A laughing answering machine made her choose his parents

Owen Thiele's birth mother had settled on a plan. She was in Texas and wanted her son raised nearby, by people she could stay close to. A couple in Los Angeles did not fit. Rather than let the agency handle it, she called them herself to say she was going a different direction. Nobody picked up. The answering machine did. The greeting was Thiele's father tickling his mother while she tried, and failed, to get through the recording without laughing. That was enough. "My birth mom was like, 'I need my son to be filled with laughter and joy, and I want him to be around... support and love,'" Thiele said on Tish Cyrus's podcast in September. Her follow-up message was four words: "Come pick up your kid." Thiele, now 30, was born in Houston in 1996 and raised in Beverly Hills by music producer Bob Thiele Jr. and Amy Kanter. He stars in Prime Video's "Overcompensating."