Justice Antonin Scalia once tried to fire Malcolm Gladwell

During a keynote speech, Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner challenged best-selling journalist Malcolm Gladwell to reveal something about himself that most people don't know.

Both are speaking this week at the Qualtrics Insights tech conference in Salt Lake City.

So Gladwell complied and told the audience that he was once an intern for Justice Antonin Scalia and it didn't go well. Scalia tried to fire him.

But it wasn't over something like a disagreement over political points of view that ticked off the famous conservative judge.

The problem was, "I proof read one of his articles and there was like 10 spelling errors when I was finished," Gladwell confessed. Gladwell admitted that Scalia was kind of right in his inclination to get rid of him.

When Dubner asked Gladwell what he learned from that experience, he quipped. "I learned to be a litle more careful when proof reading."