Outside of politics, Sarah is turning 45 today and has a project to celebrate this milestone that will take her up to age 50.

Topics Discussed

• How the organ transplant system actually works (it’s not really a list)

• Why doctors can refuse organs offered to their patients — and patients are never told

• What federal pressure on organ procurement organizations produced in Kentucky

• How the priority list was being bypassed 20% of the time — and why time pressure wasn’t actually the reason

• Wealthy foreign nationals getting faster organ access at certain U.S. hospitals

• What’s changed since Brian’s reporting and what reforms are now in place

• The future of organ donation: animal organs, AI matching, printed organs

Episode Resources

• Federal investigation into organ donation safety and the Kentucky OPO (New York Times)

• How organ procurement organizations bypass the transplant waiting list (New York Times)

• How paired organ donation works through the National Kidney Registry (New York Times)

• Wealthy foreign nationals receiving organ transplants at U.S. hospitals (New York Times)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:13] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today we are talking with Brian Rosenthal, an investigative reporter at The New York Times who has written some blockbuster pieces on organ donation. Organ donation has been on our list for a long time. It’s layered, it’s personal, the stakes are high, the resources are constrained, the process is opaque. So we are very happy that Brian is here to help us understand where the system has come up short and what’s improving.

[00:00:38] Sarah: I was obsessed with these pieces, and I stalked Brian until we got him on our show. That’s what happened.

[00:00:43] Beth: And we waited a long time because Brian was on parental leave. We’re so happy for him. Congratulations to Brian and his family. It was worth the wait.

[00:00:48] Sarah: It was.

[00:00:48] Beth: And I hope that you all learn as much from this conversation as we did. And then Outside of Politics, happy birthday, Sarah. We are celebrating the big 45.

[00:00:57] Sarah: It’s the big 45. I want to tell you about my birthday project. I got a birthday project that’s going to take me to 50, Beth, and I want to tell everybody about it Outside of Politics.

[00:01:08] Beth: Okay. I’m ready.

[00:01:09] Sarah: Before we dive in, our one and only live show of the year is happening in Minneapolis on August 29th. We’re about a month away, and we want you to be there. Even if you can’t be there, our virtual tickets let you watch live or catch it later. Right now, when you buy one virtual ticket, you can get a second at half price. So grab one for a friend, and you can discuss it together over snacks or during a walk. All the details are in the show notes. Brian, welcome to Pantsuit Politics.

[00:01:50] Brian Rosenthal: Thanks for having me.

[00:01:51] Sarah: I have a personal question first. How the hell did you end up with the organ beat at The New York Times?

[00:01:59] Brian Rosenthal: I’m an investigative reporter which means I don’t have a specific beat normally. I just roam around and look for interesting topics that should be investigated. So I’ve done investigations on all kinds of topics. In this case, interestingly enough the idea actually came from I was attending a wedding several years ago and a friend of a friend who happened to also be attending the wedding got to talking with me and I mentioned that I was a reporter at The New York Times and they said here’s what you should look into, it is the organ transplant system. They worked at a hospital and I started looking into it and found that indeed there were a lot of important and interesting things to look into.

[00:02:48] Sarah: How many times does somebody say that to you as a New York Times reporter, though, that it doesn’t go anywhere?

[00:02:55] Brian Rosenthal: A lot.

[00:02:56] Sarah: I don’t know if you’re taking suggestions because I’ll have some for you at the end of this show.

[00:03:00] Brian Rosenthal: I will take them. And I always say tell us your ideas. Tell us what your hunch is. Like, whenever people are upset about something not being covered, I always say have you told a journalist about it? We’re not mind readers. We can’t just come up with this ourselves. People have to tell us about it.

[00:03:19] Beth: I love that. So when you say that you started to look into it, what’s that process like? I kept reading your work thinking, where do you begin with this?

[00:03:27] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah. Whenever I dive into a topic like this, the first thing I want to do is read everything that’s already been written. And obviously, I will look in The New York Times at all the stories that have been written about organ donation, organ transplant over the decades really. But then I’ll also look at other news organizations. In this case, The Washington Post had done a lot of coverage in recent years, as had ProPublica. So looking at other news organizations, and for something like this, there are a lot of scientific studies too. And so trying to read the scientific studies, the reports that have been produced by the government that’s always step one and that can take days or weeks even just to get through that. Then my next step is always just to have general conversations with people in the community, the agency, the industry, whatever it is I’m investigating, and just asking them what are the big issues, what do they think has not received enough coverage what should I be keeping in mind? That process can take weeks too.

[00:04:32] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:04:32] Brian Rosenthal: It’s a lot of time just getting up to speed.

[00:04:36] Beth: The community, the agency, the industry seems like a helpful series of words because reading about this, I kept thinking, “What? What is this system?” So can you tell us, for those of us who’ve really not done anything but check the box on our driver’s license, how you think of what this system is?

[00:04:55] Brian Rosenthal: I had no idea how it worked at all. I kind of thought that if you need a transplant, your doctor gets you on the list. That’s the one thing I thought I knew is that there’s a list. And I thought that if you’re number 1,000 on the list nationwide and tomorrow you’ll be number 999 and you just wait your turn, and there’s some overarching entity that doles this out. And it’s really not like that at all actually. When you need a transplant, you do get on a registry. But it’s not a list,. In the sense that there is no waiting list where you know when it will be your turn. What happens is that people die every day. Actually, a very small minority of them are actually able to donate their organs just physically because of the way that they die. Most people in this country thankfully die because of old age because of something that happens to them and they are not really in a place where their organs would be beneficial to other people. So you’re really thinking about tragedies, people in a car accident or people with a gunshot wound or people with drug overdose. There are more examples but for the most part. And so when that happens, if they are a registered donor or if their family authorizes because I always say you don’t have to be a registered donor to donate your organs. Even if you are not a registered donor, if you die in a way in which your organs will be suitable, they are still going to ask your family if you want to donate. Registering kind of guarantees, it means they don’t even have to talk to your family. But even if you’re not registered they will still talk to your family and ask. And so if you’re either registered or your family authorizes it, that organ then is considered available. And so it is then going to be matched. And the way that it gets matched is it is based on the region that it’s in. So every state has its own organ procurement organization that handles the organs that become available in its state. Some states have multiple but basically have multiple procurement organizations.

[00:07:10] But basically, it’s one per state, and they’re in charge of finding the best match for that organ. And you need somebody who’s actually has the same blood type, is around the same size, is around, the same type of conditions to be a match. And then it’s based on the priority. And the powers that be in the organ transplant system have decided on priority, and it actually varies based on the organ. For some organs, it is based on how long you’ve been waiting. Other organs, it actually doesn’t matter how long you’ve been waiting, it’s how sick you are. But there is an algorithm that determines the priority order, and so the organ procurement organization in that state will determine the patients that not only are a match but are the highest priority. And then there is another aspect of this-- sorry for being so long-winded with your simple question-- but once the organ procurement organization identifies the patient who is a match, who’s the highest priority, their doctor then has to accept that organ. And it turns out that doctors are very choosy.

[00:08:21] Sarah: You want a choosy doctor.

[00:08:25] Brian Rosenthal: Yes, you do. But you don’t want an overly choosy doctor. There have been studies that have found that people who have died waiting for an organ have actually been offered hundreds of organs and their doctors were too choosy. I don’t recall the exact average, so hundreds as an average might be overstated. But there are many organs offered to people who end up dying waiting because their doctor feels that it’s not a perfect match. And by the way, patients never find out about that. Once the offer is made to their doctor, if they say no the doctor doesn’t have to tell the patient. But anyway, just to finish that, the organ procurement organization offers it to the doctor for the first patient on the list. The doctor may very well say no, and then they will go to the second priority person on the list. They may say no, and it could go quite a ways down the list.

[00:09:21] Sarah: So I know the federal government started grading these organ procurement organizations, and what were they trying to fix when they did that, and what did it actually produce as far as incentives?

[00:09:36] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah, so one of the things that policymakers realized several years ago is that as a community, we are not donating as many organs as we should. And I say it like that because basically there are people who are dying in a way that would facilitate organ donation that could be tapped for their organs and we’re just not getting to them. I mentioned earlier that if you’re not registered, the organ procurement organization, OPO for short, will still talk to your family and try to get you to donate your organs. They have to actually know that you’ve died and they have to then make the effort to go talk to your family, and they have to be persuasive enough to convince your family to donate their organs. And so the government was concerned that the OPOs were not being very effective at getting people to donate their organs, essentially. And so they wanted to put pressure on the OPOs to increase the amount of organs that they were recovering and to ultimately facilitate more transplants.

[00:10:49] Sarah: Whatever could go wrong, Brian?

[00:10:53] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah. And to be fair, the policy has been, I would say, successful in many ways. The number of transplants that have taken place in the country in the last few years has gone up significantly, and some of that I think is due to some problems that I’ll talk about in a second. But another piece of that which I saw with my own eyes when I was doing this reporting, and I was going in the field tagging along with the OPOs, going into transplant surgeries, I heard from hospitals over and over again that a decade ago they never heard from the OPO, and so they had people who died whose organs were viable, but they just didn’t hear from them. And these days the OPOs are much more proactive. They are monitoring what’s going on. They have people stationed in the hospitals. They are coordinating much better with the hospitals and ultimately getting more organs. And that is great. That’s saving lives. But as you referenced, we did find in our reporting that there is also some over-aggressiveness going on from the OPOs in terms of trying to get organs from people who may not be ready to donate their organs.

[00:12:09] Sarah: They are not dead yet, Brian. Just say it. They’re not dead yet.

[00:12:13] Beth: We both live in Kentucky.  So that was a chilling story for us.

[00:12:17] Sarah: We Live in Kentucky. That features prominently in your reporting.

[00:12:20] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah, I try not to try not to sensationalize things too much, but yeah there was a federal investigation that found that in Kentucky specifically there were dozens of cases of patients who were showing signs that they may have some brain activity, and the organ donation effort went forward nonetheless. And it’s pretty well documented that the OPO, which again is under pressure to increase transplants, was really driving that. Even though legally the organ donation team is not supposed to have anything to do with end-of-life care. They’re only supposed to come in after the person has already been declared dead or declared that they have no chance of recovering. Legally, they’re not supposed to be involved at all, it was documented in a federal investigation, and we found in our reporting too that these OPOs are pressuring the hospitals to try to get as many organs as they can.

[00:13:35] Beth: So you have this effort to get more organs into the system You also have this time pressure around getting those organs to patients who are waiting as quickly as possible. And it seems like the reform efforts collided with that time pressure in your reporting. Can you tell us about how what we think of as capital T and L, the list, started to mean less?

[00:14:04] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah. That’s the other piece of it is not just how they’re getting organs, but how they’re distributing them. Because as I mentioned, there is an allocation system that is in place, and it can take time. There are times when the person who recovers the organ is offering that organ out to dozens of doctors, and all the doctors say, “Eh, the donor is a little older. The donor has some test results that I’m a little concerned about. I don’t want to take the risk.” And according to the process that’s in place, you’re supposed to just call down the list and go through everybody. But what the OPOs decided is that was taking too long. And so instead of calling the doctor for the first patient, calling the doctor for the second patient, and going down the list, they said, “You know what would make this a lot easier, is if we just knew that there were some doctors out there who are really aggressive, who are always going to say yes to an organ, who for whatever reason we have a relationship with, maybe I went to medical school with them or whatever. They’re a good guy and, they’ll give me an answer quickly. They’ll probably say yes. Instead of going down the list, why don’t we just call them and say, ‘Hey you’re a good doctor. Here’s an organ that’s available. Not only should you take it for your first patient on the list, but actually with this type of an offer, you can give it to any of your patients. Any patient that’s at your hospital, feel free to take this organ.’” It’s called an open offer. And in this context of needing to do more transplants because of the pressure from the government, those open offers have just skyrocketed to the point where during our reporting we found that about 20% of the time instead of going down the list, they would skip over people and just hand it to a doctor that they had a relationship with or that they thought was aggressive.

[00:16:08] And I think it’s important to note because you mentioned the time pressure, when an organ becomes available and is taken out of somebody’s body, there is a deadline for when it can be donated. An organ is only going to stay viable for so long. And for hearts, that’s only a few hours. For kidney, they can actually keep it going for up to 48 hours now with new technology. But hearts and lungs, livers to some extent, there’s a real time pressure. And so when we did this reporting, we asked about all these open offers. That would always be cited as a reason for why they did so many of these open offers, skipping, ignoring the priority list. They would say that the organ is deteriorating, we just don’t have enough time. But we actually obtained data showing exactly when the organs were taken out of the body and when these open offers were given, and we found that the vast majority of the time, they did have time. Time was not running out. They would do these open offers in some cases before the organ had even been taken out of the body. And or it maybe was a kidney and had only been out of the body for a couple hours. And so that explanation just didn’t really hold water. It seemed that the real reason is that they were just expediting trying to get these organs placed because of the pressure from the government.

[00:17:33] Sarah: Let’s talk about incentives and the response from the government because your reporting led to a lot of people-- I am one of them because I lived in Kentucky. I was about to renew my license. I was like, “I’m not doing this. I’m not checking this box. I don’t want these organ procurement people around the corner.” Now, I told my family, “I’m happy to donate my organs should they come and talk to you.” But what did you think when all this came out and the response to the piece and people were responding this way?

[00:18:01] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah.

[00:18:02] Sarah: It had to be really intense.

[00:18:04] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah. It was really intense. And I think that my first thought and the thing I always want to emphasize is that organ donation is a beautiful gift and it does save tens of thousands of lives every year. A lot of us know people who have been saved because of that. And so we don’t want to discourage that from happening. It gives me no joy to see people reading our reporting and then removing themselves from the list. That’s not our goal at all. But at the same time, as a journalist, our job is to tell the truth about what we find. And we cannot look away from problems. And in fact, it’s doing a disservice to the donors, the recipients, the hardworking doctors in the system, everybody if we are ignoring problems. And so I think our goal has always been to spotlight problems and hopefully that will lead to positive change. Hopefully, that is what’s happening.

[00:19:16] Sarah: Yeah. Have you seen some investigations and stuff since that you’re really encouraged by? Because I think you’re right. The best thing for organ donation is to have a system people trust.

[00:19:24] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah, absolutely. And trust is not gained by shoving problems under the rug. It’s by acknowledging problems and making improvements. And by the way, the other piece of it is organ donation is such a beautiful gift and sacrifice. We owe it to the donors to make sure this process is run with integrity, and that the priority is given to people that need the organs. And so I just think that’s all just really important. As far as reform, yes, thankfully there have been reforms that have followed our work. There have been a lot of reforms that have come into place. So on the donor safety side of things, the government has put together a task force to write new rules for the organ-- the type of organ donation that we talked about when people were being pursued too early. And those safety regulations have now been drafted and they should be in place soon. The government also closed down one of the organ procurement organizations that we mentioned that had been part of these problems. They have ordered reforms at Kentucky the Kentucky OPO specifically.

[00:20:40] Sarah: Good to know.

[00:20:42] Brian Rosenthal: And so, yeah, you should have more confidence today in the Kentucky OPO than you did several months ago. They were doing things like, for example, that they have to check whether somebody is gaining consciousness every two hours when somebody is being considered for organ donation. Not a requirement before. It was just not something they had to look at. There also is a process in place where anybody involved in the organ donation any doctor, any nurse, even any family member who has concerns can pause the process and say, “Slow down. We want somebody else to take a look at this.” And so those types of reforms are coming into place on the donor safety side. On the other side, in terms of the allocation, it’s actually been even more encouraging. The biggest thing that’s happened is that the OPOs responded to our reporting by sharply curtailing how often they do this. I mentioned earlier that the OPOs were skipping the list 20% of the time when we wrote our story over a year ago now. Today that number is down to 9%.

[00:21:57] Sarah: Wow.

[00:21:57] Brian Rosenthal: And so yeah, it’s been cut in half.

[00:22:00] Sarah: Because you also reported on the, like, wealthy foreign nationals, but I want to get into, like, how they were playing a part in those lists as well.

[00:22:08] Brian Rosenthal: Sure. Yeah that’s another piece.

[00:22:10] Sarah: That’s a whole other big piece of this puzzle.

[00:22:13] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah. So but for just generally, skipping the list, it has been sharply reduced. There have been new regulations from the government that have come in about telling OPOs that they cannot do this and requiring more transparency about their offer process and when they’re making offers of organs to patients. And the most encouraging thing on that is, remember we talked about how the OPOs had said that they were doing this because they were on a clock, and that If they didn’t do this the organ was going to not be able to be used by anybody. It was going to have to be thrown out. So the really encouraging statistic is that they have sharply cut how often they skip the list, and yet there’s been no increase in organs not being used. And so that was something that was a fear, and it has not happened. So yeah, a lot of different reforms on a lot of different pieces.

[00:23:14] Beth: That’s great. Why don’t you tell us about the--

[00:23:15] Brian Rosenthal: Do you want to talk about the foreign nationals?

[00:23:17] Beth: Yes.

[00:23:18] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah. So this was another piece that we did and I think it’s right to talk about it separately because unlike the two big pieces that we did about donor safety and about skipping the waiting list, those were stories that were about the system overall nationwide that were affecting everybody. The story about foreign nationals is really a story about a few hospitals, and so it’s not as much of a systemic problem. But it is quite interesting. Basically, there are a few hospitals in the country who have figured out that a way that they can make a lot of money is by doing transplants for wealthy people coming over from other countries in need of an organ. And this is concerning to ethics experts.

[00:24:17] Sarah: Back to that institutional trust problem.

[00:24:20] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah, the big concern is we don’t have enough organs to go around. There are 100,000 people waiting for organs in the US right now. And thousands of them die without getting an organ. And so the idea that we would take this precious commodity which thousands and thousands of people desperately need, and we would give it to a wealthy person from another country coming over, who by the way, is doing nothing to support our donor pool. It’d be one thing if we had some agreement with another country that we would get their organs, and they could get our transplants, right? Or people talk about illegal immigration and whether undocumented immigrants should get organ transplants in the US. In that case, undocumented immigrants can get transplants in most parts of the US, but they also donate their organs. Because they live here. And there have been studies that have shown that they actually donate their organs at a higher rate than they get organs. So the phenomenon that I’m talking about is a much bigger ethical issue than that because the people that are getting organs are not contributing to the organ pool. And at these hospitals, these people are coming over and getting organs. And our reporting showed that compared to Americans, they get their organs faster. They are more likely to get an organ.

[00:25:49] Sarah: I don’t like this, Brian. I don’t like it. Makes me mad.

[00:25:52] Brian Rosenthal: They are also more likely to get an exception, it’s called a priority, that gives them increased ability to get an organ. And so yeah, that is taking place at several hospitals in the US.

[00:26:05] Sarah: What’s the overlap between those people and the open offer aggressive doctors? That’s what I want to know.

[00:26:10] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah.

[00:26:11] Sarah: I bet it’s pretty high.

[00:26:12] Brian Rosenthal: There were definitely cases that we found that the hospital will get an open offer and use it to give an organ to a foreign national. But I do just want to be clear, we did not find that it was an enormous number. And that for the most part, what we found was that patients that were coming over from other countries were getting some exception or some advantage to give them priority. So they actually didn’t even need the open offer because they were getting some priority already in the system.

[00:26:59] Beth: I think it’s helpful to hear about this even though it’s less widespread, just as you consider the concept of fairness around something that is such a scarce resource where the stakes are so high. Because every system is going to have an element of incentives and relationships, and the math of saving lives I can imagine being pretty difficult not to express sympathy for hospital administrators who might be making those choices. But I can see a world where I tell myself if I get this heart to this person and that gets me a new cancer wing or something, I can just see because of the layers of complexity that people trying to take care of others in the United States face, and the way in which in your reporting there is a sense when you’re talking about a horrible instance of a child who gets passed over, and at the end of it everybody goes, “Oh, it sucks. This is our system.” And you think who’s responsible for this? I appreciate that you highlighted a lot of different dimensions without giving us an easy answer to that question.

[00:28:11] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah, it would almost be easier if there was one villain to point to.

[00:28:15] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:28:16] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah.

[00:28:16] Sarah: This reporting led to a congressional inquiry, right?

[00:28:19] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah, it did.

[00:28:21] Sarah: And what were they looking at? Congress loves to find an easy villain. Surely they went on the look for one.

[00:28:26] Brian Rosenthal: So on the foreign nationals specifically, they are investigating those hospitals. They have not published their reports yet I should say. So we’ll see. In that case, I do think it’s a little clearer. We’re talking about some hospitals that have made a financial decision. In our article, we actually talked to the person who founded the international program at one of these hospitals, Montefiore in New York City. And she was very blunt with us. She said, “Hey, this is a way that we can make money.” She said they had brought in tens of millions of dollars through this. And she did make the point like other people did that, yeah, this brings in money for the hospital, and then we can do good for other people, right? Which is an argument that’s made.

[00:29:14] Sarah: It is an argument. Maybe not the strongest one.

[00:29:18] Brian Rosenthal: But yeah, there are a lot of different people involved in the process. Just generally, organ donation is unique in medicine. We don’t have another type of healthcare that is based on the gifts of other people. And so you have to respect that, but it also adds some complexity because there are the donor hospitals and the recipient hospitals and the coordinators and the regulators and all kinds of different people involved with all kinds of different incentives. And it does make it very challenging to identify the people who are doing problematic things and why they’re doing it.

[00:29:57] Beth: Do you have a sense of where this field is going? You mentioned technology prolonging the time that a kidney can be out of a body before it’s donated to someone new. Are we getting closer to being able to use animal organs or printed organs or what’s our path forward here?

[00:30:18] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah, good question. And it’s actually a question that I have studied a little less because I’ve been focused on the state of the system today. I think it is absolutely true that at some point in the future we will be able to use animal organs, use printed organs, keep organs viable for much longer. I think there’s also a lot of potential that people are excited about using AI for or other technologies to make the matching more efficient, to find better matches quickly. I think that is all going to be true. The question is how long will it take? How many people will die in the meantime? Is it something that happens this decade or this century, right? And I don’t have the answer to that. I think people in the field don’t have the answer to that either. Thankfully, I do think that it is a bit of a-- stories like the ones we wrote will probably hopefully not be written 100 years from now thankfully. But that is something to consider. The other thing to consider is I mentioned there are 100,000 people on the waiting list. There are actually many more people who need organs who have not been able to get onto the waiting list. And as you can imagine, this disproportionately affects lower income people without access to healthcare. You can’t even get onto the list. And so we are going to have the ability to have a lot more organs, but we’re also going to need a lot more organs. And the news isn’t all good on that front when we think about the actual need that exists.

[00:31:59] Sarah: What are you working on next, Brian? You going to stay on this beat?  Do you want to give us a sneak peek?

[00:32:08] Brian Rosenthal: I don’t know.

[00:32:09] Sarah: Taking tips. I forgot.

[00:32:11] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah, exactly. This is the part where you share what you think I should write about.

[00:32:15] Sarah: We are both obsessed with ed tech. We hate it. There’s a lot of things happening in the public school system that deserve a spotlight for sure, particularly when it comes to the software. I think people get focused on the cell phones in schools, and they forget about the software that all the children are using every day.

[00:32:37] Brian Rosenthal: Yeah.

[00:32:38] Sarah: What about yours, Beth? What’s your tip?

[00:32:40] Beth: I was thinking exactly the same thing, the contracts for that software, the way that within one school district they might be paying for multiple licenses for that software, the way that software has become baked into curriculum standards. Teachers don’t have any choice about how to use the software, the privacy around that software.  There’s a lot on my list about the software.

[00:33:01] Sarah: State Legislation requiring the software.  We got his attention.

[00:33:05] Brian Rosenthal: I may need to follow up with you about that.

[00:33:07] Sarah: Yeah. He leaned forward. I think we got something.

[00:33:10] Brian Rosenthal: I don’t know how much detail to go into here, but I do think that’s interesting.

[00:33:14] Sarah: Yeah. We’re here for you, Brian.

[00:33:16] Beth: Absolutely.

[00:33:17] Brian Rosenthal: Thank you.

[00:33:17] Beth: Thank you so much for talking with us.

[00:33:20] Brian Rosenthal: Thank you. I appreciate it.

[00:33:22] Sarah: Thank you.

[00:33:37] Beth: Okay, Sarah, it’s your birthday

[00:33:39] Sarah: It’s my birthday.

[00:33:41] Beth: Because I am a 45-year-old as well, I hear 50 Cent in the background.

[00:33:45] Sarah: Yep.

[00:33:47] Beth: Tell us about your project.

[00:33:48] Sarah: Okay. So I’ve been thinking a lot about 50. I don’t like the 5s, for the record. I have a strong aversion to 25. That was my worst one. I really didn’t like 25. But 35 I was more neutral on. 45 I feel fine about, but I’m like it just feels like it’s a big deal because then you’re on the other side, and you’re getting closer to the next decade than a previous decade. Do you see what I’m saying? I

[00:34:14] Beth: I did not appreciate 45 rolling around for me. I relate to what you’re saying.

[00:34:18] Sarah: You see what I’m saying? We’re getting close to 50. So I was like I’ll just do what I always do. I’ll turn it into a project. So here’s my plan. For every year on the way to 50, I’m going to take a decade of my life. So like 45 will be zero to 10, 46, 10 to 20, 47, 20 to 30. See where I’m going here? And in that year I’m going to do something fun. So I think for zero to 10 I have this like truly-- You know how just some photos become a part of you? There’s just this picture, this moment just lives in your head, and it’s a part of your life story. I have this incredible picture from the very first slumber party I ever had at seven or eight, and I want to recreate it with my friends. And I want to go through all of my childhood memorabilia, all my stuff I have, find a way to put it all together, put it all in one place, maybe put it in a scrapbook. I have this vision of the sequel to Terms of Endearment, the name of which I can’t remember, where Shirley MacLaine gets in this closet with all her stuff and she makes a book for every year of her life, like a big pretty scrapbook.

[00:35:26] It’s the only thing I remember from that movie. But I’m going to do that for zero to 10. I haven’t decided how I’m going to put it all together, but I want to work through all the stuff I’ve got. I’ve got memorabilia and photos and stuff kind of all over the house for all these phases of my life, and I want to organize it. So I’ve kind of started. I took most of it from my closet and from this other cabinet, and I divided it into bins per 10 years. So I’ll pull out the 10-year bin from 45 to 46, and work my way through it slowly. That’s my plan.

[00:35:54] Beth: And so the goal for each decade is to choose one photo to recreate or to...

[00:36:01] Sarah: I just have a plan for zero to 10. I might do a photo. I might not. Maybe I’ll look somebody up from that time period that I haven’t talked to in a long time that was really influential.

[00:36:09] Beth: So it’s more like excavating that particular decade. Okay.

[00:36:11] Sarah: Yes. I’m excavating, I’m organizing, I’m reviewing.

[00:36:16] Beth: Okay. I’m following now.

[00:36:17] Sarah: That’s what I’m doing. That’s my plan.

[00:36:20] Beth: Okay.

[00:36:20] Sarah: I got a lot of time. I got all year for every 10 years. Because if you try to do this all at once, it’s too much and it’s overwhelming. So I figure why don’t I break it down so by the time I turn 50 I’ll have it all together.

[00:36:31] Beth: Are you going to give yourself like a deadline? By your next birthday this will be done or--

[00:36:36] Sarah: Yeah, by my next birthday I need to be done with everything from zero to 10.

[00:36:40] Beth: Zero to 10. And is there a time of year where you’re going to focus on it? Because I could see myself, like, having a good intention and letting it languish.

[00:36:48] Sarah: What I’m going to do is I’m going to pull a bin out and put it in my office. I don’t like junk in my office, so the motivation will be to clear the bin and get it out of my office. I don’t necessarily need a deadline. I think it’ll probably push me to do it when I have some time. Which I should have plenty of since I just opened a new business and we have a full-time job, and I have three kids. It’s fine. I’ll find the time. Don’t worry about it.

[00:37:08] Beth: It’s so funny that you say that because I have been thinking a lot about I have a million ideas right now.

[00:37:15] Sarah: Yes.

[00:37:15] Beth: But I also keep hearing this little voice in my head that goes, “Enough right now. You’re not...” I think there is maybe some kind of energy at this stage of life where you start to feel like you’re running out of time, and you do have a bunch of ideas, and I feel like some wise part of me keeps going, “ You got plenty. It’s okay. It’s alright.”

[00:37:35] Sarah: I don’t feel like I’m running out of time. I’m going to live to be 115 years old. I’m planning on being a supercentenarian, Beth. That’s my goal. Yeah.

[00:37:42] Beth: You’re going to make Pantsuit Politics until you’re 115.

[00:37:44] Sarah: Yeah, I did say I wanted to do it till I die. Okay, so maybe not that long.

[00:37:47] I think a good old-fashioned 90. What do you think? Do you think we could do it till we’re 90?

[00:37:51] Beth: To make Pantsuit Politics until we’re 90? No, ma’am.

[00:37:54] Sarah: Next best offer, 80. [ laughs]. Your face.

[00:38:02] Beth: Listen, if you find a spry 70-year-old who wants to jump in with you, you go for it, and I will be in the audience cheering you both on.

[00:38:13] Sarah: So that’s my plan. That’s my on my way to 50 plan. But probably we should make plans for our 50th birthday too. Just saying.

[00:38:20] Beth: That’s a good point that you make. The other thing that came to mind for me as you were saying this, when you said a photo that is your iconic photo of a time in your life, I instantly saw this photo that I’ve looked at 10 million times in one of those old books with the sticky paper where you put the actual printed photos, and it is of me sitting in Santa’s lap in kindergarten, but I didn’t know that Santa was my dad when the photo was taken. So I could just see it. I know what I’m wearing in the photo. I know how I’m sitting in the photo. That photo is seared into my memory. But what a 1981 baby’s thing, right? This time when everybody was printing the photos and putting them in the books, and you would look at them over and over. I don’t know that it’ll be like that for my kids.

[00:39:01] Sarah: Yeah, I don’t know. I print photos. I definitely have photos from our vacations and stuff out, so I hope they do. And I think I’m a little bit thinking about this through the eyes of what will they want to keep, what will be interesting to them. I want to get some of the Ancestry photos that I have so it’s not just this envelope of old people, and they’re like, “Who the hell is this? What do I care?” I’m trying to get that kind of organized as well.

[00:39:25] Beth: I look forward to seeing the book of Sarah when it’s completed. Yes. I think that’s exciting.

[00:39:28] Sarah: I’ll sell copies. Don’t worry.

[00:39:31] Beth: Happy birthday. I hope you enjoy it.

[00:39:33] Sarah: Thank you.

[00:39:33] Beth: Thank you, Brian, for spending time with us. Thanks to all of you for listening. We’ll be back with you with a new episode this Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Topics Discussed

• Why kids' anxiety about the news is often rooted in a knowledge gap, not the news itself

• How The 10 News covers scary topics like school shootings — and why vagueness can be worse than directness

• What kids actually want to know more about (spoiler: more politics, not less)

• How to cover hard stories without being condescending

• The shift toward more international coverage over six years

• What it looks like to watch a generation of kids grow up through the news

  Want more Pantsuit Politics? Subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode and get access to our premium shows and community.

Episode Resources

The Ten News

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:10] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. If you have ever stared at a news alert and had absolutely no idea how to explain it to a child, this episode is for you. Tracy Kaplan is the creator and executive producer of The Ten News, a podcast for kids and families ages 8 to 12, that has been doing the work of explaining the world to kids since 2020. And what Tracy has learned in six years really mirrors our experiences. Kids’ anxiety about the news is often rooted not in the news itself, but in a knowledge gap. They’re not scared because they know too much, they’re scared because they don’t know enough. Tracy is here with Sarah to share more. And Outside of Politics, we’re going to talk about summer camp and our personal experiences there. Speaking of a knowledge gap and what makes you anxious.

[00:00:56] Sarah: Before we get started, if coming to our Minneapolis live show isn’t in the cards for you this August, join us from the comfort of your couch on your own time. You can watch our show live on August 29th or when it’s convenient for you. Bring a friend for half the price when you buy your ticket. All the details are in the show notes. Tracy Kaplan, welcome to Pantsuit Politics.

[00:01:26] Tracy Kaplan: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here.

[00:01:28] Sarah: Now, you’re here because we’re going to talk about a parentally interesting topic here, which is kids and the news. How do we talk about kids and the news? What do we tell kids about the news? When kids have anxiety about the news, how do we deal with all that? So tell us why you have some expertise in this area.

[00:01:44] Tracy Kaplan: As most parents, this does keep me up at night, but maybe in a different way than a lot of parents because I’m thinking about how to put it together in a podcast. So I’m the creator and executive producer of The Ten News, which is a kids podcast for kids and families 8 to 12, and I started it in September of 2020. So we’re going into our sixth year. So I’ve been thinking about this for a while and put together a really amazing team of people who really are spending hours, days, weeks looking at all the news that we’re all looking at it, but through the lens of what would a kid be thinking about. So when I see a headline, yes, I’m consuming it myself, and maybe it’s making me anxious as a human, as a parent, but I’m also thinking about it in the sense of what if my kid just saw that on my phone, what if my kid just saw the Apple News pop up, and how would they interpret that?

[00:02:45] Sarah: I think the key component, first of all, is the 8 to 10. I always say when you say kids, do you mean little kids, elementary, middle high school, college?

[00:02:53] Tracy Kaplan: Yeah, 8 to 12.

[00:02:53] Sarah: But I think that’s the problem. People think you have to have one way to do this. It really matters on what age kid you’re talking about because I think so much of what you’re often talking about is a knowledge gap. I think we go right to the anxiety, but sometimes the anxiety is founded in a lack of knowledge. So how do you think about that at the 10?

[00:03:12] Tracy Kaplan: Oh, exactly. That’s exactly how I think about it. I’m always thinking about we’re always telling our kids what to do, what to eat, do your homework, and they are just seeking out control, right? They’re pushing boundaries. They’re trying to figure out who they are. So I take the same approach when I’m working with my team on the news. A good example of this is when the Ukraine war broke out, when Russia invaded Ukraine. All of a sudden, there are all these terms being flown about, economic sanctions, NATO. As an adult, I was even wondering why is it now Kyiv instead of “Kiev”? I grew up with the pronunciation being “Kiev”, and now all the reporters are saying Kyiv, and CNN’s not going to take a minute to explain that, but The Ten News is. So really thinking about what are the terms. What’s a way that we can give a kid who’s hearing all this stuff enough control that they can say, “Hey, I have a question,” because they’re brimming with questions, right? We always know that with a lot of our kids, that they’re overflowing with questions. And so giving them just that little bit of control so that they can come to you with a question from a place of, “Okay, I know this, but can you help me understand this other part,” Mom, Dad, trusted guardian, whoever it is, just giving them that step up in the conversation.

[00:04:33] Sarah: Here’s my next question because I think as an adult the other way I cope with anxiety, I think a lot of us do, is just through the lens of partisanship. So we just decide I’m on the good team here. You’re on the bad team. I’m assuming that’s not something you can lean on or don’t want to lean on at The Ten, and teaching kids like the answer here is to make sure you’re on the right team, kids. So how do you handle that sort of approach to analysis?

[00:04:56] Tracy Kaplan: We do really try to just lay out what’s happening, with the exception of the show does have a strong sense of values and moral core, I will say. That was something I got great advice when I started from Soledad O’Brien, the amazing journalist, and I was tying myself in knots because there were just things that were happening on all sides where I was like, “Do I need to two sides everything? And what if I just truly don’t believe that the other side is correct from an ethical and moral standpoint?” And she said it’s really important to set your point of view and stick to it. And so I’ve really taken that to heart. We do certainly will share but always in the context of experts say or this is what the administration is saying. So we make sure to always source where the things are coming from, so then we’re not saying, “This is our side. You should pick this side.” We’re really saying “Here’s what’s being said,” but we will be extremely upfront of when we feel like something is wrong or hurtful

[00:06:01] Sarah: Yeah. What do you do when it’s just scary? Like, when it’s a very violent situation, a school shooting, that it’s a news item that affects kids, and it’s really scary.

[00:06:13] Tracy Kaplan: So those are the really hard times and that’s really when we’re also thinking about the adults and what needs to be shared for them to be able to have a good conversation with their kids and really thinking about what’s age-appropriate because you don’t want to go into all the gory details, but you also don’t want to be super vague because being super vague can actually be scarier than laying out what happened. So again, we try to be very direct. When we are covering a topic like that, we’ll add a little note at the top of the episode or in our show notes to say, “Hey, we’re talking about a difficult topic today. This may be one that you really want to make sure that you’re with a grown-up to listen through.” And then for the first time, I think it was two years ago-- it could’ve been three as we’re going into our sixth year-- we did a two-parter on gun violence, and it was the first time that we did an episode very specifically for the adults to listen to as a primer before the next episode, which was then for everyone. And I hate to say that kind of has become an evergreen episode now because this doesn’t seem to be stopping. So I’m happy that we have it there as a resource. I really wish on all of my being that it didn’t need to be there as a resource.

[00:07:46] Sarah: There’s the topics that we know are hard. What have you found to be, like, surprisingly impactful or a positive news story that hit in a way you didn’t expect or maybe a policy issue or a topic that you didn’t understand or realize that kids were really focused on?

[00:08:04] Tracy Kaplan: I will say, in general, kids really want to know more and more of what’s going on in the political space. I think there’s a tendency to shy away from it. But when I look at our podcast reviews, which is probably the most fun way that we engage with our audience, seeing so many kids who are saying “Okay, great, we love the Nintendo episode,” because I also love the Nintendo episodes, “but we want more politics.” They don’t want to be shut out of the conversations that are happening. And then I think the one that was the most impactful that also just reminded me that to take the time to do more episodes really focusing on what kids are dealing with day in and day out we did an episode on food allergies, and had a lot of listener reaction to that of thanking us. A kid who was living with celiac who wrote in. So just a reminder too of, okay, thinking about the things that are very micro in kids’ lives, not always focusing on the macro.

[00:09:01] Sarah: Yeah, that’s so true. How many or how often do you focus on like education and topics of schooling? That feels like something kids would want to talk a lot about. Or maybe not because they’re in school and all that.

[00:09:10] Tracy Kaplan: Yeah, exactly. They’re in it, and a lot of teachers are using the show in their classrooms. Certainly when there’s any kind of policies or laws that are affecting education, we talk a lot about what’s happening around banned books and what legislation is happening in that realm. So we do a lot of that. And then actually an episode we did at the end of the year last year that also got a lot of great feedback was we did an episode on screen time. And I have to say, sometimes those episodes are harder than tough news because I never want to be condescending to our listeners. So finding that line of talking about technology, talking about the good, the bad, the ugly, and being honest about how technology affects brains and affects all of our brains and doing it in a way that kids aren’t just going to turn it off and be like... oh, yeah. So I did it through a partnership with a group called the Take Two Media Initiative. It’s a group out of New York, and they had teenagers who act as media ambassadors, and they came on the podcast. That’s another little trick that I have is when there’s something that I feel like there’s a danger that my listeners will get turned off with it coming from an adult, I find some wonderful, smart teens and tween to share their experiences.

[00:10:33] Sarah: Love it. What do you feel has shifted the most? So six years is a long time to be doing something like this. In the coverage itself that you’ve noticed, because I find when you come at news coverage with a specific angle, like I’ve noticed a lot with good news, when I’m looking specifically for good news, I notice trends and shifts almost more easily than when I’m just, gathering the headlines. So from this very unique perspective of looking out for young kids, what have you noticed that shifted in the coverage over the last six years?

[00:11:05] Tracy Kaplan: I would say we’ve gotten more fearless in terms of what we do cover, and we’ve also gotten more international. Definitely a conscious shift of more events happening around the world. And I will say again, that’s where I follow the guide of our listeners, and it helps me not get caught up in the news cycle where things will be in the news for 15 minutes and then they’re gone. So coming back to the Ukraine war, kids would write in and say, “What’s going on in Ukraine? What’s the latest?” And it was a great kind of guide and push for me to be like, yeah, they’re right. Actually we’ve moved on and we haven’t come back to this thing that is still happening, unfortunately, and very damaging to the folks in the Ukraine. So I would say that’s the biggest shift is more international, not being afraid of covering tough stories, and also being much more mindful about coming back to stories.

[00:12:05] Sarah: Yeah. Over six years you’re doing 8 to 12, you’ve had kids come in and graduate, basically, from the news. Have you seen any sort of micro-generational shifts or heard from those kids who’ve maybe listened the whole time?

[00:12:20] Tracy Kaplan: I now have an intern who was one of our very first interview subjects on the podcast.

[00:12:26] Sarah: Oh my gosh. Wow.

[00:12:29] Tracy Kaplan: So she is now in high school. She’s going to love that I’m calling her out here. Hi, Sasha. And she was one of our very first interview subjects because she was in Italy when COVID hit and went through that experience and when I started the show, we interviewed her, and she was only 10 at the time. And now she’s 16 and reached out about a week ago and sent a very lovely note about how she’s really interested in podcasting and interested in what we’ve been doing with the show. And so, of course, I welcomed her. I had to have her be our very first intern, actually. For all the other Teners, we call them Teners, if there’s any Teners listening to this we’re available for more interns. But that’s been the most wonderful thing, is actually seeing we’ve had a couple of kid correspondents over the years and just seeing them grow up and being able to stay... I always say once you’re involved with the 10 News, you’re always part of The Ten News family, if you’ve been a guest or a correspondent. And so it’s nice to see them grow up and then have a different perspective on things.

[00:13:34] Sarah: I love that. I think it’s just a really important expertise and perspective you bring because as a parent I think it can feel like a lot of things with parenting. Like you’re in the deep end, then they move on. You’re in the deep end, you move on. So it’s helpful to hear from someone who’s doing this day in, day out. How do I communicate this? What am I focused on? What questions am I trying to answer? So I just think that’s a really great, important reminder. So thank you for coming on and talking to us about all of this.

[00:13:59] Tracy Kaplan: Thank you. No I love your show and what you all are doing. Oh, and there’s my cat in the back.

[00:14:03] Sarah: I know. That’s hilarious. I love it.

[00:14:06] Tracy Kaplan: She’s The Ten News studio cat. We call her The Ten News studio cat.

[00:14:08] Sarah: I have my studio dog at my feet right now. Thank you again. Thank you so much.

[00:14:12] Tracy Kaplan: All right. Thank you, Sarah.

[00:14:24] Beth: Sarah, I love this conversation that you had with Tracy. I love thinking about how to make our kids less anxious. Making kids less anxious would’ve been really valuable to me the first time I went to summer camp. I did not handle it well.

[00:14:38] Sarah: You didn’t?

[00:14:40] Beth: It’s an embarrassing story. I went off to summer camp with my church, Camp Schaefer.

[00:14:46] Sarah: Also went to church camp.

[00:14:47] Beth: And the counselors were all college students. I didn’t really know a lot of people, but my pastor was there, Brother Tim, who I loved. And on Wednesday, Brother Tim was going to drive back to our home church to lead Wednesday night prayer meeting, and I told Brother Tim that I would be going back with him because I did not like church camp. So I packed all of my things, and I rode back to church with Brother Tim, and I got there and I said, “Hey, Mom and Dad, I’m home.” And they said, “You are not.” And they put me back in the car with Brother Tim to head back to Camp Schaefer as soon as Wednesday night prayer meeting was over, and I did finish the week. Good on them.

[00:15:24] Sarah: That was the right thing for them to do, for sure. Yeah.

[00:15:25] Beth: It was 100% the right thing for them to do.

[00:15:28] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:15:28] Beth: But it took me a couple decades to appreciate that. Is

[00:15:31] Sarah: Is that the only camp you ever went to?

[00:15:35] Beth: I believe that was the end of my overnight camping experiences. I did a bunch of day camps other than that, but no, I did not find my groove at sleep-away camp. Which is why I have insisted that my daughters find their groove at sleep-away camp. It is a hole in my life experience.

[00:15:49] Sarah: I missed a lot of summer experiences because my parents were divorced, and I spent the whole summer as a child in California. Now, it has made me 30% Californian, which I appreciate. But I was gone for the whole summer when I was little because that was, like, my dad’s the custody agreement or whatever. So there were no camps in elementary school. I think I went to Girl Scout camp once. I very barely remember it. Then when I got into middle school and high school I wanted to go with my friends to church camp. My most embarrassing church camp story, I make fun of my friend Reagan for this. She’s a lovely person. She’s not mean, but this was just one of our interactions where she bullied me at church camp. I got there, and there were, like, glass shelves above the sink, and so I set out all my toiletries, and she was like, “Everybody, come look what Sarah did.” I didn’t know you’re supposed to carry them in and out every time. I still vividly remember that. But we went to that one. I remember and have a photo of the very hot lifeguard that we were all obsessed with at that church camp. We went to Centrifuge a couple years, maybe one or two years in North Carolina. We did one in Panama City. So I went to a lot of church camps in middle school and high school.

[00:16:47] Beth: I went to Centrifuge too, which I had totally forgotten until you said the word. And then I could see my sweatshirt from Centrifuge in my mind. And I did it in Panama city too with another church.

[00:16:55] Sarah:  See, there you go. See, you went. I loved it. I thought it was so fun. Truly my first regret is that I was not born Jewish in the 1950s, because I would’ve rocked those freakin’ Adirondack camps so hard. Like the ones in Dirty Dancing and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Oh my God, where you got dressed up, and there’s a schedule of activities. Designed for me. And so I have really tried to give my children the experience that I missed. I really wanted the experience of going all the way through. So Felix goes to Camp Sweeney because the number one piece of advice when he was diagnosed with diabetes, was like, “Get him in a diabetes camp.” This is an 18-day camp he’d stay all summer if I let him or could afford it, but he goes to Sweeney, and he started at eight, and he will go until he graduates from high school. So he loves it. And then my two boys actually go to a camp right down the road from your house, Camp Ernst, a YMCA camp, and this is the first year that Amos has progressed out of camper. So they were campers for several years. They didn’t quite start as young as I wish they’d had. We tried out some other camps. But now they’ve both been going to Camp Ernst, gosh, like four or five years maybe?

[00:18:03] Beth: I was thinking four years.

[00:18:04] Sarah: Yeah, Griffin is now a full counselor, so he’s worked his way up. This is Amos’ first year. He’ll be crew, which basically means you do the dishes. And they work their way up. I love that they go to this place. I remember listening to that freaking This American Life that they did on summer camp and being so jealous and wanting that experience for my kid, where they go back to the same place every summer, and it’s their place also. Did you ever watch the movie Indian Summer in the ‘90s about the people who come back to their summer? I was obsessed with that movie.

[00:18:29] Beth: I don’t know that one.

[00:18:29] Sarah: I watched it again recently, and it holds up decently well for the record. But I am sad I did not get that camp experience growing up, for sure.

[00:18:36] Beth: Yeah, I wish that I had toughened up a little bit. I spent an enormous amount of time with my mom. And I think that I just did not want to be away from my mom. I remember her dropping me off at a day camp when I was in maybe older elementary school and thinking “What is the meaning of this? Like, why are you leaving and I’m staying? What is the point here?”

[00:18:56] Sarah: This is really a divergence in our life experience because my mom put my happy ass on an airplane by myself I think at eight. I went with my grandmother a few times at the beginning, and then I would fly by myself from Kentucky to California and spend the whole summer there.

[00:19:12] Beth: My mom was a teacher in my school. We rode together going and coming. She was my academic team coach. She was my teacher for several years. I was just with my mom all the time, and so these experiences without my mom, I just was like, “I don’t understand what’s supposed to be happening here.” Hilariously, I wanted this camp experience that your sons are having near me for my daughters because I remember when we were in college, people from northern Kentucky talking about this particular camp and how wonderful it was. So I sent my daughters, and they did hate it, and Jane did call every day begging to come home. And I didn’t let her.

[00:19:43] Sarah: She did. I was there.

[00:19:45] Beth: But it was very difficult for all of us. But then I sent her the next summer to church camp, which is so much like Camp Schaefer, I can’t even tell you. It’s very much like the place that I did not want to be, and they both love it there. I think a key difference is that all of the counselors there are fully grown adults, like parents and grandparents aged people, and they love the counselors as much as the other kids there. It’s really small. They just do a great job. And so my kids are getting that experience. When I dropped Jane off this summer, she said, “Mom, I’m in Pierre again. I’ve been in Pierre, the cabin, five years in a row now.” They are loving it.

[00:20:22] Sarah: Love it. I love a summer camp. I want to hear about all of y’all’s kids’ summer camp experience, about your own summer camp experiences. I want to see if there’s any good adult summer camps. I will go to one of those. I’m into that business model. If someone has found one that they really like, I’m into it.

[00:20:40] Beth: Yeah, for sure

[00:20:40] Sarah: So we can’t wait to talk about all things summer camp with all of you.

[00:20:43] Beth: Thank you to Tracy Kaplan. Thank you, Sarah, for that conversation you had with Tracy. Thank you all for joining us today. We will be back with you on Tuesday with another new episode of Pantsuit Politics. Until then, have the best weekend available to you.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Gwyn moved to Ukraine and talked with Beth from Lviv about her experience, her project, and how we can all help.

Our More to Say listeners generously responded to this episode. We hope that the broader Pantsuit Politics community can be part of helping Gwyn make a Ukrainian bookmobile a reality.

Topics Discussed

• What drew Gwyn to Ukraine — and why she moved there during the war

• How Vinok Libraries works: sourcing books, shipping them to Ukraine, distributing to schools

• The language politics of children's books in Ukraine (Ukrainian, English, and the gap)

• Delivering books near the front line and what that looked like in person

• What $500 means to a school that's been bombed

• The bookmobile dream and how to support it

Episode Resources

Matchbook Marketing

Vinok Libraries

Donate

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:02] Beth: This is Beth Silvers.

[00:00:18] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. This conversation started as an episode of More to Say just for our premium members, but we wanted more people to find Gwyn Ridenhour’s work, so here it is. You’ve probably felt that particular kind of helplessness that comes from caring about something enormous and not knowing what to do. Gwyn felt that, too, and then she moved to Ukraine to put books in the hands of children living through war. Her project, Vinok Libraries-- Vinok is the traditional Ukrainian flower wreath, is small and specific and quite extraordinary. She’s a former child librarian who now does marketing for independent bookstores, and one of her clients is our beloved executive producer, Lisa, who owns The Bookshelf on Church. Lisa connected Beth with Gwyn, and we are so glad she did. If this conversation moves you, there’s a link in the show notes to donate towards the bookmobile. And Outside of Politics on the theme, we’re going to talk about our favorite children’s books.

[00:01:09] Beth: Before we get started, if you’re not able to join us live in Minneapolis but still want to be part of our only live show this year on August 29th, we really want you to be there. A virtual ticket lets you watch live or any time after when you can settle in with your favorite snacks and take it all in. We want you to come so much that we’re running a special right now. Just buy one virtual ticket you’ll get a second at half price to share with a friend. All the links that you need are in the show notes.

[00:01:32] Sarah: Here’s Beth’s conversation with Gwyn.

[00:01:47] Beth: Gwyn Ridenhour, welcome to More to Say. I’m so excited to be connected to you through one of our executive producers, Lisa, and she knows you because you do so much work with independent bookstores. Will you start out by telling us about that, and then we’ll get to your international reach?

[00:02:04] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yes. It’s so nice to be here. Thank you for having me. Lisa was such a huge fan and so encouraging and excited to make this connection, so I’m glad to be here. Lisa is one of my bookstore clients. I do marketing for independent bookstores in the States, and my company is called Matchbook Marketing, so matching books to their customers. And I publish a newspaper. It’s a bimonthly newspaper that Lisa’s store, Bookshelf on Church, is one of their participants. And it’s basically an old-fashioned newspaper that covers the news of the bookstore, of each individual bookstore, and also gives people sneak peeks on new and forthcoming books that the indie bookstores are really excited about. So that’s what I do, and I do some email marketing too, again, for indie bookstores. So that is my job, and I started that business in late 2014. So been around for about 11 years and it’s been a joy to get to meet and work with all of these booksellers. I knew I wanted to connect my work with Matchbook. I was a librarian for 10 years before that, a children’s librarian. So I’ve always been with books. I’ve worked with kids, and I did some education with my own kids, have two kids of my own. Two grown-up kids now. And I love connecting children’s books with both reluctant readers and also gifted readers because both of them are challenging in their own ways, and it just hits such good notes for me. And working with bookstores allowed me to help them make those connections. But I always wanted to have some kind of way that my company, Matchbook, could give back to the community in some ways. And so I’ve tried this in different ways, but when the full-scale invasion of the war broke out in Ukraine in 2022, I personally was very drawn to that because I was here in Ukraine back in ‘19. And from then I have always had this connection with Ukraine since. I loved it. It was such a transformative experience for me then.

[00:04:05] And when this full-scale invasion broke out, I knew I needed to be involved in some way. I needed to help in some way. And what I know is books, and what I know is kids, and I know that there’s a lot of kids in Ukraine who are going to school and living under a just extraordinarily difficult situation, and I wanted to be a part of that to support them. So I moved to Ukraine back in December, in Lviv, and I do my work from here. I just work remotely. I just do a lot of... it’s 9:00 PM in my time right now, and I think it’s probably early afternoon for you. It works out fine. I just have to shift my schedule a little bit sometimes. And so I do my work here, and I’ve been using our company profits and then also raising money to buy children’s books, and I ordered a huge order from the United States from a wholesaler there and had it shipped to Lviv. I’ve gotten some donations of really lovely used books from the UK. Making partnerships with other organizations that are doing similar work. And then I meet schools and libraries all over the country and ask them who they serve, what are their age groups that they serve, what reading levels they serve, what kind of interest they have. And then I basically go shopping for them from my collection and send them or deliver-- depending on the situation-- the books to them. And it’s been a real joy, honestly, to meet some astounding people who are just being there every day for these kids and in war. It’s amazing.

[00:05:43] Beth: Gwyn, you moved to Ukraine during the war. So I have a lot of questions about this. What took you to Ukraine, can I ask, back in the ‘90s that made this connection for you and that made you feel so committed to being part of this effort?

[00:05:59] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yeah. So it was 1993, just a couple years after the fall of the Soviet Union. I was in college, and it was a college social exchange. So we came as a group. There were only about six of us, I think, and then a couple of chaperones, and we stayed with host families and for three weeks. We didn’t have the internet then. There was not a lot of media coming out of Ukraine to represent Ukraine or that part of the world. It was like going to another planet for us then. I loved the community feeling. It was just so green. There was just the farmland and the way of life. All of our dinners were together and these huge groups of people and with Ukrainians, with our hosts, with people from the village, they would all just come and be with us. And we met a group of teenagers our age, and we played charades and tried... I had a little bit of Russian at the time and had a friend who met a friend there who had a little bit of English, and we tried to communicate for our respective groups. And it’s probably the age, it was the time, it was the fact that Ukrainians had never met Americans and Americans had never met Ukrainians.

[00:07:03] Beth: Yeah.

[00:07:03] Gwyn Ridenhour: It created that kind of attachment that has just always stuck with me.

[00:07:08] Beth: So how long were you there?

[00:07:10] Gwyn Ridenhour: Three weeks.

[00:07:12] Beth: Three weeks.

[00:07:12] Gwyn Ridenhour: Three weeks that felt it could’ve been a lifetime, it felt.

[00:07:15] Beth: No, I understand.

[00:07:16] Gwyn Ridenhour: As far as how it changed me.

[00:07:17] Beth: I was in Helsinki very soon after 9/11, and I was in college at the time. I was there for two days, but the way that they interacted with us as Americans on the other side of 9/11 really touched my heart. So I can imagine if you’re there for three weeks at such a formative moment in their history and such a formative moment in your life, I see it, for sure. And so where were you in the process of putting this nonprofit together when you decided to move to Ukraine?

[00:07:49] Gwyn Ridenhour: So I first came to Ukraine in August of last year, of 2025, for a month. I was just coming for a month just to check it out and there’s a really vibrant international volunteer community in Lviv. People come all the time, and they come for a week or three weeks or three months or some people then stay long term. And so I was just coming for a month just to volunteer in the places that were here and just to ask people what they were doing. I knew I wanted to do something with books, but I didn’t know what that was. And I figured I wanted to be here to kind of see what the need was. So those three weeks the volunteers at the end of the day, they get together and they eat dinner every night. And curfew is at midnight. There’s a curfew here because of the war. And they stay out and talk until midnight, every night. And so I was exhausted because I’m not young anymore, but I knew I only had a month, and so I went every single night and just asked people, “What are you doing? What’s the need here?” And I very quickly met some Ukrainians who were running summer programs in schools, and there’s refugee like internally displaced people. There’s the IDP, internally displaced people who are fleeing from the east and relocating to the west where it’s safer.

[00:09:02] And these are shelters with families and kids, and they’ve been uprooted from their schools, and there’s just so much need. There’s so much need there. And in Ukraine too there is a need for two things. There’s a need for books in Ukrainian because there’s the huge discussion of language and the oppression of the Russian language and them trying to recapture their Ukrainian language. And there’s also a very strong need for books in English and teaching English because they want to be they want their kids to be able to work in the European marketplace, in the Western marketplace. They want to open up these opportunities for them to be able to communicate outside of Ukraine. And so there is a huge effort towards that. And there are books that are published in Ukraine. They have a wonderful publishing industry here in Ukraine that does beautiful books in Ukrainian and some bilingual books and books for adults, instructional books for children. But I was touring all the bookstores too while I was here, and I was noticing there was a big gap in just books in English for young children and YA. Those were the pieces that were missing. So I was able to buy a lot of the books that we need here, but those are the categories that I wanted to be able to bring in, and it’s easiest to bring them in from England and the States for me. So that’s where I’m pulling them from. And so this kind of idea, just the more I talked about it, I found I didn’t want to start a nonprofit because I’ve done that before and it’s just a lot of extra administrative work. So I met another American who is running one of these refugee shelters, and we had a great conversation, and he was like, “Talk to my host nonprofit in the States. This would make real sense to be in one of their sub-programs.” And so I connected with them, and they adopted me. So I am in partnership.

[00:10:57] Beth: That’s very smart.

[00:10:59] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yeah, it was great. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. I wanted to spend my time with the books--

[00:11:03] Beth: Doing the thing.

[00:11:03] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yeah. So I work with an amazing organization called Hope and Actions, and they’re based in the States, and they support Ukraine. And so I’m one of their programs. And so they provide administrative oversight. I run all of my money through them, so there’s accounting, double checks and balances. And then any donations that are made are now tax deductible. So that’s how the nonprofit was born, and my program is called Vinok Libraries, and Vinok is the flower wreath, the traditional Ukrainian flower wreath that you see a lot of the women wear. And I got a Ukrainian woman that I met here to design the logo. She did just an outstanding job. She did an outstanding job. So yeah, that’s how it was born. It’s been small. I’ve just been basically purchasing books out of my company’s pocket, and then out of the donations that have been made through our website, but we’re relatively new. So you can see in the background...

[00:11:57] Beth: I’m looking at books stacked against Gwyn’s wall, for those of you listening. Tell me about some of the titles that are requested.

[00:12:04] Gwyn Ridenhour: I get a lot of graphic novel requests. Because those are so easily accessible, and there are great graphic novels really, truly for all ages. So you can get them for the very beginner readers all the way up through adults.

[00:12:16] Beth: And there’s a real Wings of Fire moment happening in my house right now. I have a 10-year-old daughter.

[00:12:19] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yeah, exactly. I get a lot of requests for the younger readers, for sure, and I’m noticing that those are ones that I need to buy more of, like the very beginning readers for the youngest of children. And there are more requests for nonfiction books than I anticipated too. So that’s another thing I’m adding to my mental list to be adding to that collection to send out. And then I get a lot of requests for notebooks and pencils and art supplies because all of these things are in short supply. So I just go shopping here, and I just clear them out of notebooks and pencils and all sorts of things, and just keep a bag here and tuck those in as people request.

[00:12:57] Beth: Nonfiction seems complicated to me when you’re working internationally like this. What are people looking for?

[00:13:02] Gwyn Ridenhour: The things that I’ve been sending there’s a great series called Who Was, and they’re biographies. And so they’re more for like eight-year-olds in that range.

[00:13:12] Beth: Yeah, those are so fun.

[00:13:12] Gwyn Ridenhour: When I was a children’s librarian, I actually learned so much about people just by ... because I would read that biography really quick. And I was educating myself through these children’s books. So I picked a bunch of books, the biographies that I felt would be relevant to people here. Scientists, artists.

[00:13:27] Beth: That’s what I was thinking about, the complexity of highlighting people who are relevant to their history, not just American history.

[00:13:33] Gwyn Ridenhour: So I skipped the American history part, and I went for more world famous artists and peacemakers and those kind of people, scientists, those kind of things. I have sent out some books on science and health, some math games. I collected some books on poetry and concrete poetry. Concrete poetry being poetry made by shapes. So you take the words and if you write a poem about a tree, then you write the poem, the words are about the tree, but you also write it in the shape of a tree. And it’s just activities like that can help actually writers of all age practice their words but also make it just a little bit different, a little bit more fun. Get them thinking, get them engaged with a different part of their brain. I also bought workbooks on writing prompts for kids, writing prompts for middle schoolers. Things like that which I was trying to add, yeah.

[00:14:24] Beth: Tell me about how this works logistically. I’m just trying to think through the infrastructure challenges of getting books in the hands of the people who are requesting them

[00:14:33] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yeah. I made one really large order from a wholesaler, it’s a wonderful shipping company called Meest, and they’re in New Jersey, and they provide a humanitarian shipping rate to Ukraine. So I have to get the books to New Jersey. And then I had a whole pallet sent over $5,000 worth of books. And it has to be 200 pounds. That’s the limit. It has to be 200 pounds, and they shipped that entire pallet over to me for $200. It took six weeks because it goes on the boat, and it takes a while. But it’s a really affordable way to get them here. So I have a coworker in the States who is my receiver. But it’s if somebody wants to donate books that they have at home, it doesn’t have to just be a huge shipment. If you’re looking there and you’re like, “Oh, I’ve got these great books that my kid really loved. They’re really in really good shape-- I want them to be in really good shape. But these are some of our favorites. They’re beautiful. They’re almost brand new, but I only have five,” I have somebody in the States that you can mail them to, and she’s collecting them.

[00:15:34] Beth: Wow, okay.

[00:15:36] Gwyn Ridenhour: And then once we have 200 pounds, then she will get them to New Jersey, and then they’ll go from there.

[00:15:41] Beth: Okay. And then what about within Ukraine? Once you have the books how are you sharing them?

[00:15:48] Gwyn Ridenhour: One way is that when-- So some of that is just I’m talking to people through social media apps and email. They tell me what they need. They do a little application. It’s very short, basically just telling me that they’re a school, they’re in Ukraine. That this is who they serve and this is their need. And then I box up. I pick out what I feel like would meet those needs. And in Ukraine, their postage system here is called Nova Poshta. And Nova Poshta has been-- it’s like UPS or FedEx, but here. And they have stepped up during this war in absolutely amazing ways. They get things across the country in two days. It’s a big country, too. Ukraine’s not a small country.

[00:16:30] Beth: It’s about the size of Texas. Is that right?

[00:16:33] Gwyn Ridenhour: A little bigger, probably. Yeah, I think maybe a little bigger. So I have a little Nova Poshta branch just down the street, and I bring my books in. Not even boxed. I just bring them. I wrap them in plastic or paper or whatever, and bring them to Nova Poshta, and I give them the Nova Poshta branch on the other side, and they charge me $3.00 and it’s there practically the next day.

[00:16:57] Beth: That’s awesome.

[00:16:58] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yeah, so I always photograph everything before I send it, and then the teachers usually they photograph it too when they get it. They let me know it’s there, and sometimes they send me pictures with the kids having them. And some of the stories that the teachers will tell me too about how excited the kids are about getting these books. And some of the pictures that got sent to me I actually teased the teacher. I was like, “You staged this. There’s no way that they were that excited.” She was like, “No, I did not stage that. They were actually that excited.” They were just like, “Which one to read first?” Cause it’s not things they can get here. These are the books that they can’t get here.

[00:17:30] Beth: It’s exotic almost. Yeah.

[00:17:33] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yeah, especially American ones. They can get more probably if they go to their local bookstore, they have a wonderful bookstore community here too. Probably, they could get books that are published in Europe or in England, but it’s going to be so much harder to get a book that’s published in the States. And so yeah, that piece of it is a little more exotic for sure. And I have delivered some as well. There was another volunteer who was donating a vehicle to the military. People do this. This is another regular volunteer-- I don’t want to say program, but effort because there’s a lot of people doing this. They’ll buy a car in Europe, and they’ll drive it all the way to the front and donate it to the military. And they catch a train back. And so my friend John was coming through and bringing a car from the UK, and I said, “ John, what if I hopped in the car with you, and I hooked up with some schools along the way? Would you be willing to, for us to make some pit stops?” And he said, “Sure.” So I lined up three schools on the way, and I put a bunch of books in his car, in the car that we were donating, and we drove across the country and there was one language school near Kyiv, and then there was one school outside of Kharkiv just further east, and that school was of 700 kids. And a lot of those kids, even though they’re very much further east, a lot of those kids were also refugees from even further east. And then there was another tiny school really close to the front and that school was 45 kids, and it was just such a small town and right on the edge. And their school had been bombed, their school building, and nobody was in it, but they moved to a smaller facility that was now serving as their school. And they had very little. They had desks. They have the basic stuff, but they had very little because it was all destroyed in the school. And so I brought her some books and just a couple bags because that’s all I had with me at the time, and I posted a picture of her and told the story on social media. And a Ukrainian friend of mine donated $500 towards her school, and $500 in Ukraine is the average monthly salary.

[00:19:49] Beth: Wow.

[00:19:50] Gwyn Ridenhour: So it was a huge gift. And I said, “ Since you were inspired by that particular school, what if I just use that to buy whatever they needed and not just books?” And he was like, “Yes, please. That would be great.” So I texted her and I said, “We have $500. You’ve got $500 to spend. How do you want to spend it?” And she said, “ That’s so wonderful. Could I have some modeling clay and some paper for the printer?” And I was like, “Yes, you can, and you can have more than that.” So we worked together for probably three weeks, and I was like, “Send me a link to something that you would like to buy, and I will order it and have it sent to you.” And so it took a lot of logistical work because these sites were in Ukrainian, and I had to end up opening a Ukrainian bank account because some of these sites wouldn’t take my credit card. It was a lot. That took a while, but I learned a lot. I learned a lot, and we spent the whole $500, and we bought things like sports equipment and a flip chart. Sports equipment being bouncy balls. I’m talking basic stuff. Just a bouncy ball the kids could kick and a flip chart and some Lego knockoffs and modeling clay. And then when she still had money left she was like we have these workbooks that the parents can’t really afford, could we buy 10 of these for the kids?” And these were just writing workbooks, and it was not expensive at all, but they’ve lost everything. It’s really hard edged out there. And I was like, “Yeah, of course. You can have all of these things.” So she and I had really worked together for weeks very intentionally to make sure that we were getting exactly what the kids needed. And then when we finished, I sent her another huge box of books. I was like, “Here’s some more.”

[00:21:45] Beth: I love that. Wow.

[00:21:47] Gwyn Ridenhour: So connecting with them, connecting with people online is great, but connecting with them in person it’s entirely different scenario. So I want to do that more. I want to meet more people in person and really just be in their space, and yeah.

[00:22:02] Beth: Do you feel safe?

[00:22:05] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yes. Do I feel safe?

[00:22:07] Beth: I get that’s kind of a does anyone feel safe? There are dimensions to that question. But just as you’re out, when I think about you in that car driving towards the front line making these pit stops, what does that feel like to you?

[00:22:18] Gwyn Ridenhour: One, I would not have done it without going with someone experienced. I definitely know that there is some risk there, but I’m trying to mitigate the risk as much as I can because there’s no reason to take unnecessary risks. And so my driver he had done this trip dozens of times over years. He knew exactly where to go. He knew the risks. He knew exactly where to stop, who to talk to. He had such a network of support, of people who would buy him train tickets and bus tickets, and there was no getting stuck anywhere without a whole network of people. And so that’s the only reason. I wouldn’t have gone with anybody else.

[00:22:52] Beth: Okay.

[00:22:52] Gwyn Ridenhour: And so, yeah, I built that in for sure. And we also didn’t stay long because there’s no reason to stay long. We needed to go. We needed to see people in person. We needed to hug them and say, “We’re here for you. We’re here with you. We haven’t forgotten you.” And then we left. Yeah. So we drove, it was like, I don’t know, 11-hour trip probably to get all the way there. We’d left on Friday, and we returned on Monday. It was like we were knocking it out. So yes, I never felt unsafe for that whole trip, and part of that is because of the infrastructure and support around me. Part of it is because we happened to be fine. But I know there is risk everywhere. And as far as living in Lviv, that’s far west. That is almost as far away that you can get from the front line as possible, and that gives me a lot of comfort and gives me the confidence and motivation to keep doing this work. And all these kids are living in worse situation, right? They’re just there. They don’t get to choose. I get to choose. If it gets too bad, I can go.

[00:23:55] Beth: Yeah.

[00:23:56] Gwyn Ridenhour: And these kids can’t.

[00:23:58] Beth: So I hear not fearful but vigilant and aware and in a range of risk that’s acceptable to you, and I think that’s very inspiring and brave, and I feel really lucky that I got to talk with you. So thank you so much for telling me about this incredible thing that you’re doing.

[00:24:13] Gwyn Ridenhour: Thank you. One of my dreams is I’m working towards a bookmobile.

[00:24:19] Beth: That would be very cool.

[00:24:20] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yeah. And I’ve been starting to talk about it with a couple other people doing this kind of work. It’s still very much in the idea stage right now, but the idea being when we’re making these deliveries to schools, we bring them the box, but then we have the bookmobile set up so that the kids can come and take a book for their very own. And do some programming around it and just really give them a point of celebration. So we’re in that beginning stage, but I’m really hopeful to raise the funds to make this happen.

[00:24:49] Beth: I was going to ask, is that mostly a matter of dollars?

[00:24:52] Gwyn Ridenhour: Yeah.

[00:24:53] Beth: And how many dollars are we talking about?

[00:24:55] Gwyn Ridenhour: I started my business plan for this last week, so I don’t even really know how many dollars yet. But I could get you that information. I have that network of people in Europe to help me find a vehicle that’s used, but in really good condition. But I want it to be really nice, too. I want the kids to see something that really excites them and lights them up. So I could get you that number.

[00:25:16] Beth: When you know, I would love to know. And I would love to share the link to donate far and wide because I feel like this will really touch a lot of people in our community. It touches me deeply, and that would be a very cool dream to have some small part in. So yeah, please let us know.

[00:25:30] Gwyn Ridenhour: Okay. I will. Thank you, Beth. I appreciate it.

[00:25:33] Beth: It was really cool to meet you. Thanks for what you’re doing. Thanks for talking to me at 9:30 at night.

[00:25:37] Gwyn Ridenhour: No problem. Thanks, Beth.

[00:25:53] Sarah: Beth, I’ve been thinking about this a lot with my new bookshop, Meander Bookshop, which books to have.

[00:25:57] Beth: I bet you have.

[00:25:57] Sarah: First Beth Shaw was on the Caldecott, so she had me order all the brand new Caldecott winners, and they are extraordinary. But I had to get the classics, our family’s classics. Pete the Cat. Tyrannosaurus Trip. Don’t be mad, I skipped Goodnight Moon. I’ve read it enough. I could recite it. I’m good. I even skipped Where the Wild Things Are.

[00:26:20] Beth: I get that.

[00:26:21] Sarah: I was looking for my new classics. But I did get Pete the Cat, Tyrannosaurus Trip, and Olivia. Those were, like, big hits in our house.

[00:26:32] Beth: Those are fun. We read a whole lot of Dr. Seuss here. Just so much Dr. Seuss. They love the rhyming. They love Go, Dog Go! by P.D. Eastman. I’ve read that so many times I could recite it. We love to say to each other, “Do you like my hat?” “I do not like your hat.”

[00:26:44] Sarah: I do not like your hat. Yeah, we do that too.

[00:26:46] Beth: And then there is a book from when I was a kid that my girls picked up at my parents’ house and loved called Once Upon a Meadow. Have you read this book?

[00:26:55] Sarah: No.

[00:26:55] Beth: It is a beautiful little story about sisters living alone. Doesn’t tell us the tragic circumstances that led to them living alone, but they are sisters and cousins. And the oldest of them is named Kate, and Kate is trying to put together a picnic, and so she’s instructing them on how to get everything together for the picnic. And then they get an idea to go up into the attic, and they dress up in all these old clothes, and they have a parade. And anyway, they’re out having this idyllic afternoon when they find an injured bunny, who they take care of until the bunny is nursed back to health. And it’s just a really sweet book with beautiful illustrations that I loved as a kid. You can tell how much I loved the book by the condition it’s in. And both of my daughters really loved it too, so that’s a classic here.

[00:27:41] Sarah: When you said bunny, I remembered The Rabbit Listened.

[00:27:43] Beth: Yeah, The Rabbit Listened is beautiful.

[00:27:44] Sarah: So good. And then another one that we love in our house is Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. So recently I had all the boys pick their favorite children’s books that they remember the most from their kids, and we had a story time, which I highly recommend as your kids get older. And it was hilarious when we were reading Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. We were like, “Griffin, how much of your personality did you get from this book, son?” It’s just very on brand. You understand what I’m saying? And Amos’s was The Hug Machine. That was his favorite, The Hug Machine. So it’s fun to go see which ones they pick, which ones they remember, and to read them all together. Ugh, God, it was the best. I kind of want to make them do it more..

[00:28:21] Beth: We should try to do that when we go to see my sister this summer because my sister has all my kids’ books now. We were big Sandra Boynton people here too.

[00:28:30] Sarah: Yeah, we were too.

[00:28:31] Beth: I have a feeling that the girls might choose from those books.

[00:28:35] Speaker: All the Hippos Go Berserk.

[00:28:36] Beth: Yes.

[00:28:37] Sarah: We did that one. We did Deer Zoo. That was a very popular--

[00:28:41] Beth: Yes.

[00:28:42] Sarah: Dear Zoo is a board book. And I think I probably could recite Brown Bear if I thought about it long and hard enough. We read a lot of Brown Bear.

[00:28:50] Beth: Dear Zoo is a controversial one here because my kids absolutely loved it, and Chad thinks that it is a very whiny entitled book. He’s like “Really? The snake was too slithering or something. What’s wrong with you?”

[00:29:04] Sarah: You gave all your books to your sister? See, I gave some away. I didn’t keep all of them, but my classics, the ones that are, like, our family standards, I’m keeping them. First of all, I have little kids come to my house. I like to have them, and I’m keeping them for my grandkids. I’m keeping my books.

[00:29:18] Beth: They’re her books, too because a lot of the books came from my parents’ house. They were my books, and which meant they were her books, too. And I had kids first, and so yeah, of course. And it’s really fun to see them with her kids in pictures and when we visit them. So yeah.

[00:29:33] Sarah: Aw. I love it.

[00:29:34] Beth: I love the idea of story night; that’s a great idea.

[00:29:38] Sarah: I got a hot new one off the presses that Felix and I read in the bookstore the other day. It’s called Don’t Trust Fish, and it’s really funny. It’s birds have feathers, mammals have fur. Super easy. Don’t trust a fish. Anything can be a fish, and it’s really... it’s a cute book. It’s a cute book. Don’t Trust Fish. Highly recommend.

[00:29:53] Beth: Okay. I know we’re going to get great lists and recommendations for days for your shop.

[00:29:56] Sarah: Bring them on.

[00:29:58] Beth: Thank you. I was like, what phrase do I want here? Bring them on. It’s the phrase.

[00:30:01] Sarah: Bring them on. I’m ready. And I’ll put links to all these in the show notes too for sure.

[00:30:05] Beth: Thank you so much for joining us. We will be back with you next week with new episodes of Pantsuit Politics. Until then, have the best weekend available to you.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

We also talk about taking the news in with a little more removal in the summer, which feels hard and complicated and privileged and necessary. And outside of politics, Angie talks about the book Shiloh, and I share (truly just a fraction) of my love for The Sheep Detectives.

Topics Discussed

• Taking an emotional break from the news without checking out entirely

• ICE shootings, cabinet confirmation hearings, and the Iran war

• Why car-dependent neighborhoods limit kids’ independence

• The nationwide school bus driver shortage

• Disappearing teen hangouts and rules around unsupervised kids

• How lawsuit-aversion backfires on children’s wellbeing

• Rebuilding civic infrastructure — rec leagues, public pools, community schools

• Book recommendations: Shiloh and The Sheep Detectives

Episode Resources

• Angie’s book on the rise in pedestrian deaths, Right of Way (Princeton University Press)

• Angie’s Substack, Love of Place

• The Substack essay on how young adults are poor despite doing everything right (Becoming Noble)

• USDOT’s Safe Streets and Roads for All program

• Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (Simon & Schuster)

• The Sheep Detectives (IMDb)

• Join us in Minneapolis, August 29th (Pantsuit Politics)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Beth: This is Beth Silvers; you’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Sarah is out on summer break, and my guest host today is Angie Schmitt, a writer and urban planner. I’m excited for you to hear from Angie. I wanted to talk with her principally about two things. We start with how important it is to have a different vibe in the summer about the news. I am sick about ICE killing Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas. I watched enough of the Jay Clayton and Todd Blanche confirmation hearings to get good and mad about how unimpressive and just unhinged people seeking and occupying the highest offices in our government are. The Iran war is so deeply depressing and senseless and maddening. I can’t even think about the produce diarrhea and all that represents. And I am really trying to flush some of that emotion from my body this summer so that I can come back in the fall and be ready to tell important stories, analyze information thoughtfully, and share good advice as we head into the midterm elections when we have real power to exercise.

[00:01:28] Angie and I talk a little bit about that lightness around the news. I love what she says in this conversation about not giving Donald Trump some of the best eight years of her life, and I’m going to adopt that as a motto. Our thesis here at Pantsuit Politics is that you can pay attention to the world and care about it and still find a happy, grounded, connected life, and that is the spirit of the first part of the conversation with Angie. But most of this episode is about building cities and neighborhoods that provide us with the infrastructure of a meaningful life. Being able to walk around our cities safely, having places for kids to hang out without their parents. I really enjoyed hearing Angie’s perspective and expertise, and hope that you will, too. Before we begin, I want to remind you of our opportunity as a podcast community to get together in person for fun and friendship in Minneapolis on August 29th. And I want to give a special thanks and shout-out to Fearless Finance and Substack for sponsoring that gathering. We could not do it without you. We’d love to see you there for the live show and the after party. All the information that you need to snag your tickets is in the show notes. And now, meet Angie Schmitt. Angie, thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode. Can you just take a second and introduce yourself to the audience?

[00:02:53] Angie Schmitt: So my name is Angie Schmitt. I have a background as a journalist, but I work as an urban planner, and so my work is it kind of spans those two realms a little bit. I have a Substack blog called Love of Place, and I’m working on a book right now. I’m the author of a book that was published about six years ago about the rise in pedestrian deaths in the US, so I have a little bit of a expertise in traffic safety. But my new book that’s going to be coming out probably in 2028 from North Point Press, is about how to make cities and neighborhoods more family-friendly, and it talks a little bit about how raising children has changed. And it goes into not just what’s happening in our streets and playgrounds, but also gets into some issues about rec sports and travel sports and the availability of public pools and swim lessons. So just looking at the economy of choices parents today are operating under and how that’s changed in some ways for the worse from when I grew up.

[00:03:54] Beth: I’m really excited to talk to you about all that. I found you on Substack. Sometimes I talk about Substack like a mall, where we have our store, and you can browse the whole mall if you want to or you can just come to our store if you want. That’s what I really like about it. But I like browsing the whole mall sometimes because I come across someone like you, or I was just watching your notes thinking, “She sounds really normal. Like really smart, but also really normal.” And that’s where I wanted to start today because it has been such a weird week in the news. We’ve had ICE kill two more people in vehicle stops. The Iran war was off and now it’s on, and off and on again. It seems really on right now. We’ve had congressional testimony for people trying to be confirmed to offices that they seem wholly unqualified for to me. I just want to talk about what is this like for a person trying to have a normal July with kids at home and limited time to take off work and just trying to really enjoy every minute? How do we do this?

[00:04:51] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. I don’t know. I was a lot more engaged with following the news and, I worked in the news. So for a while I was just constantly, it was like a IV drip of Twitter, and it was really making me insane. And I just thought at a certain point once Trump got reelected, I just decided Trump’s going to be in office for eight years of my life, some of the best eight years of my life. I’m not going to let him ruin eight years of my life. That’s really letting him win. I try to devote as little attention to thinking about him as I can. I don’t feel very empowered right now. Hopefully the midterms, right? I feel like we’re always have our fingers crossed and are praying for the midterms. But I just feel like at this point I’m looking forward to the midterms, but I don’t feel like I have a lot of power over national politics. And I think that a good project for a lot of us is rebuilding some of our local civic infrastructure. There’s been a lot of damage done there that I think feeds up into some of our political problems, and that’s where we can get more satisfaction out of what we contribute and benefit people more maybe.

[00:05:54] Beth: That’s the posture that I’ve been trying to take too, even with my work as a political podcaster, to just realize, we have the summer, and then we will have the midterms. We will dial back in when there’s something for us to do. Right now I just can’t get wrapped up in Pete Hegseth talking about testosterone testing kits. Yeah. It’s beyond parody to me. It is so bizarre. And so on one hand, I find it easy to put that stuff aside. The ICE of it all is extremely enraging to me. And I don’t feel that I have much power over that, like you said. I’ve contacted my members of Congress. I’ve said this is unacceptable to me. I don’t know what else to do, and I don’t know how to demonstrate for my kids a life where you sustainably care about the world if I feel that fully all day, every day.

[00:06:53] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. And one of my things, and I get in in trouble online for saying this, but I feel like our role right now is to get our own house in order. And I think Trump is gift wrapping this for us on a plate, right? Like he doubled gas prices. He got us into a war with Iran that we lost. He’s insider trading. Like people are unhappy with this administration, and rightly so. But Democrats need to be careful that they don’t... And I think that they’ve made some decisions in the past that have alienated certain people who are more, I don’t know, in the middle or... just they’ve made some unforced errors in the past that have kept Trump sort of competitive. So I think that’s an important project right now is what mistakes have we made? How can we strengthen our standing vis-a-vis Trump so that we can vanquish this whole thing. And I think hopefully that time is coming just based on how disastrous everything has been. But I do think that’s an important project also.

[00:07:58] Beth: I can understand why that gets you in trouble online. We get in trouble for that too. I think it is maddening. Like people who say like there’s such a double standard are right. Yes, there is. There’s a double standard. Things are really tough when you pay attention to all the details of what this administration is doing. There is a certain amount of privilege in opting out. I don’t have any argument with all of that. I just think how do I channel my life and my energy in a way that makes a difference in the long term? And I don’t think I can make a difference If every single day I am dedicated to the project of being enraged

[00:08:35] Angie Schmitt: We also have to convert people too, I think. And sometimes being enraged, especially when it manifests as like yelling at people or scolding people or not listening to different perspectives could alienate people that we really need to win over to our side to have an impact on these issues. So I think that it’s important to be conscious of that as well.

[00:08:57] Beth: Yeah. I think about this too like what is attractive? What is an attractive political movement to be part of? Or not even a movement, but just a political project. What kind of person do I want to associate with? And it’s someone who cares for sure and is informed, yes, but who also can take a vacation and who can look around and say, “Some of this is really unacceptable to me, and there’s work for me to do and I’m going to focus on my work.” I know that you were just on vacation. I’m wondering like what bubbled up for you while you were out?

[00:09:28] Angie Schmitt: So I was in Canada. It was really cool. My family, we took our minivan all the way up to Quebec, which is about 13 hours from where I live in Cleveland, and it was just-- My kids are nine and 11. They’re at such a fun age. It was just a dream come true. Quebec is insanely beautiful. It was so walkable. Of course, what came up for me, I’m in urban planning, and I’m thinking a lot about cities and transportation all the time. To be in this walkable city with this really healthy public realm, it was incredible. In Quebec, there’s blocks and it was built in the 1600s, it’s to medieval proportions. But these gorgeous really charming stone houses, cobblestone, real narrow streets. A lot of them, they had pedestrianized. People were out enjoying the World Cup. They were having a huge music festival. It was so cool to be a part of that and see that, and it made me a little bit sad, honestly, about we have this kind of poverty, I think, in our public realm in the US by comparison, and a lot of problems related to that. And a retreat. There’s been a retreat from the public realm to the point where I think a lot of people are really isolated. They’re spending so all their time scrolling and ordering DoorDash and crazy things. People aren’t even going to restaurants anymore. So I’m really concerned about those kinds of things, and it was refreshing to be there, and it just got me interested in, okay, what is Canada doing? It seems like they have a couple things figured out that we don’t. And obviously, it depends in where you are, and Quebec was a lot different than Niagara Falls, and it’s obviously this beautiful tourist spot. But it did seem to be healthy and functioning city in a way that is a little rarer here.

[00:11:07] Beth: That’s a great transition to your research. I know that you’re looking at how we can make the public square public again, and especially public to include children. So tell me about the book that you’re working on.

[00:11:21] Angie Schmitt: Yeah, I’m so excited about it. It’s almost done, but it’s going to take a long time to go through editing and get to print. I think it’s going to be called Playing in the Street. So it begins talking sort of about Jonathan Haidt has done a great job sort of bringing up the problems children are having with their mental health. I have seen it firsthand. My oldest was in kindergarten when COVID hit and everything closed. School was closed for a really long time. I saw a lot of kids, their mental health just declines rapidly, and it took a long time after that for things to get back to normal. Play time at the library, our public pools in Cleveland to get back open. In some ways maybe they haven’t recovered totally. So I think that’s having a real impact on children. And in addition, they’re getting messages that they’re maybe not welcome in certain places like restaurants, right? Some restaurants have started banning children. For example, I was in Quebec. There’s a beautiful city center. Teenagers out in the evening hanging out, and they just blend in with the rest of the society.

[00:12:18] Whereas here, teenage behavior might be forced underground. They’re not welcome. Maybe the closest thing is a suburban strip center, and there’s a sign that says, “No skateboarding. No biking.” They’re getting messages that they’re not welcome. And they need that adult support and a little bit of mentorship, and they need opportunities to interact with people and take healthy risks in order to really develop the skills they need to succeed in life. And my book looks at a variety of those things, including it’s going to get into a lot of detail about neighborhood design and sort of traffic patterns and the way that contributes to kids being dependent on their parents instead of independently mobile like they were even back when I was a kid, and I’m in my early to mid-40s. So I grew up in the ‘80s and the ‘90s and, was out on my bike all the time, walked to school. You see that kind of thing kind of disappearing.

[00:13:07] Beth: Let’s talk about the design aspect first. I know that you live in Cleveland. I’m in a suburb in Northern Kentucky, right outside of Cincinnati. There are wonderful things about it, but one of the tough things about where I live is that it’s all cars. We are so car-dependent, and everything is designed for cars. And a ton of our kids now have e-bikes and electric scooters, and we have this really cool new development near me that is a great place for kids to hang out. There are just some great opportunities for kids to just go to UDF together and sit outside and eat ice cream without parents, right? It is so terrifying to me to watch kids navigate roads that are built for large SUVs and trucks on these e-bikes and scooters. And I just keep thinking what can we be doing here? How can we be more creative and make it a priority to get our suburban kids able to have some independence in moving themselves about

[00:14:04] Angie Schmitt: I know. It’s really a tragedy. We’ve done such a bad job, and I talk about that a lot in my last book. My last book was about how we’ve had this huge increase in pedestrian deaths in the United States, and I was taking like the engineering profession, some of our government agencies to task a little bit about it. So we’ve got to do some kind of wonky reforms in that field, and I think that my first book was actually a little bit successful in moving the needle around that kind of thing. I’ve traveled a lot doing keynote speaking within my industry. I did a lot of media interviews. Trump’s election was very bad for the kind of reforms that were happening because USDOT was doing a lot prior to Trump’s election to reform some of that. But the built environment is so hostile to children, especially in suburbs, which is where most people live. It’s really a tragedy, and I talk about that in the book. There is a need, especially once... it’s almost like a primal need, I think, when you are a teenager to access retail. So I talk about this a lot in the book. I grew up in a suburban area outside of Columbus where there really wasn’t-- a very typical, it’s thrown up on a cornfield. There were no public spaces. And it was very frustrating for me when I aged into being a teenager, and eventually I figured out like if I cut through a yard and walk along this highway in a ditch, I can access like a Kmart. So we started doing that, and eventually I just hopped on a bus and took it downtown. I was like 12 or 13. I was very adventurous. But at one point a friend told me years later, I convinced her when we were like 12 to run across an interstate highway because it was like separating our neighborhood from a McDonald’s, and it was right across there, and we just wanted that ice cream so badly. That was so important to us. So we’ve done a really bad job. Our commercial streets especially are very dangerous. I talk about that in the first book. In my industry we call those suburban arterial roads. So if they have big box stores, if they have drive-through restaurants, those tend to be really dangerous places for pedestrians.

[00:15:55] They’re not at all designed with kids’ needs in mind, and that’s a huge oversight that I think is having important implications for their health. Now, children are not being run over by cars nearly as often as they were in the ‘70s. But it’s been reduced by 10 times how many kids are killed while biking and walking in the United States every year. But and we’re not able to say for certain because we don’t have very good information about how much kids are walking and biking. But my impression, and a lot of the other experts that I’ve talked to, is that kids are just walking way, way less than they used to, to the point where they’re hardly getting any physical activity. Only one in I think it’s three kids is getting 60 minutes of vigorous physical activity a day, which is a minimum of what they need to be healthy. They need that not just to be physically healthy, which too many of them aren’t physically healthy, but secondly emotionally healthy. I think that’s underrated. Emotionally, social, I need it myself as an adult. I need a certain amount of exercise to not be insane. And you think about a 10, 11-year-old boy, it’s very critical. So and that 60 minutes a day that they’re not getting, the average kid’s getting only 20, that includes walking. They consider walking vigorous physical activity. So I think that’s a huge problem in that we really need a strong public response there because there’s only so much parents can do. Parents get blamed. Your kid has ADHD. He’s not able to walk to school. He doesn’t have a place to play. I’m working a double shift and don’t have the resources to send him to a fancy summer camp. So he’s spending eight hours a day in front of the television. Of course, he does. Of course, he’s struggling in other areas of his life. So that is a big problem, I think, and we really need Not just a government response, but a whole societal response to that problem.

[00:17:45] Beth: What were you seeing that gave you hope from the former Transportation Department? And I’m trying to think about, okay, what can we do? What are the things that work to change this?

[00:17:56] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. They introduced a huge program called Safe Streets and Roads for All, and that it was targeted at different communities can compete for the funding, I think billions of dollars. We spend very little money on sidewalks on bike lanes in the United States. Almost all the money goes into these big highway interchanges, right? Which doesn’t necessarily reflect public priorities, I don’t think, but that’s the way it’s been framed in the industry. So, anyway, they introduced this big new program, and they were awarding funds to repair some of the most dangerous streets. Those of us in urban planning know like if a road with very wide lanes, for example, very wide crossings, you know what, once you get to four or five lanes, even for an adult, it can be tricky to cross safely, to say nothing less of a child. But we can do things like add pedestrian refuge islands, so little concrete waiting areas at the center to help make that a little safer. Those are the kind of things we can change the signal timing. So there are all kinds of incremental changes we can make. Also, street lighting is important. That can be improved. So those kind of things we can fit. Suburban retrofit sometimes we call it. Some of our suburban areas to make them more walkable for kids. Another thing that I think is promising strategy for the suburbs is how in suburbs there’s a lot of cul-de-sacs, right? I grew up on a cul-de-sac. And cul-de-sacs are interesting because they do protect kids a little bit, right? That’s why parents love cul-de-sacs. Yep. Then you don’t have to pass-

[00:19:24] Beth: I live on one. Yep.

[00:19:24] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. It’s wonderful. Then you don’t have to pass through traffic. But the bad thing about it is then you can’t walk anywhere, right? Because the street doesn’t lead anywhere. I think we should, and this is very difficult to do because of property rights and NIMBYs, but we should have some more formalized cut-throughs. So if there is a dead-end street for cars, there should be a pedestrian path. That would do a lot to improve children’s mobility. And maybe I think it would really benefit parents a lot as well, and the whole of society because the one thing I talk about a ton in the book is this disaster of car lines and all the congestion that’s coming from parents chauffeuring their kids to school every day, and all the chauffeuring parents have to do to all kinds of activities. So if we could reduce the amount of effort parents had to put into that by making our communities a little more walkable, I think that would really pay huge dividends.

[00:20:18] Beth: There’s just like a cascade of problems here, right? I remember when my first daughter, she’s 15-- my girls are 15 and 11. My first daughter started kindergarten. The principal said to the parents in a meeting very plainly, “We have a big yellow limousine to come get your kids every day. Please let us do that. You will be so much happier if your kid gets on the bus and comes home on the bus every single day.” And that was true in kindergarten. It sold me. I probably would’ve gotten in the car line, too. But listening to her talk about it so passionately, I thought, “Okay, my kids are going to be bus riders,” and they have been. In the past couple of years, we have had such a shortage of bus drivers that the bus situation is madness. And our poor principal now spends it seems half her day dealing with what bus is a double run, and these kids are going to be late and these kids are going to have to sit in the gym for 30 minutes after school before they can get on their bus. And I just think, like, how do we prioritize this altogether, right? This is an issue of priorities, getting enough bus drivers and getting enough kids on the buses and getting the legislature to fund it appropriately.

[00:21:25] Angie Schmitt: A hundred percent. I talk about this in the book. There’s a nationwide bus driver shortage and I agree with you. There’s been a why are we just not raising bus drivers’ pay?

[00:21:34] Beth: Yes.

[00:21:34] Angie Schmitt: Solve this problem. And I feel like in the past when I was young, my parents didn’t even think about bus service. Or I actually walked to school, and I walked to school when I was in elementary school, and then I took the bus in middle school. But my parents did not have to give it much thought. I feel like I have to be much more-- Our institutions for supporting families and children have withered a little bit, in my opinion, since I was young. And this is a great example. And this is a national problem. It’s contributing to... it’s a mess. And I can’t understand, and this is another thing I... One thing I can do a little bit with a book like this, and that I did a little with my past book, is hold the industry accountable for some of these failures. But this is not even really registering, I don’t think, on the agendas of our state departments of transportation, which have thousands of employees, billions of dollars at their disposal, as a problem. And it’s a little bit of a blind spot for them. And I think maybe it’s a little bit related to sexism or some of the historical ways we’ve defined what are the important problems in transportation. But this is increasingly parents making the school run contribute a lot to rush hour congestion.

[00:22:44] We’ve got to get this yellow bus service working again. And the conditions of the workers and finding the will to support these essential services. And I think one thing I say in the book which I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but it’s contributing to a chronic absenteeism crisis for low-income students that’s going to have devastating consequences. Huge economic repercussions if children aren’t getting basic literacy and numeracy, which is increasingly the case. And so it’s a big problem it’s been under-discussed and we really deserve better, I think, from our leaders. And that’s another thing that’s frustrating. This kind of meat and potato stuff, and we don’t hear this debated on Capitol Hill, it’s not sexy enough, it’s not culture war enough. It would help too many people, universally. Sometimes I think all this culture war stuff is just part of a con to keep us satisfied with inadequate leadership and not solving problems and not helping people.

[00:23:40] Beth: I wonder as you were working on the book how often sort of chicken and egg kept happening. Cause when I think about the buses now and the job of being a bus driver, It is starting to feel countercultural to me to put a kid on the bus. There aren’t a lot of spaces where we say, “Five-year-old, independently go somewhere with one other adult and a ton of kids.” That’s very antithetical to the way a lot of people parent now. And as a consequence, a lot of those kids don’t know how to behave on the bus. Like it is wild what bus drivers have to put up with because so many kids lack the skills to just be on the bus for a few minutes. And so if I were a policy maker, I think I’d be considering we probably need to up bus driver pay. We probably just need more adults on the bus for a while. We probably don’t need to ask drivers to be alone with all these kids and have somebody who can help with behaviors while the driver’s focusing on safety and driving. There are so many places, especially as we talk about kids and school and independence, and developing our civic life, where I can’t tell which lever needs to be pulled first to try to address the problem, because the problems have so many ripple effects.

[00:24:54] Angie Schmitt: I agree that people are having a response to children’s behavior, and children don’t know how to behave in public quite the same way we did. But that’s, of course, one thing I argue in the book is they’re being a little bit excluded. And this is another thing that gets me in trouble, but during the pandemic my kid didn’t have kindergarten for a full year. That expectation was he was going to attend school on Zoom. All the children’s activities were canceled. Your social development is set back when you don’t leave the house for a year at a critical age. So that’s just right off the bat. I have fond memories of riding the bus when I was in middle school, and I don’t know that we were great behaved. That was the fun of it a little bit, in my opinion, that it was not a heavily supervised sort of place to be with friends. And that’s another thing things that concerns me. A, I’m concerned about the fact that kids are not walking or biking to school anymore. I talk about that a lot. Only 11% of kids do that anymore. So it’s a big problem. But secondly, this retreat, there is a reduction in kids that are riding the school bus, and now a majority just recently are driven to school.

[00:25:54] So not only are they sedentary when they’re being driven to school, they’re also isolated from their peers. And increasingly loneliness is a big concern for teenagers especially. Their kids are spending less time with friends. So that is a concern also, and I do think parents some of our norms around parenting are obviously an issue too. In the book, I try not to... I think the impulse for a lot of media figures is just to dunk on parents. I try not to do that quite so much, and I talk about all these pressures that are bearing on parents and leading them to be in these long car lines that many of them would prefer not to. And that’s one of the big factors, I think, is that we haven’t stabilized school busing and made it a reliable service the way we did in the past, and we’ve done a terrible job ensuring that kids have safe routes to school

[00:27:03] Beth: I want to talk about teenage hangouts in public too, beyond retail. Dropping a group of kids off to go to the movie theater or at a public pool, and how many places I’m seeing I feel like more and more signs like, “If they’re under 16, they have to be supervised.” And it makes me really sad because I think especially public pools are places where kids could really... my 11-year-old would be fine at the public pool with a group of friends without an adult and needs that experience.

[00:27:33] Angie Schmitt: Yes, absolutely. That should be treated as a little bit of an entitlement, I think. That’s something I talk about in the book and something I’ve been... Pool access, I think is very important. Access to swimming lessons. I grew up just camping at the pool all day, and then graduated, and without my parents, by the way. My mom worked at least part-time the whole summer when I was growing up, and we went around with a babysitter that was two or three years older than us all summer. But then I graduated to being a lifeguard. So anyway different municipalities now do have different policies that oftentimes are weirdly restrictive. And the idea is a lot of this stuff is couched as being like, oh, the responsible decision for safety or a choice that they had to make for liability reasons. But I think there needs to be more pushback against that kind of thing because real harms do result from this. Obviously, we don’t want anyone drowning, right? That’s why we have lifeguards. That’s why we have certain policies. But there is a harm done to children as well by them sitting in the house for eight to 10 hours a day playing Fortnite that needs to be weighed against these other risks and concerns and hasn’t been properly weighed.

[00:28:41] I haven’t even put this in the book yet, but I heard someone say that I thought was really interesting as a solution was there needs to be a little bit of a tort reform for schools because schools are so terrified of being sued now. One woman this was on Substack, was saying she had to sign a permission form for her kid to eat gelato, which is basically she was saying, or Italian ice, which is sugar and water. There’s not even any allergens in it. This is a tremendous imposition on schools and arguably, I would argue, harmful to children, directly harming children. Protecting children is supposed to be the point, not enriching lawyers or compliance, creating an army of paid compliance officers. So again, I think that the balance there is a little bit skewed and, I’m not a lawyer and not an expert on that, but I think that was an interesting proposal, this idea of some tort reform.

[00:29:32] Beth: I am a retired lawyer now, and I will tell you that our risk aversion just needs to change too. I understand being afraid of being sued, but the number of places that the risk of being sued is used as an excuse for inaction is absurd to me. I really appreciated the firm experience that I had. I did a few years of big law and a number of people I worked with would tell me “Make the right business decision, and if you get sued deal with it.” It’s no fun. It’s terrible. We need a million reforms in our justice system to make that process more sustainable. But also, live your life. Do things that are good. Do things that make the most sense for your organization. I lose my mind when I’m with a group and the hand-wringing about being sued comes up, especially groups that have no money. Go ahead and sue us. We have no money anyway. You know what I mean? Just keep trying to be out there doing good.

[00:30:27] Angie Schmitt: And what is actually best for children needs to be considered as well. I already made this point, but children can really be harmed, I think. Let’s say you have a boy. This is the way I’ve been thinking about it. Let’s say you have a boy who’s very athletic, and he’s a little bit of a natural risk-taker, okay? That could be a real asset, depending on the context, right? Maybe he’s an incredible athlete. Maybe he becomes I don’t know. In the past he worked as a sailor. I don’t know, if he’s constantly told he can’t, that part of him is bad and wrong, and he can’t... He has that energy that’s muffled. That is a harm to that child. And too often I think that’s disregarded, and the real harms are coming to the surface right now. And I think for people who don’t have kids, maybe they’re just reading about this. But I spend a lot of time with kids, and my kids are really pretty privileged and I’ve worked hard to facilitate a little bit of a free ranges arrangement for them. But still I notice things about kids these days that just worry me.

[00:31:32] Beth: You know what I think? You’ve just clicked into place for me we are so fixated on not getting sued for the harms that can be redressed in court. That we’re creating all kinds of harms that can’t. We can’t sue for the lost opportunities that our kids are having, for the lost ability to go to the movie theater with a big group of teenagers and have an independent experience. We can’t sue for that. But we won’t permit that experience because if they are there and someone slips and falls or whatever, we can sue for that. It’s like our balance has been skewed by what court will do and what it won’t do.

[00:32:10] Angie Schmitt: Another thing that’s crazy about all this to me, too, is on the other hand, I think that we’re very lax about serious risks to kids as well in certain weird contexts. For example, we know what are the top killers of children, right? We have way higher child mortality even though we’re much more litigious than a lot of European nations. They’re getting killed by cars guns, and drugs, okay? So we’re not doing a good job of protecting kids from the things that are the biggest threats to them. And by the way, one of those is suicide. So these threats to their mental health are very serious, and one of the top things parents should be concerned about. And another thing, even water safety, drowning is a top. So when we’re denying kids access to swimming lessons, access to safe water environments, we may increase the risk. There’s all kinds of weird risk aversion theater that gets translated into a more risky situation. Parents will drive their kids to school, right? Because they don’t want them to walk, which it may be a reasonable trade-off, but they underestimate the risk even being in the backseat of a car is to kids. That’s one of the number one killers of children, and most of them are killed as passengers. So it’s not a risk-free situation the way it’s framed by school districts sometimes or parents. And so there’s a lot of things that are mixed up and don’t make sense once you scrutinize them.

[00:33:32] Beth: I want to talk a little bit more about the point you started to make that we have to buy all of our social capital. There’s a great piece floating around Substack about this right now that I’ll link in the notes that talks about how by the things that we measure, it looks like millennials are doing great but it’s the things that we don’t measure that make a meaningful life. And I would love to tease that out with you around family-friendly culture.

[00:33:59] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. I really liked that article, and that is some of the same arguments I try to make in my book. So one thing I noticed, and hopefully this anecdotal sort of makes sense, but my kids play... I’m so lucky we have a rec youth sports league in the city where I live. That’s an example of some of the social infrastructure that’s withered a little bit. A lot of the rec leagues are dying out, and if parents are pushed or kids that want to play sports are pushed into these expensive travel leagues, and that leaves out kids who don’t have as much money, regardless of their athletic talent. So that’s a big problem. Anyway, so we do this league and they kind of piece together it’s a nonprofit league. These are the kind that are really good and need to be preserved and anyway are accessible for all kids. So doing great work. And they piece together the basketball courts. Basketball courts are, like, a great example of an amenity that’s very important to children, especially in a winter city like Cleveland, especially for boys that are a certain age, I think. Although I shouldn’t discount that girls who play basketball either. Anyway, regardless so they piece these together and we play a lot of our league is church basements. So in previous generations there was, I do think, more of a commitment to-- and I think it’s partly because we led more localized lives, but more of a commitment to building this civic infrastructure and recreational infrastructure.

[00:35:25] And one thing I talk about a lot in the book is the progressive era in the United States, which is like 1890s to 1920s which just I’m fascinated with this era because prior to that we didn’t even really think of children as occupying a separate sphere than adults. They just were there by the adult world. Sometimes they worked or they apprenticed with their parents. But then we started to think we had an industrial economy. We started to think about childhood as being a distinct phase. They introduced the concept of playgrounds, which really didn’t exist before that era. They also have introduced all these really lasting and impactful institutions. Like they introduced the YMCA. They invented the sports-- I talk about this in the book and I get really excited about it. They invented the sports of basketball and volleyball during that era at YMCAs. They invented summer camp. They invented scouting. All these really lasting institutions they were building in that era palatial Just enormous, beautiful swimming destinations. So there was this real civic spirit and investment. And getting back to my earlier anecdote, even a generation or two ago, every church was investing, people were attending church more, were donating, and they were building these shared resources for children to play on. And at the time, they were allowing, I assume, children to just come in and play whenever they wanted. It was part of their ministry. Now, we have all these schools in Cleveland that taxpayers pay for that are locked all night. There’s security reasons for that. There’s labor agreement reasons for that. But we pay for all these basketball courts that are locked to kids that are desperate to use them. One thing I found in my research was that it used to be schools in New York and Cleveland were open until ten at night to give people a place to go and were big social centers around the clock, especially for youth, but going up to adults.

[00:37:20] Beth: Yeah, I would love to see a resurgence of schools as community centered. And I know that our audience is filled with teachers and administrators who are like, “Please don’t ask another thing of our schools.”

[00:37:31] Angie Schmitt: I know.

[00:37:31] Beth: Which is fair. That’s fair. And I think how could we do this and it not feel that way to those folks, right? How could we give them what they need to do what they do, and then have other support that allows that building to still be a community center?

[00:37:46] Angie Schmitt: So I talk about this a little, too, in the book. And one thing that my school district-- I just complained about my school district like a number of times. But one thing that they do that I love and that more people could do that’s a very low bar is opening their school yards. So we can increase the amount of park space pretty easily just by don’t lock your schoolyard after school hours. If there’s a minor incident of vandalism, let’s just use public funds to repair that because there’s studies that I cite that show that just having the school yards open and near the kids can increase the level of physical activity kids get measurably. Now, in that study, I just want to qualify they did have a playground attendant that was there and that was paid for also. But in terms of getting the actual schools open it’s a bigger discussion. But I do think there could be a lot of benefits. And it’s been a frustration for me with our district that’s just their policy that they don’t like to do a lot of or they have a lot of rules around any after-school activity.

[00:38:48] But children in Cleveland really are under-resourced for. We do have these rec centers, and we do have some things, but compared to kids in the suburbs, really are not getting the same level of extracurricular opportunities and causes all kinds of problems. In fact I’m all over the place, but one storyline I’m really interested in is Baltimore. We’ve seen murder rates kind of plunge in a number of our cities, and I think Baltimore is a cool example. And I think part of their strategy there was expanding just recreational opportunities for kids. Get them in basketball leagues, get them working as lifeguards, get them at pools instead of running around getting into trouble. It makes perfect sense to me that would be quite effective. I think that’s influenced Cleveland a little bit, which is exciting. They expanded pool hours this year, I think, for that reason, for crime prevention. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that strategy.

[00:39:40] Beth: Yeah, I think so too, especially because if you get the kids out, you get some percentage of parents out with them, and that starts to lead to a more connected community and less of the sort of suburban, I open the garage door in the morning and pull my car out, and then I pull my car back in after work and close it, and that’s my engagement with my community for the day. I know my girls both swim for the team at our public pool. And your kids can’t just swim. Like you are volunteering constantly. And that’s annoying and tiresome and great, it’s all of those things.

[00:40:16] Angie Schmitt: I wish we had that opportunity. A swim team is great. I think aquatic. I don’t know. I just I’m thinking about that. I don’t know why. I think it’s very important to a good life to have that access.

[00:40:26] Beth: You were saying all over the place, which is our vibe at Pantsuit Politics, so we’re just right on target for what Sarah and I do here. But I was thinking about data centers. The last guest I had on was talking about data centers and how angry the public is and how people just do not want these in their community. I was out in Hocking Hills, the state park in Ohio. Very remote area. The only thing that even remotely political that I saw for a few days out there were signs saying, “No data centers here.” And I feel like some of that is just that we don’t believe in the promise that these things are going to create a life of more leisure. If big companies and the states doing economic development deals with those companies were saying, “You know what? We really believe that this isn’t going to create a lot more jobs, but it is going to create more community. So we want to start putting attendants in parks and lifeguards at pools and employees of our company driving bus routes as part of their duties or something.” Like where is the investment back to show the promise? If you really believe that this is going to change our culture in a way that is a net positive for everyone, prove it out now while you have people dumping buckets of money into it, and you’re asking everyone to take a leap of faith with you.

[00:41:40] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. I think when we were living more localized lives, there was more incentive for successful business people to be pumping that back into the local civic infrastructure. Yeah. But I’m not sure, and I think that’s what that blog post you referenced I think that’s really what his whole thing is talking about giving back and supporting sort of the social sphere. My sense is that has declined a little bit. That isn’t happening the same way it used to, but he would know more than me. I haven’t explored that too much.

[00:42:15] Beth: Yeah. We will link that piece so that everyone can continue to read and think about these topics together, and I want to make sure that we spend a second Outside of Politics before I let you go. So we always end on something just completely human and personal, and I saw that you recently listened to an audiobook with your children that really touched you, so I wanted to hear more about it.

[00:42:49] Angie Schmitt: Oh, yeah. Have you ever read, this was on our long car ride and came with Shiloh.

[00:42:54] Beth: No, I haven’t.

[00:42:55] Angie Schmitt: Which is an older classic. It won a Newbery Medal. I love children’s literature. I have all kinds of recommendations. But I actually think your readers would really enjoy it. It really surprised me, the message at the end. I don’t want to spoil it. It’s about a boy and his love for his dog, and my kids love storylines about animals, kids and animals, and it’s set in Appalachia. If you liked Demon Copperhead, a little bit that kind of setting and that kind of family a little bit. So it’s a little old-fashioned classic. But one of the things it was about was getting along with people that are difficult and having compassion for them and what might have brought that about, which I think is such an important lesson just for anyone. We all have to get along with people a lot of times that are difficult to get along with. And all of us at times are that person, yes. I know I’ve been that person myself. I thought that was really cool, and I was just really surprised. And it was refreshing I thought, the message, and it was very nuanced morally. I’m going on and on, but it reminded me a little of Huckleberry Finn. Because you have a boy going through this moral dilemma about the law, and in this case the subject is a dog that’s mistreated and how he should respond to that.

[00:44:08] Beth: I love that. I think children’s literature and just stories for children are so clarifying. My 11-year-old and I saw Sheep Detectives recently, and I felt just completely undone by that movie. I thought it was going to be so silly. It looks like CGI sheep and voices, and it’s just going to be goofy. And I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was almost a modern parable. I was talking to a friend of mine from church saying “We could make this movie the curriculum for our children’s program for the next year, and have something new to dig out of it every single week.”

[00:44:42] Angie Schmitt: Yeah, my kids love that, too. And one thing I loved because my blog is called Love of Place, and I’m just very interested in the settings of stories. Such a beautiful setting. I was in love with the setting. And then when we were up in Quebec, and my daughter said, too. My daughter picked up on that, too. It’s this quaint little... I don’t know. Where are they? Ireland? They were in Cornwall. Ireland. So when we were in Quebec, I said, “This is just like Sheep Detectives.” Very beautiful. Yeah. My kids loved that. Talking animals, I love it.

[00:45:08] Beth: Yeah. I think you’re right. Kids and animals just it works for a reason. And then to be able to use that over and over for generations to share something important. I thought Sheep Detectives really spoke to what belonging feels like in not a preachy way at all, just a really beautiful, nuanced, thought-provoking way. Sounds like I need to read Shiloh with my daughter.

[00:45:29] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. I really would recommend it. Yeah.

[00:45:33] Beth: Thank you so much for spending time with me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:45:37] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:45:38] Beth: Thanks to Angie and all of you for being here today. If you’d like to continue the conversation, you can join us in the comments on Substack or email us at hello@pantsuitpolitikshow.com. I’m heading out on summer break now. Sarah and I have pre-recorded some wonderful new episodes for you, so don’t miss a Tuesday or a Friday next week. Everyone, have the best weekend available to you.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Reminder that Sarah and I will both be out on summer break for the next two weeks but the On…

Read more

Read more

We had a wide-ranging conversation--from the Graham Platner implosion to data centers to Alex’s experiences at immersive medieval battle events. Alex gives us an explicit call to action (tell Congress to get moving on AI regulation!) and a lot to think about in terms of how campaigns--for offices and issues--are run and won.

Topics Discussed

• Graham Platner’s Senate campaign collapse and what it means for progressive candidate recruitment

• Trust, accountability, and the “the groups are the problem” debate in Democratic politics

• What voters actually want from elected officials

• AI’s growing role in hiring, firing, workplace surveillance, and government decisions

• The AI industry’s political spending and lobbying power

• How to actually get your member of Congress to pay attention to AI

• Alex McCoy’s immersive medieval battle reenactment hobby

Episode Resources

Tickets for the Pantsuit Politics live show in Minneapolis, Aug 29 (Eventbrite)

Alex McCoy

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. I’m here today with guest host Alex McCoy, an organizer and advocate for progressive causes, who is especially focused on the responsible use of artificial intelligence. Alex and I have a wide-ranging conversation about the progressive movement in general before discussing AI, and then we turn our attention Outside of Politics to Alex’s immersive medieval battle experiences. I loved this whole conversation, and I think there’s a lot of rich material to continue talking about here, so I hope that you’ll listen and then come to the comments and our email and talk with me more about it. I want to quickly remind you that we would love to see you live in person in Minneapolis at our live show and afterparty on August 29th. The kind of connected community that Alex describes about his medieval weekends forms for us at events like Minneapolis, and we would love for you to come be part of it. We’re getting down to the wire, so if you do plan to come, don’t delay, grab those tickets at the link in the show notes. And now, meet Alex McCoy. I’m really happy to have you here, and I don’t quite know how to introduce you. So can you just introduce yourself to everyone?

[00:01:23] Alex McCoy: Sure. Yeah. My name’s Alex. I use he/him pronouns. I am a progressive organizer fighting back against big tech and artificial intelligence harming us and our lives and our families and our careers and our environment. But I’ve been organizing for more than a decade ever since I got out of the Marine Corps, where I served as a sergeant. I co-founded a progressive veterans group called Common Defense, which has done a lot of great work to fight back against endless forever wars. I worked in the 2024 election cycle leading youth voter registration for NextGen America overseeing eight state teams registering young people to vote on college campuses. And I’ve had all kinds of different jobs in state government, in different nonprofits. Before my current work, I was on the climate team at Public Citizen. Really excited to be here. I’ve been a big fan of the podcast for years, so thanks for having me.

[00:02:25] Beth: Thank you for being here. I came to your work through Twitter, now X. And I still look there-- even though it’s a dumpster fire now-- for voices that I wouldn’t hear otherwise. And you’re one of my favorite accounts that I know is pretty significantly to my left personally, but I feel like you tweet with a lot of integrity. I learn a lot from what you share, and so I’m excited to pick your brain about a whole bunch of things. And X might be a good place to start because you’ve been tweeting a lot about the implosion of the Platner campaign. I am sick to death of talking about Graham Platner, honestly-- which is not good, right? When you have a candidate and you’re tired of that candidate before the general election, that’s a problem. But I’m really interested in what can be learned from this situation and just curious what you’re thinking about as you’ve watched this unfold.

[00:03:17] Alex McCoy: Gosh I’m thinking a lot of things. Foremost among them, grief that this is where we’re at and gratitude for the women who told their stories about their experiences with Graham Plattner. It’s not easy and I want to just say that I believe them and that I’m glad that we are hopefully going to have an opportunity to select a different nominee. So that’s the first thing I would say. The real question I think is how did we get here? How do we avoid making the same mistakes? And I think obviously everybody that we recruit to run for office now, my first question’s going to be, “Tell me about your tattoos.” And I think that in a time when more millennials and people of my generation are running for office, a lot of us have a posting history online, and anybody that’s been extremely online, you’re living your raw self for years, and if you take some of the worst examples of that and throw those in an attack ad, it’s going to make you look maybe not how you are today or what you believe and sincerely think. So we’re going to have to figure out, like, how to grapple with that collectively, and I think we’re going to have to figure out what it looks like to take a person that has come from a background that isn’t planning to run for office since they were in high school and it, and support people to represent not just a perfect biography but to be representing a movement and a set of issues that they and the voters want. Because I think that’s the big takeaway I have from the experience of Graham Platner. Is that for months now people have been supporting Graham Platner in spite of Graham Platner. And it would be a mistake to think that all of those 150,000 voters in Maine who voted last month were just hoodwinked by the fact that he wore flannel shirts or has a deep voice. There’s plenty of people who wear flannel shirts and have a deep voice. What people are really looking for is somebody that speaks to the needs that we have and the desire for accountability from the political system, and somebody who feels like they’re on their side, and somebody who’s going to push back against a default of endless war and a broken healthcare system, and all the things that were part of that platform that was the basis of the movement.

[00:06:18] I think that, tactically, politics requires a lot of trust and I really feel like a lot of us in the progressive movement had our trust betrayed by Platner’s campaign. How many times we had to sit there and think “Okay, is this it?” Okay, you’re telling me what you’re telling me and we have to make a choice on how we proceed and there’s a collective action problem, the same way we saw with Joe Biden in the 2024 election where everybody saw that same debate and we’re looking at each other “Gosh, I don’t know if he can rise to what we need from him anymore. What do we do?” And it’s really hard to be that first mover. When story after story kind of dropped, everybody’s looking at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and all the organizations that supported him, and it’s we got to move together. One takeaway I have is to just be able to break through these collective action problems by speaking to each other more and being more vulnerable among the movement and asking ourselves what are our fundamental lines, right? What are our things that we find acceptable and unacceptable? And we may have disagreements there, but I am proud that the Democratic Party has established a firm line that sexual violence is unacceptable, no matter what. No matter what. We are all united in that, and that is something that makes us fundamentally different from the people who support President Trump.

[00:08:01] Beth: Yeah. Let me tell you a little bit about my journey watching the Platner campaign as someone outside the movement. When I saw his very first ad, I thought, “This is going to work. This is maybe not for me, but this is going to work.” And I thought it was healthy for the progressive movement to make peace with the tattoo. To figure out a way through that. Because the worst branding problem that the progressive movement has is this purity testing, this kind of we’re HR, we’re no fun. Anything that colors outside our lines is unacceptable to us. So I thought some good things were happening there. I thought he personally has handled every situation with a lack of integrity.

[00:08:40] Alex McCoy: Yeah.

[00:08:40] Beth: I do not like the language that every single thing that goes wrong in your life is the result of someone rigging the system against you, that the corporate media is somehow doing a poor job by investigating people who want to be one of 100 senators. So I’m watching him go along and feeling more and more personally uncomfortable with the way that he’s responding to these things. I don’t think it’s that the public wants a perfect candidate. I feel like we’re getting to an understanding that, yeah, everybody’s said something stupid online at this point. People make bad decisions. I think there’s a lot of grace and space, especially for people who’ve served in the military who’ve made poor decisions during the course of and after their service. I think there was an opportunity for kind of an everyman candidate here. To me, it is all about his unwillingness to just stand in front of a microphone and say, “I have screwed up over and over again in my life. You’re going to hear more and more of that. I’m sorry for it.” And maybe because the allegations have become so serious, and I agree with you, to me, everything being said by these women hangs together and rings true, and I believe them. Maybe there is no way to do that. And I am glad that the Democratic Party draws that line, too. But for future candidates, man, the lesson to me is just get in front of this stuff, have some humility.

[00:10:02] Alex McCoy: Yeah.

[00:10:02] Beth: And say it, “This is all on me. I want a job where the buck will stop with me on everything.”

[00:10:09] Alex McCoy: Yeah, I think that’s right. An ethos that I try to live by is the truth is the best talking point. No matter what, right? Like no matter how bad it feels or the consequences it may have, the consequences of you trying to cover up the crime are worse because it’s going to come out sooner or later. And I think, to your point, people responded really positively when the Reddit posts story the first thing came out because he looked everybody in the eye and he said, I understand what I said and why it was wrong, and I’m sorry, and here’s my plan to like actually make the issues related to those things better. And mea culpa, right? And I think that even helped him in a way. I think the Reddit story, when it was just that and him taking accountability made him a stronger candidate. But it was the fact that it was one thing after another, and after each instance Everybody’s “Okay, is this it, bro?” And he would say, “Yes, this is it.” He met with 30 senators, and he looked them in the eye and he said, “This is it.” And I was a supporter, but not involved in the campaign itself. I did support independent expenditure side efforts for him, but the nature of that is you can’t talk to the campaign. So we just had to have faith that they were behaving, with candor and grace and humility. And that really sucks. It really sucks. It’s letting down so many ordinary people who volunteered their time and their money, and their belief, their passion their aspiration for a better future. So that’s a bummer, but this won’t be the last fight, and I’m also really excited to see the Maine Democrats pick someone to step in and carry the torch. I think they have some really great options of great candidates among those who ran for governor and others in the state who have a long track record of public service, so we don’t have to, at least in this instance, take a risk on somebody new.

[00:12:37] And I think that there are some other exciting new voices that come from less traditional backgrounds for politicians or people running for office. I want to shout out the great work that Run for Something is doing to elevate first-time younger candidates who Otherwise, never would have gotten the support to run. A lot of them women, and a lot of them people of color, and a lot of them not coming from privileged institutions. I also want to shout out some of the other candidates that are similar to Graham Plattner. I’m really excited about Sam Forstag, who’s running in Montana. He’s running for Congress. It’s a red-leaning seat, but he’s polling very competitive, and he’s a smoke jumper, which is like a forest fire firefighter role. And he’s really awesome, and he’s really amazing speaker running on this powerful platform. Has been out there in the community, which is the other thing people want to see. We’re so tired of politicians not being accessible. So few hold town halls anymore, and we want to be able to see our people asking for our vote stand up in front of us and answer our questions. And he’s out there doing that.

[00:13:57] Beth: Let me ask you this question about the movement. I think much like MAGA, although animated by a completely different set of principles, the progressive movement attracts a lot of first-time voters. A lot of people who’ve been disgusted by politics, and talks to those constituents in a very plainspoken way about what matters and what you’re trying to do. And all that is both really inspiring to people and carries tremendous risk, and I think you see that risk side playing out on the MAGA movement now, that people are becoming disillusioned that a lot of what they voted for has not come to pass. Now, some of that I think is because the president has betrayed a lot of what he said he was going to do and has focused principally on enriching himself instead of making life better for all of the people who came out to support him. Putting that aside, the progressive movement has bold ambitions that in a system like ours will take a lot of time and a lot of persuasion and a lot of work to get to a critical mass to bring these things forward, and forward won’t mean the full vision, right? And so I wonder how you reconcile. A thing I keep thinking about with Plattner is if he’d been great, if he’d been exactly what he seemed to be, and he got to the Senate, and he has to compromise and he’s talking about all these things and two terms in, none of them have happened. What does that do on the movement side, and how does someone like you talk to voters about that?

[00:15:38] Alex McCoy: Yeah. This is one of the big challenges of organizing because the people we need to win and the people we need to build a better country and a better system are the people that aren’t participating yet, and we have to bring more voters into being engaged in the process. And in order to do that, we have to overcome a deep cynicism about being able to feel any tangible improvement as a result of what we’re asking from them. So how do you do that? This is why I think it is important to ground the progressive movement in organizations rather than hero candidates. In Maine, there’s a great organization called Maine People’s Alliance, which is a sort of grassroots membership organization. Graham was a member of it. He did activism through Maine People’s Alliance. He went to DC to lobby his own members of Congress, including Susan Collins, through Maine People’s Alliance around issues like healthcare. They work on issues, and they work at the local level, and they work at the big level. And we spend so much time talking about the big level, the national politics, the, “We need Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.” And we do need those things. And here where I live in Orlando, we had our local city had a agreement with ICE where they were housing immigrants that had been detained by ICE in our local county jail, and it was costing us millions of dollars at the same time that ICE had just gotten billions of dollars from President Trump and the Republicans in Congress. And we were complicit in this mass detention agenda. You may have heard of Alligator Alcatraz here in Florida. And local organizers here were able to get that contract canceled. That our city was able to help push back against ICE’s abuses. And there are small wins like that, right? That’s how we keep people engaged, is maybe we’re not going to get Medicare for All tomorrow, but we can improve real, measurable things that people can see and feel, and we can use big campaigns like Obama’s campaign in 2008, like Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020, like Graham’s campaign, like Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. Even if you’re not totally on board with every policy that they’re running on, what they’re running on is fundamentally that we should get involved and we should stay involved beyond election day, and that we should be fighting both inside the legislature and outside in the streets to push for the same changes, and you do that through organizations. And this is maybe another answer about platinum, right? The beauty of a movement Is it contains a lot of bad people. It contains a lot of flawed people. It’s messy, it’s relational. You go to your local Indivisible chapter, and there’s some people I can’t stand.

[00:19:17] Beth: True in every organization ever, right? Every church, every school, every club, like whatever it is you’re going to get it all.

[00:19:23] Alex McCoy: Exactly. And so much of people’s experience with politics has been being treated like an ATM. That the primary way we get interacted with by the Democratic Party is I made one donation to a candidate years ago, and now I get 5,000 emails a day that are saying their hair’s on fire and if I don’t give them 50 bucks, then Mitch McConnell is going to rise from the grave and take over everything and we need to go, right? And then that’s it. You don’t get invited to meetings. You don’t get asked to do anything else. And when you do get invited in, and when you do get included in a process, and when it’s not top-down, it’s not like three guys in a WeWork in DC deciding what you need to do, but it’s you and your neighbors, that feels really empowering and transformative. Whether you’re doing that through your Indivisible or you’re doing it through the Democratic Socialists of America or you’re doing it through some other community organization, that is what I find keeps people in the fight and overcomes cynicism. Because you have that solidarity with the people that you’re in the fight with and you recognize that all of those people are imperfect. And I think that speaks to why Graham’s campaign was so durable through scandals; is because the people of Maine are tight-knit and we’re looking at each other going, “Yeah, I know he’s an ass.”

[00:20:55] Beth: Yeah.

[00:20:56] Alex McCoy: Aren’t we all?

[00:20:58] Beth: I would be very impressed if I received an ask from a campaign for something other than money. I really would. So I have to ask you.

[00:21:06] Alex McCoy: Sure.

[00:21:06] Beth: If you’re building the movement around groups, the groups have quite a reputation.

[00:21:11] Alex McCoy: The groups.

[00:21:12] Beth: The groups. So all of the autopsies of the Biden presidency say the groups were a real problem for us. How do you respond to that kind of analysis?

[00:21:24] Alex McCoy: That this is a great question. I’m glad you asked me because I both agree and disagree with this narrative. Let me start by how I agree. I think there are a lot of issue advocacy organizations that have talked a big game about how they represent a base of people. And then they say, “In order to appeal to this base of people that we represent, you need to, Mr. Politician, support XYZ policies.” And it turns out that they’ve gotten ahead of where that base of people actually is. They are supporting things that those people don’t actually support. And so if the politician follows their advice, they’re actually going to lose votes, they’re not going to gain them. Secondly, I think that we have gotten lazy in the era of the internet and digital tools where it used to be in the civil rights era, if you wanted to have Martin Luther King’s March on Washington every church is going to get their 50 people, and we’re going to get a bus, and we’re all going to go and then we’re going to get all these different groups, the different SNCC chapters at the different schools, and it adds up to a million-man march. Now you have a tweet go viral. Like there are ways that suddenly you can get mass mobilization into the street that didn’t come through real infrastructure that existed that is accountable, right? And so what you really need and the way these groups get ahead of their base is they have no structural accountability to that base. The base doesn’t elect them. They’re not in a federated organization that has all these affiliates, that there’s a way to pass a resolution where we’re all going to support this thing. And if the people in charge get ahead of their skis, we’re going to recall them, and we’re going to put somebody else as our spokesperson who’s going to speak to our actual material interests.

[00:23:38] And so I think it is true that some politicians have confused highly visible organizations and influencers and activists that speak on behalf of a community but are not accountable to that community and that has led them astray. Now, where I disagree with this idea that, just don’t listen to the groups are bad, I think it lets politicians off the hook. It is the job of an advocacy organization to advocate. And it is the job of an organization, whether their idea is popular or not, if they think it’s the right idea and the truth, they should make a persuasion argument. And it is the job of the politician to say yes or no. So to outsource all the responsibility on the people trying to say it would be a better world if you did XYZ absolves the politician of the responsibility to say I disagree with that because... and we need more of that, right? I think that’s one of the things that was missing in the Platner race. Janet Mills had no policy platform. There was none on her website, nothing. And then she didn’t do any events where she said what she stood for, right? And too often that’s what establishment politicians do, is they try to avoid saying what they believe so that they don’t make anybody mad. And I think in a world that everybody’s learning about what’s going on by watching short-form video on their phone and it’s a crowded attention economy, like that doesn’t work anymore. And because so many groups are hollow and they’re not accountable to a base, and that means they can’t mobilize that base transactionally. They can’t say, “All right, Mr. Politician, I understand that, maybe this policy doesn’t poll well with the median voter, but if you adopt it, I’m going to turn out these 10,000 of our members to vote for you.” Politicians love making that kind of deal. But we just can’t keep our end of the bargain anymore.

[00:25:55] Beth: I think you said a lot of really important things there. I love the idea that accountability because I think that word gets thrown around so much that I think, “What are we even talking about?” The idea that accountability comes from proximity and relationship and cohesion I think is so good. I want to say something about Janet Mills that I don’t know if I believe about Janet Mills as a person. I just don’t know enough about her. But this point about platform and issues gets to something that really bothers me and is a reason why I would never run for office myself. What I really want in a mayor or a governor or a senator or just a state legislator is someone who promises to listen to people and do their homework and arrive at their best judgment. Because some small percentage of what they do will be proactive, but the larger percentage will be reactive most of the time. The world and the needs of the world don’t fit your policy platform usually. I think about this with George W. Bush all the time and how he wanted to be a domestic president, and that’s not what the world had in store.

[00:27:09] Alex McCoy: Yeah.

[00:27:10] Beth: And that was catastrophic. He had a domestic agenda and ended up having to be a foreign policy president, and it was catastrophic. And so I think about that when I elect people. I really don’t need someone who says, “This is what I stand for and this is what I’m going to fight for.” Yeah. I need someone who says “Yeah, I will go to hearings. I will listen to experts. I will research. I will talk to my constituents. I will do the town halls. I will take in as much information as I can and make the best decisions I can from that information.” And I just don’t know if anyone can get elected that way. Yeah. But I think that the inability to get elected that way is part of what we’re all really pissed about at the end of the day. I think most of us want that on some level. It’s just not a sexy, inspiring, let me get my checkbook out and my signs made message.

[00:28:00] Alex McCoy: Yeah. I think there’s something to that. I think what’s important for accomplishing that is people need to know who it is you’re going to do your homework with and listen to, right? And there’s a lot of, I believe, justified dissatisfaction with the expert institutions. Some of it unjustified, some of it justified. We see versions of that on the left and the right. Obviously, I disagree with anti-vax stuff, anti-mask stuff during COVID, but I think you could have a very reasonable conversation about what were some of the choices that the Center for Disease Control made? What were some of the trade-offs that the administration made during the COVID pandemic? In the point you made about foreign policy, right? The whole foreign policy expert class supported the devastating wars that we started during the Bush administration, and continued during the Obama administration, and continued during the first Trump administration, and that only Joe Biden, over the objections of much of the expert class was willing to bring to an end. And now that Trump has reopened. I think that this is one of the roles that the issue of Gaza is playing right now in Democratic primaries; is when people are outspoken about Gaza, I think a lot of voters are processing that as, “Okay, this person is unbought,” they’re going to listen to what voters think in our party, not what big super PACs or lobbyists think. Setting aside the merits of that issue, I think that is what people are interpreting from that position. And similarly there are other issues like Medicare for All, where for some voters it’s not about are we going to actually pass the bill Medicare for All in this next Congress, it’s about, “Okay, this person is not at the hock of big pharma,” right? If they’re saying this, I know that they’re on my side and not on the side of the people that I feel like are responsible for this broken situation that we’re in.

[00:30:21] Beth: Let’s take a quick break and then come back and talk about some of those big companies and who you listen to on important issues. I know that you’ve been doing a lot of work on AI, and I want to start by just asking you to introduce that work to our audience.

[00:30:45] Alex McCoy: So artificial intelligence is going to be, I think, the next big issue in our lives because it’s getting more powerful as a tool. And because it’s getting more powerful as a tool, more and more companies are integrating it into their businesses, and as a result, they’re not hiring as many workers as they used to or they’re even laying workers off. And this particularly is affecting young, new college grad kind of entry-level positions. AI is being used by our government to power autonomous weapons that the military is using to decide where to strike, and it was being used by DOGE to decide what programs to cut. It’s being used in making Medicare decisions. It’s being increasingly used to make choices that affect the lives of ordinary Americans. And in the workplace, we’re seeing AI used as a tool of surveillance. We’re seeing workers with AI systems monitoring everything they do on their computer or listening to their work sales phone calls. And I’ve talked to truck drivers who there’s an AI system monitoring them on their whole route. This is a new reality. You talk to teachers and parents of kids in school and teachers are at their wit’s end because all the kids are cheating on their homework with chat.

[00:32:29] And then the kids are like “ All my friends don’t hang out, and they all have AI girlfriends and boyfriends, and I’m using my AI as my therapist.” So there’s all of these ways that this tech is just transforming things quietly and causing a whole bunch of interconnected disruption to what we experience and what we live and in the opportunities we have. And when you zoom out, what’s happening is you have a couple giant companies owned by some of the richest people in the world who are amassing a unprecedented amount of wealth and correspondingly an unprecedented amount of political power, and who themselves are publicly saying that we think this technology could get out of control, could be used for nefarious means, is going to cause mass unemployment in the coming years, and could even make human beings go extinct. They’re saying this out loud, right? And our political system has not responded to that yet, so we need it to, and that’s what my job is

[00:33:54] Beth: So I wonder as you approach that job, just like fundamentally, how do you feel about AI? Do you use it? I meet people who are, like, almost religiously opposed to it. And then people who are, I think, outrageously optimistic about it. I find myself somewhere in between those two positions. I wonder where you land, just as a starting place.

[00:34:17] Alex McCoy: Yeah. I like to imagine a two-by-two grid where one axis of the grid is on one end, AI is really powerful as a tool. And the other end is AI is totally hype, it’s all fake, it’s a fancy auto-complete. It just gives you wrong information. Like you don’t even need to worry about it because it’s all hype. And then the second axis is and that’s good versus that’s bad.

[00:34:43] Beth: Yeah, that’s good. I like that.

[00:34:44] Alex McCoy: So I think, to your point, there are people who are like, “It’s all fake, and that’s good. You don’t even need to waste your time about it.” There’s people who are really mad because they think it’s fake, and people are over-hyping it, and they want to debunk this and have Ed Zitron, writing these blog posts about how it’s going to cause a bubble that’s going to pop and I don’t think that is true. Objectively, I don’t think that is correct analysis. And the tech has gotten better. A lot of people really got stuck on how powerful ChatGPT was when it first came out, and they’re releasing a new model every three months it feels. And it has been a couple years, and now it’s way, way better. And a lot of people tried it once, never tried it again, and they are stuck on how good it used to be when they were generating images that had five arms and seven fingers. So where my head is at is this is really powerful, and that’s potentially bad. It’s bad on our current trajectory, but if we put the right guardrails in place, it could be good. It could be liberating. It could be the new printing press. It could be the invention of agriculture. It could be the internet, right? Where if you structure it in the right way, this can free up a lot of labor that we currently have to do. I was listening to an interesting podcast about a homeschooling mom who uses AI to help keep her lesson plans really organized in an organic way, and she can upload little voice memos, and record the lessons, and it’s applying her pedagogical principles consistently and keeping track of their progress and the errors that her kids are making so that it can help her figure out what assignments to give next. So there’s like a lot of, I think, underrated, useful ways AI could make our lives better. The main one that everybody cites is in medicine. It could be really useful for discovering new medical treatments or new pharmaceutical drugs or to screen X-rays and MRIs and find stuff earlier than we otherwise would.

[00:37:02] So I use AI every day. I have no technical background. I’ve never taken a computer science class in my life. I don’t know how to code. But using AI, you remember there used to be something called the Town Hall Project that would show you, like, all of the members of Congress that were having a town hall upcoming, so you could go and you could... this was maybe like a early resistance 2017/2018 thing. It doesn’t exist anymore. The website’s dead. Nobody maintains it. I recreated it with Claude, which is the anthropic AI. And every day it scrapes all of the mobilized pages of the members of Congress and the candidates running. It scrapes their newsletters that it’s subscribed all to with a special custom Gmail inbox, and it reads that inbox and reads all their newsletters. It scans their social media feeds once a day, and it does some targeted searches of the internet for like local news reports or anything that may be mentioning their events. And so I just get every morning I log on and I check my Slack and boop. Tom Suozzi has a town hall and congressman Espaillat is going to have coffee with seniors and here’s all the details and here’s the registration link. And it makes it really easy for me as an organizer to say, “Okay, great. We’re all going to go. I’m going to get all my seniors at this coffee with seniors to talk about how my grandson is not going to have a job because of AI.” And it’s been really increasing my capacity in a way that it’s like I have... It used to be that AI was like an autocorrect. Then it was like a pretty incompetent intern. And now it’s kind of like a couple pretty competent, high initiative and self-starting like moderately experienced junior employees that you have working for you for a monthly subscription. And it’s just it’s pretty incredible to see the change, and that should both give us hope and scare us because every company’s looking at that.

[00:39:08] Beth: I think that’s a really helpful level set to know where you’re coming from and what your personal use is like. And I would say you’re probably using it in a more sophisticated way than I am, but I also use Claude, and I use it at some point in the day every day. Like one of the uses that I really like for it right now is that when I’m stuck on a hard problem, and I’m stuck on a bunch of hard problems right now, I will say to Claude, “Ask me one question every morning that I can write about and aggregate what I’m writing, and just help me discover what I think about this.” So and just having that prompt gets me further than if I were trying to sit down and work through something on my own. So I do think that’s pretty powerful. But I also try in the way that I use it to think through, am I outsourcing the decision-making, or am I outsourcing the prompting for my own thinking? How do we translate that kind of questioning to policy? What sorts of things do you want the government to be doing in the face of all of this potential, good and bad?

[00:40:08] Alex McCoy: Yeah. It speaks to what you just said. We need to keep humans in the loop. It’s about consent. We should always know when we’re speaking with an AI. They’ve gotten pretty good at talking. OpenAI just released a new version of ChatGPT that it can have a actual simultaneous conversation with you where you speak over it. I’m the kind of person that is a very animated conversationalist, and I maybe step on my conversational partner, and I have a lot of little interjections, and I talk a lot and run on sentences, and it’ll hit you back with that. It’s pretty good, and that could be used for scams. It can be used to impersonate people. It can be used for deepfakes, right? So just like labeling requirements are really valuable. Any decision that is going to affect a human being should be ultimately by a human or reviewable by a human in a meaningful way, right? So I was speaking to a worker who works in sales. They call customers and offer this this particular service. I’m not going to name the company. But they and their whole team of sales associates just got assigned an AI boss that listens to all their calls, and the machine in its algorithmic wisdom, decided that he was not doing a good enough job and put him on a performance improvement plan.

[00:41:39] Beth: Oh my God.

[00:41:41] Alex McCoy: And this is a major company that you’ve heard of, and he cannot appeal this to a human being because it’s just the AI-- it does this. It’s in charge, right? And for us on the left, part of the answer here is organizing as workers and forming a union and making the implementation of AI in the workforce the subject of collective bargaining so that it’s in the contract. You can’t do that without the workers saying “We’re okay with this process.” And we saw a high-profile strike by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America, these are the actors and the writers, a couple years ago about AI can’t take my image and impersonate me, to replicate me to make another movie if I’m not willing to star in that movie, right? Or take my writing and write in my style a new screenplay that I don’t get credit for or anything. So that’s part of the answer, but most people aren’t in a union in the United States. And so we need broader protections as well as increasing the power of workers. We need to create the rules of the road that create a favorable set of conditions for workers. So requiring that those kinds of decisions cannot happen without the consent of the workforce, that like if you can’t get fired by an AI, right?

[00:43:08] Beth: That seems like a really good one.

[00:43:09] Alex McCoy: Yeah. And then as we think ahead to the sort of big problems, that we might see AI hooked up to nuclear weapons decision-making, right? We might see AI being used for really advanced and terrifying purposes. And the AI itself is getting so advanced that the scientists who work on it are starting to be like, “Whoa, wait a minute.” It’s starting to kind of speak in its own language to itself. If you use AI for a long time, it starts to develop its own shorthand, and you have to keep telling it “Stop doing that. Speak to me in plain English.” It’s referencing its own internal thought process when it speaks to you. And that’s a big fear that people have, is that the technology is going to get so smart that we can’t follow its train of thought. And then when you hook it up to things that it could potentially use in ways we didn’t intend, it may decide, “Okay, I got a mission to cure all diseases.” And it figures out actually the best way to cure all the diseases would be to get rid of all the humans. Let me craft this virus that kills all of us. Right? There’s a lot of sci-fi stuff

[00:44:21] Beth: Yeah. Or even, like, all the mosquitoes. You could see it in a less apocalyptic way, but still significantly impacting the ecosystem.

[00:44:28] Alex McCoy: That’s right. It could affect things that we just we weren’t thinking ahead of. And so we want to see a ban on that sort of super intelligent AI that we cannot meaningfully control or understand. And we’re approaching getting to that. We’re hitting a point where they have something called recursive self-improvement, where the AI is training its own next smarter AI rather than the scientists training it, and that’s happening more and more. Like 90% of Claude’s own code is written by itself now

[00:45:05] Beth: Okay, so I feel like you are going to hit something that I talked to my guest on Friday about. I had a conversation with Lauren Pinkston, who’s running for governor in Tennessee as an independent candidate. And she intended in her campaign to talk about responsible AI. And one example that she gave me was she had a bunch of ideas about how to make data centers more environmentally friendly. And it was very sophisticated and interesting, and what she found is voters are not wanting to hear proposals about making AI more responsible. They just hate it.

[00:45:38] Alex McCoy: Yeah.

[00:45:39] Beth: They don’t want the data centers at all. They don’t want it in schools. They just hate it. And I understand why. If I got a performance improvement plan from a machine, I would be like, “Unplug this damn thing. I’m done.” And I think that’s where a lot of people are. And so how do you think about your work writing on this canvas where you do have the extremes? You have the homeschool mom. I read an article about that same person, I think. You have the homeschool mom who’s “I’ve gotten four personal assistants out of this, and I’m letting it run my life, and I’m so much happier because of it.” And then you have the people who are like, “This is the worst. Make it stop.”

[00:46:15] Alex McCoy: Yeah, it’s about consent, right? There is a real feeling that this is being forced upon us without us opting in. It’s not all this is happening because we all went and subscribed to ChatGPT and we’re all using it, right? That exists. A lot of people are using it and subscribed, but it’s not under your control. Or at least we didn’t say that we wanted all our school systems to get all this AI stuff and our government agencies to start using AI and all the companies that we’re interacting with, suddenly I’m talking to an AI bot. I go through the drive-thru of Wendy’s, and it’s an AI that takes my order now. And it’s one fewer worker, and it was pretty good. It was pretty effective at taking my order for what it was worth. But there’s just like a profound way that is disturbing. And I think you’re right that there has been an instinct by many in politics to make AI about data centers and make data centers about environmental impacts. And it is true that data centers have environmental impacts, and we should alleviate those. But even when you alleviate those, people are still mad because what they’re mad about is the AI, right? I’ve seen polling, right? If you ask people, “Would you support a data center in my community?” Versus, “Would you support an AI data center in my community?” AI data center does way worse because people are concerned about the AI.

[00:47:53] Beth: Yeah. That makes sense to me. I think about all of the sort of economic development that we have accepted as inherent good for a long time because we hear it and we think jobs. Okay, we’re giving up a lot of land. Okay this company will use a lot of our water and a lot of our electricity, but it will create jobs and so that’s a deal that we’ll take.

[00:48:14] Alex McCoy: They built a factory, so there’s going to be all the people who get to work there.

[00:48:16] Beth: Yes. It will pollute things, but a lot of people get to work there so we’ll make that deal. And I think that’s part of the problem with data centers, that end of the deal isn’t there, right?

[00:48:25] Alex McCoy: It’s a factory that destroys jobs.

[00:48:27] Beth: Yes. It’s a factory that destroys jobs. That’s a great way to say it. So it’s tough to organize on top of that. But I’m glad that you’re doing it. I’m glad that you’re trying to think ahead. What has the reception been like? Are you getting traction with legislators?

[00:48:41] Alex McCoy: I think that increasingly people in Congress are realizing that this is a big deal. It’s all very new to them, and to date they mostly are hearing from industry lobbyists, right? They’re not hearing from their own constituents as much as they need to. And so what I would say to everybody listening in your audience is that something I have heard from members of Congress is “If I go to a house party or a town hall and I bring up AI, nobody will shut up about it.” But I don’t get letters or phone calls to my office from people proactively saying “You got to do something about AI.” So we really need that. We need people to put two and two together that this is an area where there are policy improvements that can be made, that we need to demand a plan from our policymakers to address the different harms. Whether you’re concerned about, like deep fake sexualized images, or you’re concerned about the kids cheating on their homework with chat and not learning anything, or you’re concerned about losing your job or not finding a job. No matter what it is, tell your members of Congress because they need to hear it from you. Because right now they’re only hearing it from a couple corporations that are worth a trillion dollars and can afford a lot of fancy lawyers. According to Public Citizen’s report, more than one in four federal lobbyists, works for AI companies right now. One in four.

[00:50:21] Beth: I have a story to put a fine point on this too. So when Pete Hegseth was essentially trying to shake down Anthropic, and that was all over the news, my best friend called our member of Congress’s office about it because she feels really strongly that, yes, a human being should make a decision to use a nuclear weapon, for example. And she calls the office, and a person who works in the office and has forever answers the phone, and she says, “This is what I’m calling about.” And the person said, “I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re saying. Can you explain this to me?” And so she starts with this is about the company Anthropic. And they’re like, “Don’t know.” And she’s like, “okay, Anthropic makes Claude, one of the AI models.” She spends all this time on the phone with the person, and she can tell he’s taking notes, he’s listening, he’s asking her questions to better understand. But I told her like, “I think that’s one of the best stories I’ve ever heard about a constituent call because you’ve put something on their radar. They’re going to pay attention to that.” You didn’t sound like you got a script from some organization. Like you put something new in front of them. They listened. It was a good experience for her. She got to share something that she knows about. And so I think you’re absolutely right that more of us saying, “No, we do care about this as a public.” And it’s going to take a lot of that to counteract that level of advocacy from the industry.

[00:51:43] Alex McCoy: But I think it is true that we have public opinion on our side. We have even the experts that you were talking about earlier. If we prompt these members of Congress to say, “Okay, I need to wrap my head around this whole Claude thing, call in all the top scientists and let me hear what’s going on.” Like you’ve seen Bernie Sanders, he’s done these little videos with “Hello, Claude. Tell me about capitalism,” and he like brought a bunch of scientists in from not just the US but like China and other places that are working on this issue and we just need the demand signal to get our lawmakers to do that because, also frankly, like I’m a young guy, but a lot of these members of Congress are getting up there and this is all very newfangled to them and they don’t even necessarily use email, let alone ChatGPT. So we really need to push them to recognize that this isn’t just some... the AI companies are trying to replicate the success of the cryptocurrency industry. And what the cryptocurrency industry did in 2024 is they gave a PAC called Fairshake $100 million and they spent that money in primaries and then they spent like $20 million to sink Sherrod Brown in the general election, and they said, “If you cross us, we’re going to bury you in super PAC money. But if you give us everything we want, then we’re good.” And the AI companies have a new super PAC called Leading the Future that is trying to do exactly that. They’re sitting on $100 million right now. But the difference is there wasn’t like an anti-cryptocurrency movement, right? Like people were “Eh, if you’re into cryptocurrency, it’s not my cup of tea. I’m not buying Bitcoin. It’s also no skin off my back if you’re buying Bitcoin. I think that’s dumb. I wouldn’t do it, but it’s your money and use it how you want.” AI is different because it’s affecting all of us and we need the politicians to realize that this attempt by the AI industry to replicate what worked for crypto only worked for crypto because people did not speak out and did not provide that counterbalance of, “Oh no, actually don’t do what those, handful of companies and rich people want you to do. I feel the other way and I’m your voter.”

[00:54:09] Beth: Crypto’s a great cautionary tale too because who would’ve imagined when we were all live and let live about it, that the president would be selling meme coins while in office?

[00:54:19] Alex McCoy: And making a billion dollars off of a scam.

[00:54:21] Beth: Have some imagination, legislators, about where this thing could go. I’m so glad that you are doing this work and that you spent some time telling us about it. You mentioned a second ago that you are a young guy, and you have a very young guy hobby that I’m super excited to hear about Outside of Politics.

[00:54:46] Alex McCoy: I’m a huge nerd. As a kid I was in a military family. My dad was in the Navy. We spent three years living in England and went to a bunch of medieval reenactments. And then so since I was a kid, I wanted to be a knight. So I own a full suit of steel armor. Every year I go to an event called Weekend Warrior in South Carolina, where it’s a fully immersive cinematic medieval fantasy battle event over the course of four days where there’s 500 people running around in the woods wearing real chain mail and armor. The weapons are non-lethal. They’re foam with a fiberglass core. But it looks completely like you’re in a movie, and have a great time. I can share a couple photos if you want.

[00:55:40] Beth: I absolutely do want, yes.

[00:55:42] Alex McCoy: Yes.

[00:55:43] Beth: I have so many questions. Okay, first of all, is it 10,000 degrees inside all that armor?

[00:55:50] Alex McCoy: Yes. But you train for it and you work your way up, right? If you wear a visored helmet, that’s like the most oppressive thing. You can get what’s called helmet terrors where you just get claustrophobic. So I recommend for first-time people like maybe wear just like the little cap helmet with the nose piece.

[00:56:09] Beth: Tell me about the training. Are you taking fencing lessons all year? Like, how do you get ready for this?

[00:56:14] Alex McCoy: Yeah. You don’t have to. You can just show up and bash each other. If you’ve been a kid playing with sticks, you’re good enough to come to this. And people have bows and arrows with little foam tips on them, and crossbows, and you can just be the guy who holds a big shield or the gal who has a big, long spear. And it doesn’t require a lot of skill, but you’re still very effective on this battlefield. And plus, if you die, that’s okay. You just go back and then the healers heal you, and you pop back up and you run back into the battle and you can die 100 times and it’s fine. But there are people who take it’s called Historical European Martial Arts, HEMA, classes where they’ll teach you from the actual dueling instructional manuals of in the Middle Ages, you would have trial by combat. You’d have judicial duels, and there was this whole industry of if you were going to be in a trial by combat, you’re like, “Oh, darn, I need to survive. Let me hire a trainer who’s going to, teach me how to win.” And so we have surviving manuals of those kinds of trainers who teach you how to use a long sword the way they fought with them in the Middle Ages. So there are schools that you can probably find in your local area if you look for HEMA classes where you can go to a gym and have a little rubber or foam sword and they’ll teach you the different moves, and you can practice sparring.

[00:57:41] Beth: Is there a story for this four-day weekend that everybody’s part of? Is it a different story every year? Like, what’s the setup?

[00:57:48] Alex McCoy: Yeah. The one I go to it’s run by a fantasy and historical costuming company called Felon Fair. And they came up with the story. It’s a sort of low fantasy setting, no magic, no monsters or anything. Think Game of Thrones without the dragons, right? And there’s a bunch of different kingdoms. I’m part of the King’s Men who are like the loyal kind of cross between the Night’s Watch and the King’s Guard. And we wear yellow and black and have plate armor and look like knights. There’s the Sea Lords who are like a split-off kingdom, and they’re like pirates/Norman or Eastern European. A little bit of an exotic look and they’re very seafaring, and so they have all these nautical images, and they wear blue. You’ve got the Rangers, which are like Aragorn. They’ve got the green cloaks, and they have bows and arrows. You have the Hearth Guard that are like Vikings, and they wear red, and they have the round shields and the Norse helmets and you have a bunch of other factions, but it’s pretty cool. If you look up, there’s an Instagram and a website for it, and you can see everybody’s amazing kits that they put together. It’s not a costume, it’s a kit.

[00:59:03] Beth: Okay. I respect that. Look, I love a theme party. And I feel like this sounds like just a giant theme party.

[00:59:09] Alex McCoy:  A lot of theater kids, yeah.

[00:59:11] Beth: Yeah. But does it last beyond the weekend? Are you all year texting in character? Or what’s the effect of this beyond the weekend?

[00:59:19] Alex McCoy: Yeah. The flagship event, there was originally just one in October, and now the factions have gotten so big that they can only fit about 500 people on the location. So they’ve divided them in two. So there’s two factions at an event in November. There’s two factions at an event in October that fight each other out. Eventually, we’re going to get a bigger site so there can be like 1,000 people in one giant event. And then they have in the spring one day long sort of mini events that the story is going on. It is continuing over year every year. The outcome of the battles and the role-playing you do in character and the events of the king got, captured. And then we have to ransom him and all goes into the story, and it persists year by year. So I think I’m headed into I want to say my fourth year, maybe my fifth, and I have been knighted. Of course, I have.

[01:00:12] Beth: Congratulations.

[01:00:13] Alex McCoy: I’m one of maybe a dozen knights in my country.

[01:00:15] Beth: I love this for you.

[01:00:17] Alex McCoy: Yeah, it’s great.

[01:00:18] Beth: It’s great. I think this was very fun. Thank you so much for telling me about it, and thanks for spending time with me. This was really fun.

[01:00:24] Alex McCoy: All right. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

[01:00:28] Beth: Thanks to Alex for talking with me today, and to all of you for being here. We really value your time. We know you have lots of options for what you listen to, and are so glad you’re here with us. I’ll be back with you on Friday for a new episode. In between now and then, I’m talking about the Supreme Court and good news over on Substack, and would love to see you there. Until then, have the best week available to you.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

I struggle with the hazards of my profession, especially the tendency to turn death and illness into content. I want to treat others, including public, powerful figures, with dignity in this era of algorithmic media.

Senator Graham lived an extraordinary life by any measure. For a period of my life, his plainspokenness, depth of knowledge, and friendship with Senator John McCain endeared him to me. In 2017, he joined a large club of people who’ve made decisions that I don’t think I’ll ever understand.

My intention is not to conduct an accounting of his life. It is to consider his death.

Senator Graham is the third member of Congress to die in 2026. He is the sixth member of the 119th Congress to die in office. These members ranged in age from 65 to 80. Sixty-one of our 100 current senators are Baby Boomers, and 6 are members of the Silent Generation.

Countless deeply-researched articles explore how America is aging, and that is especially obvious in our governmental leadership. We know the public is weary of incumbents who refuse to retire. We know that younger generations feel they have more than waited their turn to govern. But I don’t think we’re prepared for all of the death coming our way.

Last week, as the Mitch McConnell discourse reached a fever-pitch, I popped on Instagram to say that I thought the internet had lost its mind. From the far right to the far left and everywhere in between, I saw speculation that he was “literally dead” or being kept on life support to game Kentucky’s special election rules. I thought it was absurd (not least because of speculation that McConnell’s people wanted to prevent Rep. Thomas Massie from running in a special election. There’s no love lost there, but anyone who knows anything about Kentucky politics knows that Rep. Massie wouldn’t have a chance statewide. That’s too-much-cable-news thinking). I also thought it was gross. Demanding “proof of life” from elected officials who have said they’re hospitalized is, I think, a bridge too far, whether you’re a commentator or a governor.

The Senate has been in recess. Senator McConnell had already announced his intention to retire. His successor will be elected in November. He owed the public greater transparency than he provided until today. Still, the outcry has been disproportionate to the impact of his absence.

And I think that shows that we aren’t ready for everything that’s ahead of us.

In my limited time online today, I’ve seen all manner of speculation about how Senator Graham died. It has ranged from reasonable questions to the bizarre. I know it has always been so—that when there are gaps in information, we fill them with our imaginations; that when public figures die suddenly, we cope with wild theories. Still, I keep thinking: we’re not ready. This will only accelerate.

I imagine today that so many of Senator Graham’s contemporaries have felt an intense ache. In my life, I notice that however I feel about a person, becoming aware that someone my age has suddenly died hits me hard. Senator Graham was 71, had just made an international trip, and was scheduled to be on Meet the Press this morning. When I learned that he died, I gasped, and I quickly started thinking about the ages of people I love, wondering how much time we have left with each other, reflecting on how we never really know.

Just this weekend, my sister and I were talking about our beloved Grandmother Joy and how we admired the friendships she sustained as she aged. The only problem for her, we remembered, is that her friends were all quite a bit older than her. She watched them go, one by one. It was very hard for her.

If I could talk to her right now, I think she’d tell me that we all need to talk about death more. I can almost hear her voice saying, “it will come and it will come and it will come.” It is here, now. However the universal ledger balances for Senator Graham’s life, I hope this sudden ending can facilitate more peace with more endings for all of us in the long run.

Maybe (??) we’re reaching the point of “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

My conversation partner today is Lauren Pinkston, independent candidate for governor in Tennessee. I was curious to talk with her about what it means to be an outsider who looks like an insider. She’s running without a party behind her. She has a PhD and has lived in multiple countries. Can someone like Lauren, who is polished, prepared, and professional have the authentic outsider cred that launches the career of someone like Graham Platner?

We hit on some themes that I’ll be thinking about for a while. Can’t wait to hear what this conversation sparks for you.

Topics Discussed

• Transparency and elected officials’ health, from Mitch McConnell to Tom Kean Jr.

• Graham Platner’s exit from the Maine Senate race and what it says about party incentives

• Elitism, authenticity, and what “honor” means in public service

• Money in politics and running a campaign without party infrastructure

• A proposed moratorium on data centers in Tennessee

• Rebuilding public education: vouchers, Montessori models, screen time, and special education

• Parenting lessons Lauren brings to how she’d govern

Episode Resources

https://pinkstonfortn.com/en/about

https://www.instagram.com/pinkstonfortn/?hl=en

Tickets for the Pantsuit Politics live show in Minneapolis, Aug 29 (Eventbrite)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Sarah is on her summer break. I am here with a very special guest, Lauren Pinkston, who is running for governor of Tennessee as an independent candidate. Several Tennessee listeners have told us about Lauren, and I got more interested the more I learned. Lauren is pretty fearless and has organized an impressive campaign from the ground up by herself. I’ve been honest about how much I struggle with the two-party system since we started recording Pantsuit Politics, so I want to hear about and from people who are trying a different way. Lauren and I talk about what elected leaders owe their constituents and her thoughts on education. A couple of things you should know about this conversation. Lauren spoke to me from a storage room in a public library where she’d been out meeting voters. If you follow Lauren on Instagram, you’ll see that she’s on the road in Tennessee talking to voters all the time. So it’s not surprising that she squeezed this conversation into a packed schedule. The library needed her to relocate to another small room in the middle of our conversation, and I wanted to tell you about this both so you understand why the sound quality varies and because she handled it really graciously.

[00:01:14] I’ve talked with a lot of people running for office. They’re usually in very controlled environments. I thought it was refreshing to see a candidate out in the wild. It feels like she’s walking her talk in a variety of ways. You should also know that we talked on Wednesday afternoon. As you’re listening on Friday or later, you probably know a lot more about Mitch McConnell, Graham Platner, and other news than Lauren and I knew as we talked. You’ll hear us talk less about the specifics of these headlines and more about them as a microcosm of a system that is struggling. One more quick announcement now is the moment to get your tickets to our Minneapolis live show afterparty. The afterparty is where Sarah and I really get to spend time with people, taking photos, chatting, giving hugs. It’s the best. It’s also where a lot of listeners meet people they end up staying in touch with long after everyone’s headed home. So grab your tickets by following the link in the show notes. And now, here is my conversation with Lauren Pinkston, independent candidate for governor of Tennessee Lauren, welcome to Pantsuit Politics. I’m so excited that you’re here.

[00:02:24] Lauren Pinkston: I have been waiting for this conversation. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:28] Beth: So I want to talk with you about leadership issues that are in the headlines right now because I think they correspond to your decision to seek office as an independent. Let’s start with transparency about health. We’re recording at 1:00 Eastern Time on Wednesday, July 8th. This episode will publish Friday morning, the 10th. The situation could have changed by then, but as we’re talking, we know that 84-year-old Senator McConnell of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, where I live, is hospitalized, has been since maybe June 14th. We don’t really know why, and the internet is abuzz with speculation about what’s going on with him. The big development today is that our governor, Andy Beshear, sent a letter to him asking about the status of his health, and I wondered what you thought about that and how you’ve been processing this absence overall.

[00:03:26] Lauren Pinkston: I’m someone who believes in term limits. I believe, of course, there is a learning curve when you come into office, and there’s a lot that does need to become... within your realm of understanding, right? When you’re running for public office, and then you start to serve. However, there is so much watered-down courage when someone has been in office for so long. And if you are not fit to serve, the first thing that you can do as an honoring of our republic is to say that out loud, especially if it’s clear that it has been a prolonged issue. When, our current president was elected in 2016, I spoke out against him and have been speaking to Christians about the dangers of his leadership since then. But in 2024, I said the exact same thing about President Biden, and I said that he was the most selfish man in the country at the time because it was clear that his health capacity had weakened, and his mental capacity had weakened. And to put his party in a difficult position, I thought was very selfish as well. So on both sides of the issue, on both sides of the political spectrum, we have this issue. But I think it’s important that we are transparent about our fit to govern, and especially when very serious conversations are being had, and very important conversations are being had with people’s tax dollars. It is unjust and it is not right to not use your leadership capacity to the fullest extent.

[00:04:48] Beth: I’m not sure that Mitch McConnell thinks of himself as owing anyone that level of honesty about his capacity as one of his constituents. I have my feelings about him as a national figure and the way that he has played games with the Supreme Court, his failure to convict the president after January 6th. Both of those things I think are forever damaging to his legacy and to our country. But as a constituent of his, I’ve contacted his office many times. I find his responses really insulting and dismissive, and I think that they just show that he just doesn’t think he has to tell us anything.

[00:05:31] Lauren Pinkston: Yeah. You are experiencing something that people across the country are experiencing, and it is this fear of your constituents. I’m watching so many elected officials avoid questions from the people that they are serving or are supposed to serve of offices in Washington and at the state level, ignoring emails, ignoring phone calls, or as you said, writing blanket responses back that are incredibly dismissive because our elected officials now can’t think for themselves. They are required to vote along a party line and close their minds, close their eyes, close their ears, and just check a box, and that to me is the assault of intellectual freedom.

[00:06:08] Beth: Yeah. I wonder how you think as someone who’s seeking office right now about health issues in general because there are long-term issues that you know aren’t going to get any better. McConnell is 84, and there’s one direction with aging, unfortunately. So I think that’s one issue. I wonder what you think about Tom Kean, the New Jersey representative. He’s in the House. He’s 57 years old. He was basically missing for four months, and no one could find him. There were articles being written like, “We talked to his neighbors. They don’t know where he is. No one knows where he is.” He recently came out and said, “I was being treated for depression during that absence.” And I so believe in being treated for depression and appreciate people who take that step. I don’t want to stigmatize what he was going through in any way, and I think being gone four months without some kind of explanation is unacceptable for an elected official. So what do you think about those temporary situations? How much do you think if you were governor you would owe an explanation if you had to have a health procedure of some type?

[00:07:16] Lauren Pinkston: Of course, I believe in privacy, but when you choose to serve the public, you hand over the rights to much of that privacy, right? That is written into the understanding, in my opinion. This is not in the United States, but we could talk about Kate Middleton going through the procedures that she had, and how many speculations were said. When you hide or when you’re not completely transparent, people make assumptions, and those assumptions lead to things that are not true often. But the best way to get ahead of any kind of rumors or any kind of big feelings is just to be honest, to be transparent. We’re all humans. We are not infinite beings. We are going to experience things regardless of whether we’re elected or not. And so when you hand over the rights to that freedom, because, again, your presence is paid for by someone else’s tax dollars, I just think that you owe it to the general public to be as transparent as you can be and to make sure that the role of your office can continue in your absence.

[00:08:16] Beth: Yeah. It’s so much about judgment, I think, the way that you handle these issues and the way that you choose to communicate about them. I realize that in some ways, when you’re a public person, it’s never going to be enough, right? Even if you handle everything upfront very transparently, there will be theories, there will be lies, there will be smears. And I wonder if people who serve in these positions knowing that just think, “ Well, forget it then.” It will never be enough, so why say anything?

[00:08:46] Lauren Pinkston: I run into a lot of people who genuinely... I was going through a county recently and the women who were taking me through and introducing me to folks, they said, “The people we were introducing you to didn’t even realize you were running for office because you were just having a conversation with them first.” And I said, “Is it because I’m not afraid of people?” I just genuinely love people, and I love conversations. But there is such a guardedness around elected officials. Cameras are out all the time, and so they’re always afraid that they’re going to say something. I know that I’m going to say things that someone doesn’t like or that I may need to apologize for later. But I don’t think that gives me the right to only talk to people when I know exactly the questions that I’m going to be given ahead of time. Or to only get behind a microphone when I am completely prepared in a closed-off room that I have approved every person to be there. And so we need politicians, we need public servants who are accessible and who are living everyday life with the general public because when you lose touch of that, then you fail to govern effectively.

[00:09:47] Beth: I think losing touch with that is a definition of where Senator McConnell is at this point in his career. I wish him the best and his family the best. I hate the way people are talking about this. I think it’s ghastly the way people are talking about it. I don’t even like the governor’s letter to him. I think that was just a bridge too far and unnecessary. There’s enough swirling around this. It felt like an attention grab to me. I hope that he is doing as well as possible, and I wish the best for his family. And I also think that he is very divorced from what people in Kentucky need at this point in his career. I want to ask you about another very big story as we’re recording. Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, has been accused of rape, by a woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident. She said this happened about five years ago, and there are calls across the spectrum for him to drop out of this race as we’re recording. I imagine he will have by the time this episode publishes. I hope so, anyway. what do you think about this story? What does this say to you about the larger state of our politics? I feel like how much more can we talk about Grand Platner as one man? I’m interested in the bigger picture that this is a microcosm of.

[00:11:06] Lauren Pinkston: I think it’s a microcosm of a lot of things that we’ve seen across the political spectrum, as you just said, and that is when we have our candidate, and that candidate shows promise, then we will cover up as much as we can in order to win a seat. And when we do that repeatedly, over and over again, we lose the faith in the public institution of government, and that’s where people are today. I think that’s why people are so sick of politics on both sides is because it feels like whatever your candidate does and says and is accused of is fair game if they are showing that they’re winning in the polls. And, to me, that is a gross expression of our ethics and of the decorum that we enjoyed when we were kids growing up. Of course, we could go all the way back to the Clinton administration and what our parents said during that. We go back to the Nixon administration and things that happened. I don’t know what diagnosis I need to be stepping into the political arena at this era. But what I do know is that the honor that used to come with a political office, for the most part, has failed to exist. And you see a youthful generation that is rising up and is ready to burn it all down because they don’t trust it, and I understand why.

[00:12:24] Beth: Honor is an interesting word that you used there. I’ve been thinking a lot about Graham Plattner and what he represents because immediately as accusations started coming out about him months ago, the response was like, “Are you kidding? Donald Trump’s the president. Everything’s different. The rules are not the same, and he has good policies, and it doesn’t matter. We need somebody with good policies who will fight against Donald Trump to be in office.” And I think that some of that comes from this rejection of the elite that we’ve been talking about for 10 years since Donald Trump came on the scene. And I’ve been trying to consider, what is a word that captures what people really want? Because I think there is a problem with elitism, a sense that if you didn’t go to one of maybe ten, ten colleges, you don’t have a voice in the process, if your parents weren’t wealthy. There’s definitely a sense that we are no longer a citizen government. But what is a word that would say, “And we still have standards.” Like standards both of integrity and of experience and intellect and achievement. I was impressed when I saw that you just put your full resume on your website. “Hey, I am a person of excellence and merit in seeking this office,” and you’re not being apologetic about that in this climate that is very anti-elite. So how are you putting all that together? I like the word honor as a part of this portrait of who we’re looking for.

[00:13:58] Lauren Pinkston: Well, it’s honor not just in the office, but it’s honor in our fellow man and woman. it’s honor in the way that we approach humans and regardless of whether or not they’re going to vote for us, regardless of whether or not they’re in a part of a demographic that does vote, it’s the way that we treat people through and how hard we fight to earn their trust. I’m running a race where my opponents to the right have millions of dollars from Israel and from school voucher, supporters. One of my opponents has put 5 million of his own dollars in the race. And we are, yes, in a season where it takes a ton of money to run a competitive political campaign, but you cannot buy courage, and you cannot buy transparency, and you cannot buy a real connection with the American way. I feel so strongly that those who are going to do well in the next political era are those who fight the hardest and work the hardest to earn the trust of the public. Because since Citizens United was passed in 2010 or since the Supreme Court decided in favor of any corporation being able to give as an individual to a political campaign, we have just seen the rise of corporate interest across the political spectrum. And until we scale back that Supreme Court decision, we are going to continue to be so hungry. We are so hungry for authentic, kind, honest leadership.

[00:15:27] Beth: Well, authenticity is what really brought Graham Platner into the spotlight, right? Because people read his ruggedness, his working-class background, at least as he presented it, as authenticity. I wonder how you think about being a person who says, “I have a PhD, and I really have my life together. I’m a mom of four. I’m active in my community.” Do you worry about being seen as part of that sort of elitism that people are rejecting, or do you feel like people are hearing you as, an authentic political outsider as well?

[00:16:02] Lauren Pinkston: It was a choice to not put Dr. Lauren Pinkston on every card that we hand out. It was a choice to not throw letters behind my name every time we are putting branding out. I have been very critical of the academic institution because I just really believe that we’ve lost touch with the real human experience. And so I’m a qualitative researcher, so we’re probably on our high horse compared to quantitative researchers, but I really do believe that this was a major issue during COVID, and the way that we took good scientific data and we shoved it down the throats of people who were in rural parts of this country made that divide even greater. And when you govern with a broad stroke, even when you have really good data to back up your decisions, you have to make sure that it is communicated well and in a way that touches the reality of someone’s lived experience. And what happens in Chicago is very different than what happens on a farm in Montana. What happens in Nashville is very different than what happens in Bedford County, where I am right now. I’m meeting you today in a linen shirt and my Blundstone boots and just got off of a walking horse and it’s those moments of being with people who are carrying out the best of who we are in rural parts of this country that I think will save us in moments like this

[00:17:21] Beth: One of the questions that I have as I take in this news about Platner is what are the political parties for, if not helping identify issues like this in a person’s past well before the deadline to be on a ballot? It’s not just Graham Platner, right? It’s Eric Swalwell. It’s Max Miller in Ohio. It’s Tony Gonzalez and Cory Mills. This is a non-partisan, or bipartisan problem where we have people who’ve been accused of violence and sexual harassment and abuse. It feels exhausting to talk about that. I remember when Justice Kavanaugh now was nominated to the Supreme Court, and the allegations against him came out, and just feeling “Oh my God. Again?” Like, how many times are we going to go through this cycle? And I wonder what good are the parties if not at helping identify issues like this? You’re running without the support of a party. Do you worry about independent candidates not having anyone to check them on these issues, or do you think that you have strangely more accountability because the party is not with you?

[00:18:36] Lauren Pinkston: That’s a fantastic question. And if we were watching accountability happen on either side of the political spectrum right now, then I would say sure, I’m worried about that. But I have had to build this entire campaign from the ground up without anyone willing to help from an organized political spectrum. So I contacted Republican and Democratic campaign managers over the year before I launched this campaign, and they all refused to work with me. They said it would kill their business. And so we have built a grassroots campaign with now over forty people on my team and over four hundred volunteers so far and we’ve raised over a quarter of a million grassroots dollars with people who have never even given to political campaigns before, and those are people that I text regularly. They have my phone number. My calendar is on my website. Anyone can sign up for a call from me, and they know that they have direct access to me, and I have asked them to hold me accountable. I have a spiritual director that I meet with every month. I have another somatic therapist that I meet with every month. I will not speak for every independent candidate because everyone is different, and there are some really wild independent candidates out there as well. But I really believe in the power of looking people in the eye and asking for their accountability because this is hard. And I know that I won’t make everyone happy.

[00:20:06] Beth: Let’s talk about education. I was really excited as I was looking at your platforms to see some specificity about education. I know this is part of your personal experience, so why don’t we start there? What’s your personal connection to education?

[00:20:23] Lauren Pinkston: Started my career in the classroom. My undergraduate degree was in education, and I taught fourth grade for three years. I taught in a private school first. It was the only job that I could get in Memphis when I moved there after graduation, and then taught in public school for two years. As a mom of four kids, we have had our children in Montessori schools, in international schools, in public schools, private schools, online schools. I homeschooled for a semester when I had to because we were moving around the world. So we have touched all kinds of different forms of education, and that has been very humbling for me because I was a product of public education. I graduated from a public high school that was incredible, and I have always been one who has championed public ed. And now the profession itself is one that I don’t recognize. A lot of the mandates that have been handed down from No Child Left Behind have been unfunded mandates that local governments have had a hard time keeping up with. And now we’re just looking at cookie cutter classrooms that really don’t meet the developmental needs of so many kids. And I’ve had to change my mind about my understanding of people, who choose to homeschool, who choose to pull their kids out of public school, who are sending their kids to private schools in a way that I probably, if I’m being transparent, judged that in the past and didn’t understand why we wouldn’t pour everything that we had into public education. But the reality is that the policies that are there now, the practices of the classroom are not meeting the needs of many children that are growing up here. And I, as a mother, don’t love my children being on a screen for six hours a day when they’re learning, and so there’s a lot of reform that needs to be happening. And with the Department of Education being dismantled, as much as I reject that and am concerned about the protections for children under IDEA, I do think that we need real leaders who will innovate on this moment in education and give us some new paths forward through public schools.

[00:22:19] Beth: I want to hear more about that. I was interested because I just said in our conversation with Ezra Klein last week that I feel like we don’t value pluralism in education, that we want that cookie cutter model. We want to say everything is standardized, that we have evidence-based practices that work in every single scenario. So when I read that you support diversifying public school models to meet the needs of different learners, I was really excited to hear more about that.

[00:22:47] Lauren Pinkston: Yeah. Montessori education is one of the most remarkable forms of education that has been created in the last two hundred years. And Maria Montessori was a woman who designed this model on the streets of Italy, meeting the needs of orphan children who were there on the streets. And so it is really a trauma-informed model that allows kids to play and for that play to lead to their discovery. It’s incredible. And right now we have several Montessori schools in Tennessee, but we have one that has figured out how to function within the public school demands of benchmark testing with i-Ready and AimsWeb. These are names that parents are going to hear and recognize, but they have figured out how to manage their benchmark testing requirements while allowing for a classroom of 15 to 20 kids to all be on a different learning pace. Teachers are incredibly creative. We got into the profession because we love to create, and now with the pacing guides that have come with the Common Core standards that you are handed a PowerPoint to go with your pacing guide, and that PowerPoint has a script along with it. We have taken all of the fun out of education, and that’s why we see the lowest number of teachers graduating with degrees now than ever because the profession has become something that it wasn’t designed to be. We are not robots as teachers. We are professionals. We are scientists. We are excellent at our craft, and we haven’t been trusted in the classroom. And so we’re also spending way more money than we should be on benchmark tests that do not help us or give us more information about the students in our classrooms.

[00:24:22] And when it comes to the data that is handed to so many teachers, what are you going to do with that data when you already know which of your students are behind? So I think it’s wrong to use a quarter of the entire school year on testing when we are missing direct instruction. And I think it’s wrong to put iPads in the hands of kindergarteners all day long when they need to have their hands in dirt, and they need to be exploring the world around them. We need STEAM schools. We need nature schools. There are children who learn in very different ways, and if we’re going to create paths to TCAP programs here in Tennessee, our Colleges of Applied Technology, you can’t start that when someone’s 19. They’re not even going to finish high school if they don’t see a path for them in academia. They’ll leave in 10th or 11th grade, and they’ll just go to work. And if you can start your career with $70,000 as a lineman, you should have that pathway mapped out for you through really great technical education in high school and we’re not funding those positions. So from elementary school all the way through high school, I think there’s a lot of work we need to do, and this is again my criticism of the academy, right? But yes, we have great data around teaching methods, but we’ve forgotten the human experience, and those two have to be hand in hand, or we’re going to fail the public.

[00:25:39] Beth: It seems like all the data tells us that we need smaller class sizes, and has forever. So I’m really glad that you raised the cost of benchmark testing. And I think about the cost of the tech in classrooms, not just the iPads, but the chargers and the professionals who have to maintain all of that, and the software licensing. And I just look around and feel like isn’t the money here, just the dollars are being misdirected? Couldn’t we have more people in the classrooms, more teachers doing creative things with students if we reimagined how we allocate our budgets?

[00:26:17] Lauren Pinkston: What a novel idea. During COVID schools were given huge grants in order to help kids get online to be in the classroom. And even after the school closings were coming to an end, I was watching our school district continue to apply for grants so that kids would have laptops to take home. And while I appreciate everyone having access to technology, I thought, that money could’ve been spent on occupational therapists. That money could have been spent on funding positions within our public schools to give them a real competitive edge on the private schools that were on the rise. And so I don’t understand the misplacement of that. It felt like everyone thought that they had to do it in order to be a tech-strong school. But parents are asking for that to be recalled, and they are asking for that to be pulled back. And it will be hard for school boards to hear that after all they’ve invested in technology. But the reality is that our parents don’t want our kids on a screen all day long because that’s not what we are practicing in our home. And if we’re being really honest, those kids know exactly how to watch anything that they want to on YouTube through Google Slides. They know how to text their friends on Google Docs when they don’t have access to a phone. I have a 16-year-old and a 13-year-old daughter. Neither one of them have phones yet. My 16-year-old is in a unique education environment as well herself, so she doesn’t need one. But I have tried my hardest to protect my kids from what the internet can show them, and they can access it at school when I’m not around, even with all of the firewalls, and that’s a problem.

[00:27:51] Beth: So I feel like a lot of the ed- tech and benchmark testing reflects a fundamental desire for accountability for this massive investment in public education and some kind of assurance that we’re making progress, that kids are learning what we want them to learn. If you redesign and you diversify, how do you let people know here’s the goal and here’s our progress toward the goal?

[00:28:18] Lauren Pinkston: Yeah. I’m not opposed to kids learning how to use technology. I think that’s important. They’re going to grow up as digital natives, and they need to learn how to use AI. It’s not going away. So as much as we’re concerned about it in the academic environment, we need to be teaching our kids how to feed AI better rather than just waiting on it to feed them information. And so that is definitely a skill that we need to be teaching, but I want to make sure that teachers have the funding to print paper tests if they want. That there is a budget for paper books. The data also shows you that handwritten notes are seven times more effective than a typed note. And our bodies are physical in nature, and our brain responds to the way that we move our body. And so kinesthetic learners need the ability to use their body to learn, and that comes down to paper and pencil many times. I’m not trying to take us backwards, but I am trying to help us to be really sound with the way that we’re delivering education because I don’t want the next generation to enter the workforce and have no real skills when it comes to problem-solving. And if we’re worried about the gap of the elite versus the working class, you’re going to see that so much more because the elite are going to send their children to schools where there’s not technology. They are sending their kids to the nature schools, to the alternative learning environments. And so we’ll just see that gap continue to widen if we don’t address this in public schools.

[00:29:42] Beth: What are some of the biggest concerns that you’re hearing from parents? I know you’re all over the state talking to people. What are people really worried about?

[00:29:50] Lauren Pinkston: In Tennessee, they’re worried about our voucher program that was pushed through our state legislature two years ago and then expanded last year. They’re very opposed to it. They’re very offended by it. And they are upset that the average income of someone who is receiving a school voucher is $170,000 in Tennessee. And so especially in our rural communities, they feel that they are funding a tax break for the rich and they hate it. And I agree with them on that, and I think that’s wrong. When it comes to education as well, they’re worried about safety in schools. They’re concerned about sending their kids there. A lot of the concerns are around technology, and in Tennessee right now our state has said each school district can decide what they’re going to do about cell phones. I read an article from Kentucky last year after Kentucky banned phones at Bell-to-Bell. There was a school in Kentucky that had more books checked out in August than they had the entire school year before, and that stuck with me. Our kids are hungry for eye-to-eye conversation, and they want adults in the room who will give them a break from the screen, who will give them a break from social media. And they are actually enjoying playing cards at lunch or putting together puzzles in break times. They’re hungry for that and their bodies are hungry for that.

[00:31:06] Beth: Yeah. I think about my daughter playing cards at school a lot. She loves days when they get to play cards and they’re at a homeroom or something. She’s thrilled. And she loves going to summer camp. She’s actually at a camp right now that let her keep her phone, and she was mad about it. She doesn’t think she should be able to keep her phone at camp because it’s stressful and distracting. So I feel like the kids have really internalized this, too.

[00:31:32] Lauren Pinkston: They have. And those who we did not serve well, the young adults that are in their early 20s. I met two voters yesterday at an ice cream shop. I just introduced myself and they said, | “What do you want to do about education?” And I was talking about these very things, and they got so jazzed. They said, “You have my vote.” They were like that is what we needed and nobody gave it to us.” And that alone, it speaks volumes when it’s our 20-year-olds who are asking for the adults to step up.

[00:31:59] Beth: Now, I want to ask you about the vouchers because you said at the top of this conversation that you had opened your mind and become less judgmental about people who opt out of public schools. So how do you put all those pieces together? What do you think is a good mix of educational offerings across the state?

[00:32:15] Lauren Pinkston: I appreciate that opportunity to respond to that because what I think we’re not doing well is helping families who have children who are unique learners, and I’m a mom of one of those kids who could not find a good pathway in a public school or a private school or a traditional classroom. And I know that people are really upset about the Supreme Court decision last week that kind of reversed some of the Obama-era policies that required all learners to be in an inclusive environment. But the reality is that some of our children cannot function well in an inclusive classroom, and we have not supplied the greatest amount of resources to those families who are spending between two and six sometimes $10,000 a month on the education supports that their kids need. I’m not for institutionalizing children just blanketly because we don’t have anywhere to put them. But there are some situations, especially thinking about children who may be nonverbal, on the spectrum and who have families who cannot care for them appropriately. Where do those children go when things get violent between the child and between the parents to the child? They are much more at risk of abuse in those situations. And so I just don’t think that we can, with a broad stroke, say no child should be institutionalized. I think we look at therapeutic environments, and we have a school in our community, King’s Daughters School, who serves children with all kinds of unique needs from across the country, and those families cannot get access to grant dollars to help them fund that because of some of our policies nationwide. And so I get concerned when we aren’t listening to a broad spectrum of voters and of families’ experiences when we make some of these policies. I think that’s what’s happened, of course, over and over again.

[00:34:05] But in this moment, I would like for the dollars that we have going to vouchers to go to two different groups of people. One, the families who have children with very unique needs that cannot be met in any school environment and in early childhood education, zero to five. That’s where the greatest gaps start to happen. We’re ninety thousand childcare slots short in Tennessee, and we need desperately to be investing in early childhood development centers because we can’t attract industry if families don’t have anywhere to go. And in this economy-- this is a long, rambling sentence, but this is what I really need to put a pin in. In this economy, we have created a system that really does demand two incomes for most families. And if your healthcare costs as much as your mortgage and your childcare costs as much as your income, you have put families in an impossible situation where it costs more to work than it doesn’t, and they will remain on government welfare, and their mental health will decline because they cannot contribute to society in the way that they were designed to do. And so we’ve got to close those gaps really quickly.

[00:35:06] Beth: Those gaps are especially prevalent for families of children who have exceptional needs. I did a series a few months ago about special education, and I spoke with lots and lots of listeners about their experiences with special education. And what I heard over and over again is “Look, my life has to be about caregiving. We can’t be a two-income household because the caregiving needs of our child are so significant. And we have to spend extra money on those educational supports because we can’t get everything that we need in school. And the rest of my time, to the extent that I can find any, is advocating within the public school system for the needs of my child.” and I heard that across a huge spectrum of physical, mental, emotional conditions, and really different desires from families about what they’re looking for. Everyone wants their child to feel respected at school, to be seen, to feel like the school cares about their needs. But as you said, there were families who said we don’t need to be in a mainstream classroom. We need to be in a place where if one occupational therapist is absent, there’s another one because this school is designed with my child’s needs in mind. And others who said “I absolutely want my child to be in the same classroom as other children their age and for those children to see my child as a full and complete person and for my child to be exposed to what those other children are doing and how they’re interacting with each other.” So I don’t think anything about it is easy. It seems to me that just beginning to discuss it more often would help us find some paths forward because right now the conversation feels entirely defensive. We have to protect the Department of Education because that’s the only place that anyone is talking about IDEA and the rights of kids with special ed needs. It’s the only place and it does some good work, but it’s not there, right? We haven’t crossed a finish line where we can say we’re doing a great job for these kids and families.

[00:37:11] Lauren Pinkston: You’re right. the legal structure is there, but families are not being served, and thousands of those families have cases that have not been supported or solved through that reporting process. And so, again, that’s a case of federal mandates that were unfunded mandates handed down to states that get handed down to local school boards that cannot meet the demands of the federal regulations. And I see the value in the federal regulations. I do. And I will fight for human rights all day long, but we have to make sure that the mechanisms are there to really carry out the ideals. And to be fair, when our Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, I don’t think that they knew how sacred the words that they were writing were. When the Preamble was drafted ensuring the rights of so many, those men were not even carrying out those rights in their own lives by the people that they enslaved. And so the reality is that we have these ideals, we continue to fight for them, we continue to push for them, and when people tell me that the United States is ending and it’s all over, I have to steady myself and ground myself and remind myself, too, that this country has been in seasons of real distress, but the ideals that have carried us for 250 years are still here, and they’re so baked into our DNA that we will continue to fight for them even when it feels like the walls are crumbling around us here.

[00:38:33] Beth: What do you think are the biggest obstacles to real education reform in Tennessee?

[00:38:38] Lauren Pinkston: In Tennessee, it’s going to be figuring out who those dark money funders are and identifying where my blind spots are because I’m not in the room with either party. I know who is pushing a lot of the legislation for school vouchers, for example, but I don’t know where all of those conversations are being had in a caucus with the Republican Party in Tennessee. I am not someone who wants to come in and shake up every commission office in Tennessee. I’m not looking to fire every commissioner and start from scratch. I think that’s very destabilizing. But I am looking for people who are thinking outside of the box and who are not being placed into commission seats because they have paid for it or they have been a loyalist to someone in office. And I think that’s what it’s going to take to get us on track, is putting the right people in the right seats because they have proven to be incredible leaders and creative problem solvers. And so that’s, in my opinion, what it’s going to take to really get us back on track. And it might actually require a Supreme Court case where public school families are pushing back on some of the No Child Left Behind era policies because I think we’re in an era where we’re going to need to push back on some of those, and that’s going to be a lawsuit that needs to make its way all the way up to the Supreme Court.

[00:39:59] Beth: You mentioned that you’re not in the room with either caucus, and I want to touch on that just for a minute before we move on to Outside of Politics. I heard you say in an Instagram video that you had called for a moratorium on data centers being constructed in Tennessee, which I think is really interesting. But the thing in your video that really grabbed my attention was when you said, “I don’t have to run that by a party committee. I have listened to the voters. I have gathered information. I have done research. I have considered it. This is my best judgment, and I get to just say that to you.” And I thought, “Now that is the sort of outsider, authentic, campaigning that I’m looking for.” So talk for just a second about why you think specifically in an executive role there is an advantage to running as an independent and governing as an independent.

[00:40:53] Lauren Pinkston: The ability to pivot and to pivot quickly is so refreshing. I had a strong assumption that data centers and the future of tech were going to be at the core of this election, and that has proven to be true. That’s why I came in with a plan around data centers and how we would construct them in places where we would preserve our land. We could trap the thermal energy that they give off by putting them underground and moving that thermal energy above ground to heat greenhouses year-long through vertical farming. And I presented that as many places as I could and with great respect. However, the reality remains that politics is downstream from culture. And because of where the data centers are being proposed across our state, they are the boogeyman of this election. And I hear that, and I understand that, and so that’s why I also was the first candidate to call for a moratorium because I saw where people are, and I believe that we need to pause. When people are con-concerned and they see elected officials that look like they are bending an ear to a large corporation with a lot of money, then they feel left out. And we need everyone at the table for these conversations. That’s why I’ve called for citizens’ councils across the state so that we would have real listening ears on the ground in every county that were nonpartisan. That’s why I’ve called for a nonpartisan redistricting commission that would propose where our congressional districts are aligned so that we have our ear to the ground across the state. But that’s the beauty of running as an independent is that I don’t have to ask, “Can I say this?” Or “What’s the party position on that?” I don’t have to sign any creed. It’s just me and the people and that feels really important in a moment where we’ve had a super majority in our state that has completely close their eyes and ears to the general public and people are not voting because they feel like what’s the point? Tennessee had the lowest voter turnout in the entire country in our last midterm election, and I had to ask why are you not voting? And it’s that defeat, what am I going to change? Nobody’s going to listen to me anyway. And that defeat is so demoralizing and it obstructs the beauty of a representative democracy. So that’s the importance of electing independents that have worked to earn your trust in this political environment.

[00:43:15] Beth: Let’s take a hard turn and talk about what’s on our minds Outside of Politics. You have four kids. I’m wondering, especially as you’re out campaigning and doing something that you seem very prepared for, but that also has to be brand new to you, what are you learning about yourself that you think, “Oh, this came from being a mom. This part of me is directly related to my experience parenting”?

[00:43:43] Lauren Pinkston: That’s such a good question. I say in a lot of my stops, “I’m a mom with two teenage girls, so you can’t hurt my feelings. I’ve been tested and prepared for this every day.”

[00:43:54] Beth: I got an 11 and 15-year-old girl. I feel that.

[00:44:00] Lauren Pinkston: You get that. you can ask me anything. I’m asked questions all day long, and I’m very used to explaining things, and I’m also very used to saying, “I don’t know. Let’s go find that out together.”

[00:44:09] Beth: Yeah. my girls will comment on my outfit every day, and they will be very honest about what they think of it. My hair, my makeup. I get constant feedback from very honest advisors about that.

[00:44:25] Lauren Pinkston: Exactly. “Mom, why are you wearing that? Mom, why did...” Yes, 100%. And our kids are our greatest critics, but they also give us some thick skin, so that’s so good.

[00:44:36] Beth: I was thinking about this question for myself, and a, couple of things occurred to me lately One is just I think I have deeply internalized from parenting that my plan is not the only plan. As much as I want to be in control of a day and a schedule and a method, this is how we’re going to do this thing, my plan is not the only plan. And my plan can be meaningless by the end of the day sometimes if someone else’s needs supersede mine. I can imagine that that’s something you’re encountering on the campaign trail quite a bit too.

[00:45:11] Lauren Pinkston: Absolutely. As a family, we’ve lived all over the world. We have four kids that were born on three continents. We’ve worked through the USCIS process. We have a certificate of birth abroad. We have shared tables with so many unique people around the world. I took my four-month-old to stay the night in the Middle East when we were on our way to Uganda a few years ago. There’s not a place that I have been afraid with them there with me, but that also means that I’m not afraid of our neighbors here. And we’ve been in our home now for almost seven years. And over the course of those seven years, we’ve had people living in our upstairs, three of those people who needed a place to stay or people who were in transition, and we’ve just lived in community with them. And I think that’s what it’s going to take to heal our politics too. So another thing that I’d say has prepared me is that rub of sharing space with people who weren’t just like me. Our home is a sacred place, but it’s not closed off to others. And so my commitment to Tennesseans has been we haven’t had children in the governor’s residence since the 1970s when Lamar Alexander was our governor, and we will be having family dinners there. And you will hear from me that there will be a Republican representative and a Democratic representative at the dinner table with my family, with their families invited, and we are going to humanize one another. Because if the only time that we are arguing is on the floor of the House, then we will never pass effective legislation together. And we have to see each other as humans first if we’re going to solve problems together. And so that’s my commitment to how I will govern.

[00:46:45] Beth: That’s really related to the other thing I was thinking that I’ve learned from my kids that’s, been so prevalent for me in the month of June and July, as we are in the summer here, I have learned from my kids that almost everything is a skill that you have to learn. Sleeping is a skill. Eating is a skill. Going to the bathroom yourself is a skill. Taking a shower, skill. Cleaning your room, skill. And I feel like that kind of communication politically is a skill that has been allowed to atrophy. And so I love the idea of establishing a practice. That’s how you teach a new skill, right? We’re just practicing over and over again, and offering feedback as we go along. So I like the idea of you saying, “We’re going to relearn this skill, everybody, right here at the dinner table.”

[00:47:34] Lauren Pinkston: That’s exactly it. And my kids amaze me all the time, but I remember my daughter is a Ugandan American, and we were at a doctor’s office once and the doctor was working on her and it was during the ‘24 election-- sorry I’m bringing it back to politics. But it was during the ‘24 election, and she said, “That Kamala Harris is going to ruin our country and turn us all communist, so we can’t vote for her.” And my daughter, who is watching Black representation that looks like her, so powerful for her, regardless of where you are politically. That is an important moment for her. I was just so taken back that someone would say that to her with such lack of understanding. And I looked at her and she goes, “That’s really interesting. Tell me more about why you feel that way.” And it just was such a proud mom moment where I thought, “Okay, you’ve seen this modeled, and you are learning how to carry this out,” and that’s the future that I want for my kids, and that’s what I want them to, contribute to the world. And I think we’ve been practicing that so well in our home, and I want to bring that to the state because it’s so lacking. And women are so good. Women are so good at connecting these dots. Another conversation about women in politics, but that’s why we’re talking about this.

[00:48:47] Beth: I think that’s right. Good for your daughter and good for you, and thank you so much for spending time with me today. I’m excited to see where your campaign goes, and I hope that you’ll come back and give us an update as the governor.

[00:49:00] Lauren Pinkston: I can’t wait. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:49:04] Beth: Thank you so much to Lauren for joining me today. If you’d like to learn more about Lauren and her campaign, you can find her at pingston4tn.com. We’ll link that and her Instagram profile in the show notes, along with the link for our live show and after party tickets. I’ll be back with you next week with new episodes of Pantsuit Politics. Until then, have the best weekend available to you

.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

In the states: Last year’s budget law included federal dollars for rural healthcare, and states are starting to put that money to work. Delaware is building a digital system to speed up insurance claims reviews, aimed at cutting the prior-authorization burden for rur…

Read more

After doing the reading and studying these opinions, I still think…

Read more

Chef Mica Chavez taught me and 45 other Pantsuit Politics listeners to make a southwestern feast while we were on retreat in New Mexico. The food was amazing, but her storytelling was even better. I literally leaned forward in my chair as she talked about birds spreading chili from Bolivia to New Mexico. In this conversation, she takes us through 500 years of food history--from the three sisters to precision farming.

I loved this conversation because I think it shows how food is life. Food is violence and colonization and interdependence and love and belonging. It is all of it, and all of it has shaped modern America and the world. Chef Chavez delivers warnings and inspiration, and I think, going into year 251, we need both.

Topics Discussed

• The Columbian Exchange: how corn, chili, potatoes, and tomatoes reshaped diets on both sides of the Atlantic

• The science of nixtamalization — why New World corn didn’t wreck teeth the way Old World wheat did

• How chili peppers spread across the globe via birds

• The Irish potato famine’s surprising link to New Mexico settlement history

• Indigenous and Spanish foodways merging in the Southwest: acequias, sheep, and companion planting

• How mechanization and post-WWII food policy created the mass-produced, processed food system

• Precision farming, AI, and the tension between efficiency and sustainability

• What to cook this summer (hint: it’s pie)

Episode Resources

• Tickets for the Pantsuit Politics live show in Minneapolis, Aug 29 (Eventbrite)

• Chef Mica Chavez

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Chef Mica Chavez: All I can do is what I do as an individual, and how do I see this? I shop the perimeter of my grocery store. I very infrequently go in the middle unless I’m looking for something like flour, sugar, or coffee. And going back to there are only a few corporations that are producing what we eat, that to me that’s scary.

[00:00:26] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Sarah is on her summer break this week. I’m here with a special guest who I’ll tell you about in just a moment. First, thank you so much for celebrating America 250 with us. I have been absolutely delighted by your murder mystery photos, your founder’s trunk stories, the way that you have shared our episodes and shared your family and friends with us. It’s been really meaningful to me. You all made my Fourth of July. So thank you so much. I hope that we were helpful to your Fourth of July as well, and I hope we can all keep the party going together in Minneapolis on August 29th at our one and only live show this year. Now, if you want to really hang out, grab a photo with Sarah and me, say hello to us in person, meet some new true and lasting friends, then we hope you’ll join us for the afterparty of our live show. Tickets are on sale now, but not for much longer, because the afterparty has food and music and lots of seating, and we just need to think and plan for every single person who comes, and we’re getting down to the wire on that. So this is your moment to grab those afterparty tickets along with your live show tickets. The link to snag all of that is in the show notes, and I hope to see you there.

Speaking of food, my guest today is a culinary expert. Chef Mica Chavez has cooked for presidents, and she has taught history to seventh graders. She’s been on CBS and CNN, and she has taught a group of Pantsuit Politics listeners how to make a Southwestern feast. That’s where I met her. Chef Chavez taught us at a Santa Fe cooking school, and as she was meeting our group and introducing the food to us, she told us about why corn and chilies are so important to New Mexican cuisine. The way that she wove food and history and culture and land together had me physically leaning forward in my chair, just hanging on to every word she said. And so that’s why I invited her to guest host this first show after our semi-quincentennial celebration, because I think food is one of the best ways to understand who we are. And as you’ll hear in this conversation, I think food has so much to teach us about who we are and who we can be. So I hope that you enjoy hearing from Chef Chavez as much as I enjoyed talking with her. I am so glad that you’re here. I have not stopped thinking about the way you described the Columbian Exchange to us in Santa Fe, and I just want to hear that story again and unpack it more with you. So will you take us back to, the 1400s and where our food journey begins in this country?

[00:03:18] Chef Mica Chavez: Absolutely. And actually, our food journey in this country begins way before the 1400s. And I’m going to try to stick with New Mexico because that’s where I’m living. This is home. And this being the capital city of the Southwest, I feel that corn and chili is a really good place to start. So I am also a history teacher in addition to being a trained chef with over 40 years of experience. When I first learned about the Columbian Exchange and how that pivotal journey changed everything for the world that we live in, it took me down a rabbit hole that just ended for me in Spain about a year and a half ago. A student in one of my classes asked me where oranges came from. And I didn’t know. And I don’t like not knowing things, so I started researching. And as with a lot of research-- I know that you’ve gone through higher ed as well-- you don’t necessarily find answers; you find better questions.

[00:04:12] Beth: Right.

[00:04:13] Chef Mica Chavez: And that was definitely the case for me. So oranges came to us from Valencia, Spain. Prior to Valencia, Spain, they were in Southeast Asia as a very small sour fruit. And when the Spaniards were traveling, they would bring things that they thought that they would need in order to plant fruits, vegetables, and they brought protein with them when they got to where they were going so they would have something to eat. And this is something that has been done by different cultures in different ways as long as people have been traveling. There’s a school of thought that thinks that chickens were brought to the New World by Samoans. We know people were traveling. The reason that Columbus got the press that he did was because he traveled with a journalist. He traveled with a scribe. And not too long after he got back to Spain on either his first or second voyage, the printing press was being used for more than Bibles. So his timing was really pretty fortuitous for him. The Columbian Exchange would’ve happened at some point, and it may have had somebody else’s name attached to it. We don’t know. We know there was Viking presence off the coast of Newfoundland. We know people were moving. He was just the first one to get the credit. When Spanish boots hit the island of Hispaniola, life in this world changed forever. There was an exchange of biological agents, technology, and language that we call the Columbian Exchange. One of the things that I tell people in my classes at the School of Cooking, and I probably told you this as well, is try to imagine for a moment what life was like in the major cities of Europe in the 1400s. It was probably pretty bad. Yeah. And so one of the reasons that Columbus was looking for a westward route to the East Indies was for black pepper primarily, and so that really launched all of the successive voyages of exploration and discovery.

[00:06:12] Beth: Do you know why black pepper?

[00:06:14] Chef Mica Chavez: Black pepper is one of the world’s most ubiquitous spices, and most of it is still grown in India, and we know that the Spanish and the Portuguese had big presence off of India. And so he figured that he could probably get there without too much ado, not taking into account there were a couple of continents in the spices were the first global empire industry and it started with the Dutch and their the East Indian Trading Company and a lot of a lot of traffic through Southeast Asia and certainly the New World bringing things back. But when we talk about corn, it’s really a man-made miracle. It was created by ancient peoples cross-pollinating and hybrid- cross-pollinating and hybridizing different kinds of grass. One was teosinte. I don’t remember what the other one was. And over a period of time they created corn. So corn for us in the New World, nothing here happens without corn. But if you look at each cob of corn or each ear of corn, each one of those kernels is protected by a plastic-like coating called a pericarp. Now, the pericarp protects it against birds because birds are destructive, but it doesn’t allow our bodies to break it down. So when you eat raw corn, it basically just travels right through your body. Your body can’t access the primarily niacin that’s in the corn.

And so in Mexico, somewhere about 9,000 years ago probably, they figured out a way to soak corn in water with an alkali, and that removes the pericarp, makes it more digestible, and makes the corn safer because the alkalinity of the water kills bacteria.Now, here’s the thing I just put together the other day. About six years ago, seven years ago, I was in Pompeii, and I was doing a culinary tour of Pompeii. And this woman that was leading the tour led us over to where they would grind the wheat for bread. So they had this big... It was very phallic looking. It was like this big pole, and there was this big cap that went on top of the pole. And in the middle it was shaped like an hourglass. And in the top part of this cap there was a hole in there, and they would put a pole in there, and either slaves or donkeys would turn this around in a circle. In the top of the cap, they would dump wheat berries, and the wheat berries would trickle down through and then the grinding motion would grind it into flour. Here’s the thing. A lot of the residents of Pompeii had no teeth. Their teeth were completely ground down from eating bread with pumice in because the wheat berries take off so much of that volcanic rock.

[00:09:08] Beth: Yeah.

[00:09:09] Chef Mica Chavez: Here in the New World, we were also using volcanic rock to grind our staple grain, corn, but the corn was soaked, so it was soft. So it didn’t take off a lot of that pumice, and the people here had really good teeth because we weren’t eating bread full of pumice.

[00:09:28] Beth: It’s just wild to think about this. This Old World, New World distinction and divergent methods is on my mind because this morning I was reading a piece to prepare for this conversation, and the professor who wrote it was talking about how, okay, we start with one supercontinent, and then we have millions of years that separate us, and we’re separated so completely that you see rattlesnakes on one side of the Atlantic and vipers on the other. We’re going down these parallel but divergent tracks.

[00:09:58] Chef Mica Chavez: Completely divergent.

[00:10:00] Beth: And then through human travel, and especially because of Columbus, who it sounds like has the 1400s equivalent of a great publicist, we get this exchange where you start to bring together the way that corn is sustaining a people in the New World, and wheat is sustaining people in the Old World.

[00:10:19] Chef Mica Chavez: And then you have rice in China. Rice in Asia, not just China. Rice in Asia. You have millet, sorghum, and teff in Africa. Every major ancient culture had some sort of staple grain, because where you had culture, you had agriculture or you had no culture.

[00:10:35] Beth: Yeah.

[00:10:36] Chef Mica Chavez: Corn is mentioned in nearly every Native American creation story. I’ve traveled through Mexico pretty extensively, and when you look at a lot of Native American codex and some of the carvings in Tikal or Chichen Itza or in the museums of Mexico City or in Oaxaca, people presented in silhouette or in profile, and the corn is coming out their nose in the profile because your breath comes out your nose. Without breath there is no life. Without corn, there is no life.

[00:11:07] Beth: Wow.

[00:11:08] Chef Mica Chavez: So it really was everything to the people here. And then probably about the same time, chili began to make its way onto the scene. And chili started out as a really small berry growing on bushes in Bolivia. And primarily through birds, chili spread. And if you’re wondering why birds, I’m going to tell you. Chili, as it ages, turns bright colors. It goes from green to orange, yellow, and then eventually red. Birds are attracted to red. I’ve got chickens, and if one of them gets a cut, you have to put like this salve on it that’s brown so they don’t attack each other and the red. They’re drawn to red. All poultry, all birds have grit sacs in the front of their breasts. This allows them to break down their diet, which is based on seeds. It’s also what makes your backyard chickens the closest living relative to dinosaurs you’re ever going to encounter.

[00:12:10] Beth: I love facts like that.

[00:12:11] Chef Mica Chavez: I know, isn’t that crazy? And then lastly birds don’t have salivary glands, so they’re immune to capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili. So a bird can sit and eat as many of these little berries as they want and then fly away. And when it does what birds do when they fly away, and the seed comes flying out the business end of the bird, it has everything it needs to be successful before it ever even hits the ground in terms of germination. So we know or food historians know that the African piri piri, the Thai bird’s eye chili, and the chiltepin, which was growing wild up here around the Santa Fe, New Mexico area, were all spread by birds. Everything else was spread by humans, and Columbus gets that distinction. Because as far as we know, he was the first one to come into contact with chili.

[00:13:00] Beth: So Columbus brings plants and animals, like ushers in this era of livestock coming in, dairy comes with the Spaniards, as I understand it.

[00:13:14] Chef Mica Chavez: Yep.

[00:13:14] Beth: I read about how the Spaniards believed that communion had to be wheat and grape based, and so they’re worried about bringing that stuff in. But then we’re exchanging in the other direction, too, right? So I know corn. Can you talk about what else left the New World and entered in the Old World and Asia from here?

[00:13:33] Chef Mica Chavez: Oh, girl. Yeah, absolutely. Tomatoes. That was a big thing. England was considered very Puritanical. Virginia was named after the Virgin Queen. When tomatoes first went back to England, we think the first tomato that made it back to Europe was a golden tomato. In Italian they’re pomodoro, pom d’oro, golden apple. Now when they made it to England, the English wanted nothing to do with it. They considered it the devil’s food.

[00:14:05] Beth: Tomatoes were the devil’s food?

[00:14:07] Chef Mica Chavez: Yes, ma’am. Okay, you’re living in a Puritanical society.

[00:14:12] Beth: Yeah.

[00:14:12] Chef Mica Chavez: Think about all of the characteristics of a tomato. It’s red. It’s juicy.

[00:14:17] Beth: Yeah.

[00:14:18] Chef Mica Chavez: Can’t have that.

[00:14:19] Beth: It’s just delight. Just delight on a vine.

[00:14:21] Chef Mica Chavez: A hundred percent. So it took a bit for the English to to get their mind wrapped around tomatoes. The food that made the biggest impact I think, at least upon the Irish, was the potato There were hundreds, if not thousands, of varieties of potatoes that grow throughout the Andes Mountains. Only 10 varieties of potato made it back to Europe, and only two made it to Ireland. Now, prior to the Irish potato famine, the average Irishman ate 13 to 14 potatoes a day. It was the diet. Because it’s a really cheap, easy source of carbohydrates and energy. But at the time that all of this was happening, 1600, 1700, 1800s, much of the UK was considered a feudal system. So tax assessors went and assessed taxes based on what they could see, and they can see a corn crib or a granary full of wheat or rye or barley. That’s easy. But when you plant potatoes, not even you know what you have until you start digging them up.

[00:15:29] Beth: Yeah.

[00:15:30] Chef Mica Chavez: So potatoes were perfect in so many ways. Had all 10 varieties of potato made it back to Ireland, the potato famine never would’ve happened and millions of Irish people would probably still be in Ireland, and the Irish community here would be much, much different. Now, in New Mexico, there was a movie filmed here in the ‘80s or ‘90s called Young Guns. It was Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen. Lou Diamond Phillips. That was filmed about 30 minutes from where I’m sitting right now, and that movie was based on a real happening here in New Mexico called the Lincoln County Wars. Now, the reason I’m bringing this up is because all of the characters that were portrayed in that movie all had Irish last names, O’Donnell and Murphy, O’Brien. I can’t prove this, but I think that those people may have been the children or the grandchildren of the people that left Ireland trying to escape the potato famine. Because millions of Irish people or hundreds of thousands of Irishmen came here, came to the US trying to start a new life.

[00:16:33] Beth: So you have this real sort of negotiation and melding of culture going back hundreds of years. I just love thinking about the fact that we wouldn’t have oranges here, and Italy wouldn’t have tomatoes.

[00:16:48] Chef Mica Chavez: Right. Imagine Italy without tomatoes.

[00:16:49] Beth: It’s wild to me to think about. And there’s something really beautiful in that, even though this is happening against just a really horrific background of colonization and theft and slavery, plays a huge role in all of this.

[00:17:05] Chef Mica Chavez: Slave women or African women used to weave rice in their hair because if they got captured, they knew there was a chance they were going to get captured, if they got captured, they would have this rice so that they would be able to plant it when they got wherever they were going. There are still people that live off the East Coast of the US, I think off the Carolinas the Gullah, I believe they’re called. They still maintain their African heritage. But manifest destiny, colonization, slavery, those were some of the worst things to happen to this country and to the peoples of faraway lands that were dragged here against their will. All of those ethnic groups have left an indelible impression on our country, and it would be nearly impossible to remove them now from who we are as a nation. We’re a nation built on the backs of people of color who came here against their will, some especially from Mexico because there were programs here that brought workers in the early 1900s, the Bracero Program. So people have been moving, and when people move, whether it’s through their own will or against their will they bring with them their cultures and their traditions and their foods. And try and take out of Louisiana. No way. Not going to happen.

[00:18:21] Beth: When you think about the development of Southwestern cuisine as it exists today, I’m really interested in the sort of interplay between indigenous foodways and what the Spanish brought to that area. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:18:38] Chef Mica Chavez: The Spanish presence in the Southwest was that was tolerated for a bit. Because when the Spanish got here, they brought horses, and horses changed Native American cultures forever, especially with the Comanche and the Cherokee. They became master horsemen and basically dominated the plains. The Pueblos that were here tolerated the Spanish for a bit because they gave them protection against raiding tribes. And that was good until it wasn’t. I don’t think we need to cover the atrocities that happened in the Southwest at the hands of European cultures. That being said, once there started being intermarriage, intermingling, interweaving of communities, it’s nearly impossible to remove indigenous culture from the Hispano culture that now exists in New Mexico. As a matter of fact, I think it was about a year ago that The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times ran an article about some of the Spanish dialects that still exist in Northern New Mexico that only exist here because of our rural remoteness. And at this point, you cannot extract one culture from the other. We are one people at this point. And in terms of foodways, if it weren’t for the native cultures that were here, the Spanish probably would’ve not done very well in terms of being able to grow their own food. Farming at altitude is a challenge, and farming in high desert altitude makes it even more so. When the Spanish got here, they found a thriving Pueblo population. In many cases, the Spanish and the Pueblos worked together to form foodways, and let me give you an example of that.

There is a method of irrigation that is used here in Northern New Mexico called acequias. An acequia is a gravity powered ditch of like a stream. And these acequias run all through northern New Mexico, southern Colorado, and they were named acequias by the Spanish. Now, in many cases when new towns would be built, they would build the acequia first before they would even start building buildings because they had to have water first. So the acequia system is still alive and well here, and it is a tradition in the spring with men. It’s a tradition among the men here that they go out and clean the acequias every spring to get ready for the water release. So there may be 60 or 70 families living on some of these acequias. And they’re not little is what I’m saying. The person in charge of the acequia is called the mayordomo. And the mayordomo is an elected position; they have the responsibility of regulating the water. So the water for some families may flow on Monday for three hours. So on Monday at 10 o’clock in the morning, you lift your head gate and you let the water flow for three hours, and then at one o’clock you put the head gate down and you’re done till the next Monday. If you water on a day that’s outside your permission, you will lose your watering privileges for the season. And in a place like here we were at 6% humidity last week.

[00:21:42] Beth: Wow.

[00:21:43] Chef Mica Chavez: A place like here you’re done. So the Spanish brought weaving with them. There’s a little sanctuary about 35 miles northeast of Santa Fe called Chimayo, and it’s a valley. And this valley when the Spanish got here, they found Puebloan people living out there. It’s along this beautiful stream. It’s green. It is so incredibly beautiful, that valley. But they brought sheep and they started raising sheep and shearing the sheep and making wool. And there are still weavers out in the Chimayo Valley. So how that affected other cultures here, the Navajo are master sheep producers. The Navajo Nation raises sheep. They call them the churro sheep. They came over with the Spanish. And during the summer, you take your sheep up to the high pastures in the mountains. During the winter, you bring them back down. They shear, they card, they dye, they spin the wool, and they make rugs. Navajo weavers are some of the best weavers in the world. Their rugs are beautiful. So all throughout, New Mexico and other states in the Southwest, you’re going to see intermingling of cultures. And depending on what pueblo a given town is close to, their Spanish may be influenced by the language spoken at that pueblo. And there are still nine native languages spoken in New Mexico outside of English and Spanish.

[00:23:20] Beth: It’s so hard for me to bridge the gap between this period of time and these cultures where food is life, it is spirituality, it is related to social status and who you feel bonded to today where we have through governmental policy and industry really focused on food that is abundant and inexpensive and safe to eat by some definition, but it just feels like such a broad gap. And I’m wondering how you think about that gap and what you think took us from that place where, as you said, corn is part of faith tradition. And even the Spanish with the importance of what is communion made of? Like, how did we get to this place where our food is so processed, so mass-produced, and it feels so compartmentalized from the rest of life?

[00:24:20] Chef Mica Chavez: A lot of this had to do with mechanization and World War II. And whenever you start to get bumps in population, you get bumps people need more food. As humans, we have created the kind of food that works for our mechanization. So example, corn is one stalk with two ears. Corn fields are consistently flat. Each plant looks exactly the same. We’ve made it work for the machines that we use to harvest our food, or harvest our plants. And in the ‘50s, women spent an hour and 15 minutes making dinner every day. How long do people spend making dinner now?

[00:25:03] Beth: Yeah.

[00:25:04] Chef Mica Chavez: And I’m guilty of this, and I don’t know what the answer is in terms of bringing it back to a more locavore movement. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t have that answer. All I can do is what I do as an individual. And how do I see this? I shop the perimeter of my grocery store. I very infrequently go in the middle unless I’m looking for something like flour, sugar, or coffee. And going back to there are only a few corporations that are producing what we eat. To me, that’s scary. It’s such a big issue. Food should not be a luxury. Eating well should not be a luxury. If you are very wealthy or very poor, you eat well. Very poor, because you probably have a garden, or you’re living on a farm and you’re raising what you eat, and you’re shooting your cow and butchering it out in the field and bringing in that fresh meat for your family. That’s how we did it 150, 200 years ago, and we’ve gotten away from that. Do I think everybody should go back to that? Absolutely not. It’s not possible. During World War II, victory gardens were a thing. During COVID, people started gardening again. Plant a tomato. Develop a relationship with a plant. Watch that plant grow. That’s what I’d suggest. And when I teach sixth and seventh-grade history, and I always try to incorporate a little bit of gardening in my history class. So for when we cover the Mediterranean, I give each kid wheat and peas, because that’s what they grew there. When we do the New World, I do corn, beans, and squash. When we do Asia, I do rice and soybeans. We all had a grain and a legume that we depended upon to keep us healthy. And am I suggesting everybody be vegetarian? Absolutely not. Starting with myself, it ain’t happening. But maybe eating less meat.

[00:26:49] Beth: Yeah.

[00:26:50] Chef Mica Chavez: Maybe focusing on rather than buying two or three nights worth of an animal protein, maybe buy one night and buy a local animal protein. There are little things you can do that don’t cost much that can maybe help in a small way to help support local farmers.

[00:27:10] Beth: Mechanization is a really helpful word. Just thinking about the corn as the one stalk with the two ears and the way a machine can process that field, versus the three sisters planting method, where you have the bean actually winding around that stalk of corn and the squash growing out over the soil. I feel like a lot of people have heard of the three sisters, but don’t really understand why the three sisters worked so well together from an agricultural perspective.

[00:27:39] Chef Mica Chavez: Absolutely. And companion planting is done with lots of different plants all the time around the world. This is just one of the better examples that pertains to the Southwest. Corn grows into stalk, and beans need something to wrap around as they grow. It supports them. Beans are also nitrogen fixers, and so they pull nitrogen out of the air and they transfer it into the soil, and that helps all of the plants grow better. Squash has really big leaves, and squash has really pokey stems. If you reach into a squash plant, you’re going to pull out your arm and it’s going to be scratched. That keeps rabbits and deer away. It also shades the root ball. And then the way the leaf is, it faces down, and then there’s a channel down the middle of the stem. So the water can run down the leaf, down the stem, and it ends up right at the root ball where it does the most good. And as a gardener, I’m a rabid gardener, here’s what I have found over the years. When I do companion planting, everything does better. So for example, I plant tomato plants with basil and garlic. The pests that like tomatoes don’t like basil and don’t like garlic. When I plant carrots, I plant onions because the little bugs that eat the carrot greens don’t like onions. So my garden is planted using companion planting. I plant peas near where I plant tomatoes because peas are also nitrogen fixers. And peas they’re starting to die out right now, and the tomatoes are just coming in. So I’ve got all that nitrogen waiting in the soil for those tomatoes, which are heavy feeders, and the peas are going to start to fall down as the tomatoes start to go up.

[00:29:22] Beth: Yeah.

[00:29:23] Chef Mica Chavez: So that has worked. But with corn, beans, and squash, you get less pests, all of the plants are healthier, and which means you get better yield out of each plant. But the kind of uniformity that you see in commercial agriculture, that kind of uniformity doesn’t exist in nature. It just doesn’t.

[00:29:41] Beth: Yeah, I can attest. I planted basil in between my tomato plants for the first time this year. I’m amazed already at how different my garden looks, how much healthier my tomato plants look. It’s wild to see the difference that makes in it. And it helps me understand when you read about the importance of the three sisters, the spirituality attached to that, like the art that was created around it I get it. Because it is visually stunning to see what a difference it makes just to have those plants working harmoniously together. And just so divorced from an agricultural policy that focuses on one commodity at a time, and subsidizing particular commodities instead of thinking through what is the overall output? What are we making at the end of the day for everyone, and then how is that contributing back to what we’re able to do next year?

[00:30:37] Chef Mica Chavez: And I think the lesson that we should have learned from the Irish potato famine that seems completely lost on our decision-makers is diversity is what’s going to keep us strong.

[00:30:47] Beth: Yeah.

[00:30:48] Chef Mica Chavez: Diversity is what’s going to help keep our plants strong. And I fear that probably in our lifetimes we are going to see food shortages because we are going to chemical ourselves into a mess that we are not going to be able to chemical our way out of. And we’re seeing algae blooms in places like the Gulf of Mexico. We’re seeing it here in local rivers, and streams and lakes because nitrogen-heavy fertilizers wash into bodies of water. And when you don’t have fresh water coming in and sunlight, you get algae, and where you get algae, you get dead fish, and you get dead water basically because the sunlight can’t penetrate through. So we’re creating issues that we are not going to be able to fix. And I hate to sound gloom and doom because I feel like there’s enough of that already, and I feel like there are enough organizations globally that are working toward more sustainable growing methods and keeping diversity alive. Unfortunately, we’re not getting that in the US and not on a big scale. And I think that’s really scary.

[00:31:57] Beth: What do you think about precision farming? I’ve been trying to learn about the way that some European countries in particular are using artificial intelligence to monitor the temperature of the soil and the amount of water exactly that plants need and doing these vertical gardens. I think it’s all really interesting, and then a part of it just aches for me a little bit because it feels very soulless. So I’d love to know what someone like you who thinks about food all the time, how you view that.

[00:32:29] Chef Mica Chavez: It’s not just food I think about. I think about plants all the time.

[00:32:32] Beth: Yeah.

[00:32:33] Chef Mica Chavez: I’m a rabid gardener, and I compost. I constantly drive around rotting vegetables. I’ve got to go out and turn my compost in a little while. Science is a tool, and I believe that we should use these tools for the greater good. Do I want to be the one that defines greater good? Absolutely not. That’s for somebody a whole lot smarter than me. If it is helping farmers growers produce food that’s going to keep this planet fed, sure, okay. But when you talk about AI, you’re talking about data centers. And when you talk about data centers, you talk about massive uses of water and electricity, and how are we generating that electricity? Are we using coal? Are we using water? What are we using to generate that electricity? I tend to take it a step further, and ask where are we getting the power? Where are we getting the water? Are we getting this from sustainably generated sources? Awesome. Use it. Are we getting this from sources that are going to kill us eventually? If that’s the case, then maybe we use less of that.

[00:33:34] Beth: Yeah.

[00:33:36] Chef Mica Chavez: We didn’t have this 500 years ago. And what I have realized recently is between 500 years ago and 5,000 years ago, life didn’t really change that much. Our methods of transportation were the same. Our methods of growing food were the same. Our methods of movement of people were pretty much the same. But from 500 years to now, look at how fast life has moved and how much and how fast our world is changing, and the changes just seem to be exponentially faster. I don’t know if it’s good or not. I don’t know. I think an end of the summer tomato grown in my yard from my compost, I know where that dirt came from, doesn’t taste anything like the tomatoes I buy at the store.

[00:34:21] Beth: Yeah. I hope that these advancements that we make in the way that we understand soil composition and energy production and the taste of food. I hope all of those factors converge in a positive way. In the meantime, another thing I keep thinking about from your cooking class is just having respect for the ingredients and really valuing what’s in front of you. I keep thinking every time because I eat a lot of corn, about you telling me to get the juice out of the corn by flipping my knife over and scraping the cob extracts so much more flavor, and it’s incredible. It’s incredible. So I wonder what other ways you think we can practice having that kind of respect for the ingredients and loving the food back that way?

[00:35:21] Chef Mica Chavez: I think a lot of this just goes back to care and concern overall. We just need to slow down.

[00:35:28] Beth: Yeah.

[00:35:29] Chef Mica Chavez: Put your phone down.

[00:35:30] Beth: I need to slow down.

[00:35:31] Chef Mica Chavez: I am so guilty of this. Put your phone down. Pay attention to what you’re doing. And food is more than just something that we eat. Food needs to be enjoyed and celebrated. And in the US, most of us have enough to eat. And for that I am extremely grateful because I know that is not the case in other places. And I’ve been fortunate to travel some and look forward to traveling a whole lot more. And every time I go to a country where things aren’t as good as what I have here, I’m grateful to come home to what I’ve got. And that gives me the underlying, and I guess obvious respect for my ingredients and my environment because so many people have so much less than what I do. And I am so grateful for everything I’ve got and every opportunity.

[00:36:19] Beth: Me too. Thank you so much for walking us through this. As we wrap up, Sarah and I always ask an Outside of Politics question. This isn’t really outside of food; it’s still in food, but I’m curious, what do you think we all ought to cook this summer, just to do that slowing down and appreciating what we have?

[00:36:37] Chef Mica Chavez: You know what? Almost every place in this country has some kind of seasonal fruit that we get during the summer, like Rainier cherries, or peaches, or apples, or I don’t know, whatever the fruit happens to be. Make a pie. Go make a pie. Sit down, find a recipe, make a pie. Who doesn’t love apple pie, cherry pie, blueberry pie, peach pie, pecan pie? And we could take this on a run. We could be like turning into the Forrest Gump of pies.

[00:37:09] Beth: Yes. I do love a pie. I love trying to make a pie crust too. I think it is surprisingly challenging to make it as pretty as I want, and surprisingly easy to make it taste as good as I want. I like that mix of things.

[00:37:25] Chef Mica Chavez: I did some pastry classes in France a few years ago, and my big takeaway from that was French butter, European butter.

[00:37:31] Beth: Okay.

[00:37:32] Chef Mica Chavez: American butter tends to run much lower in butterfat. And what the cows eat makes a huge difference. So the butter that I have found that I use the most domestically is Kerrygold, the Kerry gold unsalted butter. If you put that up against a Land O’Lakes, or your store butter, or whatever else, the color is so much more vibrant, and you can smell the butter. It’s got an aroma to it. It smells good. It smells like food.

[00:37:59] Beth: Yeah. It smells like food.

[00:38:01] Chef Mica Chavez: Buy ingredients, make food. Don’t buy food.

[00:38:04] Beth: Yeah. So European butter. Anything else that will help us with our pie crusts? I’m on a selfish quest now.

[00:38:11] Chef Mica Chavez: Okay. So when you make your pie crust, measure out your flour. Flour, sugar, probably maybe a little bit of baking soda or baking powder. You want to use very cold butter. Cut it into small pieces. Don’t let it melt. So when I would do my pie crust, I used to do it with my fingers, and what this woman in France was doing it with two forks. I’ve never done it with forks. I know that the old ladies in the South do it with the forks. I have never done it with the forks, so I did it like that and it didn’t melt the butter.

[00:38:40] Beth: Yeah.

[00:38:42] Chef Mica Chavez: And I used really cold water, ice water, and then put it in there. Held the ice, dumped the water in, and then just used barely enough water to bring it together. But you got to keep everything really cold, and your pie crust will come out a whole lot better.

[00:38:58] Beth: Okay. I’m inspired to go make a pie. Thank you very much.

[00:39:00] Chef Mica Chavez:  All right. You have my information. You just let me know how it comes out.

[00:39:04] Beth: I will, thank you. This was a lot of fun. And I think there’s just so much wisdom to take from food, and the way that food grows, and the way that food has been prepared, and just how delicious the food in the United States is because we have negotiated, and melded, and taken all the good that everyone’s brought to our literal table.

[00:39:25] Chef Mica Chavez: I completely believe that’s true. And wherever people landed, they brought their food traditions with them, and as a nation of immigrants, I’m really grateful for every single group of people that brought that with them because we are better for it. Our diet is better for it.

[00:39:39] Beth: Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you to Amiga Chavez for her time and sharing her expertise and her passion with us. I will be back here with you on Friday with Lauren Pinkston, who is an independent candidate for governor in Tennessee. I’ve already heard from many Tennesseans that you are really excited to hear from Lauren on our show, so we’ll be back with you for that on Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Speaking of delights, we had to share this note from Alana:

Hi Sarah and Beth,

I just wanted to thank you so much for the care and attention you’re bringing to America 250. I live in Fairfax, VA, and the first year of the 2nd Trump administration was hard here. We could not escape the reality of what DOGE and the executive was doing to its own branch of government. In the wake of everything, we housed a coworker of my husband while he was figuring out how to continue remote work for the Navy (a pre-COVID arrangement), had most of our friends dealing with the shutdown and lack of funding, and I watched a former office and coworkers of mine at DOE (Wind Technology) be gutted and practically erased. I didn’t start 2026 with any warm and fuzzy feelings about celebrating America 250.

However, you have done such a great job reminding me that this is a moment in time, and I shouldn’t let the present day president and Congress dictate how I honor this country’s history. It started slow, we took our kids downtown Memorial Day weekend to go to the Smithsonian American History museum. We’ve slowly been introducing books to the kids (5 and 8) around the founding of the country whenever we go to the library. And, on a whim, inspired by your content, we took the kids up to Philadelphia this weekend. What an amazing trip! While the kids will likely remember running in the spray ground we found along Benjamin Franklin Parkway as the #1 highlight, I will remember our time in Independence Hall - with the most amazing NPS guide talking about the real human characteristics of the men who came to the 2nd Constitutional Convention and how some were ready for change and some were reluctant to even be there (new perspective on George Washington for me!) - our time at Betsy Ross’ house’s courtyard where we listened to stories of women of the Revolution, and finding delight in the scavenger hunt and stories in the “Once Upon a Nation” story benches throughout the Old City with our kids. Philly really does historical-tourism well! ( https://historicphiladelphia.org/once-upon-a-nation/)

There were so many other great things about Philly (I also soaked in World Cup fever EVERYWHERE as Sarah did), but I’m just so thankful for the inspiration you provided me to find a way that felt really good to learn, share with the kids, and honor the great experiment that this country is.

I’m not totally sure how we’re going to celebrate the 4th of July (you couldn’t pay me to be with the throngs of people on the Mall), but probably with neighbors doing a potluck. But, thanks to you both, I’m thinking about ways to keep honoring this country in a way that feels true to where I am, whether that’s historical-tourism (Jamestown, Boston, and of course in our own backyard), or teaching history through Hamilton (the musical of course). I also told my kids about Beth’s plays, and while I was met with immediate enthusiasm, I got the follow-up of “but we don’t have costumes!” We’ll get there.

Thanks again for all you do. I really appreciate it.

All my best,

Alana

Listener since 2015, subscriber since before Substack

We appreciate Alana and all of you and your celebrations more than we can say!

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Babbel

Learn a new language and get up to 60% off your subscription at Babbel.com/PANTSUITNEWSLETTER

One More Way to Celebrate: America’s Potluck

If you’re still looking for ways to observe America250, there’s plenty of time and opportunity. We love the idea of gathering for America’s Potluck on July 5. There’s no wrong way to participate. Just get together with a friend or two or twenty and share something—a coffee, a cobbler, whatever makes you happy! You can pin your potluck to show that people all over the country are building connections and community.

My favorite potluck dish is a family summer staple: this strawberry pretzel jello “salad” (why, yes, I am from the midwest). Share your favorite potluck recipe in the comments so we can all be inspired on July 5th.

Thanks again for celebrating with us! Please keep those pics and party reports coming!

Subscribe now

Twelve colonies for, zero against — South Carolina and Pennsylvania both swung overnight.

Pennsylvania is the one to sit with. It came down to absence: Mr. Dickinson and his ally Robert Morris deliberately stayed …

Read more

Well, today, part of Sarah’s wish has been granted. Ezra Klein is here to talk with us about where America sits at this anniversary, and what he’s thinking about as he looks ahead. We hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as we enjoyed having it. -Beth

P.S. Just putting into the universe that I’d still very much like to talk to French president Emmanuel Macron. Just sayin’.

Topics Discussed

• The vision of abundance and why the future is so hard to imagine

• Attention as a collective resource — and why ours is deranged

• Freedom as choice vs. freedom as self-mastery

• Virtue, vice, and the illiberal moment

• Institutional trust, corruption, and the education debate

• Natalism, AI, and whether we're living through an aberration

• Outside of Politics: which founder would make the best podcast guest

Episode Resources

• Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9781668023488
• Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein
https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9781476700366
• The Lost History of Liberalism by Helena Rosenblatt
https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9780691203966
• The Pursuit of Happiness by Jeffrey Rosen https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9781668002483
• The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson
https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9781250231321
• "Now Is a Time of Monsters" by Ezra Klein, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/opinion/ai-climate-change-low-birth-rates.html?eafs_enabled=false

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:09] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Our guest today is a New York Times opinion columnist, author of Why We’re Polarized, and co-author with Derek Thompson of Abundance, and the host of The Ezra Klein Show. Ezra Klein is here to talk with us about where America sits at this 250th anniversary, and how we might look ahead toward a more perfect future. This episode is mostly forward-looking, but Ezra does stick around for Outside of Politics to tell us which of the founders he would be most interested in hosting on his podcast. It’s

[00:00:41] Sarah: It’s so great, guys. I’m so excited for you to listen episode. Okay. Before we share this incredible conversation, we wanted to tell you our plans for the next six weeks. Long-term listeners frequently talk about us as their political therapist or emotional support podcast, and that is what we want to be, and we want everyone who listens to be able to pay attention to news and politics sustainably over a lifetime, and that requires taking breaks. So for the next six weeks, we’ll still be here with you, but we’re softening the pace a bit. You’ll see new episodes of Pantsuit Politics right here in the free feed, and on our premium feed, you’ll see two new episodes each week, something like an episode of More to Say and a Good News Brief. But we are taking some time off, and we’ve staggered the time off. Beth will be here with you the next two weeks as I start my vacation. We’ll overlap a bit in our vacations, and then I’ll be here as Beth wraps up her time away into early August. You don’t need to memorize the schedule. It doesn’t matter. We just want you to know what to expect, and that you’ll have some time, particularly on Substack, to catch up if you’d like to soften your listening pace, and we will be back with you in mid-August as school begins for many of us across the country.

[00:01:54] Beth: Up next, here’s Ezra Klein. Ezra, we’re so happy to have you on Pantsuit Politics. Thank you for being here.

[00:02:09] Ezra Klein: I’m so glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:11] Sarah: See, you’re on a first-name basis here at Pantsuit Politics.

[00:02:16] Ezra Klein: I feel like podcasts are all a first-name basis.

[00:02:18] Sarah: Yeah, for sure.

[00:02:18] Beth: Yeah. It’s the nicest part of doing it.

[00:02:20] Sarah: I’ll remember that when I go to Joe Rogan and be like, “Hey, Joe. What’s up, buddy?”

[00:02:23] Ezra Klein: Wouldn’t it be weird to go and say, “Hey, Mr. Rogan”? He wouldn’t know what to do with that.

[00:02:28] Beth: That’s true.

[00:02:29] Ezra Klein: That’s his dad.

[00:02:30] Sarah: He teaches at the local high school.

[00:02:33] Beth: When we were thinking about what to do for July 4th on this 250th anniversary of America, we wanted to talk with you because we really liked the way that Abundance opened, with this super compelling, rich, detailed vision of what the future could look like. So as you have lived with that vision out in the world, I wonder if there are parts of it that jump out at you as distinctly American, or if there are obstacles to that vision that jump out at you as distinctly American.

[00:03:04] Ezra Klein: Ooh, what an interesting question. Okay. So for people who haven’t read the book, but it’s available wherever your books, e-books, and audiobooks are sold.

[00:03:11] Sarah:  No one in our audience? What are you talking about.

[00:03:14] Ezra Klein: It begins with a little vignette that is imagining 2050 and imagining an abundance of things that some of them we could have right now and don’t. Clean energy for a lot of people, clean drinking water. Some of them that we don’t yet have but could. Certain kinds of medications or advanced forms of energy four-day work week. And it’s saying, look, there is so much we could solve now if we arranged both the material and the genius and the will of our society to do it and to build it. So many of our scarcities, housing, energy public infrastructure, are chosen that we could live somewhere really different. It’s interesting that when I think about it now, actually, those first few pages of the book are the ones that feel the furthest from me of everything we do in the book.

[00:04:00] Sarah: Wow.

[00:04:00] Ezra Klein: And the reason is that, that’s not a full vision of the future, of course. It’s not a vision of how we’ll relate to each other, our families, what our spirits will be like. It’s a vision of plenty, right? Of material plenty. And material plenty that is helped along by advances in technology. And I think that AI specifically has made the relationship between technology and the left, however you want to define the left, much more complicated than it was even then. We were writing that book at a time when green energy was the big technology most of us were talking about. AI was beginning to build. And so I think easier for people to see the way technological advances could create a better world, right? Electric vehicles are better. You don’t breathe in combustion in the way that you do for combustion engine vehicles. But now with AI and the sort of mistrust of the people running it and the concentrations of wealth and power, even though AI could do great good for the world I think people sense that it might harm them, has made it really hard to say that technology can be a force for progress, a force for justice, a force for distributional equity. And so that part of the book was trying to get people to imagine a future that they liked a lot better than the present, but that was quite different than the present. That’s the part of it that I think is actually going worst. Other parts of the book about how to build more housing, like that’s all... we’re doing that stuff. But the reknitting a relationship between the left and technology as a force for social progress has been harder.

[00:05:26] Sarah: I think peering into the future is always so fraught. I have great admiration for futurists. I think it’s a very difficult job. And because so many of the problems, I can tell myself intellectually even with AI and the reaction to it, the future problem I’m obsessed with is the birth rate. Me and Elon out here just stressing the birth rate constantly. Left

[00:05:44] Ezra Klein: Left natalist.

[00:05:45] Sarah: I know.

[00:05:46] Ezra Klein: Close to my heart. We should talk about that. I never meet left natalists.

[00:05:49] Sarah: Listen, I am concerned. I am very concerned, but then I talk myself down. My new favorite phrase is the sleepwalker bias. We’re not going to sleepwalk into some AI dystopia. We’re not going to sleepwalk into this population problem. So you have to peer into the future, and you want to peer into the future with the problems we’ve already identified and the solutions that might work. But I have to tell myself that’s not how it’s going to go, that things will adapt and change and we will shift culturally. What I worry about with both of those problems, the AI, the birth rate, and it’s a problem you have been talking about with polarization, we have been talking about since we started 10 years ago, is this sense that sometimes if you scratch at all of these, you get to this conflict between the individual and society and institutions, societal institutions. You have distrust in societal institutions because people feel locked out of the institutions, but people don’t participate in the institutions because they no longer trust them, and then we’re in this circle of individualism bumping up against this need for sort of societal purpose, especially if we’re trying to adapt and change to these problems as they show up. How are you thinking about that? Abundance isn’t your first book. You’ve been thinking about this conflict between individualism and societal distrust as we attempt to peer into the future with AI and birth rates and all of that.

[00:07:15] Ezra Klein: Ooh, there’s so many rich directions to go on that question. I like that one. Here has been the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about how to write about and how to make into a kind of deeper inquiry. I think beneath everything you just talked about, the relationship between individuals and institutions, between individuals and each other, between the individual and society, is attention. And as much as we talk about this now, we still do not talk about it enough or have it theorized correctly. So your life is simply the total of things you pay attention to. What you are not attending to is not part of the conscious experience of your life. Now, attention here is meant widely, right? When you read a news story, you’re paying attention to that story, so it becomes part of your life. The same is true for a society. Society is shaped by what it pays attention to and the way it pays attention to it and what it doesn’t pay attention to. And attention is somehow too small of a word, but it’s the only one I have, so forgive me. And I think our attention is deranged. I think our attention as individuals and as a collective-- I believe in attention as a collective social resource, such that it is subject to tragedies of the common problems and can be fracked and overused, and everybody wants our attention, so they’re all competing with each other for it, so they get louder and louder. Going back to my first book, Why We’re Polarized, which has a lot on how the media was changing and what was happening on Twitter and algorithmic media. From there, we went away from social media to algorithmic media. That had started by then, but was not as fully flowered as it is now. I always find it amazing when you look at these court documents from META lawsuits that it’s like a couple percentage points. I think it’s seven to fifteen percent, something there, of the time people spend on Instagram is looking at things from friends and family. It’s not social media anymore. It is algorithmic media. The algorithm is not on your side. It does not want what is best for you. And Elon Musk owns X and has warped it in favor of his agenda. And I think we are being collectively deranged. And so what we attend to is really weirdly warped. And in a world where it’s warped, then our sense of society, of ourselves, of each other is going to be warped. People sometimes will do this thing where they say, “Twitter, it’s not real life.” It’s not real life. It’s not. If I thought Twitter was real life, I would do my show very differently. I do not think you can do a good show looking at Twitter and Blue Sky and Threads as barometers.

[00:09:44] Sarah: I try not to panic when you show back up there. I’m like, “Oh, no, something has really hit the fan if Ezra’s back on X.”

[00:09:51] Ezra Klein: But it has to, right? If you believe what I believe, which is that these are places that are politically deranging us, you can’t expect to do work you believe in and never make them mad.

[00:10:01] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:10:01] Ezra Klein: That’s not going to be good work. So it’s not that I try to make people mad; I try to be conciliatory and open-hearted, but I can’t be afraid of making them mad. Anyway, to the broader point, it’s all to say that I think beneath what you’re inquiring about there is this question of how do we know about the world outside of us? Everything in that world is mediated. Like from our senses at the individual level. Like sound is vibrations and airwaves that then gets converted into electrical impulses in my brain, all the way to what is in New York Times, it’s a mediation project, right? What is Twitter? Mediation. What is TV? Mediation. And if the world is mediated for you poorly and in a way that is supposed to make you angry at each other, that always brings your attention to the worst things and the worst people and the loudest people, then what is going to happen to your society over time? It’s going to derange in that same way, and that, I think, is what is happening. And it’s not the only thing happening, and it doesn’t mean it will only go one way. But that’s what that question makes me think about.

[00:11:04] Beth: I wonder if on some level that is the crux of the resistance to technology in helping us achieve a more materially abundant future. So my attention hero, the person I would most like to be like in terms of how I train my attention, is my dad. And that’s true about my dad, I think in large part, because he has spent most of his life as a farmer. He’s done other things. He’s been a county judge executive, he’s been a loan officer, but what he likes is to be out on the land alone with God, his sense of the universe, what he thinks is meaningful doing work with his hands that he can see. And it has made him just fundamentally kind and oriented to what is important. He doesn’t lose his way in terms of his priorities.

[00:11:55] Sarah: The opposite of deranged.

[00:11:57] Beth: Yeah. He is the opposite of deranged.

[00:11:59] Ezra Klein: Ranged.

[00:11:59] Sarah: Yeah, ranged.

[00:12:00] Beth: And I’ve thought so much about this because I’m really interested in precision farming. That’s part of the vision that you all mention at the beginning of Abundance. And I have learned a lot about Food Valley and the way the Netherlands is just creating so much abundance of food in clean ways, in predictable ways that could reduce the suffering of a lot of people. That is a completely different job than the job that my dad has done his entire life, and the attention at the root of it becomes a little more deranged, I think, right? It is about control and monitoring instead of creation and hope and trust and faith, and many of the things that are why he loves to farm. So I wonder if on some level, even if we could solve the social media side of it or the algorithmic media side of it, if people do have on this gut level a sense that I am just going to matter less even if they’re telling me-- whoever they are-- in this future I could be more comfortable.

[00:13:07] Ezra Klein: I guess it’s worth saying that an even modestly sane human organization on the scale of a country like the United States of America is a historically rare and unlikely thing. And we have not managed it at high levels of sanity and ethical practice for very long, or for very long periods, even inside of that maybe post-Civil Rights Act era. And which is only to say that something about what you’re saying about your father, one thing it makes me think about. There’s an old view that it is more virtuous to do certain kinds of work than others, right? Jefferson had this view. You could find it in the Greeks, right? That the small farmer is going to be a more ethical person than, say, the factory worker. They’re going to be imbued with the qualities of self-governance that a citizen needs. You can find a lot of this in Michael Sandel’s book, which is a really worthwhile book, Democracy and Its Discontents. But it wasn’t really true. We moved from farming as the dominant occupation to factories and other forms of more mechanized, mediated, alienating labor, and still had an amazing twentieth century as a country. Not obviously without its horrors, but with a tremendous amount of progress inside of it. And that progress came out of unionized factories and other places. Which is only to say that even if you have work that I think can be very sane-making, the way your world is mediated to you and who you end up believing can shift that really profoundly. Your father sounds amazing. At the same time, I’ve met many farmers whose sort of politics or sense of the world struck me as less admirable. And I’ve met many people of every profession. I’ve not found the profession that keeps you safe because in the end we have this weird question of what attracts what we’re thinking, what attracts our attention, and then who do we trust? And I do think the core question in any kind of very complex society is: who do you trust? And one of the things it sounds like to me when you talk about your father is not just that he’s a farmer, but he’s probably the person other people trusted. When you talk about some of those civic functions that he stepped into, he was probably the person other people thought he’s probably done the work. I’ll listen to him. And that’s what our representatives are supposed to be. That’s the bedrock of our system of government, and yet nobody has been spun off into more derangement than the people who work at the white hot core of politics.

[00:15:50] Sarah: Right.

[00:15:51] Ezra Klein: Being a Republican member of Congress on Elon Musk’s X is not a sane-making enterprise.

[00:15:56] Sarah: No.

[00:15:57] Ezra Klein: And so, I still think there’s something in that where you can work with your hands, you cannot work with your hands, but who do you choose to trust? Who, what? Like the newspaper, I don’t know what nobody said, and I’m not somebody who primarily reads the news on paper, I wish I were, but it was a saner technology than algorithmic media is. And one reason is it that I think it holds your attention and then it lets you release it to think. Like I was thinking about this. I read books on paper now again. I moved back off of Kindle a while ago and I really try to not read on screens. I print things out because on the screen it doesn’t release my attention to think about the thing I just read. I go check messages or whatever when I have a second of attentional drift, as opposed to like looking up and like finding myself internal. And I’m not saying there’s any one way to do it. Plenty of people read a lot of books and are crazy, and it’s not like the Nazis were illiterate or something. I don’t have the formula, but I don’t even think it’s a profession. There’s got to be something about what institutions we are tied to and what responsibility those institutions feel to be decent actors, to say something more than when they’re speaking to Mr. Rogan after Donald Trump’s second election. All that moderation we did was bullshit. We’re back in a free speech era where anything goes. To have some higher social sense of yourself than to just flip with political winds like that.

[00:17:24] Sarah: I don’t want to alarm you guys, but I think I maybe fixed it over the course of both of your answers and questions. When you were talking about attention-- and we have been thinking about this. Before we started recording, we talked about podcast secret bingo card. And I think on both of our secret bingo cards, if you’re a listener to both of our podcasts, is a word you just said, which is virtuous. We have also been talking about vice and virtue. I think it was a guest on your show that started talking about vices again with gambling and porn and marijuana, and I was like we have a name for this. I forgot. And it was so helpful to orient myself that way. And when you were talking about attention and then Beth was talking about her dad, I thought, where is the line between attention into purpose. Where on that spectrum do we go from mindless attention into focused purpose? And often it is because we have someone we trust or somewhere we trust which is telling us what to pay attention to and what to very much redirect our attention from. And I don’t think there’s always been an easy answer. Like we have been in this civic vice and virtue conversation all year, and I’m in the middle of Rick Atkinson, who was on our podcast earlier this week’s, The British Are Coming. And there’s this moment where one of the revolutionary colonels is like, “These militiamen don’t have any virtue. They don’t live virtuous lives. We are losing it. We’re all downfall.” And I was like, “Okay, I feel a little better. That makes me feel a little better. We’re not new to this game.” But I do think we are missing... we have everyone screaming for our attention, but not a lot of places where people go and the question is answered: What should I pay attention to? What is my purpose? What makes a good life?

[00:19:07] Ezra Klein: I think that’s right. And yeah, as you say, I’ve been in this inquiry as well. And maybe it’s a good another-- I worry about talking about this because I’ve done a little bit of beginning to try to talk about my thoughts here, and I can feel that they’re not at the place I can make them sufficiently non-theoretical.

[00:19:23] Sarah: This  is a safe space, Ezra. Everyone here loves you.  Don’t worry.

[00:19:28] Ezra Klein: This is a safe space for trying. Our modern definition of freedom is not the definition of freedom we used to have. Our modern definition of freedom is about choice. And our older definition of freedom was about self-mastery. And when you go back to what the founders and the framers were talking about, who had plenty of obviously sins and flaws of their own, freedom for them, the kind of freedom they were talking about did include choice, but it included the recognition that for choices to be wisely applied to be free, you had to fundamentally have shaped yourself in a way that you would not get carried off inside of that sort of more open space. And we all can. I think a lot about being somebody who is free to take heroin and then ends up in addiction is not free.

[00:20:16] Sarah: Right.

[00:20:16] Ezra Klein: The fact that they made that first choice. I watch my kids when they’re on a screen, and we’re not like a fully screen-free household, and if I’m gave them the freedom to choose what they did all the time, I don’t think that would end with them being more free in the way I would understand it. And so when you’re talking about purpose there, which I think is a really important and worthwhile word to bring into this or the citizen or something like that, there is some connection between the way we began to think and the way we were told to think, right? This was a project too. Freedom is being able to buy whatever you want with nobody telling you not to. Freedom is the freedom of the consumer.

[00:20:55] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:20:55] Ezra Klein: Not freedom is something that is a mixture of guaranteed political freedoms and the kind of virtuous self-development to find it. I like this book by Helena Rosenblatt called The Lost History of Liberalism, and one of the things she talks about is that older liberal writers, and I don’t mean hundreds of years ago, they didn’t talk about individualism, they talked about individuality. And that what you were trying to achieve under liberalism, which is a system of sort of individual freedoms and individual rights, was the space and the self-cultivation to find who you were, to self-develop as a full person, to flourish, to fully use your particular God-given gifts and potentialities. And that eventually corroded or was narrowed into not individuality, but this other thing, like individualism, just whatever, you do you.

[00:21:48] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:21:48] Ezra Klein: And just those are very distinctive visions, right? I know people who are individuals. They have cultivated themselves into someone who, even amidst the uniqueness of us all, you can really tell they found who they were and are. And I know people lost in individual choice. And those are very different ways of living.

[00:22:09] Sarah: Yeah. 100%.

[00:22:11] Beth: It seems important to me to arrive at a place where you can talk more about this because I’m thinking about the illiberalism that is flourishing right now as people, I think, recognize that we have a level of choice that is making us less free and certainly less happy. But because illiberalism so often takes the form of constraint that is unimaginable as desirable to people on the left, and that I think is undesirable in the world, it’s hard to have a positive vision of constraint. This is really on my mind today because I do my best creative work when I build a very tight constraint around it. I made an episode this week of what I called Founding Father Karaoke. I imagined the founders at karaoke together, and what songs would they choose, and what does that tell us about them? To make it happen, I needed a frame around it, so I only let myself choose songs from the Lilith Fair playlist. But that’s the thing. I look at Instagram or TikTok where there’s all kinds of choice. There’s no constraint, and what people choose to do is just replicate each other. It’s use the trending audio, use the format that has worked for 1,000. We’re just making the same thing over and over again in this world without constraint. So creatively, I understand constraint as the key to freedom. I don’t know how to share that as a vehicle for policy and culture that makes people more free.

[00:23:43] Ezra Klein: Yeah. Let’s bring this back into raw politics or more real politics. Within what we’re describing as freedoms, you have these two directions freedoms often go, freedoms to and freedoms from. And one of the things that the illiberals are doing that I think has not been popular and has not been good politics for them, has not been good for people, is they’ve been systematically breaking our protections from certain forms of government coercion, due process for the immigrant, that kind of thing, and also allowing in a tremendous amount of just raw corruption. And people see that and they don’t like it. And at the same time, they are not doing much in the way of positive freedoms. You’re not more likely to have healthcare under Donald Trump, right? It is classically a view of American liberals that you’re not going to be very free. Or maybe put it this way; the freedom to sleep under a bridge because you cannot afford a home is not a worthwhile form of freedom. That’s where we see it’s one of the things that got me to write Abundance. We were giving people a lot of freedom to sleep in a tent. What we weren’t giving them the freedom to do was afford a home.

[00:24:48] Sarah: Right.

[00:24:49] Ezra Klein: So the thing about the illiberals, who I’ve spent a lot of time talking to and reading, is they ask some good questions and they come to some shit answers. And in I think taking both sides of that seriously opens a lot of political opportunity. And one weakness, I think, of many liberals is they don’t want to admit that some of the questions are good.

[00:25:13] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:25:14] Ezra Klein: They don’t want to admit that there are things that they weren’t hearing. But the weakness of the illiberals are their answers are terrible. For instance, they like to talk about virtue, but they don’t practice it. They’re led by the least virtuous people imaginable, and they celebrate their lack of virtue. You just cannot be a political movement that is going to try to take the high ground of virtue and decency and be led by Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Doug Wilson. The mistake would be, for instance, if the broad left didn’t recognize that failure as an opportunity and just said, “You guys have embraced the absence of virtue, so we’re going to do the same thing,” as opposed to seeing that as ground they have not captured. But you got to do more than just be decent. Like just being a decent semi-virtuous person does not... it gets you somewhere in politics. I think it’s something people liked about Barack Obama, but it doesn’t get you that far. Corruption is like a good place to start. One thing you are just not going to have is any form of virtuous public sphere when the people in it spend six hours of their day dialing for dollars.

[00:26:22] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:26:22] Ezra Klein: And recognizing that might be a generational campaign to win back the Supreme Court in order to change the laws or the rulings that have made speech so hard to regulate in politics is real. So I think one place to start, going back to something you talked about at the beginning, is just institutional credibility cannot exist in such a corrupt system. Would solving money in politics or really limiting money in politics solve everything? It would not. It really wouldn’t. But it would have, I think, an outsized effect on people’s ability to have some faith in the system. Look, education has been a fairly dropped topic by Democrats. They had a lot of fights over it in the Obama era and then functionally haven’t spoken about it since then. But what we teach our children is something people care a lot about, and is not something the right has very good ideas on right now, and AI has made it something we’re going to need really good ideas on. I would very much urge people to go back to what liberal arts was supposed to be, which was educating people to be a citizen, educating people to be free. That’s the liberal in liberal arts. It’s not that you just read books. It’s you’re supposed to be developing the capacities to be a free person. And being able to guarantee that and spend the money on that and so on, I think there’s a certain amount of security that you need to put into a vision like this I also just think there’s power in recognizing that the sphere is toxic. Something I don’t know that Democrats or liberals have known how to even talk about since Obama, and this Obama in ‘08, is Obama in ‘08 was powered by articulating a sense that many Americans had, not just Democrats, that politics just shouldn’t feel like this. The country shouldn’t feel like this. And the problem was that and it wasn’t for him just Republicans. He talked about the media. Back then it feels so small now. The 24-hour cable news cycle was his big target. The political consultants, the pollsters. But then because he wasn’t able to make politics feel different enough, it feels naive to talk about that.

[00:28:18] Sarah: I’m haunted by your conversation with Chris when you were like, “If you do it, you look like you’re doing an Obama impression.” Haunted by that. Can’t stop thinking about it.

[00:28:26] Ezra Klein: So somebody’s going to have to figure out a way to channel the upset and anger and sense of disgust even some people on the right feel about how politics feels right now without sounding like you’re running a naive rerun of Obama.

[00:28:42] Sarah: Or a bad West Wing episode. Oof.

[00:28:44] Ezra Klein: Or a bad West Wing episode. And so I don’t think that’s just going to be, like, sounding notes of unity. I think it’s closer to maybe Jon Ossoff’s attacks on corruption. Newsom has his issues, but he’s at least talking to people on the other side. But I think you should be running against algorithmic media, against AI for children, against certain forms of modernity that you may not know how to fix, but you may know they’re bad. And knowing something bad is actually the first step in having a conversation about it.

[00:29:24] Sarah: I want to talk about education. We’re deeper in this project than you. I have a senior; that’s my oldest child. Beth has a sophomore. And what I see in public education is some of the unarticulated values of our current form of liberalism, both inside the Democratic Party, but I think adopted more broadly. Which is basically fairness and harm reduction. Individual fairness and individual harm reduction. To the point where the public education system I think this is why people don’t talk about it because it’s so hard. We had Rahm Emanuel on our show. He’s great on education, but you can tell he doesn’t have a kid in the system, because we started talking about ed tech and all these things we live with and he was like, “Oh, yeah.” You could kind of see he didn’t exactly know what we were talking about. Because we’re asking the public school system to do so much all the time. And I struggle with fairness, and I hear it articulated so often around AI, around so many of the issues, public education that we talk about all the time. Now, my youngest son is a Type 1 diabetic. I know you also live with Type 1 diabetes in your life. And it’ll teach you real fast fair has fuck all to do with it. When you can kind of let that go and be like what are we trying to do? What are we trying to do? And I think we’ve lost that in so many institutions, including public education. There was a great piece in The Times several months ago where she was like, “We’re not trying to educate. We’re trying to do everything else but educate to have an informed citizenry.” And so I think that we have some values articulated and unarticulated, but they’re all, like you said, that individualistic understanding instead of not just a self-mastery is freedom, but an institutional mastery. How do we create citizens that can master these institutions, that can fight corruption and be a form of servant leadership, and all these different virtuous visions inside these institutions? Because we’ve been so consumed with what’s fair especially in the housing. Like, how do we build housing when the land has to go somewhere. There is going to be a cost of AI and more housing and all these things. There will be a cost, always. But when you are consumed with individual fairness and harm reduction, you can’t get there. You can’t talk about it.

[00:31:35] Ezra Klein: Yeah, this stuff is tough. I think that one of the things that liberals, leftists, however you want to describe it, it’s a big fight here in New York City, actually where I live now, is about what is your vision of excellence in education? What does it mean to succeed? What is our relationship to kids who maybe it’s not fair. They’re more likely to come from high socioeconomic background, families and all the rest of it. But what is your vision not of just fairness, but achievement?

[00:32:07] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:32:08] Ezra Klein: And how do you think about that? How do you think about when it’s less present than you want it to be? How do you balance those two things against each other? One thing that politics always is, society always is, people always want there to be an answer, and it’s all just balancing. It’s like you’re not going to throw fairness overboard. Fairness is really important. But if you stop balancing, fairness and excellence, the meritocracy is flawed, and it’s better when done well than many of the alternatives.

[00:32:36] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:32:36] Ezra Klein: But right now the education conversation feels ripe to me because I don’t know anybody happy with what we have.

[00:32:43] Sarah: Definitely.

[00:32:44] Ezra Klein: It’s not like where people are is, “This is great,” and at least in public education, I’m not saying there’s no consultants making some money and there are teachers unions and administrators and a million people with vested interest in certain dimensions of the system as it exists. But very few people will tell you it’s going and it’s working well. And whether what that implies is the need for much more experimentation or just a different kind of leadership or... I am interested in how little leadership I see on this issue. It’s not because I’m coming to you and saying “I have the answer to this. I don’t. I will say one thing that worries me that was in what you just said is that I actually worry that we have spent a lot of time teaching kids to master institutions. And you get these kids who grow up, and I run into them all the time in politics. I feel like they are the winners of the organizational races And it does make you very, in a weird way, risk-averse. It makes you achievement-oriented, but risk-averse.

[00:33:47] Sarah: Right.

[00:33:48] Ezra Klein: And it’s a big problem in terms of the kinds of candidates Democrats recruit. You can smell it on them sometimes. There’s something about I understand how we got there, but the degree to which we have forced kids to learn to the test and learn to the application and extracurricular to the... again, it’s another way of taking away people’s individuality with this weird simulacrum. We want you to be an individual, but our kind.

[00:34:12] Sarah: Yeah. They’ll tell you this is a highly individualized systems, and the ed tech and everything, it’s all for the individual kids. Bullshit. That’s what I say.

[00:34:19] Beth: I just don’t think education values pluralism right now in any meaningful respect. Part of the reason that you can have a wonderful liberal arts experience in college is because colleges are all really different from each other. And I don’t hear a lot of professors agonizing over the evidence-based method for how I teach this class. They do some weird stuff in college. You can take some weird classes. You can achieve real excellence because you can also achieve rock bottom failure, and we don’t want any of that in elementary school, middle school, high school. It’s like individualism, but within this extremely narrow, very standardized band. And I think part of the reason not many people want to lead on this is because they feel like they need to have a solution for everyone. For all things, for everyone, that maps on to that fair system that Sarah was talking about.

[00:35:13] Ezra Klein: I think that’s right, and I’m probably maybe even more pessimistic on colleges right now than you are, which I think have not done a good job on pluralism, though are maybe turning around on that. Look, we’re in a period of a lot of fracture And there’s going to be a lot that needs to be built anew if Democrats win in 2028 and take office in 2028. And, or for that matter, in 2032 and 2033. And I do think there’s a interesting set of questions about how whether a party and a movement that have in important and problematic ways be-- It’s become a movement of people who have prospered from society to a large degree as it is. It’s a movement that wins college-educated voters and so in certain ways, it has become insufficiently skeptical. It has become identified with the institutions. And it’s not that it doesn’t want to change them sometimes or isn’t disappointed in them, but often the directionality of that is it wants them to be more of that, of their current nature. This is a place where the Democratic Party didn’t used to be, like, the professional managerial class in the way it is now, and I am obviously part of that class. But it’s like Romney won college voters. We have watched this happen in our lifetimes. It has been a tremendous compositional shift in the parties, and it does change the way they think and they feel. And so you have the right, which is way too anti-institutional, and the left, which is way too pro-institution, and a lot of the demands for reform that come from the left are in the direction of more institutional complexity. More, as you were, saying before risk aversion and harm reduction. And I think it’s a really hard problem for Democrats to be able to channel in a healthier way the profound mistrust people feel in institutions, which is why I think you have to choose places where you’re going to channel it. It’s why I bring up corruption. Look, Abundance is a book about institutional failure. It is a book arguing the Democrats need to publicly take responsibility for having failed to govern in a bunch of very important ways like housing and making it possible to do things as a citizen. And then win credibility by being willing to reform things that they run so that they actually work differently. And so I am very interested in this question of how do you have an institutionally skeptical Democratic Party, an institutionally skeptical liberal movement, as opposed to Democratic Party, a liberal movement? For that matter, even though I don’t think they see themselves this way, often like a DSA side of things that has really absorbed the institution’s view of themselves. It’s just like you really have to be on alert for where that will bring you wrong. And, again, people I’m sure criticize me on this. Everybody’s going to have different views of what this means, but I don’t think you can operate well in an era of institutional mistrust if you really trust institutions. If your big answer to everybody is believe in the science--

[00:38:17] Sarah: Especially if attention is driven by authenticity.

[00:38:19] Ezra Klein: That and attention is probably fundamentally anti-institutional right now. So it’s like I believe in science, but do I think scientific institutions fail? I also think that. As you say, I live with a Type 1 diabetic and also somebody who’s had very complicated medical issues that have not always been well treated, right? And of course, institutions can fail. That doesn’t make them bad, but operating with a felt sense of that failure is sometimes a very different, I think, attitude than you often see on the left, which can sometimes take attacks on the institutions. It can only hear what’s wrong in them. It can empathize with maybe where they come from.

[00:38:57] Beth: I asked my husband to read Abundance because I told him, “I think you’ll like this.” I think it’s fundamentally a book that says, hey, everything’s about cost and benefits. There’s nothing that happens that doesn’t have a cost, so we need to choose better what we’re willing to endure a cost about because there are greater benefits available. I think about this with education. I would love to hear a Democratic candidate say, “You know what, abolishing the Department of Education, shutting that down, not a bad idea. We could do better for students with disabilities through the Department of Justice. We could do better in terms of setting new standards or aspiring for something greater in a different format. This hasn’t worked.” I’m interested in who could just take this and run with it and say, “They have the right question and the wrong answer. Here’s my vision for the answer.” I think the problem is that you stay in protective mode. Like the Department of Education is a great example. I don’t know a lot of people who think it’s achieving greatness, but I know a lot of people who are worried about what happens to students with disabilities if it’s not functioning. How do we envision a future that isn’t costing so much to groups that we are in protective mode around?

[00:40:01] Sarah: Let me piggyback on that because that was what I was going to ask, too. Because I think we get in this situation. When you said we’ve watched this change. I think when you think about the future and you think about a vision for the future, I get stuck in where are we just living through the normal cycles? Where are we just going through the normal rhythms of history? And where are we outside that? My gut tells me AI is a normal cycle of technology. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I haven’t spent enough time in Silicon Valley. The reason, back to the pin we dropped at the beginning, the natalism freaks me all the way out. That is outside the rhythm, particularly of the United States history. We are built on a pattern of growth. But there’s a part of me like the angel on my shoulder can say, we’re entering a new phase of both American history and global history where we’ve learned the cost of growth, and we’re trying to figure a way forward that isn’t built on the back of all that growth. because that does feel outside the normal rhythms for me.

[00:41:04] Ezra Klein: To me they’re both outside the normal rhythms. It’s like I think Trump is outside the normal rhythm. I think we are living in a time of aberration. I wrote a op-ed right at the beginning of Trump’s second term called Now Is the Time of Monsters based on this somewhat mistranslation of a Gramsci quote. Something like, “The old is dying and the new struggles to be born. Now is a time of monsters.”

[00:41:24] Sarah: Oh, I remember it. Also haunted by that one.

[00:41:27] Ezra Klein: And the two things I had on that were AI fertility collapse, and the other ones were climate as I remember it, and Trump. And all of those, I think, are pushing society and will continue to push society not into spaces that have no rhyme in them. We have had other periods in which the structures of technology overturned. There’s no Nazis without the radio. We have had other periods in which demographic change upended society, some that were much more violent and mournful than this one like the Black Death. And we’ve had other periods which technology changed things really dramatically. Whether AI is normal, I think it’s not normal, but you get into this weird question of what is normal. Was the internet normal? Was social media? Is the fact that we now look at our phones and have this black box that is a thing we spend most of our day, is any of  that normal?

[00:42:19] Sarah: Think about how much electricity changed how we functioned.

[00:42:19] Ezra Klein: Yeah. And so you’re just going to be in a navigating a period of really unusual forces. And one of the things I think then you get into is what is your relationship to change? What is your political movement’s relationship to change? And how do you convince people that you understand their fears? More than that, that you share their fears, because I think you should on these things, and also that you can see a different future. I see a lot of sharing people’s fears, and I see only a little bit of envisioning a different future.

[00:43:03] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:43:05] Beth: What would change for you right now if you didn’t believe that these things are aberrations? If you didn’t look at Trump as outside the normal cycle, what would be different?

[00:43:17] Ezra Klein: I don’t think specifically anything. I don’t believe that history is teleological. So what does it mean to say Trump is outside the normal cycle? I’m not saying that he is a unique figure in human history. I’m saying that of American presidents and American political figures, he is a distinctive, disruptive figure who has dynamics that are unusual, that he is not like the eight people who came before him in that job. And, you can come up with your, “I think that there’s a lot of rhyme to the mid-20th century here,” or we can all talk about Andrew Jackson. But the way things played out at other times doesn’t, for me, give you a guarantee it’ll play out that way this time. I think sometimes people take strange amounts of confidence in different cycle of history theories, right? I’ve had people recommend me Samuel Huntington’s book on this and Peter Turchin’s book on this. And sure, maybe there are a lot of different cycles of history people proffer. But one of the lessons of long human history is they can get really fucking bad, and they can be bad for a long time. Or not. You can be amazed at how fast things can change. I spent part of my honeymoon in Vietnam. Like, when you think about what we were doing to that country just a couple of decades before that, I’ve been married a long time now, it’s shocking. So there’s this I think both confidence and fear I have that the boundaries of the possible are wider than we think in either direction. It can get much worse faster, and it can get much better faster. You think about what society was like in, 1940, and you think about where it is in 1960 at least, in America, certainly 1965, 1970, and it’s really very different. I’m not sure the cycles are doing a lot of work for me here because I can look at cycles and say a down cycle could last 100 years. Just depends which cyclical theory we’re talking about here. Are we in a the cycle is the decline of the superpower, and that’s a long irreversible cycle, or the cycle is an elite overproduction cycle or... This is why I’m skeptical, and you don’t see me have a lot of cyclical thinkers on the show because it’s like which cycle when?

[00:45:38] Sarah: What do you hope, though? So we can analyze it, but our kids are going to be older than we are now at the next big America birthday. What do you hope they see and feel and experience?

[00:45:52] Ezra Klein: I’m not sure at this moment I’ll throw the ball that long. Right now what I hope is, which is more near term, is like we’re in a political emergency and a social emergency now. And I am, as of now, not seeing the level of kind of ingenuity and strategic thinking among the people who will need to do it that I wish I was seeing. I’m not necessarily seeing the leadership emerge. And maybe I’m wrong, and maybe it’s all there and we’ll look back in a couple of years and say, “Okay, like that was navigated and somebody built something better out of that.” And history can work in ways you don’t think. But I’m really interested, and it’s why I lit when you were asking some of those initial questions because I think there’s a more fundamental rethinking that has to be done at the moment, so that at the endpoint of it, the people who are going to be the leaders of this will have what to draw on. I’ve been reading a lot of books about the history of liberalism, and I like a lot of them for the first two-thirds, and I’ll get to the last third and I’ll be like, “Oh, you just want to do the thing again.” I feel this way about many of the 2028 Democrats. If you don’t sound fundamentally different right now than you sounded in 2020, on some level I don’t want to hear it. There’s nothing about this period where you have rethought anything fundamental, then you’re somehow experiencing it very differently than I am.

[00:47:22] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:47:22] Ezra Klein: And it’s hard. It’s hard to think clearly and in a far-reaching way when you’re in this kind of constant onrush and onslaught of corruption and emergency and war and ICE deployments. Part of the strategy of authoritarians and certainly of media figures like this, is that they like overwhelm you with stuff.

[00:47:45] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:47:46] Ezra Klein: And they do that in part to make it hard to react.

[00:47:50] Sarah: Yeah. It’s not just the change; it’s the pace of change. That feels outside the normal rhythms.

[00:47:54] Beth: And the detail of it.

[00:47:55] Ezra Klein:  Yeah. And so there’s a kind of constant dynamic. My colleague Masha Gessen has written a lot about this. There’s a constant dynamic with trying to keep you off balance, and so you need people who have an internal balance. I think it’s one reason people have really found themselves drawn to Mamdani, who seems to have a kind of preternatural like calm and confidence to him. Obama was this way at another time in another way.

[00:48:27] Sarah:  I would throw Pope Leo on the pile.

[00:48:29] Ezra Klein: I would throw Pope Leo. I think people are really drawn right now to people who seem like they have a direction they are going.

[00:48:34] Sarah: Yep.

[00:48:35] Ezra Klein: And going in that direction with a kind of clarity and confidence.

[00:48:39] Sarah: I just want to say that we find a lot of balance by listening to your show.

[00:48:43] Ezra Klein: Thank you. I appreciate that.

[00:48:45] Sarah: I personally do. Thank you so much. We don’t ask about books at the end, but we do have a little outside of politics. And we have a fun revolutionary era-themed question for you. If you could have any of the founders on The Ezra Klein Show, who do you think would be the most helpful, useful, interesting?

[00:49:19] Ezra Klein: Ben Franklin.

[00:49:20] Sarah: You know he was obsessed with the birthright. Did you know that? He was obsessed with America’s birthright.

[00:49:24] Ezra Klein: I did not know that about him.

[00:49:25] Sarah: I just read that.

[00:49:27] Ezra Klein: He’s an amazing thinker. Just a fascinating thinker on a million different levels. I just think if you’re looking for a dinner companion, a lot... can we be honest? Founders, many of them are geniuses, many of them also have a much darker side to them, but a lot of them seem insufferable.

[00:49:41] Sarah:  They didn’t Like each other.

[00:49:42] Ezra Klein: They didn’t even like each other. They seem to have had good reason. But Franklin had, it seemed to me, a little bit more of a sense of irony than some of the others. So if I were picking somebody to have on the show, I think Franklin would be a good talker, as we say.

[00:49:54] Sarah: Beth, was he at your karaoke party?

[00:49:56] Beth: He was. Ben Franklin is the original gerontocracy, too. Much older than the rest of these folks but having such a good time. I’m really interested in his daughter, who managed a lot of his letters while he was off gallivanting in Europe and trying to bring the Europeans around to the revolutionaries’ cause. So I would love to hear her perspective on everyone because she was such a spoke for or a hub. A hub is what I’m thinking of for his correspondence. But yes, he was at my karaoke party doing Fiona Apple’s Criminal.

[00:50:23] Sarah: Okay. I like it.

[00:50:25] Beth: Just in response to the way that some of the others in the mix thought his behavior was distasteful.

[00:50:32] Sarah: Well, he was a little slutty, right?

[00:50:34] Beth: Yeah, and I could see him kind of winking at that.

[00:50:36] Sarah: Yeah, I like it.

[00:50:37] Ezra Klein: because you don’t want to have anybody on the show who doesn’t have appetites, right? It’s about containing, but also who’s not trying to restrain them, right? The thing about Franklin is he’s at the same time... And I’m not saying he’s all great or anything. The people who their appetites are restrained because they’re automatons, they’re not interesting. The people who their appetites are unrestrained are terrible.

[00:50:55] Sarah: He was subscribed to the self-mastery.  He’s trying.

[00:50:57] Ezra Klein: Yeah, he’s on my mind because I’ve been reading Jeffrey Rosen’s book The Pursuit of Happiness, which is all about the founders’ understanding of happiness. And so he ends up being a very central figure in that, which is part of why I’m thinking about him and mentioning him.

[00:51:08] Sarah: I just read the section where he was with General Howe trying one more time post-Declaration to reach some sort of compromise, him and John Adams. And the General Howe was basically like you need to keep British men coming here to make America strong.” And he was like, “We have a baby factory. We don’t need you. We have an exploding population.” He was, like, apparently very obsessed with the American birthright. Look at that.

[00:51:31] Ezra Klein: See? There you go.

[00:51:31] Sarah: He’d be so disappointed in us, guys. That’s for another show.

[00:51:34] Ezra Klein:  You’re a Franklinite.

[00:51:37] Sarah: Thank you so much.

[00:51:38] Beth: Thank you so much for spending time with us.

[00:51:39] Sarah: We hope you have, as we say on Pantsuit Politics, the best Fourth of July available to you.

[00:51:45] Ezra Klein: Thank you so much, and I hope the same for you.

[00:51:48] Beth: Many thanks to Ezra Klein and to everyone who’s finding ways to celebrate America 250 with us. We’ve had so much fun with all of you, and the fun will continue. We hope you’ll kick off the next chapter in our history by observing America’s Potluck with your people on July 5th.

[00:52:01] Sarah: And the film club. Don’t forget the film club through July. Norma’s Happy Birthday America Film Club. I’m going to celebrate throughout the month of July. I just want everyone to know.

[00:52:10] Beth:  I think the rest of the year it’s still game. It’s still fair game. Yes.

[00:52:15] Sarah: Yes. I feel this week is very special. I’m excited that we have this very special July 4th episode, but Imma keep celebrating throughout July, just so everybody knows.

[00:52:23] Beth: How you begin the next year is as important as how you observe the anniversary.

[00:52:28] Sarah: That’s exactly right.

[00:52:29] Beth: So I will see you back here next Tuesday. Sarah, have such a good time on your vacation. And all of you have the best weekend available to you.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Subscribe now

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Read more

Congress debated independence for nine hours yesterday, behind closed doors and sealed windows.

In wool. In July. In Philadelphia. It was meant to be a secret, and it is the worst-kept secret in the colonies.

John Dickinson spoke first, and warned that we cannot brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.

He is respected…

Read more

Today, we’re taking that genre back to the 1700s, where Abigail Adams has gathered 55 bickering founders for some good food and good times in an attempt to drag …

Read more

Over one hundred British ships are now anchored off Sandy Hook, with small boats shuttling between them.

Y’all, this is plainly an army preparing to land, and the expected spot is Staten Island — where the locals are not exactly enthusiastic patriots and may well greet the king’s troops with ope…

Read more

Episode Resources

• The British Are Coming — Rick Atkinson (The Revolution Trilogy)

• Leaving MAGA — Rich Logis

• The American Revolution — Ken Burns documentary

• The Pit — HBO Max

• Pachinko — Min Jin Lee

Get more from Pantsuit Politics in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app