You, Megan McCain, has entered the chat. Hello, 2024. This is our first episode of a brand new new year. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and New Year's. I. I'm going to admit something to you, Miranda. I do not love Christmas and New Year's. I enjoy it, but I don't have this deep, abiding love for it the way I do Halloween. And I'm actually happy to be back into routines. And I think when you have young kids like we do, my girls had trouble sleeping. We went to an Airbnb in West Virginia and they had trouble sleeping because it was like a new environment and all the things and you don't have your bottles and you don't have whatever. And I think when you have young kids, it's just like, there's not really a vacation. You're just like taking care of kids in different locations. Not that I didn't enjoy the time off, but I'm happy to be back. What about you?

Yeah, I'm happy to be back in routine. My older daughter still has another week off of school, and so it's like I'm so ready for her to get back into her schedule and routine. And not that I don't love sleeping in and all that, because my kids are sleepers, but it's the same. It's like, I love Christmas, I love New Year's, but it's so much work just for, honestly, it's like 35 minutes of the culmination of all of it. You know what I mean?

I know. And then on New Year, I didn't do anything. We stayed at home and had a shrimp party, which is exactly what it sounds like. We just had a lot of shrimp. And Ben got a bottle of champagne. I didn't drink any of it. And then I was in bed by, like, I don't know, ten 3011 and I woke up to hearing fireworks. I don't know. But then I read it was in to not go out this year. So what did you do for New Year's?

Well, so we did my families with my side of the family. We did Christmas on New Year's Eve. So we went over there, my parents house, and we did presents and all of that stuff. But we were home by like 07:00 and my husband was, like, falling asleep on the couch by ten. So it was very tame and calm and relaxing, which was nice. But we did make it till midnight. We watched Andy Cohen, Anderson Cooper, and they got to drink again this year. So that was nice. And it was a good time. And then everybody just went straight to bed. By twelve seven, everybody was just knocked out. It was very nice and chill.

And now we're going on to our very first show. There's a lot, I think also it's exciting right now, even though in DC, apparently it is like a dead zone right now. I had the easiest time driving in today because apparently the Senate and Congress are still out of session. So I guess it doesn't feel like people are coming back to life. But we have the New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucus, like less than two weeks away. So things are gearing up very quickly. We're going to have a lot to talk about, a lot to go over. I have to tell you, I have this permeating sort of undertone of static anxiety about it being Biden and Trump again because it just feels very inevitable. We do have our wonderful first guests of the new year, Emily Eakins and Kristen Soltis Anderson, who are both pollsters. And Emily is the vice president and director of polling for the Cato Institute. And Kristen Soltus Anderson really needs no introduction. She's a very famous pollster and CNN contributor. But I am very excited to talk to them to maybe give everybody a little hope that something could happen.

But I just feel like we have these two octogenarian failures that are going to be sat in front of us and I don't know what the hell I'm going to do other than that. Happy new year. Sorry.

Let's get excited.

Yeah. So that's our first one of the year. And then we have our old friend coming on today. See Robert Cargill. I call him Cargill. Everybody calls him Cargill. I know you're putting your hand on your heart. He's one of our favorites. Very old friend of yours and mine and our old show in this show. And he was a tv and movie reviewer for, if you guys want to go way back to this for ain't it cool news, which I don't even know if that exists anymore, which is like a total time warp into Internet history. And then he is now a wildly successful screenwriter and producer, like Doctor Strange. He wrote that movie black Phone Sinister, the Sinister stories. He has a bunch of very popular books and anthologies. He's like wildly successful now, which is amazing. We love him and he's taking time out to talk to us. And I do believe he's in the middle of doing a black phone sequel. And he is a frequent collaborator with Ethan Hawke. I actually had the pleasure of meeting Ethan Hawke with Cargill in Austin at the sinister premiere. And they are all just absolutely lovely people and it's great for showback.

So that's what we're doing today. I'm happy to be back. I don't love Christmas. I think Halloween is still my holiday. And yeah, I was very trepidacious about 2024 because I feel like since 2020, we've all had the rug pulled under us about New Year's and new times being to be excited about the new year. And I'm just like, sort of white knuckling 2024 so far because it's like.

We all want to jump in the deep end of the pool. And after 2019, everyone was like, yeah, 2020. This is so exciting. Roaring twenty s and then we all got, like, boned. So I think everyone's just like, okay, now let's just dip our toes.

Yes. Maybe I don't want to jump in.

Anymore because last time I did that, I got Covid and this and that.

And all of the terrible. FYi, you are sick. I think we need to tell people that because your voice sounds a little weird. I'm very sorry you're sick. You're not exactly sure what you have. And I still actually weirdly, bizarrely have a cough. And not to keep making this about viruses, but everybody's been sick in and out, so if our voices sound a little weird, that's also what's happening. But wishing you best of health. It's impossible to get healthy when you have small kids, too. But I'm so happy to see you and I'm happy to be continuing to do this again.

I'm happy to see. I talk to you every day, but I still miss you and I'm happy.

To see your face. Two other final things that we will, I promise, get into if we're going to try and dip into it a little bit on this show, but we don't really have quite the right guests for this. I want to talk about Epstein's flight list, which may or may not be was supposed to be released this week. I now was told that it will be released by the 22nd because there is someone's name on the list. They're worried about their physical safety. I mean, no shit, Sherlock. You're probably going to be exposed to be some kind of pedophile. I would judge someone on the Epstein flight list. I hope it comes out. I, for one, think we are supposed to have freedom of information. I would like to know who the celebrity pedophiles are and politician pedophiles are. I would really love to alleged don't sue me. But that's what people think you are because that's what.

The list isn't out yet, so you.

Could say it, right? Well, I don't know. I mean, they're alleged. It's a bad thing to be on that list. I don't know if they're, like, full blown pedophiles, but you were doing disgusting things. I mean, Jeffrey Epstein went to prison and then killed himself. Or did he? Maybe. Or maybe. We don't know. The other thing is, there was an absolute blockbuster last episode of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City last night. Yumi and Kara were texting about it. It was an incredible episode. I have to admit. I had a little bit of tip off of what was happening, so I wasn't as shocked as everybody else. I think we should try and have our friend Carlos King on very soon to go over it. I can't explain it because it's just too crazy. So I promise you, if we don't talk about those things today, we will be next week and in the next few episodes, I promise. Because that's what's blown up on my chats right now, too.

Got to talk about those chats.

Got to talk about chats. All right, Miranda, I'm very happy to see you. Happy new year to you all. And with that, let's enter the chat. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to our very first episode of 2024. And I am genuinely so excited to have these two incredible powerhouse women on. We have Kristen Soltis Anderson, who I said, you guys really don't really need an introduction. I feel like everybody in politics who follows politics knows who you guys are. But I will still say Kristen Soltis Anderson is a very famous pollster and a CNN contributor. You can find her on K Soltis Anderson on X and Instagram. And then Emily Eakins, who is the vice president and director of polling for the Cato Institute. And you can find her at Emily Eakins on x. Twitter. X. Twitter. X is so dumb. Twitter. But thank you guys so much for coming on. Like I said, you both are such legends in politics. So it's really such a pleasure to have you both on this morning. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. So I just want to start out, we are going to do get into what we can expect going fresh into the new year with all the election news coming up.

But I would be remiss if I didn't ask, because this podcast is based off of what everyone's talking about on my text chain, chats. Hence, Megan McKay has entered the chat and everyone's talking about Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard stepping down, resigning. For anyone that's following the story, there was a lot of controversy about the now infamous, I think, the most streamed and watched congressional hearing of all time, where she and two other presidents of MIT and Penn refused to basically say that anti semitism wasn't allowed on campus and that it was. I think context matters, and obviously no one cared. And then it also came out allegations of her plagiarizing, I guess, pretty egregiously. What do you make of her stepping down? And I guess we can start with you, Kristen.

Well, it feels like the timing of the stepping down in some ways creates the worst of both worlds for Harvard. On the one hand, if she had very know after that kind of disastrous congressional testimony, stepped down and just, you know, now's not the time, if Harvard had either pushed her out or she had stepped aside, then she may have actually been able to avoid all of the continuing controversy that has kept going in the weeks and weeks since then, because now you have both those who are upset that she has sort of been pushed out, resigned, however you want to define it, who think that this is being know, it's being driven by the far right, it's unfair, et cetera, they're upset. But you still also, it is not as though conservatives love Harvard University and think, oh, great, everything's fine, higher education is wonderful, problem solved. So you wind up in this situation where now everybody just kind of is mad at you, and this is, to me, a really strong example of what happens when you have the, no offense to anybody listening who's a lawyer, but the lawyers in charge, that was my big takeaway from the testimony that really set this all off, was that instead of answering questions in the way that you know to be right or frankly, let's just, even if you're being cynical, a way that is most advantageous for you from a PR perspective, that is not always going to be the right answer, that's going to keep you out of legal jeopardy.

And it sounds like a lot of this preparation was really just legalese avoid getting into trouble. And that actually is exactly what led to this trouble.

Yeah, I totally agree.

Such a good point, Kristen, because that was my reaction, too, is that when you saw the three presidents, president of University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Harvard, all having almost the same answer to the question that Congresswoman Elise Stephanie had asked, which is, is it against your policy to call for the genocide of jewish people? And they couldn't say, yes, that's against our policy. It's one thing for them to say people have different opinions about the state, know the policy issues surrounding Israel and Palestine, and we allow that kind of debate to occur. But that wasn't the question.

Right.

And so the fact that they weren't able to just give a very concrete, obvious answer that anyone would give, I think really speaks to your point about them doing what the lawyers probably advised them to do. But then it didn't go well. And I think to bring this actually to polling, if you've looked at polling data over the past decade, confidence in universities has plummeted. So if you go like, ten years ago, Americans didn't have a lot of confidence in the media. There were certain areas where people were like, I don't really trust it, or it was very polarized. But people trust the military. They trust universities and scientists. And if you look over the past decade, support for confidence in universities just plummeted. And I feel like we just reached the Nader with what happened with these testimonies. And then in addition to that, I do think that the reason everything happened with the president of Harvard were because of her testimony. People went and looked at her academic record and found that she did not properly cite and attribute passages in her work. What she did, essentially, is that she took lines from other people's work and didn't put quotations around it and say, this came from this person's paper or book.

She failed to do that. And people, they did that because they had lost so much confidence in universities based on their testimony, made it worse. And then when they find out that she'd plagiarized, this even further worsened people's perceptions of universities. So I'm very concerned about how universities come back from this. I don't really know. How did they regain the trust of Americans?

Well, I totally agree. And I think even for me, we all have children thinking about the albatross idea of where to send children to college right now. I honestly don't know what the hell I would do if my kid were 18 or 17 or whatever, because it does feel so overwhelming. And there's so many other things I now have to think about. And you have to think about, like, holistically, is this going to be a place where jewish people are not going to feel safe on a campus? I wouldn't feel comfortable sending my child to an environment like that. And among all the other things that are being taught in classrooms. And I feel like this has been such a weird watershed moment where all the kind of things that conservatives have been talking about for so long, all of a sudden, I just know, like, anecdotally in my life, I have liberal friends being like, so maybe you were not being paranoid and I should have been a little more respectful to some of the things you've been saying. I thought you were being, like, histrionic. I had one friend that was like, I always thought you were so histrionic on this, and maybe you were right.

So that has been interesting, too. And I agree with you just from a polling standpoint. I don't know what I mean. You obviously, guys obviously know better than I do. I don't know where they go from here because I wouldn't want to send my kid to Harvard right now.

Well, and colleges and universities have had an issue that has been long brewing, that has been driven by the rising cost of going to college paired with real questions raised almost. I mean, you have to go back to the wake of the financial crisis when people, the millennial generation at least, began kind of questioning the did I actually need a college degree in the first place? And I still think that there is a lot of data that says getting some kind of education beyond high school, whether that is trade school, whether that is. It does not have to be a degree from Harvard, still really does bear a lot of fruit.

Right.

It has a lot of benefits. You should try to get some kind of education beyond high school if you can. But I think this idea that the only way to succeed is to go to a Harvard, that is what I think in the last two or three years has been particularly undercut. And I say, as a proud state school grad go gators. There are institutions out there that can affordably provide really good education to young people that I don't think have the same kind of baggage that you see coming out of some of these private, elite institutions that just have a whole lot of other stuff going on. And that is the one thing I will know. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, to her credit, she kind of set all this in motion. Right, with the testimony that you talked about. But yesterday she put out a press release kind of spiking the football a little bit, and it said, this is the biggest scandal in the history of an american college or university. And I would say you only need a passing familiarity with college athletics to know that that's true. But because it's Harvard, we hold it up as this thing that Harvard's supposed to be better than everything else.

And this is, know what we have seen over the last couple of years is a lot of institutions that were supposed to be the thing that was better than everything else may actually just not be.

I kind of jumped in a little, like, head deep really fast because I didn't really get into. One of the reasons I wanted to have both of you on is because I actually love polling and I love pollsters. I feel very cozy and comfortable around polling. I think it's just growing up around politics. I can actually remember my dad's campaign manager, who I'm still very close with, saying that to him, the new polling data that came out every week was like a black tar heroin hit. I hope you find that funny and not, like, intensive. I hope they do. And that he needed his heroin hit every time. And I love polling, and I always feel very defensive of pollsters because I think it's a very hard and very important job. And I think there is a lot of tea leaves that you can read about the future, particularly of american politics, which is very nuanced and complicated through polling. So I just want to ask you guys, first and foremost, why go into this industry and what has changed since? Like, I think we're all around the same age since you first started doing this and then wanted to continue on, especially in a time when people are know, I think Nate Silver is not doing this anymore.

He is a professional gambler or something, because a lot of people have sort of given up on this industry.

So I can jump in and take this one first. So I got into the polling business almost by happenstance. I had come to DC because I'd watched too much west wing and all of that. I took a job working at the NRCC. They put me in the finance department because I was there at a time in the election cycle when all the parties are doing is raising money. They're not, like, persuading voters and knocking on doors. They're just raising money. It turned out I hated campaign finance, but I was okay with a spreadsheet and all of the stuff that I wanted to do on communications and speech writing, and maybe I wanted to be a press secretary. It turned out that you could actually study communications through a kind of research lens. Like, you didn't just have to say, this sounds nice to me. You could actually go and test, what do people think? Where are they at? Rather than just what sounds nice to me. So that's what I found so appealing about getting into the polling business. Now, back when I started this job answering phones and updating spreadsheets at a polling firm in 2005, almost all of the polling we were doing was by random digit dialing landline telephones, asking people to pick up and asking them 14 minutes worth of questions.

And nowadays, that is almost 0% of what I do. Certainly if I'm calling people on the phone, I'm probably not randomly dialing numbers. There are so many technological changes that have come about because the way people communicate with each other has advanced. So as technology has gotten further and further down the road, it is easier for me as a pollster to find you, and it is easier for you as a voter to avoid me. You have caller id, you have cell phones that make it easier for me to reach you at the grocery store than it used to be, but easier for you to avoid me at the grocery store than before. So the technological changes have been big, along with declining response rates. And I'd love to hear Emily talk a little bit about what she's seen. But the other big problem we're facing is that in some ways, it's a miracle that polling still works as well as it does. Back in the even, you still had 20 30% response rates. Now it's a miracle that the two to 3% of people who are taking surveys are as similar to the 97% to 98% who aren't.

That is what continues to make my job very challenging, but it's still an exciting adventure every day.

That's so interesting, Kristen. I love how we came to very similar places in DC, but from very different. I just. I love your work. Definitely. I recommend following Kristen's polling work. I come through kind of an academic path. So I went and got a PhD in political science, mistakenly. I shouldn't have done it.

It was a mistake.

And I was in the middle of the program at UCLA when I realized, oh, this actually isn't, like, the best fit for my personality. I'm very extroverted. I like to be around people, and academia is a place, if you like to be alone and read all by yourself all day long, that is the place for you. But for someone that's very extroverted, I realized it wasn't the right place. But something that really did catch my interest was one of the primary methods that we use in academia, at least in the social sciences, is surveys. In order to study something, you can ask people about it and have rigorous, empirical ways to measure things about the world. And I love statistics. And what I really liked was, I don't want to know just what people think, but why they think, what they do, and really delving deep and understanding the why. And there's all these cool tools that you learn and statistics that you can apply to political settings. And so like a study I did right after the 2016 election was to study Trump voters. Something that had really bugged me a bit during the campaign is that people really wanted to assume that all people that voted for, say, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or voted for Donald Trump were all the same kind of person.

And I think Kristen definitely sees this with her focus groups as well, is that there's many different reasons why people vote for a Republican or vote for a Democrat or how they think about politics. People aren't the same. And so using some cool statistical methods, we were able to find these different groupings of Trump supporters. And even that probably oversimplifies it a fair amount. But be able to see there's many different types of people that vote for a candidate. Some people are really moderate on issues of health care and taxes and spending, but they're really worried about immigration and the border. So people like that voted for Trump. And then there are people that were completely opposite that they don't really are not that worried about immigration, but they vote for Republicans because they feel like they'll keep spending down or try to keep the government a little bit more limited. And they voted for Trump, too. And so I love doing that kind of work to understand not just the what, but the why of politics and why we do what we do.

I love polling because, and I love focus grouping because I really do feel like it's the best way to analyze the heart of Americans and the anger and the passion and the joy and what Americans actually really care about. And I do want to delve into the upcoming Iowa caucus in New Hampshire primary. I can't believe the Iowa caucus is eleven days away. It's fascinating and it's crazy at the same time, or, excuse me, it's eleven days away when this comes out. Edit that, miranda. But a new USA Today Suffolk survey just came out that shows President Biden trailing Trump. I find this just absolutely fascinating by five percentage points with hispanic voters and that hispanic leaders are very concerned. This quote from Domingo Garcia, who is the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told some of, quote, it's a matador red flag flying out there. The hispanic vote is totally up for grabs. Trump's cutting the margins. And in battleground states like Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, that can be a big difference. I just want to present to both of you how concerned about the hispanic vote should President Biden be and what is the reasoning that so many hispanic voters are just going away from the Democratic Party and President Biden.

So I think that Biden should be massively concerned about this because Democrats have built their majorities over the last decade or two on what Ron Brownstein at the Atlantic has called the coalition of the ascendant. Right. Younger voters, voters of color. And these are all groups that Biden has really been struggling with in polling as of late. This was supposed to be the recipe that was going to lead to these kind of permanent democratic majorities, and it's not really panning out. My colleague Patrick Rufini here at Echelon Insights, he just came out with a book, Party of the People, that really digs into this. The reason why you've begun to see this kind of populist coalition that is like multiracial and working class beginning to form, that's kind of gravitating more to the right and is spoiling a lot of Democrats hopes that they had this coalition of the future. The issues are a couple first, you have economic opportunity. I think Republicans are still generally better about talking about it. There are certain issues like health care, where latino voters, for instance, generally tend to prefer Democrats messaging. But on things like entrepreneurship, on things like the value of hard work and opportunity and hope for the future, messaging from the right tends to just be a bit more resonant.

But you also have some of these kind of law and order type issues, right? Crime, immigration, these are all issues where for a long time people said, oh, Republicans, you're going to lose important swing voters on this because you sound too mean. But when people feel like crime is out of control, when they feel like the border is out of control, they're looking for someone who's going to talk tough on it and say, I want to fix this. And that has really been, I think, another big ingredient in why you've seen this shift.

Can I also present to you what another part of this poll that I found fascinating is that one in five black voters now say that they're open to voting for a third party candidate. I mean, that is just fascinating to me, given that black voters obviously, overwhelmingly, normally statistically vote Democrat. And does that mean that RFK Jr. Has a chance with the black voter? What does that mean?

I'm not so sure about RFK doing really well with a particular segment of voters, like african american voters. But I do think what it's telling us is it's like a protest vote. I think that survey found about 17 or 18% of Americans overall wanted to vote for a third party candidate. And I don't know what you thought, Kristen, but did you just think 2016, like, when you saw that? And it's not that 16% or 18% vote for a third party candidate. I think in 2016, what was it, 3%, 1% that actually voted for Gary Johnson, the libertarian third party candidate. But what it tells you is that people are very dissatisfied with the two candidates that they have. You've got majorities of Americans who have unfavorable views of both of the likely candidates. Donald Trump on the republican side, I'm assuming, and then Biden on the democratic side. And when I saw that, again, I thought 2016 majorities of Americans had unfavorable views of Clinton and of Trump. And that's not normal. Like in 2012, people had positive views of the candidates. So we're just in a very unnormal, atypical territory where people don't like either of their options.

So I think that's part of what we're reading in this data, where we're seeing large shares of black voters, hispanic voters, saying that they're thinking about voting for Trump or thinking about voting for a third party candidate. And I think a lot of it has to do with what Kristen just said. The economy, inflation, and people remember how well the economy was doing before the pandemic started. I think people realize that there's Trump, there's the pandemic, there's Biden, and they remember how well things were going in 2018 and 2019. Inflation was low and unemployment rates among African Americans and Hispanic Americans were the lowest they've been. And people remember that. And they'd like to go back to that, but not saying that they necessarily would vote for Trump because of that, but people remember that economy. And that, I think, is drawing a lot of people who otherwise might vote for Biden. They're reconsidering that.

The big question, whenever you have a high number of people saying they're going to vote third party, is, are they actually going to turn out to the polls to begin with? There's two ways you can persuade people. You can persuade them between different options available to them on the ballot, but then you also have to persuade them to participate at all. And I think the bigger problem that Democrats might face is not so much that you're going to have a huge number of, say, black voters going out and actively voting for Donald Trump, or a huge number of young voters going out actively voting for Donald Trump if he's the republican nominee, but rather you need them to turn out at all in big numbers in order to get across the finish line, if you're Democrats. And so there's a question that I've been asking in my surveys, which is less about, do you like Trump? Do you like Biden? We know that they both have very high unfavorables, particularly among voters of color, young voters, et cetera. But I ask a question where I say, which of the following do you agree with more?

That whether Trump or Biden wins would make a difference to me personally, or whether Trump or Biden wins would really not make a difference to me personally. And we find that in general, about eight in ten voters say yes. Actually, who wins does make a difference to me personally. But that is much higher among white voters than it is among black or latino voters, and it's much higher among older voters than it is among younger voters. There is a very large portion in my surveys, not a majority, but about a third of black voters who do not say, yep, you know what, it makes a difference to me whether Trump or Biden wins. And I think if that contrast seems like, well, it's two bad options, it's just more of the same. I'm not interested in turning out. That, to me, is the bigger threat to the democratic coalition.

It's just that their base not turning out because of a lack of enthusiasm.

Yeah. And that they just think, look, whether Biden or Trump wins, neither of them is going to help me. Neither of them is going to do anything to make my life better. So why even bother? That kind of sense of frustration leading to apathy and throwing your hands up, that, to me, is what I think is the big blinking alarm sign for democrats right now.

I always feel like I'm kind of like a perfect data point person to use in the sense that I guess I'm like a suburban mom and I hate both. I mean, hate is strong, where I really, well, hate is fine. I actually hate both candidates.

Sorry.

And I would not vote, be comfortable voting for Trump or Biden. And again, we're making the great assumption that they're both going to be the nominees. And I would just literally vote for almost anything over this because I find both of it just so, on so many different levels, depressing and not good for the country in a lot of different ways. So I was trying to hold out sort of like siren song hope of some black swan event that maybe Nikki Haley or DeSantis could pull it off. Obviously, I'm a Republican. I was extremely disappointed and confused by Nikki Haley's civil war answer. And not so much. It was a terrible answer. And for people that missed it, she was asked, what started the civil war, and she gave this very long, convoluted answer and didn't just simply say slavery, which I think a college student stoned out of his brain at a frat party would have just said slavery. I don't understand. Again, you want to talk about, like, lawyering things out? I think sometimes people are like, strategist out. Like, someone told her that, hey, southern voters don't want to be reminded of the civil war.

And that's why she answered that. And it really made me second guess whether or not she's, like, up to the job, as weird as that sounds. And then obviously, DeSantis, there's like, I don't know what's going on with him. From the data and polling you've seen, is there any hope of either of these candidates in any way possibly winning and becoming the nominee of the party?

I think it's pretty challenging. Emily, I'm interested in what you think.

Well, I'm laughing because both of us made the same face.

Yeah. I was like, you're both, like, making this cringey face. I don't want to expose you, but you both look like you were, know, grossed out.

It was a terrible answer.

It was.

I don't. I'm curious to hear Kristen's answer, too, but I don't know how this goes any differently than Trump being the nominee without some sort of bizarre event that happens. But right now, it's been pretty consistent where Trump is between 40, 60%, depending on the state that we're looking at. In some states, Haley has surpassed DeSantis, but in many states, it's DeSantis. It's kind of in second place. So it's really like, who's running for second place rather than who's running for first?

That's what it feels like.

I believe it is overwhelmingly likely that Donald Trump is going to be the republican nominee. So with that on the table, sure, I'm going to game out for you. What? I have been jokingly calling this, like, the trench run from Star Wars, a new hope. When you're trying to blow up the Death Star and you have to go through the trench and you have to.

Get everything exactly right, you have to.

Drop the bomb right in the exhaust. What does that look like for Nikki Haley? Because I think she's likely that she's going to win in Iowa, but I think if she gets a reasonably strong second and a pretty good showing does that suddenly mean she gets a second look from voters who are in New Hampshire who go, gosh, please don't let it be Donald Trump. And New Hampshire is a very interesting, totally different kind of state. Megan, I was just on Mike Murphy's podcast very recently, and I asked him, I said, you've won in, you know, and he was talking about how it is the kind of place where voters really are just different and you have a different electorate because you have so many independents who participate. The problem Nikki Haley is going to run into is even if she comes out of Iowa with some momentum, she's in second place, is one. If DeSantis drops out, more of his voters, I think, go to Trump than to her. So that doesn't necessarily, like, the math actually doesn't get better. But if she still nevertheless has this good momentum, is there suddenly more interest in the race?

Do more of those independents show up? If she can win in New Hampshire, and I think she has to win in New Hampshire, I think that means Chris Christie has to drop out before then. Like, that's the other domino that has to fall in order for her to be able to do this. Let's say she wins in New Hampshire, then you're going to South Carolina. And that is where I have been joking. The Empire strikes back. That is where suddenly Trump doesn't just play footsie and call her bird brain. I actually believe the full force of the Trump Death Star gets turned on her at that point. It's her home state. And so that's the only thing where I go, does that make this different? Right? Does that make this play out where maybe she does have some more goodwill from voters in that state who do go, oh, let's move on, let's do things differently. But, gosh, I don't want to give that path and say, like, oh, that's what I think is going to happen. That's the best case scenario for Nikki Haley. And I still think it's very unlikely.

That'S the ideal situation for a Nikki Haley campaign, which isn't necessarily the one that you think is going to happen the most. Is that accurate? Yes. Okay.

Do you think it's surprising that in Nikki Haley's home state, Trump is still beating her? Is still like, would you have expected that maybe she would have a different showing there?

No, because I just think Donald Trump is such a, he still retains such a strong hold on, particularly the type of very conservative Republican that you just find a lot more of in South Carolina. So it doesn't surprise me as much. And again, she was also governor there quite some time ago. I mean, I feel like she was not governor that long ago. And then you actually think about it, you're like, wait a minute, hang on. It's been like at least eight years since. Hang on. And then she was ambassador. A lot of time has passed since she was governor there.

I do think it's karmically you cannot be president if you haven't won your home state and you can't pull off your home state. I think that's a very, I mean, maybe someone has done it at some point that I'm unaware of in american history, but that tends to be like, sort of one of those old adages that if you can't even deliver your home state, what's your so, and I'm not trying to be so hard on Nikki Haley because I really like this sounds terrible, and I hope, I'm sure you've heard much worse things in your focus grouping. But I still have this idealistic part of me that wants magic with my candidates, and she's just not the rock star that I was hoping. And again, there's something about that civil war answer. It's not just that her answer sucked so bad, it's that you have to be so much better than Trump on every level. And to me, it was like an indicator that she's still very flawed and wasn't necessarily at the level that she could be. That being said, if she were the nominee, I'd happily vote for her. The end. But I don't know.

We'll see. I want to ask you guys, the Biden strategy right now is apparently, if it is Biden and Trump to keep connecting President Trump to Hitler and to keep sending surrogates, which happened on ABC News over the weekend. John Carl did an interview with three women who used to work for President Trump. And they all were saying that he's going to end democracy and that basically human life as we know it is going to end if President Trump is elected. I never understand that messaging because it never works. Why are they doubling down on something that, as you pointed out, voters of color, young people, they're very concerned about the economy, they're very concerned about crime. Why is that the strategy that they're going forth with?

I think the reason why they're going with that strategy, and I wrote about this in a piece that definitely ruffled some feathers.

The New York Times.

New York Times right after Christmas, is.

It's great, by the way.

Everyone should read.

It's fabulous. Thank you, Megan.

The main thesis of the piece is that in 2016, Trump ran as I'm the chaos candidate. I'm the wrecking ball. And Hillary Clinton's message was, this guy's going to be chaos. He's going to be a wrecking ball. And voters said, great, that's fine. And he wound up winning just enough voters and just enough states. In 2020, Trump ran again as I'm going to keep being a wrecking ball. And by then, voters had said, no, thank you, I'm off this train. I want a president I don't have to think about. I want calm, I want normalcy, I want boring. Give me the guy in the basement. Joe Biden, you're it. And the problem is that Joe Biden has not delivered calm or normalcy. Now, we can have a long debate over whether that's Biden's fault or not or what have you, but the reality is voters don't think that Biden has brought peace and stability to the world. They don't think that he has brought stability and growth to the economy. They don't think on issues like crime and immigration, he has been a president that has brought about order. And so it has meant that advantage he held over Trump on the question of who is chaos and who is order has been erased in the minds of lots of voters.

And I think that whoever wins the debate of who's going to bring about more stability will win. Normally, you would say it's crazy to think that Donald Trump could possibly win in a matchup against anyone on the question of, like, who is going to bring about more stability? And yet here we have a ton of different data points that I mentioned in the piece of voters saying, yeah, I actually think that Trump might be the one to bring about more order, stability, predictability. Sounds crazy, but there's lots of data that shows voters are there. So I think what democrats are trying to do is remind voters of not just how chaotic it felt when Trump was president, but also things like January 6.

Right.

That was when Trump's favorability was at its low point. That's when he was even among republican voters. A lot of them saying, I think we're ready to move on. I'm not really a Trump person. They're trying to get everybody back in that mindset and go, see, last time this guy was in charge, this is what was going on. You don't want this again. Right? But I still find that a lot of voters are looking back. Whether you want to argue it's through rose colored glasses or not. And saying, I kind of think things felt less crazy then. And that's why I think Democrats are going to try so hard to. No, no. Remember, this guy is not Mr. Stability. He is not a very stable genius. He is not going to bring about order. He is just going to tear down the institutions that are holding this all together at all in the first place. That's what I think they're strategically trying to do.

I think that's a really good point. And I agree with that framing of stability versus chaos. Trump is a known quantity now. Before he wasn't known. And people looking back to the economy, they remember things being pretty good. And so that's some stability that offers core stability that perhaps they're looking for. The other thing that I think is really important that these polls really demonstrate is thinking about January 6. To Kristen's point, the polls did show that favorability and Trump confidence in Trump obviously plummeted right after January 6. But he's back. And really, the key here is that January 6 was not the deal breaker that many people in DC and people in the media thought it was going to be. And to add a little pop culture here, I just finished the morning show, which is a tv show on Apple tv. Plus, I kind of hate it, kind of love it. Obviously, I'm watching it. But one thing that really struck me is there's this romance between two of the characters, and they think they're meant for each other. They're going to be together forever. And then they break up in this devastating breakup because one of them had a brother who protested at January 6 and she didn't tell the authorities about it.

And it's just such that storyline, it really reveals how people, that the types of people that are writing tv shows, working in media, writing movies, kind of that class, the political class, the entertainment classes are so insulated from how I think a lot of regular Americans are thinking about this. It's not the deal breaker for many people that I think everyone in DC and New York thought it was going to be after January 6. The evidence we have is looking at these polls showing the fact that he's even, even in the polls shows that it's just not the deal breaker that people thought. But here's the caveat. Perhaps people that pushed for booting Trump off of social media did him a favor. Because when he's not in the spotlight, when he's not insulting people in a very public, clear way on a daily basis, people, they can just focus on things like the economy, they're not focused on the chaotic aspects that Kristen was talking about. A lot of the chaos that people associate with Trump is more about his words, like what he said, not as know, perhaps they're maybe not associating that as much with policies.

And so I think that is just really key is how does this change when the campaigns really get into full swing and he starts saying what he's going to be saying if he gets back on social media, will this change how people frame and think about him? Does that bring back the memories of January 6? And does that make him more the chaos candidate rather than the stability candidate?

And this is not something that's going to be new this time around. I mean, we were talking eight years ago about how I'm sure his advisors would love to be able to take his phone from him and just try to run something approaching a normal campaign, and yet he is still himself, and you can't change that. And so there is this interesting contrast between, for instance, earlier this week, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas endorsed President Trump. You had a couple different congressional leaders all, like this week decide to take that leap. And his language is very much like when Donald Trump was president, America was safe, strong, and prosperous, very much setting up that stability versus chaos message I just described. I think that Trump's campaign is going to try to drive that, but then you have Donald Trump on Christmas night saying, go to hell, rotten hell. To my opponents, it's like, okay, that's not the message that I think your campaign probably would have preferred you run with. But he is who he is.

He is, definitely is who he is. And I saw that, too. And I was like, I'm always like, where's your family? Go enjoy yourself. God. I know he doesn't drink, but I'm like, go have some cake and chill out by the Christmas tree. I totally agree with that. I want to know how vulnerable do you think the age issue is? I know that they're around the same age. President Biden, President Trump. I think President Biden is 81. President Trump is like 78 or 79. It's not like he's like a spring chicken. But for some reason, President Biden is just coming across optically incredibly old. I found it very insulting when I saw the White House spokeswoman, Kareem Jean Pierre, saying, like, I have a really hard time keeping up with him. We just see his public schedules. He's not doing anything publicly until 10:00 most days in the morning. I know that I felt uncomfortable watching him on Christmas Eve talking to Ryan Seacrest. I don't know. It just makes me uncomfortable. And again, I have no problem with people aging. God willing, I'll get there myself. But it definitely is an issue that concerns me because I would not like to have a president that, God forbid, would somehow not make it through his second administration.

How much of an issue was his age with voters?

I think it's a really big issue.

Emily.

I don't know what you think about this. There was polling that was done on this last time around because Biden was also old in 2020. And back then, when voters were asked how concerned they were about Biden's age and about Trump's age, concern was muted and was pretty even between the two of them. People thought they were both pretty old, but it wasn't even near the top of the list of things that were really alarming them about either candidate. Now, alarm about Joe Biden's age has rocketed. Well, alarm about Trump's age hasn't really changed much at all. And I think that it contributes to this chaos versus stability narrative. Right. If you're voting for a president to be the bastion of stability, they need to be someone who is in the control room controlling things at some degree. And if you think the control room is empty, what's more chaotic than that in some ways? And so I think that Biden's age issue just further fuels this unhelpful dynamic to democrats and really gives voters a lot of worries about what does the world look like if the US president is not even close to 100%?

And I think we see some of this perhaps reflected in polling data when you look at the age groups and who they're planning to vote for. I don't know if this struck you, Kristen, but it stood out to me that Biden's doing disproportionately better among older voters than other democratic candidates have done so in the past. And then Trump doing perhaps maybe a little bit better, the gap has narrowed. In 2020, it was very much lopsided, where young people were voting far more for Democrats and Republicans. But in the latest polls, and I've been looking at multiple polls to make sure that it's not just a glitch, but you do see a narrowing among younger Americans, younger voters, in that they're a little bit more favorable to Trump than they were in the previous elections. And I think part of that has to do with what we're talking about right now, not just being age, but also just concerned about his health.

My last final question for both of you. I know you both participate in focus groups. I personally love focus groups in general on everything. I love watching focus groups. I could watch one about if people like ranch dressing or not like that SNL sketch. What has been some of like, if you can answer this, what is the vibe from so many voters? Is it anger? Is it frustration? Is it optimism when you're talking to people and you're asking them questions about the future of America? Because I feel, and again, this is just me anecdotally very disillusioned, even for new year. This year on new year's I was like, oh, is 2024 going to be like a cluster fuck? Like the last three years of no offense. And it's been so chaotic since COVID and so chaotic politically that I don't feel as optimistic, which makes me sad because I consider myself like I used to be very optimistic about things and there's something about, I don't know, just the monotony and depression and darkness of politics that is definitely impacting my psyche. Do people you pull feel the same way?

I think that a lot of this bread and butter issues are really key here. I think we can't underestimate the role that gas prices and inflation and just how much people are spending on everyday things and how much that has risen in just how they've risen dramatically in a short period of time, how that's affecting how people feel. If you look at polls, most people think we're stagnant or we're in a recession. And then the economists come up on tv and they're like, no, we're not in a recession, we promise. But it's like, but then how come everyone feels like things aren't going well? And I think just look at how much people are spending for gas, look how much they're spending for just regular household items like milk and groceries and look at what's going on with housing. I just think that a lot of the political conversations, they'll acknowledge these things, but I think they haven't given the weight and the gravity that they should and how that is affecting voters, because the end of the day, for a lot of voters, it's about bread and butter issues and how they're going to vote.

So I agree that the bread and butter issues are a huge driver of the kind of current anxiety. And the vibes are bad, the vibes are off. But I also think that there is something even more kind of fundamental that is making people feel a little just hopeless and despondent and exhausted about politics. And I think it is that nobody feels like there's a clear win for them or their side on the horizon. So there's a really interesting poll finding. The Pew Research center has asked this question over the last couple of years. Do you think that in politics, your side has been on the winning side or the losing side on kind of the issues that matter to you? And there was a point in time where during the Trump presidency, Republicans did feel a little bit more like their side was kind of winning more than losing. But that has now flipped. And now Republicans, by, like an 81 to 17 margin, think we are losing more often than we are winning. But this is mirrored on the democratic side, whereby a two to one margin, Democrats feel like their side is actually the one that is losing.

So nobody feels like their own side or people like them are on the upswing. Or, hey, things are looking brighter for us. Or, hey, actually, we're starting to put a few points on the board in politics. And I think that's what's leading to more polarization. When people feel like they're under threat and under siege, and it's the other side that's winning and people like me are losing, you excuse bad behavior on your side and so on and so forth. So I think it's driving our polarization. And I also think it's why you see so many people say, I feel like the country is headed in the wrong direction no matter where you are on the political spectrum. Just feeling like things are off.

I'm glad it's not just me, that it's, I mean, I don't want everyone to feel sad, but I'm definitely glad I'm not alone in all of this.

But I'm glad that you like focus groups so much, because I really think in a world where the quantitative polling methods that Emily and I were talking about earlier are getting harder and harder and harder to do, well, it would not surprise me that if we wind up pivoting back more toward this kind of very old school, very analog. Let's just have conversations with people. Because if the ultimate point of polling is to be a good listener, having face to face conversations and one on one dialog, that's a great place to start.

I'm going to give you guys a little insight into my private life. And please do not judge this. I actually am a member of a newsletter group where you can sit in on their focus groups. And I do it. It's over Zoom and literally, it's like twice a month, and I can't always do it twice a month because I have young kids, but I'll literally make my husband give them dinner and put them to bed so I can watch the focus.

I really enjoy it.

I don't know why I find it fascinating when you put a group of hardcore Trump supporters and hardcore Biden supporters in a room discussing, and I recently saw a focus group where a woman, I found a Kamala supporter. She's like a huge fan, loves her, thinks she's doing a great job. And I was like, that is like an incredible find in the wild. I am fascinated by this woman. And she was like, the 100% think she should be president and loved her. And I just think because I, too, live in the beltway, it's such a great way to see how real people are thinking, what they're doing and their perspective on the country. And I also think it's so important that people like me, in particular, killer keep our finger on the pulse of what people are actually thinking and feeling versus getting, as you said, so insulated that you think January 6 is going to break you up from the love of your life. It's ridiculous. I don't believe that either. Is there anything else you guys want to end on? Just thank you so much for coming on. I can't emphasize enough what fans I am of both your work and the things that you do in politics and media are so important.

I love watching both of you on tv. And like I said, you guys have both been. Maybe I'm just getting older because I'm almost 40, but I feel like we've all been around a really long time now.

When I was saying before, I was like, oh, I got my first job in politics in 2005. And that used to be, like, a thing I would say that would make it sound like, oh, I'm young, and now I'm like, oh, no, that was.

Almost 20 years ago. You were ten that were born around.

The time that we got to.

My favorite thing to do with interns.

By the way, is I don't know.

If any of you all remember the. Do you remember demon sheep?

Yes. That's crazy. Yeah, that's a long time ago. That is a throwback reference.

Yes, throwback reference. If you don't know what sheep is, google it. It was a California, I believe, Senate race ad. That, to me, is my favorite thing to show to young new people in politics. And you're. No, no, this is real. A real campaign did this during my career.

Do you remember? I am not a witch. The woman who.

That's another Christine O'Donnell from New Jersey.

Christine O'Donnell see, that's the other part about politics that I really love, too, is that because I recently also was talking to some young people about why I still love it so much. And I was like, because it's absurd. Because there are things like demon sheep and I am not a witch. Again, we're dating ourselves. Google both of these things that really happen. And there are people that do things that think it's actually going to resonate with voters. And it's like sometimes common sense completely leaves the building of rational thinking. And people are getting paid literally millions of dollars to guide candidates to do things like demon sheep. And it's fascinating, I think.

Well, they do say, right, that Veep is one of the most realistic tv.

Shows about politics, 100%.

And I do think some of the things that have happened in the past couple of years are so wild and zany that even the writers of Veep would say, no, this isn't realistic. We couldn't do this.

My favorite data point or anecdote that I heard was that the writers of, the head writer of House of Cards said he could not write the trump years because the audience would mutiny and say, this is too ridiculous and too out of the realm of rational thinking and what would happen. Anyway, thank you guys so much. Is there any place we can find you other than obviously on Twitter? At k Soltis Anderson and Emily at Emily Eakins? E-K-I-N-S. Also on, I'm saying Twitter, I know it's x, but whatever. And Instagram, is there any other place we can find you? Any place you want people to look? Thank you so much for your time and expertise today. Truly, it's just been such a pleasure to speak with both of you.

Thank you so much for having us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Anything else you want to plug while you're here?

If you would like, I have a substac. I don't write there very often, but there's no paywall. Just subscribe. It's kristensoltesanderson substack.com. It's called codebook. Come check it out.

I will 100% do that.

I definitely will. And then can check out, we have more polls coming out on free speech and technology. Those types of issues coming out this spring, and we published that at the Cato Institute's website. So ww cato.org.

Fabulous. Thank you guys so much. Happy new year.

Happy new year.

Welcome back to Megan McCain has entered the chat. So the best part about doing this podcast, and now we are, gosh, like three almost four months in is being able to have all of my wonderful, highly talented, iconic class friends on. And for those of you who are longtime fans from the America nowadays, you will remember my friend, C. Robert Cargill. Cargill that I and the rest of the world calls him, who is now a very famous screenwriter writer of black phone and Dr. Strange and the sinister series. And his work has appeared recently in VHS 85 and his anthology book, Haunted Reels. I mean, Cargill, first of all, thank you so much for joining me. I adore you. You are a true genius. And I'm just so happy to see your face and hear your voice.

It's good to see you. We've both been super busy and our paths have not crossed in a while. But. No, I'm happy to be here. I mean, I was actually just thinking about it this year. We'll have known each other 15 years.

Okay.

So I was trying to remember because it's so funny, because when I was getting ready this morning for. It's funny to prep for a friend, number one. Like, to go through your bios and whatever. You have a very beautiful Wikipedia page, by the way. I know it's not always accurate, but.

I've not checked it.

Cargill.

And I just doesn't say anything nasty.

No, it's all good. And it's accurate because I know you. It's like you come from a military family and all these things, and you're right or whatever. But when I first met you, you were writing for ain't it cool news and you were a movie reviewer, and now you make movies. And the first thing I wanted to start out with is a lot of people come to you on social media looking for advice on how to break into the industry and how to break into writing, because obviously, you're incredibly successful. What is the number one thing you'd say to people that are struggling, that are trying to make it? Because you've been working in this industry.

For, what is it, 20 years over that? Yeah, going on 25.

So what's your first piece of advice you would give people?

The first piece of advice when you're breaking in is always that the thing about the entertainment industry is it's like a big Gadspian party. Everyone wants to be there. It's really exciting. And once you get in, nobody asks you whether or not you belong there. That's just not a thing that happens. You get in and you're in. So the secret is figuring out how to get in. And you can wait at the door and have them check your credentials and say yes or no, or you can sneak in the back and find some way in. Another writer phrased it as breaking into Hollywood is like breaking out of jail. Once you've made a hole, somebody else follows behind and then they plug up the hole and you can't get through anymore. And so it's very much that your job as a writer trying to break into the industry or as a creative trying to break into the industry. Half of your job is creating that really great art that gets you in. The other half is figuring out how to get in. Some people have this, if you build it, they will come mentality towards art where it's like, I will make this brilliant thing and then everyone will show up and want it.

And that's not necessarily the case. You have to figure out how to get that thing in front of the right people at the right time. And not enough people spend the energy trying to figure that part out because nobody just really just shows up and is handed a career. You have to fight for it every step of the way. And so thinking about how to do that is central to starting off your career. And not enough people do that.

Can I ask you, you have this incredible breadth of work, but you do collaborate with Scott Derrickson, the director, and the actor Ethan Hawke on quite a few projects, including, obviously, the sinister series and black phone, and you're working on a sequel to black phone. I've always been curious, why is it that certain actors, directors, writers feel comfortable enough to literally bank their careers in this safe space together and making art? Because you've clearly found a synergy with these people. What is it about Ethan Hawk and Scott Derrickson you think that brings you all together in this way, that creates.

It'S both with, it's very different with both of them. But the thing is that Hollywood is entire making movies is entirely about collaboration. It's very weird. I have these night and day careers, so I've got my publishing career and I've got my movie making career. I even have a side Hustle as a podcasting career, which isn't really part of my career. It's just me talking about movies with one of my best friends who blocks.

Me on Twitter, by the way, because I clicked on him and I can't figure out why because I think I've been on that podcast and I was like, why am I blocked? So please tell him to unblock me.

I'm going to have to.

I was like, what the hell?

Anyway, I have no idea. But in publishing, it's very much like you're the person who writes. You send it to your editor. Your editor sends you back a list of edits and goes, now, this is your book. So you make the choices, but here's what we think. And Hollywood is the night and day of that. Everybody gets their hands dirty. Everyone has an opinion. You will have actors that will come up to you and go, I'm having problems with the script, and I think you need to rewrite it. Everybody gets into it. And you have to know that going in, you cannot go into filmmaking being like, I am going to be the full arbiter. It is going to be my voice. I am the full author of this because you never are. There's so many people that are involved in that creative process. So when you find people that you can really jive with and get really great material with and that you can do stuff that you're really proud of, you keep working with those people. We joke around on set that Ethan, we call him two take hawk because he comes in, he walks on set, he does the scene, and then we do one more for safety, and then we can move on because he just nails it right at the beginning.

You know what you're getting as soon as he walks on. Not all actors are like that. You'll work with actors where it takes five or six takes before you get that magic that that Oscar winner is known for, that they've got to get their engine revving. And then once they hit it, they keep hitting it, but it takes a while. Sometimes you don't want to work with an actor on that, especially on a lower budget movie where time is going to be of the. So, you know, Ethan is just one of those great magical blue collar actors who he comes to work with three different versions of how he can do every particular scene. He's got it all memorized, he's ready to go. And so you get in, you talk about the scene, and then you're shooting. And so we love working with him. He also is an actor that likes to take risks. When he made sinister, he had never made a horror movie before, and then all of a sudden blew up in the horror scene. And before black phone, he didn't play a villain before. And now he's played a villain two more times in other shows and movies because he enjoyed it so much.

So having an actor that gets out of his comfort zone and works the way he does, always go back to that person if you have a chance. And then, of course, Scott, me and Scott are best friends. We're two people who can sit around for 4 hours and smoke cigars and talk and feel like it was ten minutes. And so we also come from very different creative mindsets. So we approach the same material that we love from two different angles. And as a result, we're always pushing and pulling at each other and getting work that's better if we had done it on our own. And so it's always great to have somebody make you look better and smarter.

You have had so much success in the horror space. And the first time I saw sinister, it literally gave me nightmares. And for people who haven't seen it, it's a very dark, scary movie. As is.

You were, by the way, if you recall, what you haven't mentioned is you were me and Jess's plus one to the premiere of sinister. You were at the world premiere.

I actually said that the beginning of the podcast, just FYI. And that was when I actually got to meet Ethan Hawkiewic. He really lives up to his reputation. He's a very nice man. And I'm not just saying that because you're sitting in front of me, I mean like lovely. And I've met a lot of actors who are not. But whatever.

Going back to the other reason, why do you keep working with the same people over and over again? Because when they're not jerks, it makes the day go faster.

So true. It's so true. But I want to know why you think you're drawn to this dark space again, like horror movies. I mean, you know how much I love horror movies. And they're a cornerstone of american culture, of american art. And the ones that you have created in particular, I mean, they're just huge. I mean, black fun is a wild success. Why do you think that you are comfortable and successful in this space?

Well, I mean, the thing is that horror, when horror is its own subgenre, but it's also a subgenre that can blend with every other genre. You can make horror comedies, you can make horror romances, you can make horror art films. You really have a lot to play around with there. And you can do a lot of things in horror that you can get an audience to pay for that you can't necessarily do in other straight genres. It allows you to play around, flex all your creative muscles, tell really great stories, create really great characters, create complicated situations with deep themes, all while getting people to jump and throw their popcorn in the air. Sinister at its heart. Yeah, it's a monster movie about a monster that is tricking kids into seducing kids into killing their families. But the majority of what that movie is, is an indie drama about a writer struggling to find his next book, falling upon a mystery and putting his family in danger doing so. There's all these complicated things going on with the family through the film. And if you made that without the ghosts and the spooks, it'd make $2 million on the weekend and then end up on Netflix.

But you put in the jumps and the ghouls and the goblins, and all of a sudden you have a movie that opened $18 million its opening weekend that we made for $3 million. You look at some of what's considered the best horror movies of the last ten years, and you're talking about films that you could easily call cinema. You're talking about movies like nope. And get out and the Witch and the Babadook. And these movies that incredible have a lot to say and are very artistic in a way that you can't be with a comedy. And so playing in the horror sphere really gives you a really big toolbox to tell any kind of story you're feeling like you want to tell, while also having a lot of fun doing it and getting to do gnarly things with the lawn mowers.

I read an article a long time ago and I apologize. I can't remember where, but it was talking about how horror movies do particularly well in american culture in times of tension, strife, chaos. And that a lot of the horror movies that are popular are actually reflections of things going on in cultures like slasher movies were big in the 80s. I'm sure you know much more about this than I do. I guess torture porn was a reflection of Iraq, the Iraq War and 911. Right? Now, do you think horror movies are so popular because everything's so fucked up?

Well, yeah, the thing is, the question of how fucked up is everything is a product of 1000 different podcasts. But the thing is that we are plugged in more than we've ever been before, and we're exposed to more darkness and horror every day that we may have not been aware of previously. And as a result, yeah, there's a big draw to horror and scares and catharsis to get that. Essentially, one of the things about horror movies is horror movies take our fears and give them physical form so you can punch them in the face and so that you can confront them. Even the most esoteric horror films are about existential dread, things that we deal with in any given day. And a horror movie is that chance to go and viscerally experience that and jump and have those physical reactions and then have fun with those feelings and giving this relief of catharsis and safety at the end. And that's one of the big things, is that you feel safe at the end of a horror movie. Generally a really scary horror movie will follow you out to the car. That's when you know, you kind of hit it.

One of the greatest compliments I ever got was a horror director. I know she was there that night that we saw sinister, the first showing, and she went home and none of the lights in her house were on and she didn't want to go inside. And that's where, you know, you really. Yes, you did it. But yeah, the thing is, horror always does well. But yeah, during times of strife, during times of conflict, when people are really just on edge, horror movies do very well. And we saw that back in 2022 when we had so much great horror. I mean, you'd see it this year in 2023, even though it was not as good a year as 22. In terms of the volume of great horror, what was there did very well. And we had one screenwriter who had two number one openings last year, which is something I had never seen before.

Who is that?

Akella Cooper. She wrote Megan and the nun too.

Megan. So good.

Yeah, took number one both times. And so it's great to see stuff like that. It's great to be in a genre when it's really popping with the mainstream audiences and you get the LA Times calling up going, what's going on with horror right now? Everybody seems to be talking about it. It's great to be in those periods as opposed to what's happening in the superhero world right now, where everybody's kind of like, yeah, we're done with superhero movies now. And if what you do for a living is make superhero movies, now is the time where you polish up your cv and maybe branch out into a couple of other genres. But yeah, it's doing very well.

Well, I want to get into the superhero decline in 1 second, but I want to say one of the things, my dad died of brain cancer, as you know, and everyone knows. And when he died, I went to grief counseling and some of it worked. But I'm just not a great therapy person in general. I get bored easily, whatever. And I had a friend tell me to watch the Babadook, which is a horror movie, which I'm not going to give it away. It's really one of the greatest horror movies ever made because he told me that it was a metaphor for dealing with grief and how you live with it. And the premise of the movie is people finding a demon in their basement that they can't figure out how to get rid of. And literally that horror movie did more for me for therapy. I'm not going to give away the ending, but the ending is how you deal with grief. And it is a genius, perfect horror movie that has literally helped me emotionally and psychologically in so many ways. And that's why I think horror movies are so important as well, is because it really can be this lens into just the ultimate darkness in the world and how we ultimately cope with it.

So I just wanted to share that with you. Why was the Babadook such a sleeper hit from the side? Because it really was this movie that just like, exploded.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's the perfect example of a cult film. It hit with the critics, it didn't quite hit with audiences the way it wanted to, but people wouldn't shut up about it. And they're like, you got to watch this movie. And so as a result, it bled out and people saw it and then it became a meme. And now it's one of those films, horror ages better than anything else. So you can have a film that fails as a horror movie and ten years later is considered to be a classic. And that's what happened with the Babadook is the Babadook is one of those that people are like, we don't understand why people don't like it, but people kept mentioning it and mentioning it, and now it's considered one of the most important horror films of the last decade. But yeah, that movie is very much, if you took all the horror elements out of that movie, it would make a great art film, but nobody would see it. And that's what's kind of great about horror, is you can make a film that is about how do you deal with grief? What does that do to the family?

Watching a mother kind of unravel and is she going to be driven to murder her child? You get to play around with really deep, heavy stuff while also getting people to pay to see it in theaters. Because I say the Babadook didn't do great, but when you look at it, did better than indie films of that era. It just didn't do well compared to the conjuring, which came out around the same time.

It's one of my favorite movies ever. And I think because I have this weird emotional connection to it, you brought up superhero movies not doing well. Look, you've known me 15 years. I love movies. I really do. I'm worried recently I'm losing my appetite for film because when I was looking back on 2023, there were so many television shows that I loved. I mean, this is probably not going to surprise you, but the last of us was my favorite thing that happened last year in all of anything in television. I just loved it so much. I love a zombie apocalypse, end of the world anything. And I've been really trying to watch a lot of movies and I got in a little bit of trouble over Christmas because I don't know if you saw this. I tweeted that I really didn't like maestro and that I felt like it was a waste of my time. And look, I have two young kids. It's hard for me to get free time in general. I just want to watch a good movie that's going to make me escape. I was bored with it. I didn't like it.

It's not for me. It went everywhere for some reason. It was like on page six and all these things. There's a lot movies that I have watched this year that people love that I do not. Are my tastes changing or like, I watched may December. I didn't love it. And again, I hope I'm not offending you as an artist and a screenwriter.

And a writer, but you just named all my films.

Are those your favorite movies?

No. From the year I was joking that I had written.

What? The movies that are coming out like the new Golden Globe nominees. I saw a few of them. I didn't love any of them. I just saw Saltburn and Priscilla. Fine. I wasn't losing my mind over either of these movies. It was fine. Is it me? Am I the problem? It's me. You can say if I am.

Well, I mean, yes and no. There's a lot there that you brought up that's actually a lot of moving pieces.

Okay.

But everything you mentioned, first of all, you're a genre girl. You always have been. It's part of why we're good friends. You were like, I need somebody who can recommend science fiction and horror movies to me.

Science fiction, horror, apocalypse, that's it.

Yeah.

It's really all I kind of love.

Weirdly, and everything you just mentioned, essentially how a lot of this ties in is audiences are cyclical and we oscillate back and forth between realism and fantasy and in what we desire. When we sit down to watch a movie, here's what I want. And we go through patches in history where we are obsessed with fantasy which is what we're just coming out of. In 2008, we went headlong into fantasy and all of a sudden superhero movies, science fiction movies, fantasy films, horror, getting very supernatural going from, as you mentioned, what was unfortunately titled torture porn of the mid aughts, where it was all about kind of slashers but really grizzly slashers. Then all of a sudden moving into possession movies and ghost movies. And that became the last 15 years have been all about fantasy. And that's what dominates the box office now. That's not all that's been made, but when you look at the top 20, the top 30 of the year on box office, you're going to find almost entirely fantastical films. But if you go to other portions of history, like before that, you end up with realism being the dominating factor.

In 1986, the fantasy era that we had grown up with in the 80s had died and became much more realistic films where thrillers and procedurals and action movies without fantastical elements all kind of started dominating the box office. You'd have the occasional genre movie pop into the top 20, but it was very rare. It was a terminator two or it was a total recall that would come out of seemingly nowhere, but everything else would be these more realistic films. And one of the types of those realistic films is kind of the bloated, star driven director helms drama. And the Oscar bait movie, if you will, is what they typically get pigeonholed into. And those become very popular, and that just became popular this year. Every movie you mentioned is riddled with stars. You can't throw a stick in those movies without hitting a recognizable actor. You can name all of the directors, even if they're an up and coming director like Emerald, all the way up to. You got Scorsese in there, you've got Ridley Scott in there, you've got all these big Bradley Cooper in there. You've got all these big stars and these big directors that are making these movies that are very dramas when you boil it down.

Oppenheimer is a three hour movie about a guy getting security clearance and then all the things that happen along the way when you break it down. Ferrari is a movie about a guy figuring out whether he's going to recognize his bastard son or not, and there's racing in between there. But those movies aren't about the big spectacle as they were for the last 15 years. These movies are more about drama again. And if that's not your personal cup of tea, you're going to be like, why is this the movie everybody's talking about? And for a lot of people, it's because they're just done with fantasy and they're like, thank God we're back to telling movies about normal people again. And they're very excited about that fact. But those were never your somebody. As somebody who you would turn to me in the middle of the night and be like, cargill, what do I watch? Yes. None of those were movies that I would think you need to see that.

Are people with.

First of all, can I talk to.

You about Saltburn for a second? Which you brought up. Emerald Fennell.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Of all the ones that are getting award nominations, I think I hated that the least. I still didn't love love it, but I think it's because I knew so much of the plot that had been given away on social media. Emerald Fennell is getting a lot of backlash to her about this movie and about her in general. I guess she comes from a wealthy family in the UK. I guess that's where her name comes from. Her dad is a famous jeweler. That's why her name is Emerald. As a full blown nepple baby myself, I don't understand the criticism that she can't make great art and great films because she has famous parents. Do you think it's fair? Do you think some of the criticism of her and the film are fair? Or do you think it's just based in sort of, like, misogyny and backlash.

Towards, you know what? I think it's got its feet in both graves, if you will. If you've seen Saltburn.

Yes.

Because one of the things is that the criticism isn't that you can't make great art if you come from a wealthy family. I think the thing here is a wealthy person coming in and making a let's skewer the rich movie feels hollow to folks.

Okay?

And it's one of those things where you just kind of got to shrug at it because people are very much like, well, if you're rich, you can't make fun of the rich. And it's like, why not? These are the assholes I grew up with. With her in particular. The critics that have gone after her, I've seen are generally familiar with the work that inspired her, and they're finding it too derivative. The issue is, like, I was having a conversation with a british critic friend of mine who lives here in town, and he was going off on, well, if you've read all of these books, she's just ripping all that off. And I'm like, I've never read any of those books, this was my experience with this. All the books you're talking about were very big in Britain, but not necessarily over here, except with academics. So she's tapping into something that most mainstream audiences aren't really familiar with. So I don't know that that is as much a criticism as you think it is. It is what it is. But, yeah, I do think there is a bit of misogyny in there, because the fact is, I only see takedowns of directors like this for female led films.

You don't see men who do that kind of thing. They go, oh, that's not a criticism mainstream critics give to Tarantino, even though Tarantino rips off everything. The thing is that Tarantino rips off everything, puts it back together and slides it forward, and you go, oh, that's better. I like that. That's great. You took a bunch of things that I liked and you made it amazing. I think that's what Emerald Fennell did, and I thought the parts that I recognized, I really enjoyed. It was exactly the type of trashy airport thriller that I think is absolutely essential for unwinding. It did something I have never seen in a film before, a scene that I've never experienced. I was like, oh, well, that's new.

Talk about the graveyard scene.

Oh, yes.

Because I was like, oh, what am I watching? I was like, and I'm not easily shocked. And I was like, what is happening? I'm not going to give it away, but it's a lot.

And its intent is to shock. And that's the thing is, by the time you get to the end of the movie, I think somebody put that movie best saying it's a movie about a bunch of ghouls without a single redeeming person in the film. And that's the whole point. I really enjoyed it, but it was one of those movies that I watched and I laughed on the way out. I'm like, that's going to be divisive as hell. Anybody that digs that movie, that's my tribe right there.

Do you have a favorite movie of 2024? I know it's hard, or can you give me a few favorites? I'm sorry. Of 2023 and then a few disappointing ones? If you be so brave.

Yeah, I can. Favorite of the year is kind of hard. 2023 was not a great year for film. It was not a great year for horror. It was definitely not a great year for superhero movies. Overall, it's one of those years. In fact, it was a really bad year for pop music. Too. Like, it's anything that's anyone who's into pop entertainment. 2023 is one of those years we're never really going to mention in the future, unless we're talking about Barbenheimer. I would definitely say Barbie is at the top of my list of best films of the year. That movie was equal parts hilarious and meaningful. That movie has layers that I love dissecting a very well put together movie. I love Spider man across the Spider verse.

So did Ben. He watches.

Oh, my God.

He saw it, like, three times in theater. That's just.

They're wonderful. And as a comic book fan, they're a delight. And so, yeah, I really enjoyed that quite a bit. There's a film coming out in February that is just my personal cup of vodka. It's a film called she is Conan, and it played festivals last year, and I've seen it three times already. And it's about a woman who is in the afterlife, and every ten years, she visits herself. Every ten years to kill the woman she was to become the woman she has to be.

Wow.

The first iteration of her is a female Conan the barbarian. And then every ten years, it changes, and it's a different actress playing her as we see her get older and older, as she's essentially wandering through her life. But the thing is, it's shot like Barbarella on mescaline. Like, it is this insane, beautiful, crazy hour and a half existential french film. And it is so exactly for me.

Would I like.

Oh, I think you would.

Okay. I trust you. Okay.

Because it has enough of the weird genre element. I mean, it really is. It's all about this kind of hellhound leading this woman through her own life that she doesn't remember and effectively judging herself. And there's so many genre elements mixed in with great existential twaddle. And you get to the end of the movie, and you're like, oh, that's what an art film is supposed to be. You feel fulfilled. You feel like everything was there for a reason. Just really good. And that comes out in February. And I was a big fan of that one. That's my favorite film that I saw last year. It's the one that I've had people. I had them send me a screener, and I've had people over in the backyard, and we've sat and watched it, and people are like, how did nobody see that on the festival circuit? That's really great. I really liked the horror movie. Talk to me.

Okay.

That was really good. Quite enjoyed that disappointment wise, my biggest disappointment has been the big, bombastic biopics. I thought I was going to be excited to see those come back, but I got done with Oppenheimer and I was like, this is good, but it's not best of the year. And I'm shocked by the people who think it's best of the year. The thing that bummed me about Oppenheimer was it's a three hour movie about a genius. They never show him being a genius. They just, people keep telling him he's a genius. And as a storyteller, I'm sitting there, no, I understand he built the atomic palm, but can you show him be cool at some point? Like being the smartest guy in the room instead of having everyone tell him he's the smartest guy in the room? And then I kind of felt that same way about Ferrari. It was good, but not great. I feel like there were some missing components to that. I guess my biggest problem with Ferrari is that Michael Mann comes from an era where Ferrari was a huge guy and a titan. So he doesn't feel he needs to explain Ferrari to anybody.

But anybody that didn't grow up in that era and knows some of the niche stuff doesn't really have a connection with him because we're supposed to already like him. And so it was not as fun to watch for me. But they were both good. But that was kind of the disappointments. There were a couple of movies that should have been, like, great movies that I just kind of felt.

Did you like Maestro?

I still haven't seen Maestro, so I have no opinion on Maestro yet.

Did you see past lives?

No, that's on my short list for this week. I'm still crawling through screeners and some of the recent stuff. Oh, one of the other best of the years, american fiction. If you've not seen this yet, Megan, that's a great one.

I keep reading. It's incredible. And it's sort of like a movie about making poking fun of sort of like black writers being forced to write things for white audiences that are innately racist. Is that a good way to describe it?

Yeah, that's a big part of it. That's the overarching theme. And what's really interesting is its thesis that it never beats you over the head with. It's just kind of ever present, is that it's about a family who's going through a family crisis at the moment, while this guy is going through this crisis of conscience with writing. But they're a fully assimilated black family. That has done everything that they were told they were supposed to do, and they still can't get real. Equality. And here's this guy who really just wants to publish these great esoteric literary works, and everybody's like, no, it's not black enough. He writes something satirically so he could send it off and be like, fuck you. This is not who I am. And they love it. And it's the. Here's a box of money. And he's, wait, no, but. But this box of money would solve all my problems. But now I'm selling myself out, and it's cerebrally funny. Jeffrey Wright is just so delightful in the movie.

He's an incredible actor. I like everything he's in. I really do.

It was really interesting. We got both a Jeffrey Wright indie film, and then you get to turn around on Disney plus and have Jeffrey Wright as the watcher in the Marvel what if series. And you get all the Jeffrey Wright.

Yeah, he's an incredible actor. I know you're incredibly busy and you're working on your books as well as your screenplays. How do you figure out what's worth your time? Because you're writing all the time. You're saying, I just asked you offline before we started recording. What are you doing? And you're like, I'm in writing mode right now. I never really understand how you're capable of doing as much work as you are. How do you choose your projects now.

Based on the reality of them? Getting made, for one, is one thing. Scott and I get offered a lot of projects that we just pass on because we're like, that movie is going to be in development hell forever. It's never getting made. That's an insane concept. Also, if we choose based on, if we have anything to say in that field, there have been a couple of big, prominent franchises that have come our way over the last few years that we've just turned down because we were like, we could make a movie in that universe, but we don't have anything we want to do in that universe. And so thanks, but no thanks. And then just pure desire of, I've got two paid projects that I'm working on at the moment that we're developing while contracts are going through and the like. But I also have this third script that I'm writing on the side in my free time that I'm writing for a friend to direct, because it's a story I've always wanted to tell. It's something I've always wanted to do. It's something I've always wanted to see and nobody's done. And I found a director who's been looking for just that script, and I found a producer who's like, I will put in the money myself if I have to to get this made.

And so it's like, that's worth my time. If I've got other creatives who are really excited about this project, then I'll put my personal time into it to make this passion project. So it's always about those. What I don't want to do right now is I'm at that point in my career where I could easily just take the paychecks and work on six scripts a year, and maybe one of them gets made, maybe they don't, but I could be swimming in dough. Instead, I'm kind of like, let me do this smaller horror film. Let me do this thing that is not as big money, but that I know will absolutely get made and that I will be on set and we will shoot it, and I will have another finished product. Because where I am right now, I've worked on 32 films or projects, rather 32 projects for Hollywood professionally. And to date, I've only seen six come out.

That's wild.

It's a really good batting average, considering when you're in the industry, people are like, oh, wow, that's pretty good. But you do reach that point where you're like, I kind of really want to work on stuff that comes out, not just have a pile of scripts in my drawer that I was like, oh, that would have made a really good movie, but it was just the wrong time, or we had the wrong actor attached or what have you. So that's where I'm choosing these days, is going after the stuff that seems realistic.

Do you have a dream job, a dream story? Is there like sort of this white whale of anything that you've wanted to do in any way or like a topic or a person?

The one that I'm working on right now, because apart from that, I've already done a lot of that. I guess the one thing that I would love to do that I might get the chance, considering where we were just talking about with fantasy and realism. For over 20 years, I've wanted to do a story on the Battle of Atu, which is a not so famous battle in World War II that defies common wisdom. The whole thing is that we were actually invaded and american soil was taken in World War II. We often think it never happened, but the Japanese captured several islands in the alecian islands, and one of those was AtU, and the result was a really crazy, insane late night battle that decided the japanese section of that war. And the entire story is phenomenally crazy and unlike any World War II story anyone's ever told. And that would be one that I've just had there in my back pocket for years. Like, I'd love to tell that story. That would be great.

I've never heard of that, so I would love to see that a film on that as well. And I'm an educated person, so there you go. Cargo, is there anything else that you want to share with our audience right now, just about the future of movies and entertainment going forward in 2024? Is there anything like, the world is so chaotic and such a mess in so many different ways, but I feel like one of the things that still brings people together is filmmaking and storytelling. Is there anything you feel hopeful about going into 2024?

Yeah. So the bad news first is because of the strikes last year, so many movies got pushed back and they weren't able to finish shooting. There's movies that shot three weeks. There's a few movies that actually just got scuttled that they're like, we're never going to be able to come back and finish this movie. But there are other movies that I'm hoping don't rush into production and finish to get out by summer, because that's what happened in 2008 and that's how we got some really notoriously terrible movies, was they were just rushed into production. The good news is that all these dates opened up and Sundance released this year got 17,000 submissions of films, of which 4400 were features. So they could only choose 86 films. They chose 86 films. But my thinking of it is, if half of those films that Sundance chose out of 4400 features are bangers, that's a great new indie movie. Every week for the next year, there's a bunch of people that worked on stuff during the pandemic. They tightened things up. They waited until Hollywood was back so that they didn't end up dead. And as a result, you've got way too many movies.

Like, there's a lot of films that are going know vanish as a result of how many there are. But what that means is we may have a number of new indie voices coming out in the next year of just exciting films from people you've never heard of or people who weren't given the right chance in the past, and that they tweaked this and have this great film, we could go back to a 90s era kind of boom of really cool, weird new voices. So that's very exciting. When I saw the sheer numbers on that, it's just like, even if only ten of those 4400 are great, that's ten great indie films we could be seeing this year. And that always excites me. So that's really great. And the other big thing is that Hollywood always pivots Hollywood. The big thing that gets left out of the conversation is that Hollywood does not dictate what we watch. We dictate what we watch. And it's audiences, what audiences will pay for, what audiences will stream in the opening weekends before the decision has been made on things. That's what drives media. And if you love film, if you're one of those people that have sat around saying all Hollywood makes is remakes and horror films and superhero movies, it's not true.

The theaters are full of great films. You just are waiting to hear your friends talk about if you want to see good new stuff, if you want something that's different, anytime you see something out there that is that thing that is adjacent to something you love, just blind watch it. Take friends. If you love an indie film, go and buy a bunch of tickets and take your friends the next know show Hollywood. This is the stuff you want. And this is the year we can really do that. And Hollywood is constantly taking this data. They're going to take everything they learned from 2023 and said, well, this didn't work and this didn't work. And I guess we're not doing these kind of movies anymore for a while. And then they go, well, let's try something else. And if that something else is what you love, jump into it and go after it, because you get to shape Hollywood. Hollywood doesn't shape itself, and I think that gets left out of the conversation too much. So this is a great year to go and support indie films, if you love indie films, because there's going to be a lot of them, I'm very hopeful that we're going to see an error, that what we're doing is we're kind of being like, okay, that's all done.

We did all the superhero stuff. We did all the bombastic stuff. Let's make some weird art. Because I love weird art.

I love weird art, too. When you were saying the, like a great time, I always think of the Blair witch project because it's the first movie that scared the living shit out of me and made me cry in the movie theater.

Yeah, that's a throwback.

But like the indie boom of the 90s. That's what gave us Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater and Paul Thomas Anderson. And just all these great voices came out of these weird beard little indie films because people had gotten tired of watching big spectacle and was like, I want to see something new. I want to see something different. And you get pulp fiction and boogie nights and these crazy good, grounded movies, dazed and confused, and I'm hoping that's what we start getting again.

Well, I just want to thank you again, Cargill, for taking time to talk to me on my podcast, on my new podcast for being my friend for so long. And I just want to congratulate you on all your wild success everywhere. You can follow Cargill on Twitter at Massawarm, Massawyrm, and on even. You're not really a tweet excerpt person anymore and not really an instagram.

No. I'm over on blue sky.

What is blue sky? And I need to get on it. What is that?

Oh, you.

I don't know what this is. You should have told me. What is it?

Oh, it's Jack. The guy who started Twitter, moved over and is creating a new protocol, blue sky. And it is very much a.

Is it like Twitter when it started? Because that's my.

No, it feels exactly like. I've been thinking about you regularly because it feels like. Like back in the day when we first became friends, how we became friends was you would come home from these terrible dates.

Terrible.

And you'd be like, oh, my God. You hop on Twitter. Go, is anybody up? I need to talk about this terrible date I just had.

I did.

And I'd raise my hand, be two in the morning, Texas time, and be like, I am. And then we would talk about your dating life.

And Cargill, who doesn't know anything about that because he's been married to a beautiful angel for 70 years, and you met her when you were really young. And you have a wonderful.

Next week, we celebrate our 29th anniversary of being.

Shut up, Cargill. That's so long. That's so crazy. She's a beautiful angel. Perfect.

And we're not that old. It's just that.

No, you're not teenagers and fell in love few years older than me. That's amazing. What are you guys going to do? Congratulations.

We're going to go out and have a really nice dinner. And that's right on. We're going to save the big thing for 30 years. That's where we're going to be. Like, all right. We met 30 years ago. We got to do something.

Well, I was actually thinking you're going to have a big birthday coming up in two years.

Oh, yeah.

And then I want to know what you're going to do for that. I'm not going to say your age on the show.

I will figure that out as well. I have not quite laid down what I am going to do for the big 50, but I'll do something. It'll probably be a lost weekend in the middle of nowhere with a lot of really great Scots.

Yes.

Well, Cargill, thank you so much for coming on. Is there anything else you want to plug before we say goodbye?

No. If you dig horror films and want to see what's up, I've got vhs 85 is streaming on shutter. I believe you can also rent it separately. Me and Scott had a short in there called Dream Kill. And then, of course, I was in an anthology with a bunch of friends. Over the course of the pandemic, there were a bunch of horror filmmakers that were really kind of just stir crazy. And we all started hanging out on Thursday nights. And now we have this collection of over 100 horror filmmakers that come and go from this weekly Zoom. And a bunch of us decided to put together a book and just write some short stories together. It's called Haunted Reels. And I think 32 of us submitted short stories. And the short stories are great. A bunch of good people. If you want to find some new indie voices that you haven't heard from, there's those in there. There's also some bigger horror filmmakers, and I really like the story I wrote for it. So you can find that wherever you buy your books.

Wonderful. Thank you so much again, Cargill. See you soon. Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you all so much for listening today. And thank you to our guests, Kristen Soltis Anderson, Emily Eakins, and of course, my friend, C. Robert Cargill. It's been a wonderful first episode back, and I look forward to many, many, many more in 2024. See you soon. Thanks for listening to this episode of Megan McCain has entered the chat brought to you by Teton Ridge. I am your host and executive producer, Megan McCain. Additional executive producers are Miranda Wilkins, Eric Spiegelman, and Wyn why school. Our supervising producer is Olivia Decopoulos. Our senior guest producer is Kara Kaplan and associate producer Austin Goodman.