The Dispatch Podcast - Life and Loss | Roundtable

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Megan McArdle joins Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and Mike Warren to tell the story of her mother’s deathbed confession and how it informed her opinions on abortion. Then, a brief discussion on the failed redistricting attempt in Indiana and a reflection on Rob Reiner's filmography. The Agenda:—Megan’s Monday Essay: The Brother I Lost—Megan’s thought experiment on abortion—Childhood and regrets—Do the dead have rights?—Emotional toll of adoption—Redistricting in Indiana—Favorite Rob Reiner movies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of The Dispatch podcast is brought to you by Pacific Legal Foundation. Since they were founded in 1973, PLF has won 18 Supreme Court cases defending the rights of ordinary Americans from government overreach nationwide, including landmark environmental law cases like Sackett v. EPA. Now, PLF is doubling down and launching a new environment and natural resources practice. They're on a mission to make more of America's land and resources available for productive use and to make sure freedom drives our environmental and natural resource policy, not fear. To learn more, visit pacificlegal.org slash flagship.

Canada's Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back with Canada's kindest community, celebrating acts of kindness nationwide, with a chance at 100,000 donation for the winning community and a 2026 holiday caravan stop. Learn more at Canada's Wonderland.com. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we talked with Megan McArdle about her Monday essay for the dispatch, about life and death and everything in between. Then we move to a brief discussion of the Indiana Republicans defying Donald Trump.

And finally, some thoughts on Rob Reiner and his best movies. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues Michael Warren and Jonah Goldberg and the aforementioned Megan McArdle, a dispatch contributor with the Washington Post. Welcome, everyone. And a special welcome to you, Megan. We are very pleased to have published your first Monday essay this morning and wanted to take some time to talk about it. I have now read it three different times. I sort of find something new every time I read it and very interested in learning more by having a conversation with you about it. I think the best place to start is probably, at the beginning. What's the story that you tell in this essay? And then as a second part of that, why did you decide to tell it? So my mother died two years ago, and we did not expect her to die. She had COPD from lifetime of smoking. And she, but she was not imminently on the verge of death, but she went into the emergency room for, of all things, a sore foot. While she was there, she developed delirium.

They thought maybe she'd had a stroke. We would later realize that what was happening was that she, because her lungs could not efficiently expel carbon dioxide and because they had her on high flow oxygen, what was happening was that the CO2 was building up in her blood. We didn't know that, and the doctors didn't pick it up. And so there was a six-week brutal illness in which, you know, they released her from the hospital. She went to a nursing home.

We kept expecting her to get better, but she kept thinking she was dying because she would be in and out of delirium. It was pretty grueling. And so my sister and my aunt and I took shifts keeping vigil at her bed because the CO2, one of the effects of CO2 is that it makes you extremely anxious. And so she, I would like wake up in the mornings. I kept trying to push it earlier and earlier so he'd get to work. Of course, I didn't know she was dying. If I'd known she was dying, I would have just stop working and like taking care of her. But it turned out the nursing home only opened at 8 a.m.

So I couldn't get there earlier. And then, you know, I'd sit there for a few hours. Then I'd go to work. My sister would come. My aunt would be there. About a week before she died, I was there. And she, it was a Saturday. and she was actually doing a little better, and she started talking about all her regrets.

My mother had always said she should have been a better mother. This is totally ridiculous. I'd like literally the best mother in the entire world. I may be slightly biased on this point, but she was just amazing. She took amazing care of us, even when she was working full time. Every night she was home, she made us a home-cooked meal. But she started talking about, you know, I should have known that your third grade class was bullying you. I have no idea how she thinks she should have known that.

I certainly wasn't going to tell her. And then she talked about how I flunked out of high school and college. It was like, mom, again, not your fault. Really? Like, that one's on me. And then she talked about her, you know, some of her own youth. I knew she had flunked out of college when she was a freshman. She was terribly homesick.

She had randomly decided to go to Bucknell because it looked like the small farm town she was from. she didn't like it um i mean it's a beautiful campus it is a beautiful campus that's really my mother got into radcliffe and she went to bucknell because she didn't she was from a little farm town she had no idea where redcliff was and she didn't she didn't understand what that meant to go to radcliffe right anyway so we are talking and she's talking about her marriage to my father which failed uh in a very long kind of prototypically New York. Jonah will be familiar with the phrase Manhattan divorce where you can't afford to live separately. You just keep living together. And then, you know, and I'm just saying, I go, Mom, you know,

it's not your fault. Like, this is, like, you were young. You were, um. And can I just, can I just ask, was this a common thing for, did she do this over the course of years, or was this more in the moment? No, not she, I mean, she did actually, she would actually, frequently say she should have been a better mother. And I would always be like, Mother, I literally, I have no regrets. I could not. There's nothing I wish from you. As a mother, you were perfect. And that's genuinely how I felt. I mean, like, look, when I was a teenager, when I was young, I had various resentments about things. But I think as you get older, you see your parents as human beings who are struggling, right? And it's hard. And I'm told that that often happens when you have kids. kids, which I didn't. But by the time I was in my 40s, certainly, I just thought, like, let it go. Because everything that I was mad about was so petty. And so dumb. My parents were great parents. They did their best. They just did their best all the time. So then she said, you know, but I could have done so much better. And she said, you know, the wild child, the unwed mother. And I

was like, whoa! And at first I thought she was, I mean, there's like a brief moment where I'm like, what do you mean on one mother? This is, she's just saying words, right? And then I was like, you're serious. And she nodded and she looked so vulnerable and sad. And then she started telling me the story about how after she lunged out of college, she came home and she worked at the state school for the mentally retarded for a year, which was in my mother's hometown. And her boyfriend from high school was home for Christmas, I would imagine. Or he was in Albany for some reason. She went and met him in Albany.

A few months later, she realized she was pregnant. And he abandoned her. And like, I literally, people say the words murderous rage, and it just seems like a figure of speech. I have never wanted to hurt another human being, not even for an instant. I'm never like, I'm fighting with some customer service person or whatever.

I have never wanted to hurt someone. And in that moment, because she looked, she looked just like she must have looked when he left her. I mean, she was, she said he was the love of her life. This guy, I just. And this was all new. to you? This was all new. I had no idea. Although, funnily enough, when I was young, I was convinced I had an older brother. I used to call him Tom, and it really kills me now, because I think

it must have just wrenched her heart every time I said it. And I finally said, well, what happened to the baby? And she said, I don't know. All I know is that they named him David, and the nurses at the hospital said he was the most beautiful baby they'd ever seen. And that was, I understood, I now understood a bunch of stuff. First of all, I understood why I was almost born in a cab because the obstetrician told my mother when she wanted to labor, oh, you know, take your time. Because first babies take a long time to come.

First babies take a while, right? And I also understood that this had contributed to the failure of my parents' marriage. I don't think that that was the only thing. They were both in their own ways. very stubborn, very, you know, marriage, making a good marriage, I don't know, maybe it's different for other married people. It requires you to give up stuff that you think is just the right way to do things. It requires you to be extremely flexible with another person's ideas about what the world's supposed to look like and what your marriage is supposed to look

at, right? And I think that they just never found that. They never found the space where they could make a compromise, I don't really remember them being happy together. I remember when the memory I have is like, I have two memories of my parents being happy together. One of them is me walking down the street. And Jonah, I think, will also know this. You walk down in the a common thing to do when I was growing up when you'd walk down the street with a kid, you'd have would have one hand in each parent's hand. And every time you got to a crack in the sidewalk, you lift the child up over the sidewalk. And I remember my mother being pregnant with my sister

and leaning up against the stove and talking to my dad. But really, that's about it. I do not remember them being happy together. And I guess at some point she told him. And she thought that he never forgave her for that. But the other thing that I understood was why my mother was so vehemently pro-choice. I mean, look, she's like a Manhattan woman, pretty normal in my milieu.

But my sister, after college, and she wants me to clarify that she did not stay in this group or stay pro-life, but she briefly joined New York State Right to Life. And I was off to grad school, so I was living at home. And New York State Right to Life, she didn't tell my mother about this. Very wisely did not tell my mother about this. And because my mother was not, I'm making my mother sound like difficult. She was not actually a difficult person. She was fierce. She was fierce.

I remember my grandfather had a gas station in his little town, and he beat the hell out of a, when he was 70, he beat the hell out of a young man who tried to rob his gas station. He'd always told his guy, just give him the money, it's not worth your life. Well, my grandfather leapt straight over the counter, and by the time the cops got there, this guy was begging them to pull my grandfather off. And he got written up in the local papers as a kind of geriatric wonder. and he had hoped to hide it from my mother, which is crazy because my aunt lived in the same town. But I remember Christmas. She was just, Dad, how could you do that? So, like, so irresponsible.

Well, someone snatched her purse. Again, a young kind of strong man. My mom, in high heels, on her way to a showing, she was a real estate broker, chases him down the street into an alley, grabs him, throws him up against the wall, shouts to onlookers to call the police. And when no one does, she just, like, grabs her purse and top. off to her appointment. But she was, I mean, she was also, like, warm and generous. All my friends liked her better than me, which very fair. Did she know, did your sister know when she joined New York Right to Life that your mom was,

this was a known thing? Oh, yeah, this was a known thing in our family. This was an act of rebellion, perhaps. This was an act, yeah, I think it was a little active rebellion, but she, I mean, in very kind of typical wasps. Irish Catholic way. Don't tell anyone about your rebellion. Just quietly do it.

And so New York State right to life calls the house and says, is Nora there? And I'm standing in the kitchen and she says, she's not here. Can I take a message? And they're like, well, this is New York State Right to Life. And I can't hear what they're saying, but I am watching my mother's face turn from her like early morning, drinking coffee, a little sleepy. And like she's getting totally horrified. And she finally says, no one in this house would ever belong to an organization like yours. Do not call here again.

It slams down the phone. Very atypical for my mother. And she actually managed to convince herself that this had somehow happened by accident. They'd just like gotten Nora's name somewhere. And so I now understood why that was. And I had always stayed out of it. Like my, as I said in the essay, I have always had to complete. incomparable convictions. And one is that women should have the right to decide what happens

to their body and when they become a mother. And the other is that the life insider should get the same shot as the rest of us at life, liberty, and their pursuit of happiness. And so I just kind of resolve this by being like, I don't know, it's a hard question. Even when I joined the Catholic Church as an adult, I accept the teaching about abortion on faith, but it was not my fight And it is not a, it was not a visceral personal conviction. It was just, okay, well, that's the teaching. I joined. I accept that.

And so now I understood my brother existed. I sort of went back to that. And I tried, and I had to actually really think about it. And there was this thought experiment that I've talked about for years. I think I made it up. ChatGBTGBT does not gain say me, which does not mean that it is not found. out there. But it's this. It's like if you saw a really struggling single mother with a toddler and you understood that her, you know, all her dreams for her future had been wrecked and she is

at the edge of her rope and she is, you know, her dating life is not great as the dating life of single mothers often isn't, that she is like kind of facing the future with bleak despair and someone gave you a button was just like, press that button and the toddler will just disappear. No pain, no, it just won't be there. She'll be in med school, like she planned to go. She will be dating a great guy who's, you know, good husband and father potential, good doctor potential. Do you press that button? I think most of us, if we could see the toddler, would not press the button.

And I think that an important part of abortion is the invisibility. The only people who see the corpse are a specialized class of practitioners who are hardened to that site. The rest of us never do. We don't see the pregnancy. In the same way that my mother gave birth in a home for unwed mothers. And I should finish this story by saying. So as soon as she told me, at that point I was trying to find my mother something to live for. I was interested in the fact that I had a brother, but I really wanted my mother to have something to look forward to.

because she was sick and scared and talking, saying that she was going to die. And so I went off and I was like, you know, I downloaded the forms from the New York State Adoption Registry, which is a matching system. If both parties apply, they will match the people share the information. And when I visited her every day, I'd be like, Mom, don't you want to see my brother? You got to get better. You've got to do your physical therapy. Then she died. and I came home from the hospital after we stayed with her while she was dying.

We did not expect her to die until basically, we knew it was dicey in the last like 18 hours, but until I had basically said, no, like, we're done, just make her comfortable. That was, we didn't know she was going to die. And so we spent 24 hours by her bedside, my sister and I, the hospital, was great. Sibli, if you're going to die, die in Sibley. They were, they, you know, they took really good care of us at the ICU. And I came home and there was a letter in my mailbox saying that my brother had died. And that because he was dead, he had contacted the registry. So he did want to be reunited with my family or at least to meet us or, you know. And that because he was

dead, he couldn't renew his consent. And so they couldn't tell us anything about him. And it haunts me that he lived a life. I don't know when he died. I don't even actually really know when he was born. I have a guess. I think he was born in 1964. But I'm not sure. And it haunts me that I don't know anything about him.

I don't even know what his birth, you know, like I don't know what name his parents gave him, his adoptive parents. I don't know how he died. I don't know if he had a good life or a bad life. He doesn't, as far as we can tell, have children. Or at least he does not have children who have given their DNA to 23 and me because my sister did in the hopes that we would get a match. And the only matches we got were people we already knew we were related to. And so he is in this weird way like this toddler.

Like one of the great pro-choice rebuttals to pro-lifers is, like, this is just a potential child. It doesn't feel pain yet. We can argue about that, but that is their argument. They believe it. It just, it doesn't have consciousness. There are zillions of potential children. Every time you're like, I'm too tired tonight. Okay, as long as you're at reproductive age, right, there goes another potential child. And so their argument is you should not care morally about the status of the life that is erased. But because my brother was born before Roe v. Wade, he is in that weird Schrodinger space. A lot of people have talked about this. One of the problems with this is that it turns the fetus into a kind of Schrodinger's person, where if the mother

wants it, it's a person, and if the mother doesn't, it's not. But my brother existed in this weird space where he did exist, and yet he is still invisible to me. I cannot see him, and it makes me crazy. And, you know, I was, I didn't grieve him the same way. I grieved my mother. But grieving him was in some ways part of grieving my mother. I mean, when she told me, I went home that night and I cried for four hours. You know, like I was, because it was already grueling.

And my husband made me a drink and I just sat there and sobbed about her suffering. And how it was, I then understood that that had changed her forever. Because my grandfather was such a good man. not perfect no human beings are right like he was uh he was too ferociously energetic to be home all every night like my grandmother wanted my grandmother wanted like a cozy fireside my grandfather would go don't till dusk and when you even went literally when he was dying of prostate cancer that a metastasized to his bones we went up for a final christmas which was a great christmas made him a suckling pig um but i we walk in we've got the suckling pig that we brought from new york

and my grandfather said, walks in. He had just been playing Santa for two hours. He's 88 years old. He is dying of cancer. He'd just been doing the Salvation Army Santa for two hours at a Rochester mall in 18 degrees. And we sat down, you're like, and he starts to say, Grace. He says, you know, it just reminds me, we could all do so much more than we do. And I was like, Grandpa, I actually think you might have maxed it. You're doing it. You're doing it. But he was a wonderful man, and he was kind and generous and honorable. And she said, I could never have pictured that a man would do that, that a man I loved would do that. Speaking of the father of the child who left. Yeah, that he left. And even then she defended him. She said it was his mother. And I was like, Mom, I'm going to chalk this guy down and kill him.

Like, or at least, I don't know, I'm going to hobble one of the wheels on his wheelchall, on his walker, right? Like, it's just. And what, if I can jump in, what was it about that whole experience? I mean, you can imagine sort of the collective experience being traumatic, but was it that sense of abandonment, the disillusion that she felt about men? Was it the not knowing what happened to her child? Did she talk about that with you? A lot, I think it was like, it affected her marriage. It affected the rest of her life.

And I think partly it's that my father, they were just not well suited. They were both good people independently and together. They were just very not well suited for each other. And I understand what each of them wanted in the other person. But they, I think, didn't understand that or didn't want that to be what they was wanted from them in some way. And so, you know, I think she turned to my father because my father was stable. He was not emotionally expressive. He was not wild, you know.

And her boyfriend had been a little wild. He, like, he had a fast car. Apparently, all the teachers in high school used to pick on her. Not all of them, but some of them used to pick on her because, you know, she had a, she was 16. She was really smart. She would do her homework, standing up against a locker, get aza on all the tests, you know, was basically just denied the mathematics and Latin prize

at her school because the teachers thought it was like you should not get a prize for doing his little work and going out at all hours with your boyfriend in a cool convertible and you know she was a national merit scholar she was but she was also from a small town and she did not

understand what any of that meant or what it could have opened to her and I think my father was not like that guy and that that at that moment seemed necessary but over time became an issue in a lot of ways. And similarly, I think for my father, you know, what he wanted was the warmth and light of my mother's family.

And to find out even while your marriage is already failing that you were kind of like the rebound choice for someone who abandoned you, I think must have been really difficult. and I just think it's a tragedy and I think it's a tragedy for I mean like I can't regret that I exist I can't regret that my sister exists but some days I regret no my sister's great

it's really terrible I have no complaints about my sister I should I should develop some I was talking about regretting you exist like oh well no that's fair that's fair yeah Yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't, I think, I don't think she regretted giving him up. She could not have raised him in 1964. Right, that would have been insane. Right. Like, the jobs available to a single mother, she, she lived in a small town where everyone would have known, right? There was no, I just think it would, it, it, he had to be given up. So I don't think that that part scarred her. I think the whole process.

guard her. The whole process of having her life ripped apart, you know, I mean, she had to take a year out and go to Buffalo, or six months or whatever it was, and go to Buffalo. She had a secret she couldn't tell anyone. It just changed her in a way that was terrible. And I, you know, I saw that. I sort of understood when she told me the story that that had always been there. Can I ask about the most affecting part of your piece to me, which I It was, I told you before we started, Megan, it was just, it's a beautiful piece of writing. And it made me emotional many times, the most affecting part to me of your story is the idea that you sort of toss off. And I don't know how seriously you took it, but the idea that you had this knowledge or feeling that maybe you did have an older brother, maybe you view that as sort of childhood.

you know, the childhood whimsy, right? Everybody sort of has imaginary friends and that sort of thing. I'm wondering, how real do you think that that feeling was? I can't explain it. It felt very strong. I was very intent on it. And I can't explain it. I really can't explain why I should have decided I had an older brother. And I would say, like, as I got older, I would say, like, I was wanted an older brother, right? It turned out I had. an older brother. Right. I guess I don't think that that kind of knowledge can be transmitted through the womb. I don't know. I really, I can't explain it. Except me, she never told anyone. She did, like my aunt Annie, who was 11 years younger than her, would have been quite young when this happened, didn't even really know.

Yeah. It just, it raises a mystery that was, when I read it was, I could feel both the pain and just, there was a beauty. in that in that as well and um i mean i just recommend listeners read it read this piece multiple times because like steve said at the beginning you pick up new things as you as you read it so um it's just a beautiful piece thank you so i agree it's it's really wonderful piece i will also be brutally honest and say i'll never read it again um uh and i don't not because it's not not because it's bad because it's great. I'm pleased if people read me once. I know. Well, that's also what we got. But like, when I, when I talk to Steve on Friday, we had a long agenda of things to talk about. One of them was doing this podcast and whether I should be on. And I said, well, look, I only read like the first few paragraphs of Megan's thing so far because I was on deadline myself. But of course, I'll read it over the weekend. And I just thought it was, you know, a philosophical meditation on abortion. And then so then, you know, I read the whole. thing and it um it conjures a lot of stuff with my own mom which we're not going to get into

um not the similar same story but death ped conversations and stories from her early life and all these things and um and i i also lost a brother different circumstances and um yes my concern about doing this with me mike and steve was Oh, great. Megan's first Monday essay is going to be about abortion. And we're going to have the panel of patriarchs greeting her. And it's like, maybe we didn't think this completely through. And then, of course, I read the thing. And it's a completely different thing. And it raises all sorts of, again, stuff we don't need to dive into because this isn't about me. And I don't want to talk about it. But I will say that the thing I like best about it. is the so i have one of the one of my arguments about at a sort of metaphysical level what is conservatism and one of the arguments have made for many years is that it's a certain amount of comfort with contradiction it's this understanding that um the universe is messy that life is messy that sometimes good things can be intention um that there can be there can be positive

things about horrible stuff, and there can be horrible things about positive stuff. I often tell my daughter, you know, the hardest decision to make in life is between two good things or two bad things, because it's really easy to make a decision between a really good thing and a really bad thing. It's only hard when the outcomes are potentially equally bad or equally good, right? And take the lemon meringue pie, not the meat ice cream. But when you've got lemon meringue pie and a cherry turnover, things get difficult. Right.

I'm very much with you on this. First of all of this stuff, James Kirk, notwithstanding, these are all Kobayashi Maroos that are unwinnable scenarios. They are not. And the idea that nature is itself unfair, I think is a really profoundly important point to communicate to people that in many ways nature sucks. And the whole point of civilization,

is to get our arms around it rather than to embrace it. Like the life of the noble savage is short, nasty, brutal, and short. And, you know, you don't use the trolley problem, but it's sort of, that's part of what you're getting at here is this, how do you decide which life is of value? And, again, it's an impossible question. It's like, how do you make a round circle? I mean, how do you make a round square?

It's just like, you can't be done, right? And how do you make a round square? circles an easy answer um yeah uh and but i also think about the vampire problem right that's that this l-a paul this philosopher she proposes this hypothetical about what do you about becoming a vampire right all vampires like being vampires but if you propose to someone hey look you can live forever but you can only really be awake at night and you can't really have a nice meal anymore you just have to drink blood, you'll be super strong, but, you know, you'll be indifferent to your existing friends and family. Would you do it? And you say, no. But then once you do it, you're like,

I'm not going back. And this is, this is Russ Roberts' whole thing about wild problems. And you don't have any answers because, and you just have to sort of be comfortable with the fact that there are no obvious answers. I do think, and I'll stop rambling, but I do think philosophically, that is not necessarily, because life is hard and reality is complicated, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have clear rules, right? I mean, if we took this out of the realm of some of the most personal things imaginable, and we talked about it in terms of markets, we get a lot more nodding heads about simple rules for complex society, right? And they're going to be edge cases and complicated cases and exceptions to the rule and figuring out what those are and when they're justified to make the exceptions is really, really, really hard.

But that isn't an excuse to throw your hands up and say it's all too complex for us to have any answers or any rules of any kind. and I'm not here to propose what rules I'm to have in mind, but like it drives, it drove, it drove my very pro-life friends. You know, I was at National Review for 20 years. I have very, very pro-life friends, dear friend, super pro-life, super dear friends. Yeah. And when I would say I am most- They want to protect the gleam in dad's eye. Yeah, and I would say I am mostly pro-life.

And they would say, that's ridiculous. It's a binary. And I would say, well, not in my gut. Like, I will tell you, like, I mean, there's a reason why conservatives focus on partial birth abortion in the ninth month. Because it's such a glaringly obvious moral hypothetical that it infuriates people. It galvanizes the people on the margins towards their position. But if you start talking about a blastocyst, it does not arouse the same moral indignation and moral outrage. for most people

I know people for whom it definitely does and so the thing is it's that spectrum it's that part in the middle about when do you get do you muster the moral outrage of partial birth abortion

in the ninth in the third trimester and when do you muster the I don't like this but a clump of cells without a central nervous system isn't the same thing as even a three-month-old fetus.

And it sucks to have the argument. I hate having the argument. I try not to have the argument. My wife was trained by Jesuits, so I really don't like to have that argument at home. But part of the point of the point of the essay is that it's not ultimately answerable purely through reason because nature is messy and unfair.

And I like that about it. Yeah, and the reason I wanted to write this this was a hard thing to write and of course I wanted to you know you always have to hesitate when you were airing family secrets

I checked with my sister and my aunt before I did this is that I think we're bad at talking about the mess and that what we like to do is you know pro choicers again just kind of devalue the potential life entirely

but like if my brother had been aborted whatever he did with his life, just think of how much, just think of how much you experienced this morning, right? You're driving, you're listening to some music, you're whatever it is, you're enjoying a warm coffee, you're looking at your spouse who you love and have been married to forever, or in my case, 15 years, which doesn't feel like forever. It feels like but a moment. You know he's listening, huh? But there are moments that feel like forever. But then you think about all, like, and there's bad stuff too, right?

But you think about the immense joys, the immense experience, you think about everything you've had in your life. And your abortion erases that for someone. And I, like, I often say that when someone dies, an entire universe dies, right? Because each of us is, in some sense, self-contained, we perceive the universe in a way that no one else does. and all of that goes away. Or if you believe, at least it leaves this world.

It is no longer available in this world. And so you take that universe away. And I think that it is an immense moral act, but it's a complicated moral act. I look at because I think that lifers often, they downplay how much damage. My mother put the baby up for adoption. Like in some theory, right,

she just went on with her life. she didn't just go on with her life and that they people really I think downplay the moral and emotional trauma of adoption they because a lot of I was really surprised to learn that a significant number of women say they are having an abortion

because they couldn't put the baby up for adoption if they had it and that seems on its face crazy to me right you're saying this thing is so precious that I could never let it go, so I have to kill it. But in fact, like, I talked to a friend who worked at a pregnancy crisis center, and she said, like, first of all, a lot of these women, this tends to be poor women, and they know people who have had experience in the foster care system.

And they may not be aware that to a first approximation, any infant that is born in the United States can be adopted to a very good family. There are so few adoptions and so many parents who want to adopt. there are somewhere it's in the low tens of thousands of infant adoptions in this country the demand is much higher than that which is why people were going abroad until you know orphanages abroad cracked down on that and so they may not be aware of that they may be picturing something that wouldn't happen most of the kids in foster care tend to either be sick they are parts of large groups of kids their parents still have parental rights and haven't terminated them yet there are all sorts of reasons, they're older, there are reasons that they don't get adopted,

but infants can always be adopted. But it's still traumatic. It's not like nothing happened. It changes you forever. And abortion is probably, if we're honest, closer to it doesn't change you forever, which is not to say it doesn't change you. I was talking to a pro-choice activist of Mike Wynes. And she said, she was telling me about another activist who had an abortion, believe she

did the right thing, and every day on the baby's birthday, she gets kind of sad and has a kind of day of it. And that's the reality that what I wanted to do was not say, like, you should be pro-choice or you should be pro-life, because I think that we have a lot of those conversations, they don't go anywhere. What I wanted to do was show people me wrestling with these realities and dilemmas, and invite them to wrestle with them, because I do think that one thing that has happened in this country, right, is that we've hardened into two polls. Both polls are incredibly intransigent. They are, this is the way, this is the only way. And look, even if I, I think, you know, Kevin Williamson has said this, is like, even if your vision is that we should ban all

abortions, or even if your vision is it should be legal right up to the point where the doctor says it's a boy, you would probably rather compromise than have the other guys make the rules. But because we're in this terrible space of it's, you know, all or nothing, it's binary. I think we have had a very bad 50 years politically on this. I was glad when Roe was overturned. It came into existence the same year I did. And I thought, I think, it deformed our politics, but I also think it deformed the abortion debate. Like, we have to, as a society, wrestle with the messiness and stop thinking that there is some way you can make this fair or easy because there is no way to make it fair or easy. All right, we're going to take a

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when network is busy. Capable device required, availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. Before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere here at the dispatch. batch. This week on The Remnant, Ambassador Rahm Emanuel joins Jonah to discuss the wonders of Japan, income inequality, and Rom's case for banning social media for America's youth. Search for the Remnant in your podcast app and hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. I think the thing that I reflected on most, on both my first reading and then subsequent readings, obviously born of my own experience. So my dad has been an adoption. attorney for, I mean, he was for his and almost all of his professional career. And so my growing up was hearing stories at the dinner table about the families he was bringing together and the tremendous joy that that brought these families and these people. And I, Megan, I'm listening to

you talk about, you know, the existence of your brother and the life that he may have had. And what that means to him, and my immediate thought goes to what that might have meant, we don't know, of course, to his adoptive family. I mean, did he bring them joy? I hope they saw that beautiful baby. Yeah. And it was the happiest day of their life. And I hope he had a wonderful childhood. Yeah. And I thought I was going to get through this podcast without crying. I mean, that has to be part of the difficulty, I think. Obviously for you, but also for your mother. It's just the not knowing and, you know, trying to reach out and get some answers to that as you did can be fraught, right?

I mean, you don't know, and you don't know that he would have wanted to. I am so angry that the state of New York won't let me find out about him. I don't understand. I mean, look, I don't think the dead have rights. I think we should honor their wishes. There are good reasons for various. things. But I don't understand who it could hurt to let me find out my brother's name and when he died. He wanted to know us. He did contact the registry. That was his declared choice. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's just like, I don't, I don't get it. Like, it's not, what could it possibly hurt for me to know my brother's name? Unless I, the state, I mean, the only thing I could come up with is that the state is protecting the privacy of his adoptive family and potentially, I mean, they may have secrets. Maybe it was not known that he was adopted. Maybe the family doesn't. Maybe there are things that that family wouldn't want people to know that could cause them problems.

It's more of the mess. But it was very valuable for me to read this and spend time on the, you know, not that I hadn't thought of it. Of course, you think about this. as we hear these. And of course, not all of the stories that we heard my dad tell over the years had happy endings either. I mean, some of them, you know, he had children who were given up for adoption and lived with the adoptive family for years and then were taken back. And those were just gut-wrenching horrible cases. But, you know, in so many cases when my dad was a

birthday maybe five years ago. My brother had reached out to some of these families through people that my dad worked with. And we got stories of what had happened with those newly created families and the difference that my dad made in their lives. And just one after another after another of sort of moments of joy created from what must have been true despair and difficulty. But it was very helpful for me to spend time thinking about it from the opposite point of view. Well, and vice versa, because it was actually very helpful for you to say that and for me to think about it from the point of view of parents who I assume. loved my brother.

And I'm glad that he was loved by people who wanted him and could give him a good life. Not to, not to, because again, I am walking on a precipice talking about some of the stuff, but not to drag it into public policy, but I would just want to put a pin in the idea. I'm not saying I disagree, I'm not saying I agree, just want to put a pin in the idea that we should hold for further conversation, this claim of yours that the death, that the dead don't have rights. I am not entirely sure I agree with that. But not, and I agree with you entirely on the prudential policy matter.

Like, you should be able to find out this stuff. I agree with that. But, like, as a blanket statement, we should, we should talk about this on another podcast. Yeah. I have, I have some non-standard opinions for a libertarian on this matter. I was saying, like, like my, I am not a libertarian, but I have, Like Tarzan wasn't a great ape, but he lived amongst them for so long he could speak their language, and he knew when there was something bothering them. And when a libertarian says, when any libertarian says, blank don't have rights, I'm like, huh, all right, we need to discuss this further.

So to be continued when you come on the remnant. Well, what's really great about that is I spent. a good part of this weekend fretting about how we were going to transition from the conversation we just had into more standard dispatch podcast fair, including waking up at 5.30 in the morning and not understanding. But Jonah, thank you for introducing that point because it allows us to put a pin in it, as you say, and touch briefly upon some news that happened last week before we end with a short not worth your time. I did want to just spend a moment.

There was a lot that happened over the weekend, a lot that we could have talked about, including the horrific anti-Semitic attacks in Australia. There was a shooting at Brown University where a person of interest was taken into custody, and law enforcement in some ways celebrated this, and then that person has been released because the investigation has gone in a different direction.

But I wanted to spend a moment on what we saw last week coming out of Indiana. There has been this pitched battle about redistricting in Indiana. The Trump administration, the White House, all sorts of outside MAGA groups put tremendous pressure on Republicans in the Indiana Senate to pass a redistricting plan that would be advantageous for Republicans heading into 2026. And beyond, and the pressure included, apparently, according to, I believe it was the lieutenant governor of Indiana, threats to withhold federal funding for Indiana for things like highways and other things if the senators, the Republican senators, didn't support this new redistricting plan. And in spite of all of that pressure, they did not support the plan and had various reasons for opposing it, but opposed it nonetheless. And I guess I'll start with you, Mike, for any thoughts you have on both sort of what that means in terms of redistricting for 2026, what it means in terms of Republican politics, if anything, and what it means that, you know, the size of. group of a majority of Republicans in the state Senate in Indiana, if I'm not mistaken, opposed this, which is not something we have grown accustomed to seeing from Republican

elected officials defying Donald Trump. You know, I was, I think I said this to you, Steve, when it happened that it was incredible because as these state senators in Indiana, these Republican, 21 in the state Senate, 21 Republican senators rejected this. This was not a small rump that, you know, joined with, you know, a Democratic minority to get a bare, you know, majority. It was significant and it was, it was a big part of that conference. At the same time that they were rejecting this, you had members of Congress, you had the Republican governor of Indiana, who was a former senator during the first Trump administration, former U.S. senator from Indiana. You know, castigating the senators saying this is a bad decision, you know, where, you know, this was, people, these Republicans have, you know, have rejected what, you know, the great and powerful Trump has deemed should be, should be the law, the new redistricting. And it just showed me, first of all, that just the hold that Donald Trump has on his party nationally or federally in the federal government. is not necessarily the case in among these states. So that's the first, that was my first thought.

The second thought I had was I talked with someone in the last couple of weeks who knows one of the state senators. I won't reveal too much to demonstrate who that is. But this person reminded me that these state senators are part-time, you know, legislators. A lot of state legislators are part-time legislators. They have regular jobs. In a way, they are much more connected to their voters and to their communities. This is also not their entire existence.

And so they're not so easily cowed always into doing the things that the sort of political establishment, and Donald Trump is the political establishment in the Republican Party, that the political establishment wants the importance that Donald Trump and his allies were insisting that this totally irregular mid-decade redistricting had to be done in Indiana. If you listen to the state senators who voted against this, they said, our voters didn't want this. They made it very clear they didn't want this. And, you know, it would have been wrong by the rules official and unofficial that these states have set up to do this mid-decade redistricting. And that would have been reason enough for them to reject it, but the fact that the voters were not on board, I think speaks a lot to how irregular this was.

And it reminds me of the backlash to Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which also, I think, struck, if you look at the polling on that question over the next several months, it struck a lot of regular voters and regular people as cheating. It's not right. It's not fair. and I think they saw this the same way. The last point I'll make is the threats backfired incredibly. I mean, you had, there was the one state senator who was a grandmother who said her grandson had been getting text messages saying, your grandmother needs to do this. It's a problem, all these things.

Like, there is no political upside to threatening the grandchildren of state senators part-time. legislators to get what you want. I think it's a big capital M moment for the Republican Party and for the sort of the health of our civic life in the second Trump administration. It was a significant rejection, and we can't sort of understate that. Sorry, we can't overstate that, is what I meant to say. We've seen other instances where that kind of bullying and those kinds of threats have been effective, sometimes in public and other times, I think many more times in private, the one that comes to mind was Senator Joni Ernst, who had raised questions about Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth and immediately was besieged by not only criticism, but real threats.

I mean, you had some of these sort of mega media types, writing, sort of threatening. hit pieces on her staff, on her senior staff. There were questions about, there were shots taken at Senator John Thune when he was made majority leader by, again, MAGA media, these outside political groups, going after his kids. Yeah, we've seen this and it's worked.

I think you hit on something, Mike, about this being these state senators living in the communities, having other jobs, having a life beyond politics, and that may be part of the explanation here. Megan, to you next, is this something that we could see set an example for others or are the circumstances so unique that this is likely closer to a one-off? So here is what I think a lot about, which is Timmer Koran's great book, Private Truths, Public Lies. It is a book on what he calls preference falsification. And one of the things he lays in, you know, you could certainly see this in cancel culture,

right, is all of these people who were just huddled, afraid, mouthing things that didn't really believe. And the thing about those private truths, now there's always some of those, right? You don't tell everyone exactly what you think of the attractiveness or behavior of their offspring. spring. But there is, when it's a big truth, something like communism. So why are communist regimes so oppressive? The reason is that as long as you keep those truths private, it can be, the regime can keep going, right? Because no one else knows. If they're too afraid to talk to anyone else, no one else knows that everyone else is unhappy. But they're also fragile because

they're vulnerable to what he calls a preference cascade, where as people become aware that other people agree with them, you can switch from one belief system to another completely different belief system very quickly. And you saw this in the late 80s in Poland, for example, where, like, as solidarity gets more powerful, suddenly everyone understands that everyone's unhappy with the regime. I think you also saw this with sort of trans issues in the United States. where I wrote a feature on Leah Thomas in 2022. And if you had read, she was the Penn Swimmer who had swum as a man and then switched and was swimming for the women's team in her senior year.

And if you had like read the media accounts, what you would have thought was, well, there's a few bigots who are against this. But a decent, you know, good people who are not LGBT-phobic. They all agree with this. And that was not at all what I was hearing in private. I was getting unloaded on by liberals who would like absolutely, because they figure like, I'm safe. I'm a conservative, right? I was actually less and more equivocal about the issue than they were, which was pretty funny. And with Trump, I think, you know, there have been a number of attempts at a preference cascade that have failed.

But it is, in fact, true that, like, his party secretly hates him. Not everyone in the party, but, like, a lot of people at the party secretly hate him. They all bend the knee because they're afraid of his voters. But at the moment when he starts looking weak, you can see a kind of preference. There is a chance you will see. a big preference cascade. Now, that said, after January 6th, they really looked like preferences were cascading, and then they didn't, and they stopped, and they went in the other direction. But every time there's an event like this, I think about, is this the moment, not because it matters

so much in and of itself, but because it can, it can be the little, little grain of snow that forms the snowball that then keeps rolling down the hill and gets huge. And Jonah, we've seen a couple of other examples of this. There was a, I believe, a state representative, maybe a state senator in Minnesota who wrote to Trump rebuking him for his bigoted remarks about the Smollies that he made in the Oval Office. You had Marjorie Taylor Green. I don't like to spend a lot of time talking about her. I think she's, to a certain extent, that people are overreading the MAGA split because Marjorie Taylor Green split from Donald Trump and has now become critical and is hanging out with code pink people.

But one of the things she said, something that we've talked about here often, something that Megan just mentioned, a lot of people in the Republican partly secretly despised Donald Trump. And she said, I can't remember the exact quote, I don't have it in front of me,

but something to the effect of, they all laugh at him behind his back. And, you know, we have had, you and I, Jonah, have had experiences sitting at dinner with senators who, you know, have nothing good to say about Donald Trump for three-hour dinners with us and then the next day go on and praise him on an issue where we know they disagree with him.

Is it, are those also those snowflakes? I mean, we have seen more of those recently. And yet, I would say, you have the $12 billion farm bailout. Republicans hate that. They don't like the policy that caused Donald Trump to get to the point where, he gave a $12 billion bailout, which were tariffs that most of them oppose. And you saw one after another after another take to the microphones and praise Donald Trump for his leadership on making life livable for these farmers.

What should we believe? Well, when we were talking earlier, I talked about how nature is unfair and confusing and be comfortable with contradiction. Both stories are true. Donald Trump has a massive political hold over his party, particularly over the primary process. And until filing deadlines come, we are going to see much less, where it's a podcast, just assume massive air quotes. We're going to see much less courage from a congressman until they're free of a primary challenge. And then things will be a little different.

Like, we all know this in journalism, like the cliche is three examples equals a trend, right? And we also know there are people in journalism who have one really great example and then one okay example and one really crappy example. But you're calling me out, Jonah. What is this? They sneak it over the plate because the reader is already. bought into the narrative from the good example that they want to be true. And so, you know, the Indiana thing is actually really kind of fascinating. Part of the reason why this was politically unpopular there is that there are a bunch of districts that suburban districts that just don't want to

be part of Indianapolis. And part of the redistricting would require them to be part of Indianapolis in some political fashion. And the whole reason these people moved to the suburbs is they didn't want to be part of Indianapolis. And that sort of granular facts on the ground thing has a lot less to do with Trump losing his hold on the GOP and more about Trump and the White House not understanding how big a political ask they were asking and then asking it a bad way, right? Which then became its own story

about threatening grandchildren and whatnot. But as these stories accumulate, are these examples accumulate, the trend can become a thing, even if not all of the examples, are all that great. Whether Marjorie Taylor Green is a great example of the unraveling of MAGA

or if it's a great example of this trend of kind of semi-nuts, crazy political opportunities, opportunists like her and Nancy Mace going off on their own for their next stage in their political career and figuring out a way to get attention in the process because they have figured out

that the attention economy is where they thrive and that the story about Trump losing his strength is sort of secondary to that other kind of story remains to be seen. But it is obviously true that he's not, unless the economy gets much, much, much better pretty rapidly, he's not going to get more powerful within the GOP unless he, you know, I don't know, launches a war in South America and then you get a rally around the president kind of thing. But he's going to be a lame duck after the midterms, particularly if Republicans lose the midterms. There was a great episode of the Monday or the first dispatch podcast last week

about the midterms. I highly recommend it. I listen to it. I don't think there were enough references to me, but that's fine. I had to declare a moratorium on Jonah references. That's outrageous. But I think this trend is going to get bigger, right? Whether every example is worthwhile, depends, remains to be seen or is open to debate. But the more this story gets bigger, this trend gets bigger, the more it gets covered as a real thing, rightly or wrongly, Trump is going to get really pissed off about it and start reacting to the narrative, however true it is or however false it is, and that is going to create its own sort of dynamic politics that are going to be kind of hard to predict. I think you're right about that.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump right in. Before we leave today, there was news that broke Sunday evening that Hollywood veteran Hollywood actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife were found dead in his house. There's lots of early reporting on how and why that happened. We're not going to get into that, in part because there's still a lot of. to learn. But I thought we'd end today with just some thoughts from you all on Rob Reiner

movies. Of course, he was a well-known sort of part of the liberal Hollywood establishment. He was very politically active, particularly in the 90s and aughts, made a number of classic movies, the Hollywood Reporter in its obituary. this morning wrote Reiner's opening seven film run and it lists the films regularly cited as film fans and critics is one of the greatest hot streaks enjoyed by any director in Hollywood among the movies where this is spinal tap stand by me the princess bride when Harry met Sally misery a few good men the bucket list others I'll start with you Megan do you have a favorite Rob Reiner movie and if

So what is it and why? Okay, I have a favorite three-year Rob Reiner period, and that is when Harry met Sally to the Princess Bride, I spent a while thinking about this one, and it was so hard. I was like asking me to choose my favorite children, right? Although I'm told that sometimes parents do have a favorite. So if I really had to pick one, gun to the head, it would probably be the Princess Bride.

But when Harry Met Sally is such a strong contender, and the fact that those movies came out back, to back is just amazing to me. If I had to guess which your favorite would have been, it most definitely would have been the Princess Pride. Because it is one of the best movies in history.

William Goldman's script. Yeah. I mean, William Goldman deserves, I mean, writer deserves an enormous amount of credit for respecting the script, but the script is really the star of that movie. Billy Crystal as, uh, oh God, what was his name? Miracle Max.

Miracle Max. Thank you. Jonah, what about you? Well, I mean, I'm tempted to sort of defer to Megan on that because that was a good run. I'm going to have two, let me just put this way. I love Princess Broad. I think when Harry Met Sally's a great movie, I defer to anybody who wants to say spinal tap because it's spinal tap. But I think his most underappreciated movie is probably the sure thing. It came out at the absolute perfect time for.

this guy in 1985, it really spoke to me in ways that anybody else who was an older teenager male in 1985 would appreciate. And the other one, because I think a lot of people just missed it in terms of underappreciated, in 2023, so just a couple of years ago, he directed a documentary about Albert Brooks called Defending My Life, that the second half, sort of like Princess Bride is awesome because the script and the book are awesome. This documentary was fantastic for the first half

because the first half of Albert Brooks's career was so much better than the second half. But it really is great. It really does give you a feel, not just for Albert Brooks, but also the world that Rob Reiner comes from. Remember his dad was Carl Reiner, who was one of the great

sort of comedic writers and, you know, people know from Oceans 11 and that kind of stuff, but he was you know, he was a Sid Caesar your show of shows guy, your show of shows guy who could hold his own comedically with Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. And that's the world that

Rob Reiner grew up in. So underappreciated movies, Albert Brooks defending my life in The Sure Thing. And also, everyone talks about how he was meathead on the family. That's fine. I get it. It his career, but people forget that he was Sheldon on the odd couple, and it was Sheldon because they misspelled Sheldon on his birth certificate. So, there you go.

Mike? This is difficult for me because. Because Megan went first and cleared the field. Well, you know, I did, it is interesting. We watched, we showed our kids, my older two kids, 11 and almost. eight, just a few weeks ago, a Princess Bride. And we had this experience where Fred Savage's character, who's the little boy who's being read by the story by Peter Falk, his grandfather, my kids' reactions to the entire

movie mirrored Fred Savage's reactions to the story, which, like, if you haven't seen the movie, it's sort of a meta story where, like, he's listening to this story, and he doesn't want to hear it. And then, of course, as it goes on, he wants to know what happens next. And, I mean, down to, like, is this a kissing book? You know, is this a kissing story? And my boys were like, oh, is this a kissing movie? I was like, you guys, you guys don't understand how well you're grafting on to exactly what. Anyway, so I love that movie. But I have a very soft place in my heart for this is Spinal Tap. It's, I love the mockumentary style, and it's, it was like

one of those movies, I'm younger than you guys, so, like, I watched this on home video after it came out, and it was like, the kind of movie that I would, like, want to watch, and my friends would be like, why do you want to watch this movie? Like, this is not, this is so old and weird, and,

like, they didn't get it, but I was like, no, this is really funny. And by the way, he's great, he's in it, right? He's not only the director of the movie. Rob Reiner is playing the director of the documentary that the movie is

supposed to be. And on the other side of that long, nice run is a few good men, which, again, it's an Aaron Sorkin script based on an Aerosorkan play, but it's one of those movies. It's like the thing, like, if it's on TV,

I will watch it wherever we start, you know, wherever I turn on the TV, if a few good men is on, I will just watch it to the end because it's, I just love it. And we should also just say that Castle Rock Entertainment, which was the production company that he started, along with some other partners,

which he, all of his movies were Castle Rock also produced the greatest sitcom ever, Seinfeld, and some other shows after he sold Castle Rock. But so he just has this legacy that is, if he had never played Meathead, you know, maybe he would have had that,

career, but, like, it's, you know, it's this long career in TV and movies behind the camera and in front of the camera. It's, um, it's such a loss. Yeah, I mean, I'm the least qualified to comment on any of this, of course. Um, but I will at least say a word for when Harry met Sally. I'm not a huge rom-com guy. That probably surprises you, Jonah. Um, it does, but you're lying. You think I'm big into rom-coms? I probably get named five. Talk about secrets that you're keeping, you know. Well, I mean, this is, the actual the great sleepless in Seattle scene, not a Rob Reiner film, but a Nora Effron film, and since she also wrote the script for Harry B. Sally. And Rob Reiner's in it.

Yeah. This is a great, there's a great scene where the guys, the women are talking about at a fair to remember, this great romantic drama, and they start crying, and then the guys start talking about the dirty dozen, and Tom Hanks is crying. Creeny Lopez died, parachuting in, yeah. And this is the historic divide, although I will say, I love The Dirty Dozen. I love The Great Escape and all of those 60s World War II movies. And I also love Nora Ephra and rom-coms. So we can heal this bridge. I did.

I saw Sleepless in Seattle, but I don't watch very many rom-coms. And I did like when Harry met Sally, for reasons beyond the famous scene in the diner, which was a... What happens in that scene, Steve? Can you remind us? Mike, it's a kissing movie, Mike. We don't want to, we don't really want to get into that. Fun fact from Sleepless in Seattle. The little boy is named Jonah.

And his partner in crime and girlfriend is named Jessica. And it's the only Jonah and Jessica, my wife's name is Jessica, of any movie I've ever known. And that little boy goes on to be in Seinfeld. And he's the one who renounces his religion because he's not a man enough to date Elaine. And then he went on to be one of L.A.'s premier car salesman. So there you. That is trivia. I drink scotch and know things.

Well, thank you all for listening. And Megan, thanks for sharing your story with us for the Monday essay and then talking about it here today. Thank you. If you like what we're doing, doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And we hope you'll consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join. And if you use my promo code roundtable, you'll get one month free and help me win the ongoing, deeply scientific internal debate over which dispatch podcast is the true flagship. And if ads aren't your thing, you can up. to a premium membership, no ads, two free gift memberships to give away, early access to all episodes, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. Shout out to a few folks who recently joined as premium members, Mike Moke, Janet Walker, and Wayne Ashmore. We're very glad to have you

aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from people who like kissing movies. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Victoria Holmes and Noah Hickey. We couldn't do it without you.

Thanks again for listening, and please join us next time. Thank you.