl.
[01:31:43]  Yeah.
[01:31:44]  Kind of like, oh, perfect line.
[01:31:47]  Perfect line for an end of a movie.
[01:31:49]  I mean, it's like, oh, I loved it.
[01:31:51]  But you guys were the key, the writer of the film.
[01:31:54]  Is it Leslie Dixon?
[01:31:57]  Leslie Dixon.
[01:31:58]  And then there was writing from everybody.
[01:32:01]  Harvey wrote some stuff.
[01:32:03]  And we worked on it together.
[01:32:06]  Well, so she says, she gives you guys all the credit.
[01:32:09]  She's like, Kurt and Goldie are the cutest people on the face of the earth.
[01:32:13]  She goes, I don't say that to be diminishing.
[01:32:14]  She goes, it's just a fact.
[01:32:16]  Everyone loves them.
[01:32:17]  The chemistry was palpable.
[01:32:20]  You guys had met a few years earlier on the set of Swing Shift, which I also really enjoyed.
[01:32:25]  And you could feel it.
[01:32:27]  And then you had a new baby, Wyatt.
[01:32:29]  Wyatt of now, like, who's out, like Captain America?
[01:32:34]  I just learned today he was running around the set.
[01:32:36]  He was one of the kids in one of the outdoor mini golf scenes.
[01:32:41]  He was nine months old.
[01:32:43]  Oh, my gosh.
[01:32:45]  Nine months old.
[01:32:46]  And my nanny was holding him in the scene.
[01:32:49]  So he was just one of the extras, right?
[01:32:53]  It was meant to be.
[01:32:54]  He's like a baby on the movie set and still is on one.
[01:32:58]  Right.
[01:32:58]  And he took his first steps on that movie.
[01:33:02]  Wow.
[01:33:03]  I don't know.
[01:33:04]  Why do you think that movie has withstood the test of time?
[01:33:05]  You know, because not every movie made in 1987, like Moonstruck, that was an amazing film.
[01:33:10]  I think it may have come out that year.
[01:33:11]  People aren't still watching it.
[01:33:13]  It's still not on television all the time.
[01:33:14]  So why is Overboard doing that?
[01:33:17]  Well, I think Overboard is a general relationship movie, first of all.
[01:33:24]  It's about people falling in love.
[01:33:27]  It's an amazing premise.
[01:33:29]  If you didn't know who you were, who would you be?
[01:33:33]  It's also about when you, it's also about love.
[01:33:37]  When you think you can't fall in love, it changes you.
[01:33:42]  And it's also good for blended families to see is that sometimes when they don't know who their mother is or they don't have a mom anymore, a new person coming into the household doesn't mean that it's going to fall apart.
[01:33:56]  Sometimes it means that they're going to have a great time.
[01:33:59]  A lot of doctors use this movie for blended families to show that.
[01:34:04]  And so it has tremendous ability to make people feel.
[01:34:10]  And it has nothing to do with time.
[01:34:12]  That's why it's so timeless.
[01:34:14]  It's that it's really about humor, but how people get along and how to get along.
[01:34:21]  And, you know, it was emotional.
[01:34:23]  I mean, when she wakes up and says, when she had, you know, all that, you know, she was had, she said, I'm so ugly.
[01:34:30]  I mean, this is where she had, you know, it's she had poison oak.
[01:34:34]  Exactly.
[01:34:34]  Yeah.
[01:34:35]  You know, no, it was great when she came out.
[01:34:37]  He was telling all these stories about her past, that she was in the Navy and that she had, she used to be really fat, which is why she had, he had only these huge house dresses for her that he got from the Salvation Army.
[01:34:45]  And she goes, I was a short, fat slut.
[01:34:50]  That's right.
[01:34:51]  I mean, really, it's just so funny, you know, and then when we're in bed together, right?
[01:34:56]  And it's sleeping and he got me a washing machine for my birthday and the kids, it's, she was so happy, you know, and then he told her all about how she, you know, was a employee of the month.
[01:35:10]  And she was so happy about it, you know, and so you had this feeling.
[01:35:17]  You kind of hated him and you kind of knew he was falling in love with her.
[01:35:20]  And she was so vulnerable to believe that I was employee of the month, you know, learning about who I was and feeling good about it.
[01:35:30]  And new information for this character that she might actually be a good person, which Joanna, the other person, not, would never have actually heard.
[01:35:39]  And by the way, I mean, it must be said, your body was so amazing.
[01:35:44]  It's like, your body looks by the way.
[01:35:47]  I had a baby while he was nine months old.
[01:35:50]  How is that possible?
[01:35:51]  What were you doing?
[01:35:53]  Well, you know, I guess being a dancer all your life, your body knows the muscles know that there's, they have information.
[01:36:03]  And so it's like when you go back to work again, or you lose weight again, or you do whatever, you kind of got to go back.
[01:36:11]  Your body has memory.
[01:36:12]  And I think that's what happened.
[01:36:14]  What did I do?
[01:36:15]  I worked out.
[01:36:16]  I did a lot of things, you know, I didn't break my back, but I worked out.
[01:36:20]  I did my sit-ups.
[01:36:21]  I did my stuff.
[01:36:22]  I had someone working with me.
[01:36:24]  You know, I did all my weights.
[01:36:25]  Of course, I did aerobic.
[01:36:27]  So yeah, I mean, you know, I did what I what I normally do.
[01:36:32]  You looked amazing.
[01:36:33]  You both did.
[01:36:34]  I think it's muscle memory.
[01:36:36]  I swear to God.
[01:36:37]  You still have it.
[01:36:38]  You post these little videos of you and your family during the pandemic when you got the puppy or whatever.
[01:36:42]  I'm like, that bitch looks better than I am.
[01:36:44]  And she is 76 now.
[01:36:45]  I don't even know what you, it's like, what the hell?
[01:36:48]  First of all, your body is killer.
[01:36:52]  I mean, you will always have that, by the way.
[01:36:54]  You know, there's nothing to snap back into.

=== Happy New Year Reflections (02:40) ===

[01:36:55]  No, it's very jiggly.
[01:36:56]  It's not like the Goldie Han in Overboard.
[01:36:58]  Trust me.
[01:36:58]  It never has been.
[01:37:01]  You can't tell me that.
[01:37:02]  Not true.
[01:37:03]  But anyway, yeah, so it's really, it is nice.
[01:37:06]  But you know what's interesting as we get older and I'm very, very, what, as you can tell, you know, I've been a dancer.
[01:37:13]  You cannot let that go.
[01:37:15]  I mean, once you're three and four and five and six and seven and eight, and that's what you did, danced all your life.
[01:37:19]  You cannot let yourself go.
[01:37:21]  Right.
[01:37:21]  So, you know, I went and I got, I go to places for cleanses and all that.
[01:37:25]  We were just talking about that this morning.
[01:37:29]  And I said, you know, no matter what I do, I go to the cleansing place.
[01:37:32]  It's great.
[01:37:33]  I'm doing all my everything we do.
[01:37:35]  We do come on, we do the scrubs, we do the massage.
[01:37:37]  We don't eat.
[01:37:38]  We have, you know, all the stuff that we do do.
[01:37:40]  You know, my stomach is so flat and I'm so happy.
[01:37:44]  And it takes about two weeks.
[01:37:45]  What the hell cleansing?
[01:37:46]  What is this?
[01:37:47]  What cleanses this?
[01:37:48]  Goes back again.
[01:37:49]  I mean, my stomach is not huge.
[01:37:53]  It's just all in the wrong place.
[01:37:54]  You know what I mean?
[01:37:55]  And I'm like, oh, come on.
[01:37:58]  So, you know, so am I paying attention still?
[01:38:01]  Yes.
[01:38:02]  What we can tell is you look amazing.
[01:38:04]  And by the way, Abby, could you sign me up for dance classes immediately?
[01:38:08]  Goldie on.
[01:38:10]  I love you so much.
[01:38:11]  Thank you so much for doing this, for doing Mind Up.
[01:38:14]  And the next Aquilas are on me, sister.
[01:38:17]  Okay, babe, you got it.
[01:38:19]  Talk soon.
[01:38:23]  Thank you so much for joining me today and all week and all year.
[01:38:27]  Could not do the show without your support, your clicks, your downloads.
[01:38:31]  I know you're busy and you have a lot of options to choose from.
[01:38:35]  So it's important that we live up to the high bar that we believe you set for us.
[01:38:40]  And we try our best every day.
[01:38:42]  Most of the time, I think we succeed.
[01:38:43]  Yeah, we're one off here or there, but we appreciate you.
[01:38:46]  And truly, I'm grateful for you every night.
[01:38:48]  I pray for all of you guys every night when I say my prayers.
[01:38:51]  I know you're out there and I really, really appreciate you.
[01:38:55]  So excited to start the new year with you on Monday as we rejoin you live in 2023.
[01:39:03]  Happy New Year.
[01:39:06]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:39:09]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
[01:39:30]  30 gigabytes of bar 24.
[01:39:33]  One call is a very good thing.