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- [00:00]
Steve Hayes
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 vs 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 flagship every.
- [00:40]
Meghan McArdle
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- [01:09]
Michael Warren
Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we Talk with Meghan McCardle 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 you 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.
- [02:34]
Meghan McArdle
It so My mother died two years ago and we did not expect her to die. She had COPD from lifetime of smoking, 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, thinking she was dying because she would be in and out of delirium. It was, it was pretty grueling. And so my sister and my aunt and I took shifts keeping vigil at her bed because the, like the CO2, one of the effects of CO2 is that it makes you extremely anxious. And so she, I, I would like wake up in the mornings. I kept trying to push it earlier and earlier so I could 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 8am so I couldn't get there earlier. And then, you know, you'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, you know, 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. That one's on me. And then she talked about 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.
- [05:18]
Michael Warren
I mean, it's a beautiful campus.
- [05:19]
Meghan McArdle
It is a beautiful campus. 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 Radcliffe 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 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, so you just keep living together. And then, you know, and I'm just sitting there going, mom, you know, it's not your fault. Like, this is like, you were young. You were.
- [06:03]
Michael Warren
And 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?
- [06:12]
Meghan McArdle
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 you. 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, which I didn't. But I. You know, like, by the time I was in my 40s, certainly, I just thought, like, let it go. Anything. 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. 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, unwed 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 shavlunked out of college, she. 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.
- [08:38]
Michael Warren
And this was all. This was all new to you?
- [08:41]
Meghan McArdle
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. And first of all, I understood why I was almost born in a cab because the obstetrician told my mother when she went into labor, oh, you know, take your time. Because first babies take a long time.
- [09:23]
Michael Warren
First babies take a while. Right.
- [09:28]
Meghan McArdle
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. 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 like. 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 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'd 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, 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. She. Once, 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 guys, 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. Cause my aunt lived in the same town, but she. 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 toddles 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.
- [12:45]
Michael Warren
Did she know.
- [12:46]
Steve Hayes
Did your.
- [12:47]
Michael Warren
Did your sister know when she joined New York Right to Life that your mom was. This was a known thing.
- [12:53]
Meghan McArdle
Oh, yeah. This was a known thing in our family.
- [12:55]
Mike
This was an act of rebellion, perhaps.
- [12:57]
Meghan McArdle
This was an act. Yeah, I think it was a little act of rebellion. But she. I mean, in very kind of typical wasp, Irish Catholic way, don't tell anyone about your rebel. 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 early morning drinking coffee, a little sleepy, and 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 just, like, gotten Nora's name somewhere. And so I now understood why that was, and I had always stayed out of it. As I said in the essay, I have always had two completely incompatible 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 inside her should get the same shot as the rest of us at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And so I just kind of resolved 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 was not a visceral personality conviction. It was just, okay, well, that's the teaching. I, I joined. I, I accept that and that. And then. So now I understood my brother existed. I sort of went back to that and I tried and I, I had to actually really think about it. And there is this thought experiment that I've talked about for years. I think I made it up. ChatGPT does not gainsay 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. She'll be in med school like she planned to go. She will be dating a great guy who is. 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, you know, in the same way that my mother. 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, right? 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 gotta get better. You gotta 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 basically said, no, like, we're done. Just make her comfortable. That was. We didn't know she was gonna die. And so we spent 24 hours by her bedside, my sister and I. The hospital was great. Sibley. If you're gonna 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. 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 23andMe 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, look, 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, 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, right? 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. My. And my. 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. 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 dawn till dusk and when you even went, literally, when he was dying of prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bones, we went up for a final Christmas, which was a great Christmas, made him a suckling pig. But we walk in, we've got the suckling pig that we brought from New York. And my grandfather said, walks in, 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, 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 matched it.
- [21:11]
Michael Warren
You're doing it. You're doing it.
- [21:14]
Meghan McArdle
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.
- [21:28]
Michael Warren
Speaking of the. Speaking of the. The father of the child who left, that he left.
- [21:34]
Meghan McArdle
And even then, she defended him. She said it was his mother. And I was like, mom, I'm going to track this guy down and kill him. Like, or at least, I don't know, I'm gonna hobble one of the wheels on his walker, right? Like, it's just.
- [21:48]
Michael Warren
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? Was it. Did she talk about that with you a lot?
- [22:11]
Meghan McArdle
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 was wanted from them in some way. And so, you know, I think she turn 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 and she was really smart. Smart. She would do her homework standing up against a locker, get A's 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 as little work and going out at all hours with your boyfriend in a cool convertible. And, you know, she was a National Merit scholar, 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 abandon you, I think must have been really difficult. And I just think it's. It's a tragedy and I think it's a tragedy for. I mean, look, I can't regret that I exist. I can't regret that my sister exists.
- [24:21]
Jonah Goldberg
But some days I regret.
- [24:23]
Meghan McArdle
No, my sister's great. It's really terrible. I have no complaints about my sister. I should. I should develop some.
- [24:29]
Jonah Goldberg
I always talk about regretting you exist, like.
- [24:32]
Meghan McArdle
Oh, well, no, no, that's fair. That's fair. Yeah, yeah. Ye. 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.
- [24:45]
Michael Warren
Right?
- [24:46]
Meghan McArdle
Like there. 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. It would. It. He had to be given up. So I don't think that that part scarred her. I think the whole process scarred 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.
- [25:29]
Mike
Can I ask about the most affecting part of your piece? To me, which I was. I told you before we started, Megan, 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?
- [26:16]
Meghan McArdle
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 always wanted an older brother. Right? It turns out I had an older brother.
- [26:35]
Mike
Right.
- [26:35]
Meghan McArdle
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.
- [26:53]
Mike
Yeah, it just. It raises a mystery. That was when I read it was. I could feel both the pain and just there was. There was a beauty in that. In that as well. And 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 it's just a beautiful piece.
- [27:22]
Meghan McArdle
Thank you.
- [27:23]
Jonah Goldberg
So I agree. It's a really wonderful piece. I will also be brutally honest and say I'll never read it again. And I don't. Not because it's bad, because it's good.
- [27:34]
Meghan McArdle
I'm crazed. If people read me once, I know.
- [27:37]
Jonah Goldberg
Well, that's also what we get. But when I talked 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. 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 conjures a lot of stuff with my own mom, which we're not going to get into. Not the similar. Same story, but deathbed conversations and stories from her early life and all of these things. And. I also lost a brother, different circumstances. And 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 my arguments about, at a sort of metaphysical level, what is conservatism. And one of the arguments I've made for many years is that it's a certain amount of comfort with contradiction. It's this understanding that the universe is messy, that life is messy, that sometimes good things can be in tension, that there can be positive things about horrible stuff, and there can be Horrible things about positive stuff. I often tell my daughter 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.
- [29:54]
Meghan McArdle
Take the lemon meringue pie, not the meat ice cream. But when you got lemon meringue pie and a cherry turnover, things get difficult, right?
- [30:03]
Jonah Goldberg
I'm very much with you on this. First of all, that all of this stuff, James Kirk notwithstanding, these are all Kobayashi Marus 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 a noble savage is short, nasty, brutal and short. And you don't use the trolley problem. But 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? How do you make a round square? It's just like. And how do you make a round circle? Is an easy answer. But I also think about the vampire problem, right? That's that this la 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 Russ Roberts whole thing about wild problems is that. And you don't have any answers. 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 a complex society, right? And there are 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 have in mind. But it drove my very pro life friends. I was at national review for 20 years. I have very, very pro life friends. Dear friends, super pro life, super dear friends would say they want to protect.
- [33:10]
Meghan McArdle
The gleam in dad's eye. It's not just.
- [33:14]
Jonah Goldberg
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, I will tell you. 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 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 the argument at home. But it's part 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.
- [34:44]
Meghan McArdle
Yeah. And the reason I wanted to write this is 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 the 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.
- [35:40]
Mike
You.
- [35:41]
Michael Warren
Know, he's listening, huh?
- [35:45]
Jonah Goldberg
But there are moments that feel like forever.
- [35:49]
Meghan McArdle
Fair enough. 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 abortion erases that for someone. And 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 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 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, I talked to a friend who worked at a pregnancy crisis center, and she said, first of all, a lot of these women, this tends to be poor women, and they know people who've 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 reason. They're older, they. 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 Wins, and she said she was telling me about another activist who had an abortion, believes 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, 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 think 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 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.
- [40:29]
Steve Hayes
All right, we're going to take a.
- [40:31]
Michael Warren
Quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast.
- [40:39]
Steve Hayes
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- [43:32]
Michael Warren
I spend a lot of time thinking.
- [43:34]
Steve Hayes
About that and honestly, payroll and HR tasks are always high on that list. I know our team spends more afternoon that I'd like to admit buried in forms, double checking tax details, tracking down onboarding documents. It's the kind of stuff that Eats up your entire day, but before you even notice. And that's why I really appreciate what.
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Michael Warren
Gusto brings to the table.
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Steve Hayes
It gives you that okay, we're getting our business act together this year. Feeling like starting with a clean desk.
- [44:03]
Michael Warren
And an organized inbox.
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Steve Hayes
Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire onboard, and support your team from anywhere. And here's a big one for small businesses. Unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. No hidden fees, no surprises. You know exactly what you're paying for, which is pretty rare in this space. It's also genuinely quick to switch to Gusto. You just transfer your existing data and get up and running fast. You don't pay a cent until you.
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Michael Warren
Run your first payroll.
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Steve Hayes
Try gusto today@gusto.com dispatch and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll@gusto.com dispatch one more time, gusto.com dispatch.
- [45:00]
Jonah Goldberg
Before we.
- [45:00]
Michael Warren
Return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere here at the Dispatch. This week on the Remnant, Ambassador Rahm Emanuel joins Jonah to discuss the wonders of Japan, income inequality, and Rahm'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. 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, 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. Did he bring them joy?
- [46:17]
Meghan McArdle
I hope they saw that beautiful baby.
- [46:20]
Michael Warren
Yeah.
- [46:20]
Meghan McArdle
And it was the happiest day of their life. And I hope he had a wonderful childhood.
- [46:25]
Michael Warren
Yeah. And I think I was gonna get.
- [46:26]
Meghan McArdle
Through this podcast without crying.
- [46:28]
Michael Warren
I mean, that has to be part of the difficulty, I think, obviously, for you, but. But also for your mother. It's just the not knowing and 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.
- [46:48]
Meghan McArdle
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 to, 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.
- [47:15]
Michael Warren
That was his declared choice. Yeah.
- [47:17]
Meghan McArdle
Yeah. I mean, it's just like, I don't get it. Like, it's not. What could it possibly hurt for me to know my brother's name?
- [47:29]
Michael Warren
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.
- [47:51]
Mike
More of the message.
- [47:51]
Michael Warren
But it was. 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. When my dad. It 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, you know, 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.
- [49:21]
Meghan McArdle
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.
- [49:40]
Jonah Goldberg
Not to, not, not to. Because again, I am walking on a precipice talking about some of this 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 and 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 dead don't have rights. I am not entirely sure I agree with that, but 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.
- [50:19]
Meghan McArdle
We should talk about this on another podcast. I have some non standard opinions for a libertarian on this matter.
- [50:25]
Jonah Goldberg
I was saying 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, 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.
- [50:56]
Michael Warren
Well, what's really great about that is I spent a good part of this weekend fretting about how we were gonna 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 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 into it 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 what that means in terms of redistricting for 2026, what it means in terms of Republican politics, if anything, and what it means that. But this sizable 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.
- [53:38]
Mike
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 joined with a Democratic minority to get a bear majority. It was significant. And 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 is a former senator during the first Trump administration, former US Senator from Indiana, you know, castigating the senators, saying this is a bad decision. You know, this was people. These Republicans have rejected what the great and powerful Trump has deemed 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 among these states. So 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 once 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 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 reg voters and regular people as cheating. It's not right, it's not fair. And I think they sell 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, there is no, 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.
- [57:39]
Michael Warren
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 MAGA 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 maga. Again, MAGA media, these outside political groups going after kids. Yeah, we've seen this and it's worked. I, 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, 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?
- [59:10]
Meghan McArdle
So here is what I think a lot about, which is Timur 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, and you know, you could certainly see this in Cancel Culture, right, is all of these people who were just, just huddled, afraid, mouthing things they 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. But 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, 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 as Solidarity gets more powerful, suddenly everyone understands that everyone's unhappy with the regime. I think you also saw this with trans issues in the United States, where I wrote a feature on lia Thomas in 2022, and if you had read she was the pen 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. 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 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, it 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 be the little grain of snow that forms the snowball that then keeps rolling down the hill and gets huge.
- [62:07]
Michael Warren
And, Jonah, we've seen a couple of other examples of this. There was, I believe, a state representative, maybe a state senator in Minnesota, who wrote to Trump rebuking him for his bigoted remarks about the Smalleys that he made in The Oval Office. You had Marjorie Taylor Greene. 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 Greene 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 despise 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?
- [63:56]
Jonah Goldberg
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 congressmen until they're free of a primary challenge, and then things will be a little different. We all know this. In journalism, 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.
- [64:57]
Mike
Me out, Jonah, what is this?
- [64:59]
Jonah Goldberg
They sneak it over the plate because the reader has already bought into the narrative from the good example that they want to be true. And so the Indiana thing's 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 or these examples accumulate, the trend can become a thing, even if not all of the examples are all that great. Whether Marjorie Taylor Greene 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 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, 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 gonna 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 listened to it. I don't think there were enough references to me, but that's fine.
- [67:14]
Michael Warren
I had to declare a moratorium on Jonah references. Outrageous.
- [67:18]
Jonah Goldberg
But I think this trend is gonna 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.
- [67:53]
Michael Warren
I think you're right about that.
- [67:54]
Steve Hayes
We're going to take a quick break.
- [67:56]
Michael Warren
But we'll be back shortly.
- [68:00]
Jonah Goldberg
This episode is brought to you by NBA on Prime. This Tuesday at 8:30 Eastern, it's the Emirates NBA cup championship game on Prime. This year's Quest for the cup has been building to this. The championship game live from Las Vegas. Not a prime member. Sign up for 30 day free trial to get started today. The Emirates NBA cup championship game this Tuesday at 8:30 Eastern only on Prime. Restrictions apply. See Amazon.com amazonprime for details.
- [68:28]
Meghan McArdle
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan. Real United Airlines customers.
- [68:33]
Jonah Goldberg
We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he.
- [68:37]
Michael Warren
Wanted to see the flight deck and.
- [68:38]
Jonah Goldberg
Meet Kath and Andrew.
- [68:39]
Meghan McArdle
I got to sit in the driver's seat.
- [68:41]
Jonah Goldberg
I grew up, I grew up in.
- [68:41]
Steve Hayes
An aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
- [68:46]
Meghan McArdle
That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain.
- [68:53]
Jonah Goldberg
Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.
- [68:56]
Michael Warren
That's how good leads the way. 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 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 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 sort of classic movies. The Hollywood Reporter in its obituary this morning wrote Reiner's opening seven film running and it lists the films regularly cited as film fans and critics as one of the greatest hot streaks enjoyed by any director in Hollywood. Among the movies were 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?
- [70:33]
Meghan McArdle
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. It 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 is just amazing to me.
- [71:03]
Michael Warren
If I had to guess which your favorite would have been, it most definitely would have been the Princess Pride.
- [71:09]
Meghan McArdle
Without question, it is one of the best movies in history. William Goldman script.
- [71:14]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, William Goldman deserves. I mean, Reiner deserves an enormous amount of credit for respecting the script, but the script is really the star of that.
- [71:23]
Meghan McArdle
Billy Crystal as. Oh, God, what's his miracle? Max? Miracle Max. Thank you.
- [71:28]
Michael Warren
Jonah, what about you?
- [71:30]
Jonah Goldberg
Well, I mean, I'm tempted to sort of defer to Megan on that because that was a good run. I'm gonna have two. Let me just put it this way. I love Princess Bride. 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.
- [72:05]
Michael Warren
That.
- [72:07]
Jonah Goldberg
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 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 people know him from Ocean's Eleven and that kind of stuff. But he was a Sid Caesar, your show of shows guy who could hold his own comedically with Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. And that's the world that. That Rob Reiner grew up in. So underappreciated movies, Albert Brooks, Defending My Life and the sure Thing. And also, everyone talks about how he was meathead on all in the Family. That's fine. I get it. It made 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.
- [73:40]
Steve Hayes
Mike.
- [73:42]
Mike
This is difficult for me because.
- [73:44]
Jonah Goldberg
Because Megan went first and cleared the field.
- [73:48]
Mike
Well, you know, 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 ready 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 the 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. 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. I love the mockumentary style. And it was like one of those movies. I'm younger than you guys, so 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. And 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, is an Aaron Sorkin script based on Aaron Sorkin play. But it's. 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. I just love it. And we should also just say that Castle Rock Entertainment, which was the. 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, maybe he wouldn't have had that career. But it's this long career in TV and movies, behind the camera and in front of the camera, it's such a loss.
- [76:27]
Michael Warren
Yeah. I mean, I'm the least qualified to comment on any of this, of course, 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.
- [76:41]
Jonah Goldberg
It does. But you're lying.
- [76:44]
Michael Warren
You think I'm big into rom com? I probably can name five about secrets that you're keeping.
- [76:48]
Meghan McArdle
Yeah, well, I mean, this is the actual the Grid Sleepless in Seattle scene. Not a Rob Reiner film, but a Nora Ephron film. And since she also wrote the script.
- [76:56]
Jonah Goldberg
For Harry, Ben, Sally and Rob Reiner's in it.
- [76:58]
Meghan McArdle
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 Trini Lopez died parachuting in.
- [77:18]
Mike
Yeah.
- [77:21]
Meghan McArdle
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 Ephron rom coms. So we can heal this bridge.
- [77:33]
Steve Hayes
I did.
- [77:34]
Michael Warren
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 what happens in.
- [77:47]
Mike
What happens in that scene, Steve, can you remind us?
- [77:51]
Michael Warren
It's a kissing movie, Mike. We don't really want to get into.
- [77:55]
Jonah Goldberg
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 LA's premier car salesmen.
- [78:25]
Meghan McArdle
So there we go.
- [78:27]
Michael Warren
That is trivia.
- [78:30]
Jonah Goldberg
I drink scotch and know things.
- [78:33]
Michael Warren
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.
- [78:43]
Meghan McArdle
Thank you.
- [78:49]
Michael Warren
If you like what we're doing here.
- [78:50]
Steve Hayes
There are a few easy ways to support us.
- [78:52]
Michael Warren
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.
- [78:59]
Steve Hayes
Member of the Dispatch.
- [79:00]
Michael Warren
You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up@thedispatch.com 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 upgrade to a premium membership. No ads. 2 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 Moak, 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@roundtabledispatch.com we read everything, even the ones from people who like kissing movies.
- [79:49]
Steve Hayes
That's gonna do it for today's show.
- [79:50]
Michael Warren
Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Victoria Holmes Homes and Noah Hickey. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for listening and please join us next time.
- [80:22]
Jonah Goldberg
Limu Emu and Doug.
- [80:25]
Steve Hayes
Here we have the Limu Emu in.
- [80:28]
Meghan McArdle
Its natural habitat, helping people customize their.
- [80:31]
Michael Warren
Car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
- [80:36]
Meghan McArdle
Fascinating.
- [80:37]
Steve Hayes
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera.
- [80:44]
Michael Warren
They see us.
- [80:44]
Mike
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty.
- [80:47]
Meghan McArdle
Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by.
- [80:50]
Mike
Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.