Pantsuit Politics Flashback: 2023

Emerging technology and the start of the war in Gaza

Pantsuit Politics is celebrating ten years of podcasting this year!

A lot has happened politically, culturally, and personally in the last ten years. This summer, we’re revisiting each of the years we’ve been podcasting with a special flashback episode. Today, we look back at how emerging technology and the start of the war in Gaza changed the world.

Topics Discussed

• Emerging Technology in 2023

• October 7th and the Start of the War in Gaza

• Outside of Politics: Taylor Swift & Travis Kelce

Thank you so much for listening! We’re currently out for a short summer break. We’ll be bringing you new episodes of Pantsuit Politics on Tuesdays and finishing up our flashback series on Fridays. We’ll have a couple of new More to Say episodes for you each week, but no Good Morning and no spicy bonus episodes. We’ll be back in your ears in real time and on our regular schedule on Monday, August 11. Until then, keep it nuanced, y’all.

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Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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

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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.

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:11] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics. We are here for a special episode of our flashback series. And today we're tackling 2023, which feels about five hot minutes ago. So that should be fun.

Beth [00:00:25] It is harder now to have any unique insight, I think, because it's like didn't this just happen?

Sarah [00:00:31] Well, we stopped 2024, so you better buckle up.

Beth [00:00:34] I know. I'm kind of worried about it, but I am sure that we will uncover interesting things to reflect on here. And just a reminder that these flashback episodes are coming to a close rapidly as is the summer. We will be back to regular programming August 12th. Brand new current event episodes, Tuesdays and Friday, beginning August 12th. I hope that you have enjoyed the summer and a little bit of a downshift, which is hard to say, considering all that happened this summer, but a little. We did our best for you, okay? We did our best and we are excited to get back to normal August 12.

Sarah [00:01:11] Up next, 2023. Okay, Beth, let's tackle the most important headlines of 2023, beginning, of course, with the romance between Taylor and Travis. I'm kidding, but only sort of because it's really the only thing I want to talk about that happened that year.

Beth [00:01:42] It was my favorite part of 2023 for sure.

Sarah [00:01:43] It was impactful! It mattered! Do you understand what I'm saying? Like, it mattered to me personally. Look, here's the truth. When I look back at all these headlines over 2023, I think this was not a five-alarm fire for most of the year and we did not appreciate that enough.

Beth [00:02:04] I had the same reaction. That is not to say that nothing happened. But it's very perspective inducing to walk through year by year, the biggest news stories and then to look at this year and say, well, we got through 2023 okay.

Sarah [00:02:22] I mean, really up till October 7th. That's what I wrote. This year was easy breezy until October 7, which we'll get into. But up into that year, you can see it in our episodes. We were doing episodes on like, I don't know, bigger, softer conversations. I think this is when I had the conversation with Richard Reeves. We talked about with Jennifer Senior about long COVID and friendship. We talked to Hillary this year. You could go back and look at the episodes and every episode wasn't, "Oh my God, this just happened." It was, "What about this bigger question?" You can just see it in the pattern.

Beth [00:02:56] As a team, we decided this year that we would pursue some pet projects. So there were more conversations that just you had or just I had because we were like, you know what, we got some room. Go live your life, pursue your interests. And I did really enjoy that.

Sarah [00:03:10] Now, there were still, obviously, some very big things happening. The war between Russia and Ukraine continued. We had continuing record-breaking heatwaves, wildfires in Canada and Hawaii. We had those two terrible, terrible earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. But overall look back and you're like it wasn't a triage. We talked about triaging in 2021. There was no triaging. It was just like, okay, we're chipping away at these long-term issues. I think honestly-- you tell me if you agree with this. I think in 10 years from now, when we talk about 2023, we will probably only talk about chat GPT and artificial intelligence.

Beth [00:04:02] And I totally agree. As you said that I thought, and we were also stepping on the doorstep of a brand new era.

Sarah [00:04:12] Right, it's like when you go back and you look at the years when the iPhone premiered and that was not the headlines everybody was obsessed with, but that was definitely the most impactful thing that happened.

Beth [00:04:24] There is this part of Mountain Head, the Succession creator’s movie for HBO about tech, where Steve Carell's character is describing how people receive new technology. And I can't remember exactly what the sequence is, but it's basically like people first are like, what? They don't even understand what you've made. And then very soon they get to, oh, cool. And everything's just funny and cool. And that's what it is. And I think that this is the year we had the, oh, cool, about chat GPT, where we got enough about what a large language model is, not to understand it or make meaning of it, but to say, "Huh, that's fun. I'm going to try that. I'm going to make something that I've never been able to make before. I'm to ask it to write me a poem in the style of Beyonce." And it is exactly how we've been lured in with other tech. And I think that we jumped right on the hook in 2023.

Sarah [00:05:25] How I feel about this moment is how I felt when my mother had the sex talk with me. Immediately I thought, I wish I didn't know this. And basically since artificial intelligence has come along, I just have been like, I wish I didn't know this. I wish we could go back to before. I don't want to deal with this, I don't want to think about it, I don't want to read one more thing about P(doom) and whether they're going to take out humanity. I cannot. I know it's impactful. I know it's coming. I knew it was impactful then. Ezra wouldn't let us stop thinking about it. He did like 16 shows in a row about artificial intelligence back in 2023. I would listen to it because I'm a good and faithful servant. But every time I was like I don't want to. I just was screaming. We are just now barely wrapping our heads around social media. We're just now being like, you know what? This mass experiment we ran on our children, it was a bad idea. And now you want us to deal with this? Help!

Beth [00:06:28] In our last flashback episode, you talked about this sense from everyone that we have to win the AI battle with China. And I would like to plant my flag today and say, no, I don't think that we do. I think that have a lot of choices to make, which is why this topic feels very overwhelming to me.

Sarah [00:06:50] Yeah.

Beth [00:06:51] Because we did not make choices around social media. We just rode the wave. We rode the wave of oh cool and we let it take over and we allowed it to condition us and it's still conditioning us and I hate it. Even as I can recognize some good parts of it, some things it's brought into my life, I probably wouldn't have a career without that wave doing this job that I love. But I want to make decisions around AI. And that's a big lift and it feels really daunting, but I do not accept the inevitability narrative. This is coming, somebody's going to have it and so we've got to be the people who have most fully allowed it to take over our lives. No, I want it to be present for scientists to come up with new ways to prevent suffering in the world. There are people for whom these tools can be tools and make a lot of sense. But they don't need the rest of us using them for absolutely everything and surrendering our humanity for them to have those tools and to use them as tools.

Sarah [00:07:58] Something we have not named over the course of this series really is how our relationship with social media changed over the course of the 10 years. But I would think around 2023 was probably critical mass for me, if not maybe 2022, where I was like, I don't want to do this. Somewhere around that time I had this realization that I was living two lives. I was like living one on Instagram and I was one in my real life and I did not want to do that anymore. I just wanted to have one life. And 2024 I had some real realizations. So I'll save that so we have something to talk about with just a little less than a year's hindsight. But I do feel a little bit different and it felt different immediately. The second this got announced, it did feel like we had enough muscle memory from social media to be like, hold up. Already we get studies where people are like, well, this is what happens when a group works with Chat GBT from the beginning.

[00:08:59] This is what happens when a person uses Chat GBP after they've written a first draft. So that seems encouraging to me. That already we're having social scientists be like this is how it changes your thought process, just FYI. That feels slightly encouraging to me. I both think it's going to be impactful and cannot believe that we are trusting the same bozos with the same mentality all over again that we did the first time. Seems kind of crazy to me. This idea of the race to the win and move fast and break things. And we're all like, yeah, you thought leaders really send us down this road again. What the what guys? They didn't steer us so well the first time. The fact that we're letting them roll this out across colleges after the mass experiment we just tried and failed with EdTech is bananas to me, but okay. Sure, why not.

Beth [00:09:57] Even the people who describe it in the most, to them, utopian terms are not describing something that I want. The people who are like we're just going to not need to work anymore. What? We need to work. A lot of our problems come from the fact that we don't have to work to survive the way that we used to. And we're really struggling to make meaning of life and connect with each other and find a sense of purpose without that. Now, I don't want to go back. I really value indoor plumbing and turning on the tap and believing that my water is safe to drink. I appreciate those things. But I don't want to go further down the path of, actually, I'm just kind of floating in this like a hamster in a cage where some invisible hand gives me my food or a wheel to run on because I need to be occupied. No thank you.

Sarah [00:10:48] Y'all were not affected by WALL-E the same way I was. I think about that movie once a week. I'm not playing. Was everybody watching? I was watching. I wasn't taking it in. I was thinking, no, thank you. And it just feels like that's what they're selling us on. And I'm like, I don't want to live in WALL-E. Did y'all watch it? It's no good. It's no good. And that's where we're going with this. At least that's why they're trying to sell us. I don't think people will go willingly into WALL-E. I think people will be out like this. And so there's all this undercurrent I think in 2023 of not just AI, but I think also with the banking crisis and the crypto and the Silicon Valley Bank, and these investments that weren't insured by the FDIC. Crypto is the other threat that we haven't picked up really over the course of this flashback. Because even when you're flashing back, it's hard to pick up these threads of technology, social media, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and see how they're influencing us and playing out and where real critiques are starting to surface and have impact. Even when you're really looking back, it's hard to catch all that.

Beth [00:12:03] Crypto is for me somewhere between a truly world-changing technology, perhaps more than AI and something that could just be a bubble and I can't figure out which one it's going to be. I did not foresee crypto being used to openly bribe the leader of the free world. I just didn't know that that's where we were going. I knew that crypto had the potential to lead to lots of criminal activity being done without being detectable, but I didn't foresee it becoming the most transparent form of bribery that we've ever had.

Sarah [00:12:41] But I think that connects to our January 6th conversation from 2022, which is the belief that nothing matters. Like that cynical take that, of course, they're bribing, of course there's influence. And, look, when one side, in particular the left, just harps on and on and on about big money and politics and everything's broken and corporate influence and money and politics is the root of all evil, well then you can't calibrate. You can't say no. But this one is really a big deal because we've been on since Citizens United. It's not that I don't have a problem with Citizens United, I actually don't think money is speech. But you can't tell people everything's already broken and then come up with crypto and be like, no, but for real, it's really broken this time. That's not a persuasive argument.

Beth [00:13:31] And I don't even know exactly what I mean by saying the most transparent form of bribery we've ever seen because, look, I don't think legally anyone's ever going to be able to establish a quid pro quo. He's the president. He's going to make some people mad. People who gave him large sums of money as every president ever has. And people believe this has already happened through lobbying for decades. And while I think there's a meaningful difference, that's not a persuasive political argument. I don't mean that as a political point. I mean it more in terms of the impact of the technology. Like what happens when something that seemed designed to promote secrecy actually becomes something that's hyper visible? And will the hyper visibility of the Trump meme coins make this more rapidly adopted by people or will that just be a fad? I compare it to Beanie Babies all the time because that's the best way for me to understand the creation of a new market around a thing because we all agree the thing has value. But the Beanie Babies are kind of over now. So is that where crypto is going or do we think that it actually will become the dominant form of how we exchange value with one another? I just have no idea.

Sarah [00:14:47] Well, I think the NFTs, which was also kind of a big thing in 2023, was really like the pure Beanie Baby. I have NBA NFTs. Why do I own that? Why is that a thing I have? I don't know. Because I got influenced. I was like I need them; they're going to increase in value.

Beth [00:15:02] Which is so crazy though. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's so crazy because the NFT made more sense to me as going somewhere than the crypto did. But they didn't go anywhere. We had a conversation with someone trying to explain cryptocurrency to us and he was talking about the potential for NFTs to be like the deed to your house. So that there is a digital form of a truly unique document that can be secured and traced through time. That makes a ton of sense to me. And that seems to not have gone anywhere so far. Maybe it's going places and I don't see them and it'll resurge at some point in the future, but it is strange to me that the NFTs became like these weird drawings.

Sarah [00:15:48] Well, and I think the other component of this that was at work simultaneously with-- it's all part and parcel of the Trump era. Which is this chipping away at the rule of law or maybe the elite understanding of the rule law, and this sense of there is no corruption anymore is because in our own lives, which is the thing I don't think we've ever really talked about on the show, the way that crypto and now AI has just supercharged scams. And every day you get six text messages about tolls or speeding tickets and they're all scams. I had family members affected by these calls. This is your family member, they're in prison, you need to go bail them out. Like crypto makes that level of fraud so easy. It's so easy to clean up that money. Any money you steal. You're seeing it bubble up in real crimes where people are taking hostage or attacked maybe because they have real money or maybe because somebody's just trying to get a hold of their crypto. It's getting wild out there. These pig farms, all this stuff, this is also building over this time period. I know we're all tired of talking about the frog and the pot because it's also [inaudible] the frog would hop out. But this was like we were just absorbing all these scams and texts and emails and they were increasing in velocity, but we weren't noticing because it was happening so slowly right in front of us.

Beth [00:17:47] One hundred percent agree about the scams and that honestly I think if a politician came forward and made scams their whole personality for a while, they would get a ton of support. It is disorienting. I got a toll scam that looked really, really good the other day. I'm alert to this. I made a More to Say episode about it relatively recently. And I still thought this is close enough to me and there are so many cameras that I better just make sure. I don't think I have a ticket, but I better make sure that this is not real.

Sarah [00:18:19] If the government or my banking or financial institutions ever try to get in touch with me via text, I will not believe them. I hope that's never a form of communication they plan on taking advantage of because it's not going to work. Because I will be like they would never text me.

Beth [00:18:34] But this is really bad because I do opt in to text for things. Like I get some social security information electronically because I've opted in to do that. And so it is a real problem, similar problem. How many times lately, and this is on the uptick, people are sending things to us and saying, is this real? Videos from the internet, stories from other content creators. There is no 'Is this really' police. There are resources for different things, but there is no one place that you can go to say, is this real? It was difficult to get to someone at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles who could answer my question about whether that was real or not. We have got to regroup in this new reality and figure out what it even means to have a government when you can't believe that a communication that looks like it came from the government is not actually from the government. So I think the marriage of these two things and the unpacking of that would be a fantastic place for some enterprising politician to start to say enough of this and not to couch it in consumer protection language of the past but right now, today, aren't you sick of this? We are going to have a place where you can go to figure out what's real.

Sarah [00:19:58] Well, the other big thing in 2023 were all the Trump indictments. So many. We had the criminal indictments related to election interference, the classified documents and the hush money payments, all while he was campaigning for 2024.

Beth [00:20:16] This relates to something that I wanted to talk about 2023, which is how we got ripped off from the fun of a real presidential election.

Sarah [00:20:27] Yeah, it's so true. No primaries.

Beth [00:20:30] Nothing.

Sarah [00:20:30] It was not a really good primary in the Republican. There certainly wasn't a good primary in the Democratic party. There was this articulation of like, especially in 2024, isn't it great that we had a short presidential campaign? And the answer is, no, it was not great. We need more time; we definitely need primaries. A lot gets worked out in the primaries from both parties and nothing. I think the reason we feel so stunted around policy and articulating problems, including problems with artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency scams, is that stuff gets worked out in primaries where there's like 16 people on a stage and you have a good couple of months and that didn't happen.

Beth [00:21:10] And the ugly truth of it is probably with the pace of change and the distortion of reality through the filters of AI and social media. We need it more frequently, not less. We've all been in this space of like, oh God, it's election time again. No, we really, really need it. All these indictments that prevented Trump from actually having to run a campaign at all, letting him soak up every bit of attention while falling asleep in courthouses, we are worse off for that. I don't know that the outcome would have been different. The outcome may have been what it was under any set of circumstances, but I know that we are worse off because of that.

Sarah [00:21:50] Well, and look, I know that the Republican Party is riding high. I get it. I would be too. They got a crisis cooking when he's no longer there because they haven't been having these intellectual debates. And you see a little bit of it bubbling up the further into this term, and I bet we get more of it. I bet we get more of the further he gets down this path. He is a powerful presence, but he is not an eternal presence. And I don't think they've fully grappled with that yet. Well, next up, let's talk about the real pivot though in this year, which was October 7th. And even just a minute ago, I kind of regret using the language so old because I just think old doesn't work anymore. What does that mean? Because it doesn't mean what it meant even 20 years ago. Eighty does not mean what is meant 20 years go.

[00:22:48] We say it all the time, 50 is the new 40 and 60 is the new 50. We're always changing it and for good reason. A certain subset of the population-- not the entire population, but a certain privileged subset of the population is living longer and healthier lives. And I think there's this tension where you have an elected individual who is empowered by the voters, but whose decision to run again or to resign is very individual. And that's just where we're stuck. It's in that same black hole where people lose the mental capacity to retire and therefore do the job and then we can't do anything about it. And so it feels like we need-- definitely in the Senate, I don't know about the White House. I wrote it was a really chill year until October 7th.

Beth [00:23:51] And I think a bunch of the trends that we've identified in previous episodes roared in a very intense way around October 7th. It created such a strong sense of threat for so many people, such a present sense of thread. And it melded the present sense of physical threat with the present sense of psychological threat, internet threat, what online makes you a good person threat, that it was difficult to have any level of conversation around it whatsoever.

Sarah [00:24:31] Yeah. For me, when I look at this moment, I just think it good and fully broke identity politics inside the Democratic Party. It was broken. People were saying such bananas things and still do to a certain extent around this incredibly complicated situation. Now, I have evolved, most certainly, from what my position was regarding Israel on October 7th. I don't know how anybody couldn't.

Beth [00:25:07] Agreed.

Sarah [00:25:07] But I don't feel bad about my immediate reaction in that moment. You know what I'm saying? It's like I was telling Griffin. We were talking about protest at graduations. And I'm like, if we are moving from identity politics to persuasion politics, which feels like the conversation happening and that began to happen in 2023 with this moment inside the Democratic Party because there wasn't a take on what a good person would do. We couldn't use that anymore. We couldn’t use the, based on who you are, then you plug your identity into this calculus and that will tell you the morally righteous position to take. We reached all the way to the end of the road on that one on October 7th. And so we're not going to use that if we're going to stop saying, based on who you are, this is how you should feel. Based on who are, this is you should vote. Because I think we ran out of road on that on 2024.

[00:26:21] Based on you are this is how you feel about this in order to be a good person. Then these protests that are really about shame and moral outrage of which there is plenty of source material for moral outrage in this situation, okay? Not arguing that point. But I'm like if we're trying to persuade people instead of saying, this is how you should feel if you're a human, then what is this accomplishing? If we are trying to persuade people-- because that's not what happened October 7th, nobody was being persuaded, everybody was just being hardened in their positions. To what end? To what pursuit? To what strategic goal? And so it just felt like it was playing out over and over and over again. And it got definitely worse over the course of 2024. But I feel like immediately you saw the limits of what our approach to politics up until this point could do.

Beth [00:27:28] I share the sense that I'm in a different place today than I was then, but it is because circumstances have changed, not because I've changed my mind about what went down on October 7th. I am probably more angry today than I was then at all the conversation around it because we let this just rip us apart in communities where there wasn't any real threat while people were actually being held hostage and kidnapped and killed and starved. Whether your identification is more with the Israeli pain or the Palestinian pain, there was real pain, physical, inescapable, present pain for so many people and has been ever since. And yet in the United States, we have found a way to make it about us. And it really bothers me. And I want to do less of that. I think that's related to something that keeps coming up for us. Can we have a time where we just say things are actually pretty good right now?

[00:28:43] Even though there's suffering in the world, I enjoyed this thing and that's okay. I want be able to look at other terrible, terrible things happening in the word. Things that deeply affect our hearts and people we love, and still not make every single thing about us. I feel like American politics, this is our cardinal sin, the narcissism of how we take in these events. And so I try all the time now when I'm reading about the Middle East to say to myself out loud, deliberately, "I am not there, and some people are." People as real as me are there. And so I can care about this and I can have a perspective and I could analyze and I want to do those things, but I got to separate myself from it too because something is lost when I over identify with a thing I am not present for.

Sarah [00:29:39] To me that reaction speaks to the inauthenticity of any isolationism. We don't ever mean it, do we? We don't ever actually not want to be involved in the world's conflict. We just don't. That's why we make everything about us because we see everything through the lens of America's presence on the world stage, which is outsized and probably will remain outsized even in a multipolar world where China is as big a superpower as we are. Still going to be true for as most certainly the rest of our lifetime. And so that's why the isolationism is never quite hidden. You know what I'm saying? You don't mean it. You mean it until you can drop a bunker busting bomb and have some impact, right? Like the isolationism rings a little hollow all the time, probably because again, we don't mean it. We don't mean it and that's fine. That's fine. We can want a presence on the world stage. We can want impact on the word stage. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But just own it, be honest about it.

[00:30:49] And I think this was another moment, not the first, but another moment where I thought I will not let people on the internet tell me the contents of my own heart. I will do that ever again. And I had a person show up in my DMs who I volunteered to speak to on the phone. And they were so hateful and ugly to me, and accused me of heinous things. And I thought, no, I will not. I've read the poem, First They Came For. I understand World War II history, but you will not convince me that I am immune or ignorant to genocide, or that I'm secretly anti-Semitic, or that am secretly anti-Muslim. I am done. I'm not saying that we all don't have things to learn or ways to improve, but no carousel on Instagram, I don't care how convincing it is, is going to make me believe that what I know about myself is untrue. I'm not doing it anymore. I don't care how heinous the situation is. I am done trying to be convinced that I'm not who I know myself to be by some stranger on the internet. Sorry.

Beth [00:32:22] Something that I am proud of in listening back over our 10 years and that feels especially true for me about analyzing October 7th, I think we have done a good job resisting what makes content creators get bigger. I want to grow as a business so that we can continue to do this. And some growth is necessary because you always have some contraction too, but there is a call to have such a prescription for everything that happens as a content creator on the internet. And what I said a million times this year after October 7th remains true for me. If this situation were easily resolved, it would be resolved by now. Plenty of smart people have been trying for a very, very long time to figure this out. And I am not going to make a cute video that contains the prescription. It's not within my grasp.

[00:33:29] And it doesn't mean that it's valuable for us to talk about it, for me to not reach a conclusion on it in that way. I think that this was a time when we faced an unusual level of pressure from our own audience to take a hard stand in one direction or another. And if they didn't hear the hard stand, they heard that as a lack of empathy or a coldness or a cruelty. And I have tried to not take a hard stand from a place of the purest form of love of other people that I have in my heart to just look at this situation and say, I don't know and it's not mine to know. And I am present with the suffering, regardless of what geography the suffering is taking place in or what type of suffering it is. But I feel more convicted all the time that there are situations like this where the most caring thing is to recognize me labeling a hero or a villain or a victim or a path forward here just doesn't add anything, and it doesn't fully recognize the humanity of all the people and interests involved here.

Sarah [00:34:58] The paradox of this time is I both grew more comfortable with my values and less comfortable with my takes. Why wasn't I screaming the whole time? Joe Biden is too old and we're going to lose. Joe Biden is too old and we're going to lose. The way in which I decided the-- we talked about this in 2022. Like, well, based on who was giving the take, that's how I know it's right. Instead of being like, hold up, wait a minute. Let me think about this. Let me really think about. It's just so easy to follow the Trump derangement syndrome and anything related to him. And it's not like he ever left in this whole time period. And so if they were saying he was too old, well, that meant it had to be wrong. And that was a bad take. The idea that you can't cross streams ever with people on the opposite end of the political spectrum with you where that means you're wrong, led to some really, really not just bad takes, but missed opportunities and actual losses. Dare I say tragedies.

[00:36:26] I look back and I think, but I just was knee jerking. I just was following the popular idea of what this meant and trying to find the moderated reaction to what everybody had decided was the good and moral stance. And I still feel that. There are still times when I'm like, oh my gosh, should I really go on Instagram and make sure and share XYZ and stories so everybody knows I'm a good person that cares about this issue? And then I have to just slap myself across the face figuratively, because it's just such a powerful feeling. It's like social pressure. Like it's constant social pressure to prove through the lens of politics that you're on the right side and that you are a good person.

Beth [00:37:21] I know we spent a lot of time on Joe Biden's age and the fact that Joe Biden shouldn't have run again. I think the thing that I'm still unpacking is how you say Joe Biden is too old to be president, and then respond to all the people who are like, "But my brother is 87 and the wisest person I know and would be an incredible president." Like that's probably true. That's probably true, sure. It's not about being ageist or how you feel about all people. We need to be able to speak in the shorthand of America has looked at Joe Biden the person and decided that Joe Biden the person is not up for the job of the president. Doesn't mean he's worthless and should be thrown away. Doesn't it mean we don't appreciate him. Doesn't that every single person who's his exact age, we would make the same decision about. Clearly, we still have a very old president. But it is that we need to just be able to say in the normal way of speaking, "I've decided that Joe Biden is too old to be president." Or I hear that that's what the American populace largely believes. And that's extremely relevant to political analysis about the next election.

Sarah [00:38:40] May I offer up everything can't be about everything. It really is a good catch-all for this moment and where we were like just constantly shoving ourselves through. Look, that is true even of something as heinous as October 7th. Even up until today as something as horrific as the starvation currently taking place in Gaza. Still true. That is true of a freaking Princeton College graduation. Everything can't be about everything or else then nothing matters. You can't calibrate. You can't name the stakes if everything is about everything all the time. If every time you experience joy, you have to talk about your privilege. Like it's not tenable.

Beth [00:39:33] Which is, funnily enough, like full circle back to one piece of our origin as a podcast. Because when I wrote for your blog about hashtag nuance, what I was saying is, can we assume that I have more to say about this? Can you assume that this does not sum up the full and complete experience? If you don't know this story, I wrote a post for Sarah about how social media was making us crazy because a person would just say a thing and then people would jump on that thing in exactly the way that we're describing back in 2015. And my hope was could we have some kind of shorthand to just be like I promise I'm a good person who also loves other people and wants to positively contribute to the world. And I think that is where a lot of things have gone wrong because instead of having that shorthand, and what I've gotten caught myself doing, is creating a habit of always articulating the full and complete footnote to the point where again nothing is really heard. And I don't really connect with someone listening to me.

Sarah [00:40:51] I think Taylor Swift led us out of this wilderness. Let's talk about that next. I'm sure other things happened in 2023 culturally. I'm willing to give Barbie a shout out, but really the only thing that happened is that Taylor Swift went on tour and fell in love with Travis Kelce. Everything else is actually a footnote, in my personal opinion.

Beth [00:41:27] It was certainly the thing that added the most to my life culturally in 2023.

Sarah [00:41:34] It was pure joy.

Beth [00:41:35] It was so fun. It was fun to text other women about. It was a moment when social media was actually delightful, especially if you let the algorithms know this is really all I want to look at, which I did. And they delivered. It was like a moment of being happy with what was in my feed.

Sarah [00:41:53] But you have to see the whole plot line, Beth. Because you have to say we were fully primed for the joy with the tour itself. We were already in it with her. We're in it. Like we're waiting for the secret songs.

Beth [00:42:08] Oh my God, a new outfit.

Sarah [00:42:09] We're seeing the outfits. We're experiencing the tour. Like some of us like me and Maggie who weren't even big Taylor Swift people, then we go to the Eras tour and we're like holy crap. Then you have this whole universe introduced to you. Then the plot twist, she's actually sad. She's up there entertaining us and this man has broken her heart. So you're like, son of a bitch, we can never have it all. This is bullshit. Then Barbie comes along with her monolog and you're, like, yeah, we cannot ever have it. Why not? Why can't we have joy in our personal lives and also in our career at the same time? And then Travis who also is very hot-- helpful piece of this puzzle. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Beth [00:42:50] I do.

Sarah [00:42:50] Travis comes in. He is pursuing this woman at the zenith of her success. And you're like, wait, hold up. Can we have it all? Can we have love and incredible success professionally at the same time? Do you remember when they went out after Saturday Night Live? And he had her makeup all over his face because they were clearly making out at the bar the whole time? The joy that gave me, the exhilaration I felt in that moment.

Beth [00:43:19] Well, and we talked about this at the time it happened and at a moment we were kind of starving for that sort of like hot, steamy romance.

Sarah [00:43:25] Yeah, no one was having sex.

Beth [00:43:26] Like it wasn't being depicted in our film. It wasn't being depicted on TV. We were very limited in what inspires hot-steaminess in our own lives in the zeitgeist. And then there they were, and it was great.

Sarah [00:43:42] I want to go back. I want go back to that moment and live it all again. Travis and Taylor, if you're listening, a good wedding really would give that to us right now in the year of our Lord 2025. Just throwing that out there. A good wedding can really do a lot, just saying.

Beth [00:44:03] I don't know. I think watching them date is so fun. I want them to live happily ever after in whatever their version of that is. I hope this goes great for both of them. They're so fulfilled by it. I would like to see a study on whether Americans actually had more sex this year. And I bet they did. I think that all of the social content being fed out to happily married ladies where maybe things had gotten a little boring made a difference. My anecdotal evidence is that it made a difference.

Sarah [00:44:32] I just want to say that I also feel very good because immediately I was like, they're in it. They're not breaking up. They're getting married. Now they're not married yet, although sometimes I do have a secret theory that they've gotten married and just not told anybody. There was like me and this one-- like I don't even know who it was. It was like this lady on maybe like a local morning show. I still remember her standing up and being like they're forever in love. They're staying. This is not a rebound. These two are getting married. And I was like me and this lady are on the same page. And I really feel like we've been proven right so far.

Beth [00:45:02] Mid-Juneish there was a video of them in New York out on a date.

Sarah [00:45:07] That was the SNL, yes.

Beth [00:45:09] No mid-June of this year, just a couple weeks ago, there's a video that comes out of them coming out of a bar or restaurant or something, and she looks real drunk. And depending on how you read it, it could look like they were kind of annoyed with each other, especially like he might be kind of annoyed by how drunk she was. That is the perception that I brought to this video. And people were freaking out. And, for me, I thought this is the kind of thing that makes it seem real. If they are a real couple, they should be annoyed sometimes. They should have arguments. If this were just an elaborate PR ruse, we would not see this video.

Sarah [00:45:50] Do you remember that terrible take where people said they were just a PR ruse?

Beth [00:45:54] Yes.

Sarah [00:45:54] Oh my God, that was such a bad take and I knew it was a bad take. I was like, this is outrageous. Neither of these people need this. They don't need it professionally. Why would they go to the trouble and take all this heat? Especially like the people-- because they ran out of road. They know it. That's why they've disappeared. That's a crazy take, guys.

Beth [00:46:13] Yes. She needs it less than him. This has been objectively enormous for the Kelce family. They were on their way anyway, but this has been objectively enormous for them and good for them. Who cares? But I like that there are little moments where you're like what's going on there? Because it just affirms for me that, yeah, this seems real. And I think they really care about each other and they're really in it doing the thing.

Sarah [00:46:36] Also, I want a wedding. Don't listen to Beth, Travis and Taylor, I want you guys to get married. I want a wedding.

Beth [00:46:40] It's not that I don't want a wedding. I just do think there is something particularly exciting and fun, especially for old married lady me in watching other people be at the beginning. The beginning is so great. And it has made me want to recreate the beginning in my own life as much as possible.

Sarah [00:46:59] They're past the beginning though. They've been dating for two and a half years now, right?

Beth [00:47:03] I know, but when you've been with someone for like 20, that's still their beginning.

Sarah [00:47:07] Listen, I want them to get married for one reason and one reason only, and it is very selfish. All I want in life is Taylor Swift's songwriting capacity applied to motherhood. I've wanted that since law school. I was like, oh man, she going to write such good songs when she has babies. I want it so badly. I want it so, so badly.

Beth [00:47:30] Well, I think you'll get it. I think it's coming.

Sarah [00:47:33] It's going to be good, too. It's going to be so good. Taylor and Travis, we owe you so much.

Beth [00:47:39] Yeah, good job guys. Thanks for this.

Sarah [00:47:41] Great contribution to all of us in 2023, both the tour and your delightful love story. I still cannot thank you enough.

Beth [00:47:52] Not a single note about it. Not a single footnote, not an asterisk, no qualification.

Sarah [00:47:55] All good. The reels, the takes, delicious. Loved every minute of it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for your service to America and the greater global community. All right. Thank you so for joining us for another episode in our flashback series. We only got one year left. Next Friday, we'll tackle 2024 and then we will have done it. We'll have looked back over all 10 years of Pantsuit Politics. Thank you so much for being along for this again both excruciating and weirdly fun ride. We will be back to our regularly scheduled programming on August 12th. We hope everybody has the best weekend available to you. And until Tuesday, keep it nuanced, y'all.