Megyn Kelly and Doug Brunt dissect the rise of elite university accommodations, citing The Atlantic's "Accommodation Nation" which reveals a surge from single digits in 2014 to 38% at Stanford, driven by parents leveraging the ADA for mental health diagnoses like ADHD. While promoting Brunt's book on Russian oil tycoon Emmanuel Nobel and analyzing Marco Rubio's Times New Roman mandate as a tone-setting move, they argue this trend prioritizes admissions over resilience, unfairly disadvantaging students without disabilities while undermining real-world preparation. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
I'm joined now by a very special guest, a New York Times bestselling author, host of the excellent podcast dedicated with Doug Brunt, and the author of the upcoming book, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel, Romanov's revolutionaries.
and the Forgotten Titan who fueled the world.
Doug happens to be my husband as well, so that worked out well.
Hi, honey.
Hi.
It's great to be here.
Congrats.
So here is the galley copy of the new book, which is just so cool looking.
It's beautiful, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel.
And it looks kind of similar, similar style to your last big New York Times bestseller, The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel.
Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel will not be available until May, but they can pre-order it today, have it in time for Father's Day.
And tell us what The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel is about.
Well, getting the galleys is such a nice moment.
We open the box, you know, as a family around the dining room table and you pull them out and you see it and you hold it in your hands after years of working on it.
It is a companion book to the Diesel book.
Emmanuel Nobel has an appearance in the Rudolph Diesel story.
But you don't have to have read diesel in order to read it.
It can be out of sequence.
And in fact, I haven't said this really.
The only people who know this next piece are you and my editor and a few people in archives around the world, but I'm working on a third, which will be, it'll complete a trilogy of these three turn-of-the-century characters.
Emmanuel Nobel essentially established the Russian oil industry along the Caspian Sea in southern Russia.
So by 1900, he and his family had built an oil business larger than Standard Oil.
And in World War I, he controlled more oil than anyone else on the planet.
So it was this huge prize sitting in southern Russia that Germany, the Brits, the Bolsheviks, the communists, Japan, everybody wanted to get to the Nobel oil because they had essentially developed a whole oil infrastructure that was superior to anything else in the world.
Superior to Rockefeller.
That's great.
Super to Rockefeller.
And yet, for reasons explained in the book, Nobel has been obliterated from history.
Totally.
And this brings him back to life and tells us.
The only Nobel anybody knows is Alfred Nobel, who started the Nobel Prizes.
This is Emmanuel Nobel, his nephew, built a totally different, bigger fortune that has been totally forgotten, wiped out.
His name is not really known at all in connection with the awards.
That's all the Uncle Alfred who did dynamite.
That was his business.
And it's, it's, do you reveal why?
But I mean, like.
A little.
I mean, it has, of course, the, when the communists took over, Stalin and Lenin, they nationalized all these businesses.
But everyone, even in that time, even when the Bolsheviks had taken over, everyone thought the communists are going to last about three days.
And so there's an interesting negotiation between Standard Oil and Rockefeller and Nobel about all these Russian assets of petroleum, what to do with them, because nobody believes Lenin's going to last.
And with regard to the prize, though, so Alfred Nobel and the prizes, he was an investor in the oil business of his brothers and nephew.
But the prize wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Emmanuel either.
And there are two funny stories about that.
When Emmanuel's father, Ludwig, dies, Alfred and Ludwig are huge celebrities around the world.
And the newspapers in France, where Alfred lives, mistakes who's died.
They thought Alfred died.
So they print this obituary for Alfred Nobel, calling him, you know, as the inventor of dynamite, this merchant of death and caused more, you know, killing than anyone in history.
And so he reads his own obituary and thinks, holy crap, you know, I need to, this can't be how I'm remembered.
And so he changes his will to establish the prize and gives tons of his money away.
And of course, all his, you know, after he dies, all the other Nobel people are like, you must be joking.
Like the fortune's going to this crazy prize, including the king of Sweden, who pulls Emmanuel aside.
And Emmanuel's in charge of the estate, basically, for his uncle Alfred and the prize.
And everyone in the family is fighting it.
The king of Sweden is like, you don't want to pay attention to these crazy pacifists.
This is nonsense.
You know, you should take care of your family and put all the money toward that.
So Emmanuel stands up to the king of Sweden and says, no, no, no, we're going to, I'm taking my role as the executor physical.
Seriously, we're going to have the prize.
And so he, at the last second, rescues the prize.
Had it not been for Emmanuel Houston.
But the funny thing is, it's like you think about, you know, Russia, and you know, they've got one huge asset.
Well, two.
One is oil and two is their ability to mess with you online, right?
Like those are two big assets that they have.
Those are their two primary weapons.
There's also the matter of nuclear weapons, but in any event, this is their main source of income is their petroleum industry.
And it wasn't theirs and they didn't invent it.
And actually, nobody was doing it at all in Russia until Emmanuel Nobel came along and was like, hey, look at all this stuff.
This actually looks quite interesting.
When they first bought land in the Caucasus near present-day Azerbaijan along the Caspian Sea, people were skimming oil out of puddles.
There was no drilling.
You know, any wells that were dug were dug by hand with spades.
So they come down there with great, they are chemists and engineers by trade.
And so they come down there and they completely turn it around.
But this was in the 1870s in the time of the czars.
So the book has these amazing detours through history that include the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and Dostoevsky and Tabor.
And I was on Stalin.
I learned so much about Joseph Stalin that I did not know.
And you personalize his backstory in a way that I didn't know.
Like, how did he grow up to be this murderous, crazy dude?
And now I know.
I mean, you actually have a lot of backstory on Stalin.
You see the rise of these two men, very, very different in character, but in strength.
They were equals for a long, long time, Emmanuel Nobel and Joseph Stalin.
So you learn a ton about world history, about Russia.
Everything that Russia is today is explained in this book.
But you don't feel like you're learning.
You feel like you're just getting like a caper.
Well, yeah, it's written ideally in a very novelistic way.
It's a ripping read.
I mean, you go through it, but it has these fun detours, but it is a piece of history.
And Stalin, as you say, grew up as a neighbor to Nobel in southern Russia.
He grew up in Georgia, which is between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
And he actually worked in the oil fields of the Nobels and the Rothschilds, who are another big figure in Russian oil.
And so Emmanuel Nobel and Joseph Stalin, they're sort of like these counterpoints to each other.
And Stalin's looking at these oil capitalists, industrialists with envy and hatred.
And, you know, ultimately, you know, the whole book brings this collision you know is coming.
Yeah.
He was looking at Nobel's oil the same way Zorhan Mamdani is looking at the billionaires in New York.
Christmas Traditions and Liquor Flowing00:11:45
All right.
Now, so don't forget, it's called The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel by Douglas Brunt.
You can get your pre-order right now.
That would help Doug out and yours truly, because I'd love to see the colours of the colours.
And avoid the pub day.
Like diesel sold out.
People couldn't get it for like two months because Simon and Schuster had to go back and print more copies.
If you pre-order it now, it shows up on your doorstep or your bookstore has it.
And so you don't have to wait.
And that's happening right now with Charlie's book where they've already sold out.
You're going to have to wait months for his book.
They always underestimate anybody who's conservative or married to a conservative.
Conservative Jason.
Yeah, they do because they just assume there's no audience for that because that's not the world in which these book publishers live.
So it's called The Lost Empire, Empire of Emmanuel Nobel.
Get your copy now.
Now, more importantly, what do we have here with us?
Yes, I got it.
And explain what happens on Dedicated.
All right.
First, we've got, we have our Jack Carr tumblers with the, I don't know if it can show up here with the, with the ice, but it's got the Tomahawk, Navy Seal thing.
So shout out to Jack Carr, Mary Jack.
Christmas.
Thank you for the glasses.
We're going to have a little traditional eggnog with bourbon.
It's organic.
It's healthy.
Locale organic.
It's like having an egg.
We learned that lesson a few years ago.
Yes, exactly.
We'll do it with rye, Mictor's Rye.
Yeah, what officially goes in an eggnog?
Some people do bourbon, some do rum, some do both.
And what are we doing?
Well, rye, which is basically bourbon.
Okay.
The reason that we're doing this is A, it's eggnog and why not?
It's that time of year.
But B, on Doug's podcast, which is called Dedicated with Doug Brunt, where he interviews authors.
He both interviews authors and talks about their books, and he always pours a cocktail of choice.
Could be virgin, could be alcoholic.
This one happens to be alcoholic.
It's almost almost always alcoholic, thank God.
And everyone drinks the drink.
Michael Lewis was on the other day, and he's like, do people actually drink the drink?
He had a Sazerac, by the way, which is like the New Orleans cocktail.
Sazerac.
Yeah.
It's basically similar to an old-fashioned.
Now he's doing the nutmeg.
Nutmeg over the.
Didn't we do this last year?
Did we do the eggnog last year?
We did.
I think I had to read your ad by the end.
Maybe that was a different show.
Cheers, then.
Merry Christmas.
Love you.
Oh, yeah, that's tasty.
Our first eggnog of the season.
That's delicious.
I know.
Well done.
Yeah, no, and we talked about how that one year we were drinking eggnogs like they were going out of style when we were young.
We didn't have kids.
And we both blew up like ticks.
We were huge.
Looking in the mirror, like something's changed in our diet.
Is it possible?
It's the eggnog.
The full fat eggnog.
And then we looked at the nutritional information on the box.
Which, by the way, horrifying isn't a whole lot better.
What is it?
What does it say?
Well, 150 calories.
You know, a lot of cholesterol in there.
Yeah.
A lot of sodium in there.
Oh, really?
Sodium?
Decent amount of sugar.
Nothing is worse than the Martha Stewart recipe.
I mentioned this to you this morning over coffee.
I just saw it on X. Steve, I'll send it to you.
We had to drop it in for the listening audience.
This thing was loaded with alcohol.
First of all, it was like so many eggs and so much sugar and so much heavy cream.
And then on top of that, it was like three cups of bourbon, three cups of rum, and three cups of another alcohol.
Martha gets after it.
You're phoning it in with this rye business.
That's putting me to shame.
I don't know what you were thinking.
Usually men are trying to get women intoxicated.
We're on set.
You can't like, but we can definitely have more booze, but getting involved in eggs and cream and stuff.
We're not going to do that here.
No, you don't want egg cream of any kind.
And she stuffed the yolks in there too.
It was pretty nasty.
So we're getting ready for our holidays.
What have you been doing to get ready to live?
I sent a few present suggestions, which is more than I normally do.
I'm only laughing because every woman knows that's a joke.
And every guy gets defensive.
No, we kind of have our shared responsibilities, I would say.
But generally, the Christmas shopping is on my list because I want it to be.
Yeah.
Well, you're so good at it.
It's amazing.
It's like a, you know, Santa Claus threw up under the tree.
There's like a million presents everywhere.
He helps me.
And that's why I have an ace in the hole.
I have a secret weapon.
You have a little elf up in the north.
Yeah.
So I don't really need Doug Bruns' help because I've got Santa.
Although I do help a little.
You do help.
But we were talking a little bit about our Christmas traditions.
I was doing this for Steven Crowder.
And there's so many that we do.
Like we go to Montana every year.
And there's a bunch of stuff we do over there.
But what would you say?
Like, I've asked what's our top or what's our couple of top Christmas traditions that we have?
I mean, well, we're still, you know, earmuffs on the kids.
We're still firing away with the elf every morning and the advent.
They know.
And we try to carol as much as possible, but that's not every year.
We do have a great, like almost 20 years tradition of getting lunch with a particular group of friends in the city that used to be at the 21 club.
Hello, that's got to open back up.
21 club.
Yep.
But we have found new venues for that.
Wait a minute.
What was the second thing you said?
The Advent Calendar.
The Caroling.
Of the Caroline.
Do we really?
That's not really tradition.
I said that's not an agenda.
Should we reveal what happened last year when we caroled?
Yes, it's embarrassing, but it's a funny story.
It's a disaster.
Yeah.
No one wanted us.
Well, our first stop was actually pretty good.
They were amazed.
They're like, this is so great.
And we kind of knew them.
And they thought, this is great.
And the other dad was like, I'm coming with you.
And he turns around.
It's like, let's go.
And they're all like, screw you, dad.
He's like, next year, maybe I can join you.
But he was totally supportive.
It was just the five of us.
Yeah, just the five of our family.
And so then we go to the next house.
From that point forward, it went down.
Like nobody really wanted.
They're like, it's cold outside.
Why'd it have to stand by this open door?
There was one moment where we were waiting across the street.
We had our Santa hats on.
We were freezing.
And this SUV drove by with the window down and just kind of waved at us and we were like, jingle bell, jiggle bell, jiggle bell.
Like shaking the bell out.
It was like an assault of Christmas carols.
It's hard to get an audience.
Everyone was kind of like trying to squeeze the door closed, kind of like, I got some people inside.
Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't the greatest outing.
It's probably not going to be a tradition.
No.
But I think I'm thinking of things like when we watch It's a Wonderful Life.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So actually, you drive, in addition to getting the presents, you do drive a lot of these things.
We do.
It's a wonderful day.
But everyone's a gamer.
With the salt and the bread and the whole bit and, you know, ringing the bell when Clarence makes an appearance on screen.
And hissing when Papa.
You and I, like the greatest tradition, bar none, of you know, Christmas aside, you and I start every morning with a cup of coffee.
We've got the coffee machine in the bedroom.
It's set the night before with the alarm.
It goes off.
And we start each day with 20 minutes together talking, having coffee.
Sometimes listening to AM update, other times watching Christmas in Connecticut for a few minutes.
It's just an awesome way to enter the day and enter the world, you know, having connected a little bit.
It's so true.
And right now we have a little tree in our bedroom.
We've got some Christmas lights.
And that makes it magical too.
You know, like turn that on.
The only thing Doug and I argue about in the bedroom is the temperature.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
So now we both like it cool when we sleep.
That makes sense.
Everybody should have it.
They say 68 degrees.
It's good for your health.
It's good for your sleep.
But Doug would like the thermometer to be turned down much earlier in the evening so that it's like cold when we arrive.
Yes.
That makes me irritable.
We climb in bed.
I'm like, it's so effing hot in here.
And I'm like, it's freezing.
Because you can't function in there when it's 68 degrees.
Like when you're doing your nighttime routine, you're washing your face, you're in your nightgown.
You're freezing your ass off if it's 68 degrees.
You've got a heated floor, though.
You should just sort of like get low.
That is a luxury, by the way.
When we bought the house, it had a heated floor.
I've never had that.
And it's wonderful.
It makes a nice difference.
Damn.
Damn, as they say.
So we're going to go to Montana.
It's not snowy there, unfortunately.
No, early, early conditions.
But you know, making some.
Yes, for me, like I'm happy to do a couple groom blues and then go sit by the fire, play poker with the kids and never get out of pajamas.
Like a couple days like that would be great.
Doesn't that sound like heaven on earth for two weeks?
It's going out there.
We've got our annual costume night.
I recommend this to everybody.
You can go big.
I mean, obviously I go big because I love costumes, but you can do this on a shoestring budget too.
You just go to the local costume store and you get a couple of costumes for your family.
It does not have to be fancy, but it needs to be a theme.
It needs to be theme-related.
And then the way we do it in our family is on costume night.
I like controlling it.
So I'll put out the costumes on people's beds.
You'll keep the kids busy.
They all know it's costume.
It's super fun because nobody knows what the theme is.
Meg plans is every single year.
And then the theme's amazing.
One year was Back to the Future.
One year we had watched the Ten Commandments.
So I was Moses and someone was the various kings.
You were the best.
Oh, look, here's Back to the Future.
Oh, nice.
Blurred the kids' faces.
You were the best McFly.
You were George McFly, the dad.
Oh, yeah.
He's his Marty.
And you, oh, you've got to do your imitation.
Can you do your George McFly imitation?
All right.
Take your damn hands off her.
I don't know if I nailed that.
You did.
I love it.
And then we did Moses.
We did 10 Commandments and you made an amazing Moses.
Years earlier.
This was good.
I mean, we went all out for the Moses.
We got Pharaoh represented.
We got Zephyr.
If there's no one in the family who does this amount of planning as you do, which is amazing because everyone fully appreciates, but even like a wig night is kind of fun if you're recommending to the audience.
We have a closet full of wigs.
It's true.
And it's fun just to like, I don't know.
Somehow things are more fun in wigs.
Yeah.
Right?
It's like you could just be eating your dinner.
We don't actually do anything.
Like somebody's asking, what do you do on costume?
I'm like, nothing.
We just put them on.
Laugh at each other.
There's the Wonka.
That was a great one.
Here's the funny story about these two people in there as Violet Beauregard and Augustus Gloop.
They've since become dear friends of ours, but that night we didn't know them at all.
So we were expecting two family members who then couldn't come.
It was like right after COVID.
That was either 2020 or 2021.
It was right when things were still nutty because of COVID and their flights got canceled.
And these two go to our school and we had just met them and we're like, so would you like to come for dinner?
They're like, sure, we'd love to.
We're like, and could you wear some of that?
We know exactly how it goes.
There's no could you wear.
It's like, here's she, Meg like lays down the law.
When you cross that threshold, you're in her world.
And she says, off you go.
And here's your costume and don't come back out until it's on.
It's kind of the price of admission.
Yeah.
Anyway, and we realized too late that Augustus Gloop winds up looking a little like a Hitler youth.
He's in like a little military outfit with the blonde wig.
Yeah, it's very like Australian.
Our friends, Lisa and Chris, were such good sports.
They donned the outfits and it was such a fun.
I think he sort of entered with a little trepidation, but you know, mid-dinner was loving it.
Once we got the liquor flowing.
Well, that helps with all costumes and wigs.
But no, so the other piece of costume night is just to order a background from Amazon.
So if you go on Amazon and you type in 10 Commandments or you type in Back to the Future backdrop, you will pull up so many options for 40 bucks or under.
And 40 bucks for the big one for 8 by 10.
But if you want to go smaller, it's much cheaper.
Anyway, my point is simply for under $150, you could probably get everybody in your family in a costume and with a backdrop.
And that's really the end of it.
So we'll try to sometimes do like the food that's themed appropriately.
If like that night, one year we did Karate Kid, Cobra Kai.
Yeah, that was great.
We had Asian that night.
That's about as much as what, you know, it's not that like, then you just sit there and you laugh.
Specials.
Yeah.
Oh, we did have John Kreese do one of those.
And speaking of like cheap, that was like 30 bucks.
Yeah.
One of those services where you can pay an actor to like say something personal.
And it's like, strike first, you know, getting on with our kids, who, by the way, that was the best 30 bucks we ever spent because the kids were totally into it.
Costume Nights and Themed Backdrops00:03:31
And he called us the Blunts, I think, instead of the Brunts.
I was wrong for sure.
It was close.
Whatever.
You don't expect perfection from John Crees.
Anyway, I can't wait for all of that stuff to start.
It's like that's what makes the two weeks magical.
Like the Christmas is the apex of it.
But if you put these other things around, then it's not as much of a letdown when Christmas is over.
Yeah.
You know, you sell something.
It's also that contains, you know, one of the few times of the year where there aren't obligations all over the kids, especially in us.
And we get, you know, tons of time together, high quality, low quality, but it all adds up.
It's great time together.
Yeah.
The poker has become a fun tradition.
Yeah.
You know, we're, the kids are getting more into Texas Holding.
We should be able to beat them more easily.
I know.
We'd have the big stack in front of us.
Now it's funny.
Or at least cheat them without them knowing.
One or the other.
But yeah, no, that's been fun.
We got to learn some new games.
The kids are now into Texas Hold'em, which I actually, I don't totally know how to play Texas Hold'em.
You just hold three cards and you play off of.
You hold two and there's, yeah.
But it's really, it's like a betting thing.
Once you learn how to bet, you're good.
It's basically everything's a poker hand.
So we should try that.
Yeah.
Let's do that.
This time next year, we'll be sitting here talking about how well I did at Texas Hold'em.
Done.
Okay.
So let's talk about the news a little bit because it's always fun to get your take on it.
And I thought, I saw this article yesterday.
I was like, this is a good one for Duggar.
Here's a headline from the New York Post.
Marco Rubio instructs diplomats to use Time's New Roman font, eliminating Biden-era DEI initiative.
Did you know there's DEI font?
I did not.
By the way, I don't think the takeaway of this story should be that Calibri is woke, exactly.
But I totally get where Rubio's going on this.
Calibri does look a little light in the loafers.
It's a little different for sure.
Times New Roman is like bald, bald.
We're showing it on the screen for the listening.
Oh, that's YouTube.
That's perfect.
Calibri is like skinny with softer edges and it just, it looks a little more feminine, I'd say.
Well, look, here's my overall take on this because I understand what Rubio's doing.
I'm sure when people heard about this, you can imagine the attacks.
Like you're running state and this is what you're going to spend your time on, but it does matter.
And you know firsthand when I am working on these books, Simon ⁇ Schuster and I spend time on the font.
Like it's got to match the mission.
And, you know, it's your first chance to set the tone, set the atmosphere for the audience that you're engaging.
The mood.
It's the last little bit of connection point that you have.
And it does matter.
It's why writers, authors, and publishers and editors actually focus on this.
The font of different books looks very different depending on what kind of book it is.
Like if you open George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones and you see Times New Roman, you're going to be like, what is this?
Like the best versions of those books look like it was written by an elf, you know, like Bilbo Baggins.
Something a little medieval and fanciful.
And, you know, especially like the first letter of the chapter should look that way.
And so it's Rubio's way of creating a mindset or creating an atmosphere for the information he's putting out there.
And you see that dynamic everywhere.
It's the same as Bill Bratton's Broken Windows policing.
You know, you walk into a neighborhood that's full of broken windows and graffiti on the walls and trash on the streets, and that creates a mindset and an atmosphere for crime.
And Bratton and others before him have proven that if you fix the windows, paint the walls, clean up all the trash and have this beautiful neighborhood, you prevent crime before it starts.
And it's that same dynamic.
It seems like a small thing, but setting that tone, setting the atmosphere matters.
Like strong, robust language or so I think if he was going to, the only change I would make is he shouldn't go back to Times New Roman.
He should do like the Bilbo Baggins handwriting for all of our state communication.
Broken Windows Policing Mindset00:08:45
But actually, that reminds me of a story you were telling me the other day.
It's the same thing of like the small tonal things we should value and prioritize them more.
Almost we have to invert our thinking that these things are more important.
It's like that Jordan Peterson piece that you were showing me.
Yeah, that's right.
Oh, yeah, that was so good.
It was the Jordan Peterson sound bite on Instagram where he was saying, yeah, it's great to go to St. Bart's or Aruba and have a margarita, you know, down on the beach.
Everybody would love that.
But your life, he said in this clip, is how your wife greets you at the end of the day.
It's how you are around the dinner table with each other, how you're treating each other, you know, whether you're, quote, present, you know, but truly it is.
Like, do you feel valued when you walk into the room with your spouse or your kids or your family?
Like that, that does make up your life.
Well, so many more of our waking hours are spent around that table or that coffee mug than they are down in, you know, Aruba with a mocktail.
And they're small and they're often overlooked.
And it's not, we don't think it was a big deal.
And yet we really do need to invert how we think about that because that's the biggest deal.
As Peterson points out, that's 80% of your life, those little moments that add up.
And so it's, you know, long way of saying I think that's the same thing Rubio is getting at of like, this is the font they're going to be staring at for 10 hours a day.
Like this is an opportunity to set an atmosphere, to set a tone.
This is what I want.
What is a telegraph?
Yeah.
So it's not, it's not trivial.
It actually is something.
Well, this led to a discussion that we had about like, what, who do you want the kids to marry?
You know, and I was saying, my God, they, they all have to marry somebody with a good sense of humor, like number one.
Totally.
Right.
And we were talking about this because it's like.
You're so lucky in that regard because I, you know, you're very funny.
I am lucky.
Yeah.
I treasure you.
Yeah, I am very funny.
I see, though.
You are actually the funnier of the two.
What?
That's never been conceded before by anyone.
Well, I felt under pressure on Aaron and everything.
No.
All fair, I'm going to take it back.
But we laugh a lot.
Totally.
We laugh at each other.
And our kids are so good.
All three of them have developed a different but awesome sense of humor.
Yes, because it is important.
Number one, it's important to laugh at life, but it's almost equally important to be able to laugh at yourself and others.
All of those things must be laughed at.
It's not cruel.
Like it's, it's a stress relief mechanism.
I really think it's the antidote to cortisol, right?
Like just laughing.
And life provides so many opportunities.
It could be just nothing, but like we're constantly making fun of ourselves, you know?
And I have noticed, I mean, you and I have had these little sidebar conversations when one of our kids isn't hanging in that department.
Like he gets made fun of.
And you can see like he's a little pissed off that he got a little made fun of.
And we're like, that's not, I mean, we don't pounce on him at that point, but we're like, it's, you know, that's, that's a sign that we need to keep doing that until he gets a little better at the end.
Otherwise, he's going to, you know, it's not going to work out come college dorm days.
That's right.
Life is tough.
And you really do have to be able to laugh at all of it or you're not going to make it very far.
I really feel like, you know, my Nana, I've talked about her on the show too.
She, she died at 101.
She only ate processed foods.
She never exercised a day in her life.
So what did she do?
She laughed a lot.
She was very funny.
She had a circle of friends that laughed.
She was very quick to make fun of herself, first and foremost, but everyone else as well.
Like, I do think it's a, it could make the difference between life and death.
Totally, totally.
We need to study Nana and we need to study Dick Van Dyke.
Whatever those two are doing, we need to do all of it.
Well, I was a little concerned about Dick Van Dyke's comments about how he made it to 100.
He said he was like drinking way too much until his 50s.
That wasn't the part that concerned me.
It was he said.
I was sort of on board with that.
He said he's, he's never, it was either he's never hated anyone or he's never been like rageful.
I was like, uh-oh.
I don't think he's right about that.
You know, people can't self-analyze.
They have no idea.
We need to analyze him, you know, from the outside.
It was all the dancing.
It was the dancing.
He's skinny.
You know, he's a skinny guy.
That helps a lot.
It was totally the old bamboo and Chitty Jitty Bamboo.
Totally.
Once you learn that, you keep doing that dance, you live forever.
Yeah.
How are we going to do that?
The old bamboo?
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Yes.
We have to watch that with the kids.
I think they're totally up for it.
They haven't, the kids, we used to watch this movie on a loop about 10 years ago.
You guys know, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Yeah.
And it's such an amazing movie.
It does have that AI haircut.
So I saw your tweet on that, actually, that this was already invented in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
But the kids, I think, have like foggy memories of it.
So I'm excited to see how they see it now.
I love all parts of it.
I love Truly Scrumptious.
I love, love, love Dick Van Dyke.
He's just so utterly charming.
I love the apparatus he sets up in their house to cook the breakfast, to lift the blankets off the beds.
It's all great.
The villains are great.
Bavaria.
The whistle thing.
Yeah, toothpaste.
That's such a great scene.
It's like, who even knew?
But we had a very funny thing happen with our love of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang over our fakesgiving holiday where we have the family come for fake Thanksgiving, not the actual day, but it makes it easier on everybody who needs to travel.
And we split the family into two groups to play charades.
And our side was coming up with the clues for the other side.
And then they came up with their clues for us.
Now, unbeknownst to our opponents, who are also family members, our family is obsessed with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
We know a lot about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
We've seen that movie truly hundreds of times.
Yeah, exactly.
So there was a joke when we used to watch it.
Our oldest, Yates, who was just a little guy at the time, like two or three, he saw this one scene involving this boat.
And there were these like rounded things on the boat.
Like funnels from the top of the boat.
Okay.
Yeah.
And for whatever, and then the two bad guys hide themselves later in those funnels and go on land and start spying on people.
And for whatever reason, Yates always referred to them as the barrels.
I want to see the barrels.
And he would do this with his hands.
For listening audience, I'm like twinkling my fingers together.
It needs to be like the barrels.
Well, I got up there and I pulled my clue from the other side.
And the movie was chitty, chitty, bang, bang.
And you were on my team.
So I needed to act this out to you.
And of course, they're wondering, I'm sure the other side is like, okay, maybe she'll do bang bang.
How's she going to get this?
And all I said was movie.
And then I did the finger motion.
And you were like, chitty, chitty, bang.
At which point, there's no convincing them that we haven't been cheating.
There's nothing you can say.
They're like, no, no, no.
You obviously cheated.
None whatsoever.
And we did crush them.
I mean, it was embarrassing.
We also had to take pity on them.
It was brutal.
It was so fun.
I love Charates.
What a fun game.
Our kids have recently introduced us to a new game.
Oh, my God.
That is so fun.
What is that thing called?
Imposter.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So someone in the group, you can do it on your iPhone, which is actually a great use of the phone for this.
So explain it how it works.
Let's see.
Oh, my God.
If there's five of us sitting there, remember.
The five of us are sitting there.
Someone's the imposter.
And there's a word.
And everybody has to hold the phone at one point.
Like, it starts off.
I'll explain it.
So if I were patient zero of this five-person game, but you can play it with three people too.
I think three is probably the fewest you could do it with.
Five.
Yeah, I would say five.
Yeah.
Five or more would be most fun.
Yeah.
So you open, you see the phone.
I don't know the app.
I'll ask the kids, but I'm sure if you Google imposter app, you can get it.
And it will say, like, you agree as a family on which category you're going to pick.
Like there's sports.
There's like movies.
And we pick movies for one.
I wasn't, was I the first on that one?
No, I wasn't.
Okay.
So Yardley went first on this one.
And I mean, I might take over.
No, no, I've got this.
I'm going to me, she got Peppa Pig.
That was the clue.
So Yardley wasn't the imposter I was.
And so when Yardley looked at the phone, it said Yardley and she saw Peppa Pig.
Then we handed it to Thatcher and he saw Peppa Pig.
Then they handed it to me and I saw imposter.
Yes, you have no idea that it's Peppa Pig.
You don't know.
So when the phone gets handed to you, it says, it just says your name because the person who starts it just types in the five names who are playing.
So when it sees, I see Megan, I hit it and then it either says imposter or it gives me the clue.
And then we pass the phone around and then you start guessing.
And the way it works is like Yardley went first.
And so she said, oh, I knew we were in like TV and movies and she said pink.
And then the next person said, Australia.
And so when it got to me, I was the imposter and I thought, flamingo.
That's what I thought we were going for.
So when you're the imposter, you have to try to act like you know what it is.
Peppa Pig Phone Game Clue00:02:57
You have to, you have to like act like you know.
And the other people have to, when they, when they do know, have to reveal a clue that shows they know, but not so much that they're going to clue in the imposter.
Yeah.
So I said feather and you go, mom's the imposter.
And everyone started laughing at me.
Everyone started laughing because if you're early as the imposter, you don't have enough.
You know, if you go late, you might get enough clues that you can sort of dial in on what it is.
Otherwise, you're just sort of throwing darts and hoping to say something that makes any amount of sense to the rest of the group.
We are here today with Douglas Brunt promoting his new novel, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel, even though it doesn't sound like it.
You can get it on preorder right now.
It's well worth your time.
But that game imposter is worth your time as well.
However, be more ambiguous than I was with that whole thing.
Now, I want to keep going.
I want to keep going a little.
We're going to keep going past the break a little bit.
Sorry, EJ.
I'm going to eat into the next hour just a bit.
In the news today, well, yesterday, but also today, is the fact that they have named a new CBS evening news anchor.
Did you know that they were looking for one?
The only reason I know anything about this story is you tweeted how irrelevant it is.
And I saw your tweet and I'm like, oh, what's so irrelevant?
And it was DeCopel.
Yeah.
Tony DeCopel.
DeCopel.
Do you know anything about Tony DeCopel?
I don't.
I remember he got in trouble for like doing an interview that pushed back a bit in a way.
I don't even remember all the details about it, but I remember he pushed back in a way that seemed like actual journalism and he got some blowback for it.
It was a great moment on the morning show.
That's the only way I know, which is a positive thing to know, I guess.
But it is crazy irrelevant.
I mean, you and I are the same age.
We grew up in, you know, 150 miles apart at the same time, like loving all the same movies, having the same high school experiences and watching one of three evening news anchors.
And that's almost how households identified in those times.
Like, are you at Jennings' house?
Are you a Rather's house?
Yeah.
You know, we were Jennings.
You were Jennings.
We were Jennings too.
And no longer.
Like, that's no longer how people, it used to be like, I'm an American.
I'm a Christian or a Presbyterian.
I'm a whatever.
And we watched Jennings.
Like it was in the top 10 of things.
Identify your household.
And no longer.
Nobody even cares.
Nobody, you know, our age or younger gets news that.
No, it's so irrelevant, right?
It's like, I mean, I would, I know I'm biased, but I think podcasts are far more relevant now.
People like they have their loyalty, their allegiance to like this show.
If you're going to spend an hour or two a day with somebody, it's not going to be the evening news.
My God, why would you?
By the way, it used to be like the newspaper the next day was kind of stale from yesterday's news, you know, the immediacy because of cable.
And now, you know, with the, by the time it's made it through the producers and packaged and written and ready for prime time cable evening news, it's so old.
It's so old.
Default Judgments in Law Practice00:06:54
Yeah.
So I don't think, you know, like all the mainstream media is writing articles like, can Tony DeCoppol restore CBS to its former glory?
I'm like, when?
What glory?
And they're like, can he get them out of third place?
The answer is no, he cannot.
He can't do that either.
Nothing's changing in TV news other than Dimitri.
Maybe he can do something relatively with the other three, but the three as a unit, like evening news is going only one way, which is down.
No, one big Tyrannosaurus rex, only not as scary.
We are back now with Doug Brunt.
It was a very tough booking for me, but I made it this morning over coffee.
He is here promoting his soon-to-be-released The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel, Romanovs, Revolutionaries, and the Forgotten Titan who fueled the world.
I like that.
Not ruled the world.
Fueled.
Fueled the world.
With the font that Rubio would approve of.
Well done.
Exactly.
It's musculature.
It's got musculature.
Yeah, it gives you a sense of history, turn of the century.
Yeah.
Except we've changed the cover since then, since this.
Yes, not the font.
We got rid of the Romanovs.
Wait, okay, there we go.
That lower right picture of the Romanov, Tsar Nicholas II, his family who were brutally killed.
We moved that to the back because it seemed like the cover was a little too busy with that on there.
It's fun hearing the stories, right?
About like how a book that you enjoy or wind up loving changed over time.
Like from the title to the chart.
So here is the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel.
This is Doug's bestseller.
This book has sold a ton, hugely successful.
And it's a mystery about Rudolph Diesel, who was the Elon Musk of his time who went missing.
And Doug solved the case.
He solved the mystery of what happened to him.
And it was not always called the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel.
No, I mean, for months and months, my editor and I were going back and forth, like, we're going to solve this over a bottle of wine.
We came up with Engines and Empires.
It's the Diesel engine.
And I loved it.
He loved it.
11th hour.
They have a sales meeting with the internal SNS team.
Barnes and Noble has a sales team that contributes to this stuff too, the CEO, John Karp, of Simon ⁇ Schuster.
And so I get this call.
We've already printed galleys, like what we have for Nobel.
And it has the Engines and Empires title.
He's like, everyone loves the book.
It's charming.
It's atmospheric.
It takes us to this early downtown Abbey era and a crazy mystery.
And it's super fun and great history.
Except the title.
We got to change the title.
I'm like, what?
That's the one thing we had.
So they had come up with a different title.
And in the last second, it was that.
So those things happen.
And it's kind of a fun part of the journey when the book is all aspects of it.
I really love the research and time in the archives.
All of it is great.
But these fun little twists at the end and looking at the cover art, the SNS cover art team, their art department is amazing.
Very cool.
And it's always interesting to hear or see how someone else has an expression of the story.
You know, like what did they come up with for a cover of this book you just spent years writing?
Right.
That year, it's like yours.
It's your personal baby.
Your creativity, your research, all of that went into it.
And then somebody else has got strong thoughts on it.
And it's fascinating to get the first like read back or feedback on how somebody else sees it.
Like, what is this book about?
What should be called?
You do host a podcast, which we're actually now airing on the Megan Kelly channel on Saturdays called Dedicated with Doug Brunt, which I mentioned.
And you had a very interesting interview the other day with Michael Lewis, famed author.
Author of Moneyball and Blindside and Liars Poker.
Yeah, all of which have become big movies.
And he wound up, he winds up telling you a story about, okay, I'm not going to give it away.
Listen to this story.
I'm just going to run the sound bite.
It's going to end in a big reveal about somebody you, the Megan Kelly show listeners and watchers know very well.
It's this guy's everywhere.
He's Waldo.
He's everywhere.
Okay, listen to Michael Lewis talking to Doug Brunt.
One of the people we interview, I interviewed for this podcast, was Steve Bannon.
My connection to Steve Bannon, he bought the movie rights to Liar's Poker.
Oh my God.
I didn't know he was even in that business.
You did know he was in that business.
Where do you think his money came from?
steve bannon was involved with steve bannon went from the navy to the navy to harvard business school to goldman sachs to hollywood Bannon told me, I just found this out like a month ago, that not only did he buy the movie rights, but he was so pissed off by how bad the script was they got out of a very fancy script writer that he went off in a little dark room by himself and wrote a Liars Poker screenplay himself.
He was obsessed with this.
Did you get to read it?
Well, this is the next thing.
I'm going to go see him.
And he says he has a copy somewhere.
So I want to read it.
I want to see what he did.
That would be amazing.
I'm glad you played that crip.
I got to follow up with Michael Lewis to find out how the Bannon meeting went.
This is all sort of happening now.
You call him and I'll call Steve and we'll see whether this is happening.
I would love to see that.
Liar's Poker is an amazing book.
It's still a good thing.
Liars Poker Poker has not yet been made a movie.
It has not been made a movie.
But it's his first book.
It was a breakout book.
He tells so many amazing stories of how he first started writing.
You know, he was working at Solomon Brothers and Wall Street and he writes, he has sort of a Jerry Maguire moment.
He gets this article published about how bankers are paid too much.
And it goes in the Wall Street Journal.
And someone had sort of stuck their neck out to get him this job.
It's Solomon Brothers.
So he comes up the elevator feeling like, I've written this.
I'm in the journal.
Like, this is so exciting.
And the guy who got him the job is at the top of the elevator bay, like ashen, looking like, what have you done?
Like, you can't do that.
You can't work here and do that.
You pick one.
So he ends up actually writing financial articles under a, under a pseudonym for a while.
But then he comes out with Liar's Poker, which is an amazing book.
This reminds me of a story when I was practicing law where we had a client who came to us already having had a default judgment entered against them.
Like they had blown off this complaint repeatedly and the plaintiff got a default judgment against them because they failed to defend.
Then they called us and said, will you help us?
So I was a little person on the totem pole.
They sent me in there like, go get this default judgment vacated for our client, which is an uphill battle.
So I went in there and it was very contentious.
And the other side, the plaintiff did not want the default judgment to go away.
We really battled.
And the judge gave me a super hard time because the client had been completely derelict and defending.
And it was just a funny and tumultuous time in my career.
So long story short, they vacated the default judgment.
And the court wrote this opinion, like in writing that you can still look up now, where he really praised me and the oral argument, but he completely dumped on my client.
I was so young, I was like, this is the greatest opinion ever.
He loved me.
I brought it back to Jones Day and I'm like, look what they said.
And of course, the seasoned lawyers were like, this is not a great opinion for our client, who now is like being ripped by a court on the record repeatedly for its dereliction duty.
College Applications and Extra Time00:13:44
I'm like, but I got the right result.
And look at all the priests for me.
Kind of like that.
Yeah.
And like Michael Lewis, you went on to a great career.
Yes.
From there.
It all wound up.
It's a different place.
That's right.
All wound up working out a different industry altogether, although some of the skills translated.
Here's the other piece of news I want to talk to you about.
We've been trying to get this on.
This has been out for a week now.
The Atlantic dropped a piece called Accommodation Nation.
And this piece, you may not have read it, but it is all about something that you're very familiar with.
How many schools now, this focuses on colleges, but it's true in high schools and other schools too, have quote, disabled students who need, quote, need extra time on the exams.
It's gotten out of control.
Even the Atlantic is calling it an explosion over the past 15 years.
The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.
The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions.
Of course.
Right?
Students, they write, you hear students with disabilities, it's not kids in wheelchairs, one professor at a selective university told the magazine.
It's rich kids getting extra time on tests.
Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions, elite universities have entered an age of accommodation.
Listen to this.
Individual universities.
These are stats from the Harvard Crimson.
Stanford, in 2014, 3% of the student body said they had a disability.
Today, 38%.
I haven't seen that.
Brown, 2014, 10%.
Now 22.
Cornell, 2014, 5%.
Now 22.
Harvard, 2014, 3%.
Now 21.
Yale, 2014, 8%.
Now 20%.
The school with the lowest is MIT.
They had 3% in 2014 and they have 8%.
UC Berkeley, the number has quintupled over the past 15 years.
Amherst, it's at 34%.
At one law school, which they don't name, 45% of the students receive academic accommodations.
And listen to this.
The Americans, it's because of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which passed in 1990, meant to make life fairer for people who have actual disabilities.
And you have to provide a reasonable accommodation.
But now it's been expanded to people who basically have any physical or quote mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity.
And even beyond that, now in 2018, 2008, Congress amended the ADA to restore the definition to include a list of major life activities that could be disrupted by disability, including learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, even if it doesn't severely restrict your daily life.
And now this depression thing, listen to this.
Mental health issues have joined ADHD as the primary driver of the accommodations boom.
The number of young people diagnosed with depression and anxiety has exploded.
Okay, it doesn't need it after the release of the DSM-5, the symptoms need only to interfere with or reduce the quality of academic functioning.
That's all.
Reduce the quality of your academic functioning.
And for this, you get extra time or unlimited time on your exams or papers, or you can get out of homework, or you can get the professor to, quote, not call on you without warning.
That's happening at Carnegie Mellon per the Atlantic.
Ohio State says 36% there have these issues.
You can get extensions on take-home assignments, permission to miss class.
You can get social anxiety disorder.
If you say you have that, you can get a note so you're not called on in class.
And then some get housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional support animals.
One administrator told me, writes the author, that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class.
This became a problem because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.
This is deeply wrong.
And we've all seen it.
You know, as you're reading that and all the stats, and there are all these universities you're talking about, it's occurring to me the real, I mean, this is something we've talked about a bit before, but with this story, the real problem here is the college admission process.
It's so screwed up.
And the parents.
Well, it's the parents' fault and the university because the parents gear everything around the wrong goal.
We're supposed to be preparing these kids for life.
So offering these little cheat codes to get a better grade to get into the college is not preparing you for life.
It's preparing you to get into the college that makes the parent feel good, like Junior got into an Ivy or whatever it is.
And it's ruined not only academics, it's ruined athletics because that's the same thing too.
Athletics used to be about teaching practice equals improvement and teamwork and all of these values that you get from sports.
And in addition to just sort of having a rounded youth, having a rounded youth, that's like the way to get into college in the 70s and 80s.
Now you're not rounded.
You have to be a specialist in one thing.
You have to be the best violinist or the best chess player so you can get into Yale or whatever.
Well-rounded is not valued at all.
And it's the same with these academics.
If someone's like struggling on their SAT or on their math test, if they don't actually have a problem, giving them an extra hour to take it so they can get a little bit better grades, so they can get a little bit better college is backward.
You should be teaching them how are you going to survive in the world.
Right.
When you get out into the law firm or the investment bank or whatever you wind up doing, they're not going to give you extra time in the test.
You've got to perform.
Someone's there.
The client needs this result by 5 p.m., period.
But no one is, no longer is anyone chasing a goal for their kids of how am I going to prepare this person for life?
How are they going to be strong and self-sufficient, provide for themselves?
It's all geared around a college application for an Ivy League school.
Yes.
That is if that degree is your make or break ticket.
That's why they play lacrosse 500 hours a month or squashed or whatever it is.
It's all about college.
It's not about a great experience for my kid or my kid enjoying a rounded life.
It's all, we're all so screwed up with all of this college stuff.
It's really perverted everything.
And this is so unfair because if you have a kid who just studies hard and goes into class and is ready to take the test, they get disadvantaged by this.
They've got a kid with obviously equal abilities.
Yeah, but has a little money.
So they get a doctor's note that says he has this problem.
It's diagnosed.
Right.
We could all get this note very easily and use it to advance our kids' future or get extra time for our kids on their tests.
This is not to disparage those who have genuine disabilities.
There are that few.
Those numbers in 2014 sound real to me, about 3%.
But now it's gone from 3 to 34.
Bullshit.
Those 31% are fucking faking it to get an academic advantage.
And it's a disadvantage for the kids who just work hard and show up and want to color within the lines.
They'll play by the rules.
You have to hope that after college, when Junior with the note went to Cornell and someone else without the note went to Syracuse.
What?
They're going to meet in the workplace one day and who's going to win?
Right.
Oh, see, Doug caught my illness.
Well, Doug caught my illness.
Sort of.
Sort of.
I'll explain what happened.
But let me remind me to explain that in a second.
I really think when I was reading this, I was like, okay, so then when you apply to college, you don't have to put on there that you got the extra time.
The colleges don't get to know.
What?
Yeah, you're not actually allowed to ask and you don't have to put it on there.
So the colleges have no idea who took the SAT in nine hours.
So do they have to resubmit the note when they get to college for the tests?
No.
No.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Of course.
Yes.
But who cares?
By that point, their only goal is to get hired by Goldman Sachs or what have you.
But I think like, what if we just played this out and said, there's no time limit.
There's no time limit on any tests.
Tests are now held like whatever.
If you want to take your history test at your history class, which starts at 1 p.m. and most students have to finish in 40 or 50 minutes, whoever wants to stay for two hours can stay for two hours.
Like, go ahead, all of you.
You'll then have to make up the work that you missed in the classes after that.
Good luck with that.
Like, that's a disadvantage.
That's a you thing.
But like, what if we just said to all students, if you want the extra time, you can have it.
I actually think this could help solve it because this would be like a nightmare for the teachers.
They wouldn't like it.
It would eventually kill itself, right?
This system.
And what would happen to like the kids with the disabilities wouldn't much like all the other kids having all the extra time either?
Yeah, but they can take 10 more hours if everyone's, yeah.
I don't know.
Actually, that would be good.
I kind of, I'm tempted by it.
But so here's what happened with Doug's illness.
As you guys know, I was sick last week.
I still have a hangover on the voice, but I'm fine.
But Doug got it.
Obviously, he's my husband.
So he got it.
But yours was less bad.
Yeah.
And would you like to tell the people how you fought it?
I claim that when I first started feeling something, it starts in the throat.
So as soon as I felt something, I'm like, oh my God, I had a couple of things that were going to be hard to reschedule.
I was like, I really would like not to get sick as I now am.
So I started, I cut a lemon in half and I squeeze it into tea and I took a sauna.
Like every, I've got one.
Thank you, honey.
Yeah, I was going to say you need the water.
And I, and I did that basically every day for like five days.
Took a sauna and squeezed lemon into tea.
Yeah.
And you were taking the Zycam.
The Zycam, yeah, which is like, I don't know, zinc is in there and some other stuff.
Yeah.
And you think it minimized your experience?
So I did get it, but I feel like I got it about 10% the level you had it.
You were really hurting for a while because you lost your voice and I never had it anywhere near what you had it, but I did have it.
You did want to discuss it.
It is amazing.
I don't know if this is a sex thing or what, but I do talk about it more when I'm sick and I'm a little bit of a baby and I want to just like be under the blankets and have someone tell me it's going to be all right.
And meanwhile, Meg, like you've lost your voice, you're taking steroids so you can keep your voice.
And I'm like, you know, I feel a little tickle.
And you're like, would you shut the fuck up?
I said, we don't have to talk about Typhoid Mary over here, but we definitely should not spend too much time talking about that tickle.
That was very funny.
But I am sorry that I got you sick.
Now that you actually have it.
It's all worth it, honey.
Watching our Christmas in Connecticut.
Yeah, we actually fired that up this week for the first time in a year.
It's so fun.
I don't know.
I love everything about it.
I love the way I feel when those Christmas specials are on the TV.
Love.
It's not even like, it's not like a great movie.
You know, it's no, it's actually kind of weird and a few flavors gets the atmosphere going.
Yeah, like she's kind of supposed to be married to this guy and cheating on him, but whatever.
She's not, though.
She's not actually married to the guy.
I just love the feeling.
I love the, first of all, I love the feeling of old movies, right?
It's like a very cool vibe.
And second of all, I love the cinematography with a sleigh ride in that movie.
I love like all the snow outside.
Reminds me of my childhood up in Syracuse, New York.
I miss snow.
I miss tons of snow.
Like I miss where snow is the default as opposed to green and brown in the winter.
Well, brown and brown.
And I just love this season so much.
You know, like these little twinkling lights in the studio.
I'd love to keep these past December, but even I, who am a diehard Christmas fan, can't do it because when Christmas is over, you've got to move on.
Come mid-January, you're just ready for warm weather.
Yeah.
It's enough.
You got to clean it up and move on.
It only comes once a year, which is why you must treasure it for the next X number of days because it comes and it goes.
So what are you getting me for Christmas this year?
Not telling.
We don't really do Christmas presents for each other, is that?
Lately, it's like write a letter.
Yeah.
I love that.
That's an important thing.
And then I'll find a little something.
One year, a couple of years ago, it was either my birthday or Mother's Day.
I don't remember, but you gave me a beautiful letter, which I always love.
That's really what I want every year.
And a little dumb pillow.
It wasn't even that nice.
It was from CVS.
No, it was a CVS pillow, like a shamrock.
I'm like, what is it?
Sometimes they acquire some nice merchandise.
It doesn't go anywhere.
It was cute.
It was a little shamrock.
It was like a statement pillow.
Like, the house has been decorated by somebody who knows what he's doing.
He will not approve.
Yeah.
It was the thought of that count.
I really loved it.
Yeah.
By the way, so I know you had Elliot Ackerman on early this week and you were discussing my lack of faction, which I cannot deny.
Fashion, your observations there on my fashion, but I was bleeding edge on the quarter zip, which apparently is the thing now.
Totally.
You were Black Diamond Sexy before it was popular.
Totally.
We will find the episode with a fifth column to explain to the audience what that means.
Although the diehard fans at the Megan Kelly show already know you're black diamond sexy and how you're the saboteur.