What Happens When The Supreme Court Stops Chasing Headlines

Alito

The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution by Mollie Heningway

The Supreme Court doesn’t just decide cases; it teaches the country what power is allowed to do. Today on Cross Word Books, Michele McAloon talks with Molly Hemingway, senior editor at The Federalist and Fox News contributor, about her book on Justice Samuel Alito and why his originalism sits at the center of America’s biggest constitutional fights.

They discuss judicial activism, the rise of originalism, religious liberty, free speech, the Voting Rights Act, and how Supreme Court opinions are actually built behind the scenes.

If you care about the Constitution, judicial restraint, and how the Court really works, this episode will give you a clearer framework and sharper questions.

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Find Michele at bookclues.com

Transcript

Welcome And The Book Pick

Michele McAloon 0:04

Hey folks, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon. Have a fabulous book by Molly Hemingway on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. It's called Alito, the Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution. It is a great book, and a couple books I've been putting out recently. Great graduation gifts for your high school senior, for your high school college senior. These are books and civics. These are books that are part of the national discussion and would be a gateway to making us all civically more minded and smarter as we come up on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. You got any comments? You can contact me through my website at bookclues.com. Thanks. God bless. Happy listening.

Molly Hemingway Joins The Show

Michele McAloon 1:05

All right, folks, I have a guest on today that you would not believe. It is Mrs Molly Hemingway of so many things, of Fox News, of the Federalist, of Hillsdale College. It's a real honor to have her on to talk about her book, Alito, The Justice, who reshaped the Supreme Court and restored the Constitution. It is put out by one of my favorite publishers. It's the first book in the series of basic books, but it's basic liberty, an imprint of basic books. And the editor is a good friend of both Ms. Hemingway's and mine. So Molly Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. She's a senior journalism fellow at Hillsdale College, a Fox News contributor. She's a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on special report with Brett Baier. I really like Brett Bear. And her work has appeared in too many journals to uh name, but she is definitely a face on the conservative and the liberal national conversation. Molly, welcome to the show.

Molly Hemingway 2:10

It's great to be here with you, Michele.

Michele McAloon 2:13

It is so great to have you. So one of the things you write is time and time again, the liberal bloc has begun with an outcome and responded in a way to actually justify the results. One of the things about Samuel Alito, he is a huge part of the conservative judicial movement. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and how that has developed through the years and how actually how Justice Alito has been produced from that movement?

How Originalism Took Over

Michele McAloon 2:45

Because that's really integral to his story.

Molly Hemingway 2:47

Yeah, I think the history is important to understand there. And all sorts of issues crop up all the time. You've seen recently people on the left being very upset that the court is not an institution that they currently control. But they really did control it for many decades and they kind of got used to controlling it, where it was this approach with the court to have the court declare that the Constitution or a certain statute said what the justices wished it said or what they wished the people had voted for. And so you had quite a bit of, you know, what people refer to as activism on the court. They'd be frustrated that something would come up for a vote and it wouldn't go the way that they wished it had gone. So they would say, actually, it's hidden in the Constitution somewhere. And there was a lot of frustration over that develop that really reached a boiling point by the end of the 1970s. And conservatives started a movement based on this idea that you couldn't read into the Constitution certain things. And that's called originalism. It's just a belief that what the Constitution said at the time it was passed is the ruling authority there. And it becomes a massive movement to the point that you now have a majority of justices on the court who identify as originalists. And then there's a sixth person, Chief Justice John Roberts, who tends to vote with that side a lot as well, even though he does not identify as an originalist. So it has real power right now. There's not really a competing philosophy at the moment, but there is a frustration that the originalist philosophy is having such dominance on the court and in many lower courts as well.

Michele McAloon 4:40

Okay, before this conservative movement, so a liberal judge, a liberal activist judge, what sources are they pulling from to make judgments?

Molly Hemingway 4:50

In the best part of this, it really starts, again, decades earlier. FDR passes a bunch of legislation that keeps getting overruled by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. And a movement does develop during that time to say, really, justices should not be overturning congressional decisions. We should defer to Congress. What's interesting about this is at the time that was a super progressive position, like a super left-wing progressive position. But as FDR ends up appointing everybody on the court and, you know, that becomes dominant, a lot of the justices who claimed to believe in deferring to Congress, once Congress changes and is doing things that they don't like, they change their position too. Now, there would be major difference between many of those justices and a Felix Frankberger, who just retains his belief that you should defer to Congress. And again, you see a lot of that now, even with Chief Justice John Roberts, tends to like to defer to Congress. But it begins as a progressive position. Then when progressives gain power on the court and they lose it with the people, it becomes a conservative position. Sam Alito, who's got a kind of different originalist approach than many of his colleagues, he loves this idea. He studies this idea. He is deeply influenced, like from childhood, with understanding how the court should not be activist. And he goes to Yale law to study under the Felix Frankfurter clerk Bickel, who's written eloquently on this. So for him, you know, he didn't care that it was a progressive position when it starts. He just agrees that court should be restrained, they should defer

Alito’s Long Game On Religion

Molly Hemingway 6:40

to the people, and he continues to have that. And you even see it in his current jurisprudence where he's saying, you know, if it's not in the Constitution, we have to give it back to the people.

Michele McAloon 6:50

So he's been just on that horse for a long time. Well, you know, it's interesting. He's, I mean, his decisions in some of the religious cases. I think the one about uh the the Muslims being able to wear beards in a state prison. I think it was Arkansas State Prison. I can't remember the name of the case. But if you look at it on the surface, it's actually sort of a progressive position. But or a deeply conservative one.

Molly Hemingway 7:14

I mean, he cares about this deeply when he so he goes on the Third Circuit, appeals court, and during that time, the Supreme Court, there's actually a rare bad decision from Justice Scalia, which constrains the religious rights of minority religions. It deals with a case, you know, so this is happening at the Supreme Court, but it deals with a case from the Pacific Northwest of a Native American public employee who is smoking peyote as part of his religious tradition, but loses benefits because that is a violation of drug laws. And so, as part of that case working its way through, Justice Scalia authors the decision, Employment Division v. Smith, that constrains religious minority rights. Almost immediately, Justice Alito, who tends to be, you know, pretty friendly, he ends up joining the Supreme Court, he ends up becoming quite close to Justice Scalia, but he has always worked to protect religious minorities, even with that Supreme Court decision in place. He figures workarounds, you know, how to how to find other ways to solve cases so that the religious rights, and it's he's very ecumenical about it, you know, Muslims, Jews, Christians, I mean, like one of the cases he, one of the opinions that he handed down dealt with like a kindergartner who had her artwork taken away because they were supposed to draw pictures of their heroes and she drew a picture of Jesus, and the school said that that was a violation of like that the kindergartner wasn't allowed to have that view. But yeah, if there were Sikh members who wear ceremonial daggers and you don't allow daggers in a courtroom, he was arguing that they should be allowed to practice law and that their that their religious ceremonial daggers should not prevent them from entering the courtroom. You know, just across the board, he cares about this issue. And then when he joins the Supreme Court, it becomes like a major thing. And they have come very close to overturning employment division B. Smith. I would not be shocked if it happened in the near future because they've already done, they've already moved the ball so much in terms of allowing religions to dictate their own ideas of what, you know, how they should run their schools and run their churches and also protecting minority religion, religious people's rights.

Michele McAloon 9:35

Right. And and the d definition of a minister, which, I mean, there's been some, you know what, there's been some really, really good decisions. If you call Samuel Alito a practical originalist, now what do you mean by that?

Molly Hemingway 9:49

So I should say

Practical Originalism In Hard Cases

Molly Hemingway 9:50

he calls himself a practical originist. Oh, okay. All right. And I think it's a really good way of understanding how he differs a bit from some of his colleagues. So you take these originalist giants like Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas, and they tend to be very theoretical in their approach. They just look at first principles and then they go down from there. And that's probably why they are so beloved. They're so crystalline pure in their thinking. And many of the other current justices on the court also do this. They like to decide things in big, broad, well, that's a First Amendment issue, so there you go, you know. And Justice Alito, he clerks for a judge on the Third Circuit when he comes out of Yale law school and after he does his service for the military that he owed, he clerks for this judge who is known for being very practical. And what he means by that is he looks at the facts of a case rather than the broad principles and determines like this particular case. What would a judge do with this particular case rather than trying to make a big pronouncement about it? And that is something Sam Alito takes to heart, and you see it in his current jurisprudence as well. So, to give kind of an example of that, there was a case dealing with a group that calls itself a church that is mostly known for protesting and just attacking the families of deceased military members. They just like cruelly attack these people at their funerals and will say, at the funerals of their dead sons, and they'll say, you know, they'll say horrible things and they protest and their signs. And a lower court or, you know, jury, I think, had awarded the family of one of these deceased soldiers a large monetary award. And the, you know, quote unquote church appeals it to the Supreme Court. The court decides 8-1 that that church has First Amendment rights that were violated by that jury award. And so it says that they have every right to protest a funeral. And Alito cares deeply about the First Amendment, as we just discussed. He just thinks that if you looked at the particulars of the case, that some of what was said in the majority opinion just doesn't hold up. So they say, well, they were protesting the government and they're allowed to do that even at this funeral. And he looks at the specifics and he's like, actually, no, if you go back to the original trial record, they weren't protesting the government. They were protesting this kid and his religion and his family. And we do have tort law that can handle this. And so rather than making a big First Amendment pronouncement, we should have just looked at tort law, you know, statutes in play. And so he's more practical about applying a case unless big picture philosophical or theoretical. Now he works really well with the people who are big picture theoretical, clearly aligned with Scalia and Thomas regularly. He just has a notably different approach and one that I think might be helpful for other people to follow in the years to come. As some of these broad things have been set down, it's getting a little more nitty-gritty on how it, how things are applied in a given case.

Michele McAloon 13:14

One of the things sometimes I read some of the um SCOTUS briefs on some of the bigger cases. He's not the easiest one to read on the court. It's, I mean, his like uh Clarence Thomas, his arguments are more simple, where I, if I'm wrong, I'm an ecclesiastical lawyer, I'm not a civilian lawyer, a secular lawyer. But he is, it's easier to follow. I think Clarence Thomas or uh Scalia was easy to follow. I think he's a little more difficult to follow. Am I right in saying that?

Molly Hemingway 13:42

Yes and no, if I can say that. Oh, I totally agree. I also love that Clarence Thomas is like he'll take two paragraphs to say, you're all wrong. Here's what the right answer is, and just drops his mic and walks off. Like he just is very brief. And then there are really engaging writers. You know, there are entire books written about the descents from Justice Scalia. And he had such a like, you know, so funny and biting and hilariously mean, but in a way that nobody took personally. Like it's just fun to read that. But you said easier to read. And here's where I would say so. When you have these big, broad, big picture but two-paragraph things or really colorful writing, it actually can be hard to apply that when you are an appeals court judge or when you're a U.S. attorney trying to decide like what's the right approach here. Alito served for 15 years as a lower court judge. He had to apply Supreme Court jurisprudence to all of his cases. So he kind of thinks, are we writing clearly and specifically enough for a lower court judge to know exactly what we mean? And so he will be very specific because this statute says this thing, this is how it should be applied, basically. And so for us, I think it is more fun to read a Thomas or a Gorsuch, I think is very fun to read right now. Yes. But if you are in the business of applying the law in a in a as a judge, I actually think Alito

Writing Opinions Lower Courts Can Use

Molly Hemingway 15:15

might be the easier one to read.

Michele McAloon 15:17

One of the things that your book, I think, does brilliantly, and I haven't read a compendium of this sort, but really it's almost a tell-all of the Supreme Court, of how cases are made up to the Supreme Court, of the individuals that are currently serving and some that have served in the past, how the originalist they have different jurisprudence, and how they come about it is very differently. And one thing that you wrote about Samuel Leto is that he tries to bring as many as he can onto the decision, which that's probably not an easy task.

Molly Hemingway 15:55

It's just everyone has different skill sets. And I think this is again, if I can just take a recent example of how we saw this work out. There was this big case this term dealing with whether the voting rights act requires you to set up racist gerrymandered districts. Right, right. And the the court ruled 6-3 that in fact the Voting Rights Act does not require you to be racist. And in fact, the whole point of the Voting Rights Act was that was to uphold was to support the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which explicitly forbids being racist in anything to do with elections. Okay, so it's a 6-3 decision authored by Sam Alito. But there's this concurrence, meaning, you know, there's sometimes like the judges, justices want to write that they are with the majority, but they want to emphasize a different point. And Clarence Thomas writes a concurrence along that is joined by Justice Scorsic, which is basically that the entire section two of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, probably, or it's just a big, again, a big picture thing. I actually think he's probably right, but he only got one person to go along with him on that, right? So you don't have a majority opinion with that. Alito writes the majority where he says, where he gets six people on board to say the Voting Rights Act, section two, does not require you to set up racist gerrymandered districts. By being, again, more practical about what he's dealing with, who's on the court, what they're willing to do, he figures out the maximum position that you can take in the right direction, even if he maybe agrees with Clarence Thomas about the underlying Voting Rights Act. And so the way I always think of it is Thomas plants his flag. By the way, one thing I just love is that for the longest time, people who were awful toward Clarence Thomas, like the New York Times, they were always mocking his influence and saying, oh, he just follows Scalia. And very race-coded attacks on Clarence Thomas. Like he's not his own man. He couldn't possibly be this smart. And following Scalia's death, it's become impossible for even the New York Times to say things like that anymore. They have to concede he's this giant on the court. So I love the acclaim that Clarence Thomas is getting long overdue. But he's this guy, he just says, here's where we should be. I'm right. Y'all know I'm right. And he doesn't really care if anybody joins with him. He is very confident in his position. He's just unafraid to say what he thinks that when they have wrong decisions, they should overrule them as quickly as possible. He's like, he's just a very clear thinking person. And then Justice Alito is saying, okay, I agree we should be over there. How are we gonna get there? So they work together very well, but they have very different strengths. Someone put it to me that Thomas's chambers are like the deployed aircraft carrier, and Alito's chambers are like the Green Berets. They're like, okay, you know, we got this big mission, but what are we gonna do to gain

Voting Rights Act And Majority Building

Molly Hemingway 19:10

ground right now?

Michele McAloon 19:11

A couple questions that I have from that. One thing that I think has been very, very upsetting, and and I want to go back to that Louisiana because uh Calais case was was Katani Jackson Brown's reaction to it. What does this say about us right now? What does this say about this uh particular court? And it's interesting, yes, they have New York Times has attacked Clarence Thomas, but boy, they sure have given, you know, Katani Jackson Brown a room that I I don't want to be uncursion here, but let's go.

Molly Hemingway 19:43

Well, my favorite comparison is how they treated Neil Gorsuch when he came on the court. Neil is Neil, like, you know, my monophere. Justice Gorsuch is someone who's he's an orator. And they mocked him for this. They're like, oh, this kid Justice who just joined the court, how dare he think he can talk as much as he's talking? It's embarrassing. We're all embarrassed for him. And then Katanji Brown Jackson shows up on the court. She literally speaks like twice as much as he did in his first term. And they're like, oh, isn't she just amazing? She's she's just very confident in herself and she's not afraid to get in there. Those types of double standards for the justices are intolerable for a lot of them. They don't care if they're all being attacked for the same thing. But when one side is traveling the world, drinking the finest wine and having, you know, partying with Beyoncé and getting nothing but accolades, and then other people have every detail of their lives scrutinized and they can't go out to dinner with their wife because they'll be attacked, it's just very difficult. But specifically to what Katanji Brown Jackson did in this case, I think it's pretty obvious that the other justices don't have a high regard for her legal reasoning. But she is dangerous in that way. I don't play poker, but I have friends who play poker and they say that playing poker with someone who doesn't know anything about the game is actually much more dangerous than playing against a formidable opponent. And I think there's an aspect of that with her, but she made some huge errors here. Okay. If I can just back up for a moment and say in the book, I tell the story about how the liberal justices delayed the release of the Dobbs decision while even though the justices who auth who authored and signed on to the Dobbs decision had their lives being threatened, and they had asked their liberal colleagues to please get it out so they wouldn't be killed. And instead they slow walked it for seven weeks. My book comes out and says that at the same time there's reporting that the liberal justices are slow walking the collision I don't know how to say the word, the collet, I hope you're right.

Michele McAloon 22:00

Okay, Calais because of Calais, France.

Molly Hemingway 22:01

So Calais. Great. Okay. So Calais. Not that we don't have a long tradition in this country of pronouncing foreign places very differently. So that decision is actually first argued more than a year ago, but then it gets a rehearing in October of the of the previous year. So they've got nothing. It's the only decision from October that hasn't come out yet. And there's reporting that it's being slow walked. Well, after my book comes out saying that they'd use this as a political tactic, the liberal justices do, well, finally the decision comes out. And then more slow walking appears. Like they, I just think it's interesting that they do finally get the decision out. All these states are like, well, if if we're not required to be racist with these black majority districts, we're going to clean up the constitutionality of these districts immediately. And then there are all these, you know, motions toward the Supreme Court that are denied. And the two other liberal justices are smart enough to not say anything. But Katanji Brown Jackson writes this fiery dissent, and Justice Alito responds to it with a footnote that is essentially, you know, I wasn't going to say anything, but y'all did have this since since October, and we're already pretty delayed. Thereby, I think, confirming that earlier reporting that they were slow walking this for political gain. If they could keep it dragged out until the very end of the term, it would help their political party, the Democrats, not face redrawing of congressional districts that might cost them a couple of seats, or, you know, many seats, actually.

Michele McAloon 23:39

Wow.

Media Narratives And Court Tactics

Michele McAloon 23:40

I tell you, there's such an argument for merit-based promotion, right?

Molly Hemingway 23:44

I actually think the Democrats should have picked someone who they thought a little bit more about whether she was savvy. So President Biden said that his criteria for a Supreme Court justice would be that it would be a black female. So that was his criteria. He probably should have emphasized other things like could this justice persuade her colleagues or turn them off? We want someone who will help us get whatever wins we can get. Now I know that the media love her, but she's clearly having almost zero influence on the court itself.

Michele McAloon 24:20

Wow. I mean, it just absolutely amazing. I uh this may be very innocent of me, but I was hoping, and your book really shows that they really are sensitive to political pressure. If you're not a Clarence Thomas, if you're not a Samuel Lee, if you're not a Neil Gorsuch, Neil Gorsuch, maybe a little bit, but they really are sensitive to political pressure. I kind of had this pipe dream that this wasn't true. And it's clearly true.

Molly Hemingway 24:48

I think it's a lesson for everybody in the world, you know, everybody in life. We are pressured by different things. It takes a lot to practice the habit of not being pressured by wrong influences. I think about this a lot because in DC, a lot of people come here with certain values, and then you see them 20 years later, and they are very different people. The saddest thing I hear from people is, thank you for not changing. And I'm like, that's not really an admirable trait. We all should be like they, I do think that they are much less susceptible to political pressure than justices of even recent vintage or media pressure. You take a Justice Kavanaugh, I think he has been admirably consistent, has not really changed from the way he was on the DC circuit, and he couldn't have faced more horrific pressure from the media. Yeah. I think Chief Justice Roberts is the one that I heard from a lot of the people I interviewed. They really wish he weren't so susceptible to media pressure. And they understand that he probably thinks he's preserving the integrity of the court by responding to media pressure. They just think it's it's a completely wrong approach, that the way the court has integrity is by not being subjected to political forces or responding to them with anything other than a clear reading of the law. They think that justices almost never make good politicians, so they shouldn't try to be. So when they're like, oh, if we kind of go this way, maybe people will back off on their attacks on us. It's not just the wrong approach to the law, it's usually the wrong political approach as well. And they don't have backgrounds. Like the more the biggest campaign that John Roberts ever ran was the campaign to get on the court. So there's not like a purely political campaign where you're dealing with the will of the people. It's more about running a campaign to get chosen as a Supreme Court justice among a very small group of deciders, including President Bush. So they're just, they just should probably avoid politics because they're bad at it. One exception would be, I think, Elena Kagan, who has the most political background of any of the justices, she's better at politics than the rest, I think.

Michele McAloon 27:11

Interesting. Very interesting. But you know what? I mean, this is the problem that with I think our three branches of government right now, they're they're not staying in their lane. Judiciary, judiciary, executive, do executive, and I mean, even with a strong, unified executive, do executive, right? And legislative, just start acting, legislatures. I mean, just wake up.

Molly Hemingway 27:32

Yeah. Michelle, I personally believe Congress is so broken that it might threaten the entire existence of the republic. But this is one thing that people should all be very happy about. The current court has that view. They're big believers in the separation of powers, and they are constantly

Pressure On Justices And Cameras

Molly Hemingway 27:50

devolving things back to Congress and saying, I know you tried to give away this job that the Constitution gives you, but it's your job. So do it. And they're, they do have a strong view of the executive, but not a completely unconstrained view of the executive. And again, it's their interpretation of the constitution that each branch is strong in its place. Right. And that that makes for a healthier situation. I really hope Congress picks up the ball and runs with it. There has been some great stuff happening with having them be in their constitutional authorities, but Congress needs to recognize that as well.

Michele McAloon 28:29

Oh, absolutely. I tell you, and I just listened to an interview with Ben Sass. It was really interesting. Ben Sass was talking about one of the problems is the media fragmentation now of Congress and having everybody having to get onto X or everybody having to do a media stunt instead of legislating. Do you see that in the court? I actually get into this in the book a little bit.

Molly Hemingway 28:49

There's a word for it, demos prudence. Yes. Lanny Guineer is a big proponent of this, where when you have no power on the court, you speak directly to the people. Ruth Bader Ginsburg did this a lot. Obviously, Katanji Brown Jackson is, but so are the other liberal justices. I think it would be very bad for the court to have cameras in there. I think it would completely destroy the court. And I would love to see cameras out of the House and the Senate. They don't do anything other than perform for the camera. They do nothing. I know how serious they are about something by whether it's in front of a camera or a closed hearing. If it's a closed hearing, they might be getting something done. They do almost no closed hearings or private transcribed testimony from someone they're doing oversight on. It's all for what can get me a clip that can go viral that can help me with my fundraising. We have had a recent technological change on the court where, you know, they've always done oral arguments publicly. You can go hear them. I just show up and go to them sometimes. Many other Americans do, but they've now started streaming them live. They used to record them and release them later. I think that has probably increased the per somewhat the performative nature of for some of the justices, but I don't think it's a huge

Retirement Talk And Civics Takeaways

Molly Hemingway 30:10

problem right now.

Michele McAloon 30:11

One last question retirement. And I know you hate this question, but Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, they're not young men anymore. Where do you think they are in that?

Molly Hemingway 30:24

Ever since people found out I was writing a book on Alito, they figured that that meant he must be retiring. I don't quite understand the logic there because it's my book and he's the one that would be making a decision. But given all of my interviews and who I talked to, I do not think he's retiring at the end of this term. And his chambers, people close to him did get the word out when there was increased speculation that he would be leaving, that he's not leaving. So that's been credibly reported by multiple solid Supreme Court reporters. And Justice Thomas also got the word out that he's not. For some reason, I'm not therefore convinced that Thomas isn't possibly interested in retiring. I know that he has always said he is leaving feet first. And he quite recently became the second longest serving justice in U.S. history. He would have two more years before he had the number one record. I do think that's kind of been a goal of his. He was put through so much racist horror that I think he views it as like a matter of black pride that he not ever. I just want to say it is human pride, but I do think there has always been a racial component to the attacks on him that we can't ignore. It's really horrible what the left has done to him. He's been very clear about that, but I think his main goal is to make his enemies suffer. Good. So I don't know if that means that he might consider retiring rather than dying underneath under a Democrat president or something. For some reason, not like for no reason, but for a few different reasons. I hate speculating, by the way. I just think it's like thing people waste time on. But I I do wonder if there won't be a retirement, and if it's not Thomas or Alito, if it might surprise us or something. So I'm not, and I you just kind of detect activity coming from the White House, which could just be them preparing at all times for an opening where it could be something more. So I guess we'll all find out together at the end of the year.

Michele McAloon 32:39

Interesting. Well, to my listening audience, this would be a great book for a teenager, for someone graduating from college, from some graduating from high school. Give this book along with a copy of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, because this is a great book in civics and how the court works and why the court is so important and why originalism and why education, one thing, he's a very well-read man, Samuel Alito. Why just keep reading and keep, you know, making yourself smart. Molly Hemingway, I know you're a very busy woman. I really, really am so honored that you took time out of your schedule to talk to me because I'm not a Joe Rogan or a big chip hero, but I really, really appreciate it. And hoping there's another book coming out from uh Molly Hemingway.

Molly Hemingway 33:31

So yeah, we'll see. I'm definitely in the phase of I'm never writing another book.

Michele McAloon 33:36

Yeah, I know writers always say that. And then you start to itch. So it's good. That's good. We like that writing itch. But anyway, thank you so much. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you.