Welcome to Michael and Us. I'm Will Sloan, here as always with.

Luke Savage, hey everyone. And there are some topics that are just too great, some topics that are too important, too vital to be encompassed merely by Luke and myself. This week's episode will address one such topic.

The 1998 Nora Ephron comedy You've Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

What does it mean for our world today?

We are joined by two guests who will help illuminate the situation.

You know them both from Jacobin magazine.

We have Megan Day. Hi, glad to be here. And returning champion, Bronco Marcotteich.

Hello, good to be back. Before we get to the movie, there is, of course, much happening in the

wild world of politics. We are coming a few days off of a widely seen

vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. Bronco has written a piece for

Jacobin about the debate, a short piece that was published today. Bronco, what did you think of the

debate? You liked it, right? Yeah. I like pretty much everyone in the

entire world, it seems like, thought it was deathly boring. People talked about how this was kind of

a throwback debate. And it was in a sense of, it felt like after Trump won in 2016, there was this

great break from the status quo that even though Trump was a new and scarier thing than we'd seen, there was at least something different, you know, with the rise of Trump and then Sanders and various socialist politicians.

And this felt like it was a reset.

It's like, which I think is what a lot of people want.

They want a reset.

They want to just pretend the last four years didn't happen.

And then we can just go back to the Obama era.

And so we had this corporate, liberal who masquerades as a progressive,

taking on this terrifying right-wing religious extremist, both of them lying through

...