Megan McCain has entered the chat. Welcome back to Megan McCain has Entered the Chat. We have a great show today with my friend Michael Moynihan, who is a veteran journalist and co-host of the very popular podcast, The Fifth Column. And then we have a feature writer at New York magazine, another long-form journalist, Elizabeth Weil. She wrote this New York magazine piece called The Women Who Walked Away: What Drove a Colorado Mother to Flee into the Rocky Mountains with Her Teenage Son and Her Sister. I read it about a month ago, and I was just so deeply impacted by the story that I just asked Kara and Miranda if we could have her on, and she said, yes, which is fantastic. Great show today. I don't really have anything else to say because we recorded already, Miranda. And it's a great show and really interesting people. And that's the best part about having a podcast is just having all these interesting people on.

Yeah, I know. You've been really looking forward to talking to Elizabeth.

I remember when you first read that piece and you sent it out to us and you were just like, we need to have her on tomorrow, like special episode.

This is all I could think about.

And it finally happened. I'm very happy.

Happy Bladed Valentine's Day. I don't have anything else to ask. We're creeping, creeping, creeping very close to the South Carolina primary, which will be the week after next. Then also just a final disclaimer, we're not going to I have a show on Monday. I am sorry. I don't want anyone to be upset. I know consistency is really important in podcasting. It is President's Day. Miranda has two little girls. They don't have childcare at the time because they won't be in school. I will be in Florida making a speech, and so it just didn't work out. We don't like to do it. It is a very specific situation, but we, of course, will be back again Thursday. I'll be recording on Wednesday. Yes. Okay. On that note, thank you so much. Let's get started. Welcome back to Megan McCain has entered the chat. My next guest is a very, very old friend that I have known since I was, I think, 23 years old. We used to work at the Daily Beast together. He is co-host of the Fifth Column podcast. Very popular, very cool podcast. It's not like my podcast. You're slumming it with the women here today.

My friend Michael Moynihan. Thank you so much for taking time to come on.

Thanks for having me. I was worried that you were going to... Your preamble was that I was very, very old, which is also true. But yeah, I've known you for a very long time.

You're not that much older than me. I was reading your Wikipedia last night to do some research on your career, and I was like, he's not actually that old at all. You're only a little bit older than me. I won't say your age.

I mean, you can because it's on Wikipedia. It's not a big secret.

48?

I'm in there. Okay. Your math is a bit off, but I'm happy with that It's mistaken math. Okay.

If you're old, I'm old, so whatever. I'm 39. I'm almost 40. I want to ask you first and foremost, the Fifth Column is such a big podcast. You, Camille Foster, Matt Welch. It's like a cool kids podcast. Again, we don't know anything about that with Miranda and I here. Yeah, you get the cool guests. You guys get invited on the cool podcast, all the things. What do you think has made it spike in popularity? Why do you think so many people listen to it? Because I feel like when you guys started, it was just for fun, and now it's turned into something with a big following.

It was. As a matter of fact, we've never done advertising of any sort. We've never promoted ourselves in any way. We've never taken advertising. We don't have advertising on the podcast. None of that, even monetizing it in the slight way that we do was out of boredom. It predated COVID by about a month. I was like, Yeah, maybe we should do something and have people subscribe to the Patreon or something. But we've never really thought much about it. It was three friends like legitimate friends, not like a constructive thing in any way. We were having lunch one time. We're like, I don't know. We just talk shit all the time about politics. Why don't we put a microphone in front of ourselves and see if people care? It was a slow role. I think the thing that did change it, and it changed a lot of things for a lot of people, was the pandemic. We got an email over and over, basically the same email from different people. It was people that were pretty isolated, just geographically isolated, physically isolated from other people. When you're in a city, you're like, Man, I can't go out during this pandemic.

It's incredible. There's a lockdown, all this stuff. Why am I living here when I don't have access to it all? But you saw people all the time, and you would be distanced and hang out with people and maybe break the rules a little bit. But so many people were so far from others that we would get the same email all the time. I feel like I care about your lives. I feel like you guys are friends of ours. People would come up to me, like we do a few live shows, and people come up to me and say, So how's Olivia doing? And I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm about to pepper spray you. How do you know my daughter's name? I'm like, Oh, shit. I talk about her in the podcast all the time. So they follow her gymnastics career. It's bizarre. But it's become a community. And the interesting thing about it is that there is a organic community that has grown up around the podcast. They call themselves the Fifthdom. That's cute, actually. And they have their subreddits. We've had people get married who met through listening to the podcast. Really? People get divorced.

They get married to people that they met listening to the podcast. Yeah, there's a very, very weird active community, and we love all of them.

Yeah, it's very, very good, like I said, and it has this huge following. But you and I... It's funny that I've come to podcasting and then a new digital show I'm working on, and I have complete ownership. I have partners, but I have ownership over everything. And part of why it happened, and I assume you have a similar story, is I just couldn't handle old legacy media anymore. The gatekeepers, I find visionless, old, just promoting the same six people over and over again, scared about talking about the reality versus what they want to hear. You used to work for Vice News, which has since had a lot of financial problems. There's news about the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated. Then last night when I was cooking dinner, I saw that CBS News had fired Katherine Haridge, the great- Yeah, who's a great reporter. Incredible reporter. What is going on right now? What do you think is happening? I know it's a big question, but again, you and I worked at the Daily Beast together. You've worked in so many different places. Obviously, Vice News, I loved for a really long time. Why do you think so many of these places are falling down?

And then at the same time, getting rid of people like Katherine Haridge who are these would-of-a-last truly incredible journalists.

She probably costs a lot, too, because she's been around for a while and they're always trying to cut costs. Look, there's a number of different things here, and I'm much like you. I have been liberated by I mean, I was liberated by vice when they said, all of you have to leave. I think maybe five years ago, I would have started panicking. I have a child, I have a mortgage, I have all this stuff. And where am I going to get my money? That changed because we have listeners that pay us directly because they want to hear what we do. And we give them extra content. But even just telling them like, Hey, I do this for free. Do you want to kick in a couple of dollars? They do that. So that is an incredibly liberating thing. But it's also disrupted the media business in a pretty interesting way. Because if you look at all of these people saying, Oh, what are we going to do to save the Los Angeles Times? Well, I'm one of those people who believes in the free market. I know there's not a lot of people who believe in that anymore, particularly on the right.

Nobody believes in that anymore. But I believe that there's market mechanisms in place here. When one wonders why the LA Times is laying off X number of people, 20% of their staff, etc, it's a pretty simple answer is that people don't want to pay for what they produce. The New York Times, on the other hand, is making money because they do create things that people want to pay for. Some of that, by the way, are things like puzzles. There's this weird thing that Wordle and spelling bee and all this stuff. Makes them a ton of money. That was actually a very smart investment. When they bought that from some guy who created it during the pandemic, people were like, What are you doing? But that stuff, their Daily, the podcast they do, very popular. They tried their hand at TV. It didn't work as well. But there's a couple of things at play here. When vice got away from its core mission, and its core mission, for lack of a better phrase, I don't know if it's so much of a mission, but what it was doing at the time was doing things that nobody else was doing.

It was going out as correspondence who didn't look like correspondence, who didn't really know a ton, but were learning, and you were learning with them. They were looking at the camera and saying, Isn't this insane? What the hell is this about? Let's go find out. And that was a new way of making television. But then when vice got bigger and Disney put money in, and Rupert Murdoch put money in, they basically were like, Well, we want to be the news. We want to hire all these news people. So they hired all these people from traditional networks. And guess what happened then? The wheels started coming off of it because it just became like everything else. But I don't want to be the cliché of go woke, go broke, but the politics of it didn't help either. What was once, we don't really give a shit about offending you. We say whatever we want. I mean, you look at these original vice guide, too. That was the naming convention. And some of the things in there I can't mention on this podcast because it's I think it's probably kids that listen to it.

I think it's probably something 10-year-old. No, you can say whatever you want.

There's some dirty stuff there. That would never happen. I'll give you a great example of this. I had a guy that sat next to me, lovely guy, producer, young guy, didn't really know vice from the previous iteration of vice. And what made it popular, why he had a job was because it was so popular back then and people were like, This is really cool and interesting. He was doing a story about, I think, Somalia. He was looking on the vice website. I was right next to him. I sat next to him. He was looking on the vice website for pieces that they had done about Somalia before. I saw his eyes just like his whole... He went white. He was like, What is this? It was a story from 2009 or '08. It was about how Somalia is the shittiest country on Earth and why it sucks so bad. He was like, This is really offensive. I'm like, Yeah, but that's, again, why you have a job. When that changed, they tried to be legacy media, that's when the whole thing essentially fell apart. But legacy media, people can punish legacy media. Now, it used to be you had four channels, you had your local paper, you had probably two papers in the city that you were in, maybe three sometimes.

You didn't have a ton of choice. But choice has rocked and roiled the media industry in a really good way, I think. I know a lot of people handering about it, but I think it's generally a positive thing. There's some negatives, but it's generally a positive thing.

I like it because... I mean, obviously, you and I like it because we're not in legacy media anymore. But I like it because I think you actually, like you said, you have to create interesting content, and then people will give you money directly. If you're not making interesting content, people are just going to find interesting content elsewhere. That has to feel, though, if you're a CNN person, an MSNBC person, hell, even a Fox person, it has to feel somewhat threatening. I don't want to humblebrag here, but I just want to give context to this. For some reason, CNN keeps asking me to come on their network, and I keep saying, I don't do cable news anymore. I I don't think it's worth my time. I don't think anyone's watching it. And I said to the PR person I work with, Just show them how many people watch my Instagram reel versus how many people are watching this show. And I'm not trying to be a cunt about this, but I am saying that it is not worth my time. So if you are, again, a CNN right now, what do you do when you are bleeding viewers and a two-bit podcast host has more people watching her Instagram than your whatever, Midday News?

I mean, it's funny, and that's the thing that these metrics are actually pretty useful. If you look, we still talk about CNN as if it is meaningful, as if Don Lemon left CNN. It's like, who gives a shit? Yes. I mean, honestly, no one cares. Don Lemon doesn't care. I mean, really, because you know what he's doing? He's actually not going back to a different cable network. He's going to X. He's going to Twitter. He's starting a show. This is something I heard reported and see much about it. He's negotiated with Elon Musk to do his thing on Twitter. Just do it. It's Don Lemon, and that is it. He doesn't need the network behind him. But if you look at those shows, we're a country of what, 340, 45 million people? Yes. Probably with the migrant crisis, probably like 800 million. I to you at this point. Can't really keep track. But 340 odd million people. And you see a show that has 200,000 people watch it, 300,000 people watch it. And then in the demo, it's basically nothing because it's a bunch of people people that are in their '70s and 80s just flipping the channel as they stay at home.

There's nothing much to it. I think it's given an enormous amount of weight. We talk about... I mean, look, it is influential in some ways, particularly when it comes to certain Fox shows, certain MSNBC shows. But the influence that MSNBC has, for instance, is to not necessarily move the dialog in the way they want it to move. It's for people to just really We dislike media even more. I mean, the Russiagate stuff is pretty interesting. I mean, there's nobody in podcast universe who's probably more hakish on Russia than I am. I am not these Tucker Carlson idiots. I am not these people. Maybe me. Maybe you. Yeah, exactly. Maybe that's why we're friends. But this stuff of like, Oh, Putin's a lovely guy, and Moscow is such a great city. I am not one of those people. I'm the exact opposite of that. But even me, who is willing to believe so much about this Russiagate stuff in the first year, started saying, Wait, hold on a second here. This is sounding a bit conspiratorial. I'm not sure that there's a lot of facts to back this up. And you turned on cable news, you turned on particularly on MSNBC, and you had just this endless wall to wall for years.

People saying that the Donald Trump, who was not my idea of a good president in any way, not my idea of what the Republican Party should be, was an actual agent of the Kremlin. In This was just common casual conversation. When that thing blew up and the Mueller report didn't justify any of those claims, they just kept going. They didn't turn around and say, We're sorry about this. We got this wrong. No, these are the same people that in the next breath are telling you how to spot misinformation. For three years, you told me stuff that wasn't true, and now you're telling me how to spot misinformation.

An old co-host I had at Christmas time, we could give book giveaways on the show I worked on, and she gave the Mueller report. I remember being like, These fucking tourists came here wanting Tuesdays with Mori or something, and they got the Mueller Report, which is obviously all garbage. But that's how obsessed people were at a point, and I think that's a really valid point. To that point, so Jon Stewart just returned to The Daily Show. I actually got a lot of heat because I said I was disgusted by the woke creature he turned into because I thought his Apple show was just like- It was terrible. I don't know what happened to him. That being said, maybe he heard the criticism of people like you and me. He returned to The Daily Show, he criticized President Biden's age, and now he's getting eviscerated by people. Yes. I want to ask you- Both sides is what they accuse him of. I don't know what reality I'm living in when you're not allowed to talk about Biden's age. And I want to ask you, in regards to John Stuart, someone who I consider on the left talking about this on top of the special counsel report that said that, President Biden's possession of classified documents.

His memory was hazy, fuzzy, faulty, poor, and he had significant limitations. He apparently couldn't recall defining finding milestones in his life, such as when his son, Bo, died or when he served as vice President. Why are we not allowed to be alarmed by this? Why is that both sides of them?

When his son, Bo Biden, died in Iraq, which he said probably eight times at this point.

Can I tell you how much that insults me?

It's insulting to everybody who served and everybody who died in Iraq, too. I mean, the thing is- It's also insulting to people who died of brain cancer because that's a horrible thing, too.

And it's like my dad died of the same cancer, and I'm like, it's okay. It's a horrible thing, too.

But That's a horrible thing, too. Why does he always say that? That his son died in a react. The thing is, this was the first indication that there was something that the cognitive decline was pretty serious, was that I don't believe that Joe Biden is saying that thinking he can get away with it. I mean, he obviously can't. At the same time, he obviously does because people don't really point it out, and he's going to be fact-checked on this. I think he's internalized that as being true. I don't think that it's actually a malicious thing on his part. Let me do a stolen valor thing. I actually don't think he's doing that. I think that there is just a confusion that rains, and that's pretty easy to see. You see people like Molly Jong fast and all these other people on TV saying, Are the authors of this report? Are they doctors? They're not a cognitive specialists or neuroscientists and everything. Does one have to be a neuroscientist to realize that he referred the other day to his meetings with Helmut Cole, who died in 2017, twice in one day? Then the previous week talked about François Mitterrand, who died almost 30 years ago.

When I was 12. We have to be doctors to say this. But look, the Jon Stewart thing, I think, is really interesting because I have given Jon Stewart a lot of shit, too, because it's funny. We have a mutual friend. And a friend of mine said, We should have dinner. I think you'd like Jon Stewart. I think you'd be interested. I think you guys would be able to have a good conversation. And he stopped. This is actually 100 % true. He stopped and he let 10 seconds go by. And he said, I I think you guys actually would hate each other. It seems fair enough.

Why? Why would you hate him?

I don't know. I don't know. I think the guy's pretty funny. I don't love his stuff. I think he's done some pretty admirable things when it comes to the 9/11 stuff and first responder stuff. Yeah, of course. And military stuff of veterans. I'm impressed by that. But at the same time, he is a comedian, and then he took on this role where it overcame him and he became a political commentator. But I think there's something that's pretty interesting about watching his first appearance back. I think people who are skeptical of him shouldn't get too excited yet. I think it was a really interesting piece. If your listeners haven't seen this, it's about an eight-minute thing about Biden's age and Trump's age and everything. He takes on the things that need to be taken on. To not do that makes you look like who? Jimmy Kimmel. Totally. It makes you look like who? Stephen Colbert. These are people that created the second act of their career. Remember that Jimmy Kimmel started not only in the Man Show, but also worked for Ben Stein.

He wore blackface in different sketches. I mean, he's not clean here. Yeah, he dressed as like Karl Malone or something.

It's crazy. But the interesting thing about that is when you came up during the Trump time as the political comedian, the obsession really took people. It just took over people. I've never seen Jimmy Kimmel make a joke about Joe Biden. I've never seen Stephen Colbert. They're that tribal and partisan. The comedy is not even the important thing anymore. That's the thing about when you see things like wokeness. I don't love that term, but just- I think Barry Weis has taken it and moved it to death, and now it almost means something.

It also is like a stand in for real problems, and it triggers on both sides. So I agree with you.

Yeah. But I think that as a shorthand, I think people know what I'm probably talking about. But the absurdities and the excesses of that are sometimes so funny and baffling. And yet I've never seen anyone on Late Night make a joke about... I'll give you a good example of this. We did a podcast two days ago. Camille, podcast host. Camille Foster. Shows up, Camille Foster, on the video with this fucking Apple Vision heads-up. And I was like, Good Lord, what are you? Such a nerd. Could you stop?

It cost like four grand, by the way.

It cost like four grand. Well, that's what happens when you're Camille, you spend money on it. I made a joke about how we used to have this contest when you pick anything, any subject, and add race to it and Google it and see if you could find something. I said, I'm going to look and see if the Apple Vision Pro headset is racist. Of course, it came up. Somebody said, It's very unfair to blacken people of color, creator. It was the weirdest thing in the world. That stuff is very ripe for making fun of. And that's why I think our podcast, which makes fun of a lot of this stuff, has been popular. But why don't people do that in the late night shows? Because this stuff is so absurd. But they've become so political that when John Stuart comes back and he's like, Yeah, these people are all stupid. He wasn't doing that during the Trump years. He was in the wilderness. Then he tried to do it in a very serious way, and people didn't like it. He comes back and says, Well, you guys all suck. Everyone's like, Oh, my God, thank God.

Thank God someone's saying this most basic thing that Joe Biden is old. Guess what, people? It does not mean we don't like Joe Biden. I mean, I'm not a fan of his presidency, but that doesn't mean I'm mad at him for this. I don't blame him for this. He's an old man. That happens to old people. Don't be defensive of somebody being old and shuffling off the stage and having directional issues, having thought issues, brain issues, memory issues. I have sympathy for that. What I don't have sympathy for is these people that are fucking gaslighting us, saying, who are you going to believe, your lion eyes or me, who says, was a crème Jean-Pierre who says, he can run circles around me. Mike Mike Barnacle the other day on MSNBC said it was actually his superpower. Someone who was 45, as Mike Barnacle said it, somebody who was 45 couldn't do this job.

Are you joking? Mayor Pete just came out and said something that President Biden, he had to come in and bring extra experts in because of all the incredible questions he was asking and how many hours he stayed in. I'm obviously paraphrasing, but I was like, Mayor Pete, stop it. That's a lie. And by the way, no one ever films these things. I never have proof that these things happen. No. I want it, just to that note, Most COVID, one of the things I'm very, very sensitive to and I get really angry very quickly is when... Because I really had to trust, as I know, because we talked a lot during COVID, I trust my head, I trust my instincts, I trust my brain. If you are telling me that something isn't happening, and I in my head and my eyes and my instincts know it is happening, I get very angry because of all the things that happened during COVID, mostly peaceful protests with buildings on fire. I know this man isn't okay. So why are so many people in the media so defensive? Because he will be '86. And I know Trump is the great dictator that people have problems with, and we can get to him if you want.

But why is it that so many people in the media are debasing themselves to just be like, bag dad, Bob, nothing to see here when there's clearly something wrong. And I think that's why there's this breakdown of trust, get back to legacy media and podcasts like yours have become so popular because you have no agenda and no one's paying your bills that's working for the administration. You don't give a shit if the Biden administration likes you or not. But how much longer could this last?

It's a really good question and point. I mean, there's a couple of things that work here. I mean, you can always tell that people in the mainstream media are really mad and really irritated that people don't trust them as sources because they We're the experts. You should listen to us. My friend Noam Dworman, who owns The Comedy Seller and has a great podcast, and he's become a very political, he had Philip Bump on. And he had Philip Bump on to talk about Hunter Biden. Philip Bump walked out of the interview at the end, very angrily, and it got like a million views. Noam owns a comedy club. He's not a political guy. Philip Bump, before he walked out, he's like, I'm the expert on this. He pinned him down and all this stuff that he wouldn't answer. And he said, You You had me on because I'm the expert. And for me, that actually encapsulated, I think, how a lot of people in what we call legacy media, how they think about this stuff is like, We're the experts here. You have to listen to us. Why are you listening to these other people? And why are you, again, believing your lying eyes?

A good example of this, and I think COVID was really disruptive in this sense. No one ever thinks about this, which is a very strange thing. During COVID, do you remember when there were Friends of yours, you might not have done that, I didn't do it. But we're like washing their groceries. They were like desanitizing the groceries.

I never did that, but I know people who did.

Yeah. Yeah, I didn't, but I knew people did. Wearing gloves, right? Stop wearing gloves. Hand sanitizing constantly. You couldn't find hand sanitizer. There were distilleries in Brooklyn that were making gin that stopped to make hand sanitizer because we needed so much of it. There was never a point, and you can try to find this, there was never a point in which the government, which the CDC, which the health authorities, which Anthony Fauci said, Stop using hand sanitizer. Stop washing your groceries. But people did. Why? Because they figured it out. Because they saw around them that this is not what was happening. They saw that their friends weren't dying. Oh, everybody can get COVID and die. Well, not entirely true now, is it? I mean, this is the same thing during the AIDS crisis. There was a thing to make sure no particular group felt bad about it, which I understand the instinct. I'm not a bad I'm a mean person. I don't want people to be victimized and said, You guys are the problem. But it was like, Everybody can equally get HIV. That wasn't true. And that's why I know I had many, many friends who, I friends that are still alive who have HIV, like my friend Andrew Sullivan.

I didn't know any straight people. They were mostly gay men, not gay women, gay men. Then I said, Wait, when I was a kid, they used to tell us you had to wear a condom because you could get it, too. Well, yeah, possible, but the likelihood is pretty small. The same thing was true of my daughter going to school. She had to mask up. Well, kids aren't really dying, are they? No, they're not. I mean, you looked at... I used to live in Sweden, and Sweden had a very aggressively controversial policy for COVID, a guy named Anders Tegnell, who was their public health guy, and they published all their stats. They're very, very good statistics in Sweden. I remember looking at that about eight months in, and it broke down the number of people who got... Almost all of them were over 80. I was like, Oh, my God, this is an old person disease, and it's hurting other people, pre-existing conditions. But we had to figure that out on our own, because what the public health authorities were doing, and this feeds into how people think about the media, and the media was not helping them at all, was not helping us determine what was real useful information.

But at this time, we're disaggregating what What is true and what isn't? Because no one else is telling us. They're saying, Look, it's probably better if we lie to you because more lies prevents... It's more safety in a way. It's like the AIDS thing. It was like, What does it matter if we lie? People will be safer about sexual contact, et cetera. People will be safer. They will wear masks. It's like, Well, you don't realize how people internalize this information. It's not that they feel safer. Like, oh, thank you for just being extra safe. They think that you're lying to them. And actually know that you're lying to them. So at the end of all this stuff, you had people like Jay Batacharia. You had people that were signing statements that say, Hey, this is serious, but we should isolate the people who are most vulnerable. And those people were absolutely brutalized in the public debate and at their own universities, like Jay Batacharia talking about how he was treated at Stanford. He was right. I'm sorry. He was right, and you guys were wrong. Is there anyone that comes back from this and says, let's have a commission, a truth and reconciliation commission.

After COVID, there's no stomach for this because so many people would look like the complete idiots that they were and sit down in front of Congress and say, Who was right and who was wrong? Let's figure that out. We have the data. We can tell now. But nobody wants to do that because I think the intense conservative focus on Anthony Fauci is misplaced. He is not the worst of the It was a movement of people who walked around. I remember it was driving my daughter off at school, and I can say this because his parent is no longer at the school. He had a hat on that said, I believe in science. Oh my God. A hat. I was like, Who the fuck is a hat? No, I don't believe in science. I hate science. Science is terrible. I'm a fucking diabetic. And thank God for the pharmaceutical companies and science for giving me synthetic insulin. But this person believed in science, and he was showing us all that he believed in science. He was showing us all that he wasn't one of those bad people. And that's what it became. At the end of the day, those people who were posturing and posing were wrong on a lot of things.

They were right on some things. Wrong on a lot of things, though. Add that to the general distrust of the media, and now I think that's probably why it's at its lowest ebb. Yeah.

I want to ask you. I agree with everything you said. I actually take a lot of choudenfeuille that media is in the place that it's at because, again, I've been so frustrated and angry. And like, anytime someone's like, well, what's it like when you work at ABC? What's it like when you're going to MSNBC? And I'm like, you need to hear me now very clearly. They fucking hate you. They hate you. Of course. They hate you. They hate average Americans. They hate Republicans. They hate anybody who questions them. If you're not a liberal making over 200 grand a year living in a major city, they hate you and they don't understand you. And I say that with 100% conviction. In all ways, I've been in legacy media my entire life It's up till two years ago, two and a half years ago, and I'm happy to see it on fire because I think it deserves to be, because if you don't care about telling the truth, then what's the point of view? I do want to move just to comedy one more time because this story is so interesting. This weekend, the comedian Shane Gillis is going to be hosting Saturday Night Live.

He was, for people that don't know, he was hired as a cast member and then fired four days later, never actually made it to air or the building because of, quote, racist tweets. I believe the comedy is a free speech zone. I am almost impossible to offend. In general, I like to laugh. I like to laugh at things that are controversial, and I like people that say controversial things as a general rule. Why did they invite him back? Why did he say yes? And did he officially make Saturday Night Live his bitch? And does this look like it is like a sea change for maybe Saturday Night Live? Oh, and I should say, Shane Gillis has a large conservative following. Do you think this is some signaling of Saturday Night Live, realizing that they need to make a difference? What do you think of all this?

I always used to be mystified by bookstores. You go to a bookstore in a city and there would be only books from one side of the... Yeah, Noam Chomsky books. I know that maybe the person who owns the bookstore was like, Yeah, these are the things I like. But I'm like, You're a bad business person because there are Conservatives who read. That was something that Judith Regan, for instance, figured out when she put out Rush Limba's book. They said, Oh, Conservatives don't read. Conservatives don't like X, Y, and Z. This is our domain, and we're not going to make money off of it. I mean, comedy is very, very similar. Shane Gill isn't a conservative, but he's somebody who speaks about things that Conservatives relate to because he's from rural Pennsylvania. He's also, hands down, in my opinion, the funniest standup in America right now. He's hilarious. His last special on Netflix His one that he put out on his own in Austin are two of the funniest things. I mean, he understands. He makes fun of Donald Trump a lot. We were saying, Jimmy Kipple is not making fun of Joe Biden. He makes fun of Donald Trump, but he does it in a way that isn't like, aren't those people so stupid?

The person who is the Trump avatar of a Trump supporter in his standup is a person who he loves dearly, his father. And he has an amazing joke at the beginning of that bit where he's like, I have a Fox News dad. You don't want a Fox News mom because she's the one who smokes in the house. And that's an amazing small, subtle joke, which is a dig at Conservatives, but Conservatives don't get mad about it. Because it's like, yeah, there's a certain truth to it, and it's not malicious, and it's not like I'm trying to make a political point. But at the end of this, it's like, I don't think that SNL and Lorin Michael wanted to do that. I think they were like, Fuck this. They've had these problems in the past. Andrew Dice Clay in the 1980s was coming on, and I think it was Nora Dunn, some cast members who said that they didn't want to be on because they found him offensive. They'd been through this offense machine in the past, and they just weathered it. But there was a response to it. When I was saying the thing about Camille's headset in the, Is it racist?

Can we find an article that says that the Apple headset? The one thing I did actually find after that was a statement from Apple about George Floyd. I was like, Wait, what? Why is the Why are the people that are making our phones and our computers talking about George Floyd and the guy who died in Minneapolis was killed in Minneapolis? That's insane. But that was the moment that I think is now passing, that every corporation, every television show, every comedy show, had to make stand on not something, but everything. Then actually, I think, by the way, this started to crumble with Israel because nobody wanted to say anything about that. It's like, Oh, wait, I thought we had to talk about every global... Oh, interesting that this is the one that you're not going to actually put out any statements about universities doing this, businesses and companies and the rest of it. But I think it upended it because nobody really believed it. That's what I always found in media, is that this stuff about the statements you have to put out, nobody actually believes it. Are you kidding me? As you said, Megan, they have contempt for you.

Also true. They also don't really have any principles. You see this in Washington, which you expect. I mean, people who were free market Conservatives who believed in American greatness in the old Republican Reagan way are now mega type populist left wingers as far as they are. They sound like Noam Chomsky on foreign policy and saying we really can't touch Social Security and the market is like, who are these people? It's like, didn't they just say something totally different five years ago? Well, yeah. Nobody fucking believes anything. I mean, that's the problem.

That is true.

Everyone's trying to make a buck and nobody fucking believes anything. That's the problem. That is true. Everyone's trying to make a buck and nobody fucking believes anything. I I think that to loop it back to your first question, the reason that our podcast is successful is that we do believe things, and we don't give a shit, and we lose listeners when we talk about Israel, we lose listeners when we talk about Ukraine, and we lose listeners when we talk about free market stuff. It's just the way it is. What am I going to do? Pretend that I care about stuff? Snl pretended that they cared about Shane Gillis' quote unquote racism, which, by the way, wasn't racist. I sat down last week for an interview with Andrew Yang somebody I have an enormous amount of respect for, a really interesting guy who pisses people off in his own camp all the time. He's an Asian guy. He had Shane Gillis on his show right afterwards, and they had a great conversation, and they talked openly about this stuff. And SNL is like, This guy's popular. I mean, this is the same thing happened with Rogan.

But he's popular because you fucked him over, and then people felt territorial of him. And then I'm curious if someone like Bowen Yang, who stands on the side of the stage when Dave Chappelle is on, and I think actually didn't show up to when Dave Chappelle hosted. How do the Woke-est of the woke co-stars, co-host, whatever, deal with this? Because Shane Gillis has a picture of Trump with Trump in his Instagram. Yeah, when she's doing- Yeah, it's raising his thumbs up. What's it like to be like... I always wonder what it's like for people like that when the anti-woke free speech side, it looks like it's winning now. How do you feel? Because I would feel like an idiot.

Oh, Remember that Shane Gillis career was supposedly up-ended, and they actually had the exact opposite effect because of a journalist, who writes about comedy. His only thing is to dig up the offense archeology, going back to people's podcast and trying to find things to say that they're offensive. I mean, he's the guy that attacks Dave Chapelle all the time. It's not even worth mentioning his name. I don't really remember his name. But that stuff doesn't work on the American people. People don't care. They care if the jokes are funny. The thing about Bowen Yang is I don't care what Bowen Yang's politics are at all. Is he funny? I don't find him funny. Not really. This is not my cup of tea. That's fine. He just strikes me as a theater kid that's different than being a But that's fine. Look, I know people like him. Fine. But the point being is that my basis for judging somebody in comedy is whether or not they're funny, whether or not they make me laugh. Trust me, if Shane Gillis was just trying to weaponize this, and this is actually, I have to give credit to Andrew Yang for when we talked about it, he's like, he didn't weaponize it in the sense that he was the aggrieved conservative, and these people are putting their boot heel on his neck, and now he's going be an anti-woke comic.

He was the same comic, exact same comic. He was just really, really funny. My friend Andrew Schultz, who is probably the other biggest comic in America, he doesn't give a shit either. I don't know Andrew's politics. I had a dinner with Andrew two weeks ago, and I think we disagree in a lot of political things. But the thing that is paramount to Andrew is, is it funny? What Andrew showed is what Joe Rogan showed. I mean, Joe Rogan is pretty interesting because he was already famous. He was already a comedian, fear factor, news radio. But how long did it take for a mainstream corporation to open their eyes and snatch him up? Any other person who has a rising podcast will get a million calls. Like, Hey, we want to get you over. It took them 10 years plus. And finally, Spotify said, All right, we're going to hire. And what happened then? Half the staff walked out. And they were like, You can't have this. You can't have this episode, et cetera. And Spotify stood up to them. Netflix I mixed it up to the people about Dave Chappelle, and they went away. That's what happens.

They're paid tigers. Let them complain. Fine. That is your right. I'm happy that you get to do it, and you can do it in this country, and I want more of it. But don't try to shut people down, because at the end of the day, technology the way it is, the way people consume information and entertainment the way it is, we will find it, and we will get it, and you can't keep it from us. They're finding that out the very, in a very hard way, and it's absolutely glorious because the brilliance of American capitalism has allowed us all of these technological runarounds that we don't have to be in the face of corporate sensors or government sensors. It's fantastic.

I really hope that he just filets them in his monolog. I don't know if he will. I don't know if he'll be a gentleman, but these people said that you're trash and would have ruined your life, and now they're begging you to host show for ratings. It's pretty delicious. That's great. Michael, I know we're off on time. Is there anything else you want to promote? You have, like I said, the Fifth Column podcast is huge. You don't really need my help promoting it, but it's still a very big deal, and I listen to it every week. Is there anything else you want to promote? Anything else?

I have a couple of episodes of Barry Weis' podcast, Honestly, Coming Up. I've been the Joan Rivers to her, Johnny Carson. I fill in. That's nice. I have one on Ukraine that I recorded yesterday with the Wall Street Journal's Foreign Affairs Correspondent. I read a fantastic book about Ukraine. It was actually Ukrainian. It was really interesting. The interview I did with Andrew Yang, and I got some other stuff coming up in And I will be promoting all that at the fifth column at wethe5th. Substack. Com and subscribe because it helps.

I'm subscribed. By the way, you are not active at all on Instagram. I use that as a weapon.

So the last thing I posted, this is actually the last thing I posted, Sam Altman, the head of Open AI. He's a weirdo. He's a total weirdo. And people were talking about how much of a genius he was and et cetera. And I did an interview with him, and we used a bit of it for a documentary on HBO about the future of work and artificial intelligence. It was a very brief bit, but I had the actual entire interview. And I was like, Fuck this guy, and I went back to the interview because I remembered how angry it made me interviewing him. He was such an asshole. He was such an unbelievable prick to me that it's one of the two worst interviews. The other shitty person was not Mike D, the other guy from the Beastie Boys, Adam Horowitz, who was a complete asshole to me, which is too bad because I like the Beastie Boys, but he was a prick.

I thought you were going to say Bernie Sanders.

No, Bernie was one of my favorite interviews. Okay, never mind. It was absolute joy.

I thought he threw his or something. I don't know.

Oh, no. That was a funny one. He came in and was complaining about the chair because it was very low. It made him look very low. He was yelling at a staff and he's like, I can't sit in this chair. Where is this chair? This is a stupid chair. I was like, This is fucking Larry David. He was a joy to interview because- Okay, never mind. But he was a fun guy. But the Sam Altman thing, he was a jerk to me. I found that clip and posted it on Instagram. It's just a little spot for revenge for me. I'm too old for Instagram, Megan. You're not that old.

But it made me laugh when I was looking at social media. I was like, he barely tweets, and he's not on Instagram.

I stopped tweeting. Tweeting is just poison.

It's bad. It is poison.

But- Look at John Podheritz from Commentary magazine. He goes back on Twitter, destroys his brain.

Can I tell you, I listen to commentary every day. I have deep affection for everyone who works there. The two podcasts I listen to are commentary and yours every time it comes out. Yeah, he needs to get off Twitter. It's not helpful. No, it's not. He should not be on Twitter. It actually is... It's not good for him.

No, it's not. He's a brilliant man, and he's somebody that I like listening to, even when I disagree with him. But on Twitter, it just makes him the worst version of himself, and I think he'd probably acknowledge that. It's weird. I don't like Twitter.

He's like, You absolute fucking buffoon, all this stuff. And I was like, John. He's like, You Jew-hating buffoon.

It's like everyone.

He's older, so it's weird. It's like watching my uncle flip out on social media.

You're an occasional guest in that show. I heard you on Commentary Talk.

I love them, and I listen, and I've had a ton of the guests. This is not personal. I just think social media brings out the worst, and people, myself included. I try and really keep it tempered on Twitter, too, just because what's the point? But it still has its purpose once in a while, when I want to get some attention from something.

I know we have to run, Megan, but you have a quality that I wish I had Everybody hates me. I don't have this quality.

Or loved me, and there's nothing in between.

No. The inability to be criticized in a brutal and unfair way and to just keep going forward. I have the most random person with an egg avatar say a horrible thing, and I'm like, Oh, God, I don't like it, and it just dislodges me for the day.

Thank you for the compliments. I will say I have six brothers and sisters, and I'm just tough and scrappy, and I just don't give a fuck anymore. People People can say whatever they want. I think it angers people. I'm still here. That's fine.

Tell your tough and scrappy brother who I haven't seen in a very long time.

He's a great guy. He's deployed right now, or I would. I am not talking to him. I mean, I can't. I'm talking to him. I just can't talk to him, but I will. Come back anytime. If you want me to help you on anything of yours, anytime, let me know. You're so smart. One of the smartest people in media and have been for decades. Thank you, Michael.

Megan, thank you so much.

Welcome back to Megan McCain has entered the chat. Every once in a while, you come across an article that really just hits you and stays with you. And this is something that happened to me about a month ago. I read this incredible article in the New York magazine called The Woman Who Walked Away: What Drove a Colorado Mother to Flee into the Rocky Mountains with Her Teenage Son and Sister. And it is about two sisters who abandoned civilization with their son to live off the land despite not having any experience or training living off the land. The best part about having a podcast is I can tell Miranda, read this piece. It's so impactful. It's so intense. Let's please try and get the writer on. And lucky for me, we have Elizabeth Weilon, who is the writer of this incredible piece, a veteran journalist of New York magazine. Thank you so much for taking time to come on today.

Thank you for asking.

The first question I want to ask you is, what response have you had to this piece? Because I read it twice I sent it to everyone I know. And there was something about it that just, I think, is so deeply tragic. And really, I think, a significant... It's like a small micro of a macro issue that's happening in America right now.

Yes. So it's been a really intense reaction. I think that there's a part of women today. So many people feel this sense that things are not okay, and what are we going to do about it. And obviously, this is an extreme and tragic story. But the question of what we're going to do with our fears and our feeling that we can't keep our family safe is there for everybody. I've also heard from some families who have a family member who's gotten lost in the same ideas that drove these women to try to live off the grid. And those families are really worried and really concerned and wanting their stories Can I ask you, originally, how did you even find this story about Becky and Christine Vance?

I assume this took a very long time to investigate and report and write. How did you even come across this?

So the story was in the news all over the place for a very short period of time. Within the span of 24 hours, both my husband and my editor said to me, You should write about this, which was funny to me because because I didn't quite see it at first. Why are they telling me that I should do this? But they were right, and you were right. It took a really long time to report. It was a hard story to report because not much was left behind. One of the sisters was incredibly private, so there weren't dozens of people around who could help me understand who she was. And this wasn't that long ago. So the family that I spent time with reporting it were really, really still hurting and really, really still in shock and trying to make sense also of what had happened.

Can I ask you, I When I was a teenager and I think early in college, the movie Into the Wild, which is based off the book, came out, which is about a guy named Christopher McCandless, who was a young man who chose to go into the wilderness, I guess Jack Kerouac style or something. I don't know. And he naively went into the wilderness and died because he was not prepared. But there's something about that story that he was a young, naive young man, and young guys do stupid things. This story is about two sisters, two adult sisters, and their child. And I don't know if it's just my gender bias, but I just don't think of women, let alone mothers, doing this, going off into the wilderness unprepared. I certainly couldn't live off the land intentionally moving and then putting your child's health at risk and obviously their lives at risk. Do you think that's also what struck so many people about being unique in this?

Yes. We have all these stories about men who go on these grand solo adventures and who leave the world behind, and they're heroic. And even Chris McCandless from Into the Wild, he's still represented as a hero, and the book is written in this very exuberant way about him. And the story of the Vance sisters is so tragic. They have their child, which, of course, makes everything different. But I think culturally, I really agree with you. It's really different to try to process a woman who walks away from the world. You are not supposed to walk away as a woman. And that question really intrigued me of what is different, how much is different. Obviously, the child is very different. But this is not the story we're used to. The story we're used to is Shackleton.

Can I ask you, one of the things that also struck me, I'm obviously Republican, but I'm not a MAGA person or a Trumper, and I obviously think QAnon is insane, and it scares me. I think when we see with Pizzagate, it really can have very dangerous consequences, and sometimes lethal consequences. Can you talk to me about this element of paranoia that happened with Becky and Christine, because when you're reading it, she was radicalized, believing in the deep state, believing in Q&A and conspiracies. And I know people who, like you said, are very scared, feel like they can't protect their families. I think COVID did a lot to everyone's mental health. I actually know quite a few... I don't know if I'd call them doomsday preppers, but they're people that prep very hard in their homes or generators and food and supplies of an apocalyptic situation. How were they radicalized in this way, again, to this extreme point where they decide to just leave civilization?

For Becky, I think it was a long, slow process. She was somebody who was always retreating from the world. She had dealt with her pain and the way she was suffering by being introverted, by isolating in her own...

Sorry. We can edit it out. Don't worry. Okay.

She dealt with the pain of the world by trying to retreat. She had been retreating more and more in some ways her whole life. When COVID hit, it was both, I think, comfortable to her in a certain sense. Like her kid was now homeschooled. She could work online at home. But it also really removed her from society even more and removed her from the people who wanted to love her and protect her and know her more. I I think she was radicalized because she was susceptible, because she was somebody who was always very scared of the world and always trying to deal with that fear by removing herself. I think she was radicalized in the same way from the same reasons by being so isolated. When I was in Colorado Springs talking with people, the people in their community, every one of them was just like, I wish I had known. I wish somebody had talked to me. I wish I knew where they were. I would have saved them. And so that piece of it, which I think is not uncommon, that she was radicalized because she wasn't being pulled back from the edge by a community.

Can I ask you the ending? And again, this is a spoiler. So if you don't want to know this, just pause or fast forward, because I don't want to give it away for people that haven't read the article. And I really highly suggest you read this article. But finding their bodies at the end, the law enforcement finding their bodies starved without clothes, the state of their campsite being in just complete disarray and garbage everywhere, the way you describe. I was horrified by this scene, but also confused. I know this sounds a little naive, but how does one starve to death like that? And why were their clothes off of them?

Their clothes were not off of them.

Or did they not have a sweatshirt What was it? Are there no socks?

They didn't have shoes and socks on. There we go. Okay. Sorry. Which was the temperatures were freezing. So that was surprising. But to answer your question of how did they wind up in this state That's one of the mysteries of it. One piece of it is they'd had a car at this campsite outside of Gunnison, Colorado, and they had been living into the woods away from where anybody would see them. By choice, they did not want to be found. But at least a few times, we know that they drove into Gunnison to get food and to get supplies. And the last time they drove into Gunnison, they'd asked for some money, and it seems very likely they bought a solo stove, which is a small piece of equipment that would have put out some heat. But once it started really snowing in the mountains, the Park Service tows out all the cars so they don't get just marooned up there and ruined over the winter. Their car got towed. Their car looked abandoned, and the Forest Service towed it. Who knows if they would have been able to drive out or If they even would have wanted to drive out.

I feel like one piece of the story here is how afraid they must have become of the world. You have to be so scared of the world to stay starving and freezing at a campsite at 10,000 feet through the winter. So it's unclear if the car would have saved them. If they wanted to be saved. I tend to believe they didn't want to be saved. That I think that their minds were in a place where living in the world was not safe. It was not tenable. Things were going to be worse unless they removed them themselves, and they died for it. So they ran out of food. They didn't have adequate gear to survive sub-freezing temperatures. And it was a huge snow year. And people who know those mountains, all of those people feel they didn't stand a chance.

That's so sad. My last question for you on your piece is, what should we take away from this? Because like I said, I don't really know why this resonated so much with me, but a lot of my girlfriends with kids really just felt this like, I don't know, this is just, again, vulnerable people in the absolute worst case scenarios being, like you said, COVID, Conspiracy theories online, isolation, like worst case, perfect storms. What do you think the main takeaway is from Becky and Christine Vance's story?

I think the main takeaway is let your community save you. That they were so isolated that their community couldn't save them. And we're all, as you're saying, so many of us feel so scared of the world, and we're not over COVID, and it's impossible to protect your children. I have children. That's a piece of what happens is you have these little humans, and you realize you can't fully protect them. I understand that deep feeling of things are not okay. I am not okay. My kid is going to grow up and move away, and I can't protect them from everything. But to me, the lesson in it is keep people around you, keep people around you who will pull you back. There are moments where we all feel like walking away and put yourself in a position where you can still be pulled back.

Are you open to having your piece being turned into a film or a documentary?

Sure. If somebody does it well, then I feel like it's a tricky story. I wouldn't want them sensationalized or demonized. To me, it's a complicated story under it in that it's easy to write them off as crazy. And of course, their mental health is a huge issue underlying this. But the pain that they're feeling is real and the fear that they're feeling is real. So If somebody does turn it into something, I want that respect intact.

Yeah. No, I completely agree with that in respect to their passing, obviously. You're a long-form journalist. You do these very long, beautiful pieces. In an era where so much of journalism is dying, people are being laid off at so many different places, Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, I read a bunch of your pieces. I really enjoy the one about San Francisco and canceling at 17. How do you pick what stories you want to pursue? And why do you think your work is still resonating in this way with so many people again during a time which, sadly, a lot of journalism is not thriving?

I feel really lucky to have come into this industry when I did. I've been doing this for a long time. So I entered the profession when there was still room to learn, when there were still a lot more outlets where you could write a long story and you could get an assignment, and it could be not perfect, but you would learn something along the way, and there was time to get better. I feel like that's a big piece of it. I mentor a lot of young journalists, which I really love doing. Everybody in the industry is so stressed, so nobody's editor has time to sit down and teach anybody. I feel like part of it is just having had the opportunity to get to learn earlier. And part of it is having a job where I have the time to really report stories and then really worked on the craft of them. There's so much to be upset and fearful about in journalism these days. But one of the bright lights in it still is that readers really respond to good stories. Readers will read a long story if it's good, if it's if it touches something in them, if there's some deeper thing to connect with.

I feel like the stories the readers connect with are the stories that the writers connect with. And that's part of my process is trying to find, Okay, where is the point where this really connects with who I am? And how can I build on that? So it connects with readers in the same way where we find this place in all of us where we're all really pretty similar, which if you dig enough, I think you can usually find.

Did you have a hard time shaking the story after delving so deep and going into their communities and interviewing people? Because this is a very dark story.

This story was really emotionally taxing to report. I also wound up really loving and getting close to their surviving stepsister who I had an incredible emotional intuition where she would just see on my face where I got too tired from trying to process all the emotion of what she was telling me, which was an unusual experience in my 25 plus years of doing this work. I hadn't had a subject to see the instant when I got tired on my face before. So I would come home just flattened from reporting this story. And it's always true when you report on really, really painful parts of people's lives. And I've accepted that that's just part of the job and that there needs to be time to just feel flattened I've written.

Do you have a favorite piece you've ever written?

My favorite piece was a profile of this Polish kayaker, a kayak across the Atlantic three times. It's a really different story. It's funny. I was just talking I was thinking about him this morning with somebody. He'd had a really hard life, too. He grew up in communist Poland. Everything went wrong. There was no food. He had just found... He was like the forest gump of Poland. And he had found this way to find freedom, which was to go do this thing that absolutely nobody in the world wanted to do. It sounds terrible. Who wants to kayak across the Atlantic?

It does sound terrible. It sounds awful.

And yet he had this intuitive understanding of human nature Art, and that there was freedom for him in this, and he loved it. So somehow, he was just this character that touched something in me. And he was somebody who I feel had decoded something about human nature and found a way to be totally exuberant in the worst of circumstances.

I will 100% read that, but I don't really know how he's alive because that sounds- He's not.

I should tell you, he was elderly. He did his kayaking across the Atlantic in his 70s. You didn't drown, though. God. He realized he was getting a little too old for it, but he insisted that he needed to keep living a big life, and he didn't want it. He She joked with me. He didn't want his big adventure to be to go drink a beer in the woods behind his apartment complex in Poland. So he died just after he summited Kilimanjaro. Oh my gosh. He went out, I'm sure, exactly the way he would wanted it. He was very clear with me that he did not want to die at home in his bed. He wanted to die doing what he lived. So he's not still alive, but in a not tragic way.

I watched that documentary, Free Solo, about the young man who freebase Mount Shasta and all these things. And the most interesting part to me was that there was literally a part of his brain that didn't process fear. Do you think that was the case with this man as well?

I don't quite think he was like Alex Alex Hanald, the climber in that way. I think he was someone who had really, really suffered in his life already and had learned that he could endure that suffering, that he wasn't going to be trapped by it, and he'd broken through to the other side. Whereas Alex Hanald, I think, just doesn't experience fear in the same way as others. I feel like Olek, the kayaker, was more like some monk who'd lived in a cave for 10 years and had some massive breakthrough that the rest of us haven't had.

My last question for you is, are you working on anything or anything that's inspiring you right now? I just love this work. I could never do it because I have the attention span of a hamster. And that's, I think, why I like doing podcasting and interviewing people and doing social media stuff and things that are in 20 minutes increments. But I have such respect for this long-form journalism. Is there anything you're working on that you can let us know or anything we should look out for?

The truth is my mind is still in this story, and I'm trying to figure out if there's a book to write that is both their story but combines some of the exuberance of the kayaker in a way of what happens when we walk away, or in his case, paddle away from the world, and what is there to learn about human nature, and what is there to learn about the world that we're all in.

Whatever it's worth, there is this trend right now of homesteading among my generation of elder millennials. I was even reading an interview with Adrian Grenier yesterday, who's the guy who started Entourage, who, I guess, moved to the middle of nowhere, Texas after rejecting Hollywood. I think your piece is an extreme example of a lot of people feeling like they just don't want to be around society, which is a really fascinating post-COVID trend. So if you ended up writing that, I obviously would be the first person to buy your book. But this story, like I said, I can't exactly pinpoint. And like I said, I really want to thank you for coming on and talking about it. But the story I had, I read it, and then I had to sit and not... I remember it was right before dinner, and I didn't go downstairs with my husband and children. I needed to take 15 minutes because I was just like, I just read this really heavy, intense story. Then I sent it to a bunch of my friends. I sent it to my sister, and they all had the same reaction. There's definitely something to this piece that you wrote, and I thank you for writing it.

Well, thank you for caring. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. You can find Elizabeth Weil's work. She's a feature writer at New York magazine. You're also on X Twitter. This piece is called The Woman Who Walked Away: What Drove a Colorado Mother to Flee into the Rocky Mountains with Her Teenage Son and Her Sister? It's fantastic. Elizabeth, thank you so much for taking time today. It's just really fascinating.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to. Megan McCain has entered the chat. Once again, we will not be back on Tuesday. We will be back Thursday. I am out of town. It's President's Day. Just a lot of scheduling conflicts. We don't like to do it. This will be very rare, but I promise we'll be back same time, same place, Thursday. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. 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 Wigal. Our supervising Olivia DeCopoulos. Our senior guest producer is Cara Kaplin, and associate producer, Austin Goodman.