Talking Ourselves Into Gavin

Laura Tremaine joins Sarah for California politics, the Democrats' leaderless wilderness, and the viral Atlantic piece announcing the end of reading.

Beth is out for two more weeks, so I brought in reinforcements. First up is Laura Tremaine , my co-host over at Slow Read, who has lived in California for twenty-five years and has some things to say about her governor. We start with Gavin Newsom — the trolling, Prop 50, the podcast with Charlie Kirk — and somewhere in the middle of it Laura talks herself into him in real time, which is very much not where she started. Then we get into that viral Atlantic piece about the end of reading, what our civic life loses when people stop reading books, and why slowing down might be the only sane response to algorithmic everything. We also announce our next Slow Read, and I’ll just say it: the fandom scares us a little.

— Sarah

Topics Discussed

• Gavin Newsom Can’t Help His Face (But He Could Build a Bench)

• The Democratic Party Has No Leader and Everybody Can Tell

• The Atlantic Declares the End of Reading (Meanwhile, I Opened a Bookshop)

• Slow Reading Outlander and Being a Little Scared of the Fandom

• Outside of Politics: The Summer the Movies Came Back

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Episode Resources

Two weeks left! Join us for our live show in Minneapolis on August 29. There will be trivia, there will be singing, there will be lessons learned from America 250 and wild speculation about 2028. Get your tickets here.

Our next Slow Read is Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander. The reading schedule is out now, and this season lives behind the paywall so we can talk about it in all its glory. Read along with us at Slow Read.

America’s Next 250 with Ezra Klein (Pantsuit Politics)

Episode Topic Resources

• The End of Reading Is Here (The Atlantic)

• Are We Living Through the End of Reading? (NPR)

• The Obscure Media Theory That Explains “99% of Everything” (Derek Thompson)

• “The End of Reading Is Here” (Plain English with Derek Thompson)

• Footnotes and Tangents (Simon Haisell)

• Secret Stuff (Laura Tremaine)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Laura Tremaine: And so I feel like I’m talking myself into Gavin Newsom in this conversation which was not where I started

[00:00:20] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:22] Laura Tremaine:  This is Laura Tremaine.

[00:00:24] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. I’m back, y’all. Beth is still out for two more weeks, so I’ve got guest hosts joining me, and first up is the gorgeous, the brilliant, the one and only Laura Tremaine. You like my sound effect there? I’m learning some new tools here, guys

[00:00:46] Laura Tremaine: You’re really gassing me up. I’m feeling it.

[00:00:50] Sarah: Laura is also known as the co-host with me of Slow Read, our podcast where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle. We’re going to talk about slow reading. We’re going to talk about that viral Atlantic piece, The End of Reading, and what that means for our civic environment. But first, we’re going to talk about California politics and ol’ Gav, because Laura is from the great state of California, so she’s got some thoughts. Laura, our states couldn’t be more different, but we are united by the fact that both of our governors are running for president right now.

[00:01:22] Laura Tremaine: Isn’t it exciting? Isn’t it something to watch?

[00:01:25] Sarah: Oh, that’s true. Outside of Politics, Laura and I are going to talk about movies and the movie industry because Laura’s husband, Jeff, is a director, and she’s been living that movie premiere life this summer. Before we get started, there are two weeks left to get tickets to our live show in Minneapolis. The plans are coming together. There will be trivia. There will be singing. There will be lessons learned from America 250, as well as wild and reckless speculation about 2028, I’m sure. So you’re not going to want to miss it. A special thank you to our live show sponsor, Fearless Finance, and Substack. And check out the link in our show notes to get your tickets for our live show in Minneapolis on August 29th. Next up, California and its governor, Gavin Newsom. Laura, how many years have you lived in California?

[00:02:20] Laura Tremaine: 25 years this month.

[00:02:23] Sarah: 25 years. Now, do you know that I consider myself about one-third Californian?

[00:02:29] Laura Tremaine: I did know that, but remind me why.

[00:02:32] Sarah: Because I spent every summer of my childhood in California.

[00:02:37] Laura Tremaine: We’ll claim you, man. We’ll take you.

[00:02:38] Sarah: And I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the state. I’m now firmly in love. I do love the great state of California, and Beth and I have talked quite a bit about Gavin, your governor. He’s out there. He’s hustling, and this is super interesting for our conversation. I just read that he has been spending a lot of money in the South. He’s been raising money for all these state parties like South Carolina, which we have recently learned is going to be the first state in the Democratic primary. So he’s not just preening is what I’m saying. I think he is making money moves when it comes to the presidential primary.

[00:03:20] Laura Tremaine: Yeah, and I feel differently about it in 2026 than I would have, I don’t know, two, three years ago.

[00:03:27] Sarah: Okay. How would you have felt two, three years ago?

[00:03:29] Laura Tremaine: I wasn’t really for him being the nominee a few years ago.

[00:03:35] Sarah: Okay.

[00:03:36] Laura Tremaine: He feels like too slick. He almost feels like a movie character

[00:03:44] Sarah: That’s what I say all the time. I’m like, “Listen, he cannot help that he looks like central casting politician. He can’t help his face. It’s not his fault.”

[00:03:53] Laura Tremaine: Well, it’s not his fault that he looks like that, but he slicks his hair back. He holds himself in a way--

[00:04:02] Sarah:  Great head of hair. It just is.

[00:04:05] Laura Tremaine: There’s mixed feelings about Gavin in California. I’m not here to speak for all of California. In fact, California is so large, it’s such a huge state, bigger than most countries. Certainly bigger than almost all the states in our nation, that it’s really hard to talk about California in the same way that other states are able to talk about their politics. I grew up in Oklahoma. Much more homogenous.

[00:04:33] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:04:33] Laura Tremaine: And California is not like that. I tend to pay more attention to Los Angeles politics. I’m in the middle of Los Angeles; itself is a population of millions which is bigger than most states and many countries.

[00:04:48] Sarah: Los Angeles is probably bigger and more diverse than Oklahoma.

[00:04:51] Laura Tremaine: Oh, absolutely it is. Absolutely it is. So I think primarily in terms of California, I think primarily in terms of Los Angeles. When you talk about California, sometimes I can’t even believe that we’re in the same state as people in Northern  California.

[00:05:07] Sarah: Like how does Los  Angeles feel about Gavin?

[00:05:09] Laura Tremaine: I Would say it is pretty mixed. He is not beloved in my circles, okay?

[00:05:14] Sarah: Okay.

[00:05:14] Laura Tremaine: At all.

[00:05:16] Sarah: I’m not sure he’s beloved in any circles. It’s just not a word that comes readily to mind when you’re talking about Gavin Newsom.

[00:05:22] Laura Tremaine: No, and culturally Los Angeles is not a place where people chitty-chat about politics socially as much as I’ve experienced in other areas.

[00:05:39] Sarah: Interesting.

[00:05:40] Laura Tremaine: Now, again I think Los Angeles politics, Hollywood industry, which is tied to a lot of political things, like those things come up. But the governor is not a thing that comes up that often. But when it does or has, over the last several years, a lot of people would roll their eyes at Gavin. A lot of people in the Los Angeles area have real issues with how he handled wildfire stuff.

[00:06:06] Sarah: Oh, interesting.

[00:06:08] Laura Tremaine: Backing the electric companies in these areas, and then the insurance companies, like it has been a sticking point for a lot of people in my area, for sure. Also, people who own small businesses, not a big fan of Gavin in California. And I understand some of those things. I’ve witnessed some of the flight from California, of people moving out of our state to the middle of the country, Texas, Tennessee, Florida.

[00:06:37] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:06:38] Laura Tremaine: I’ve lost some friends to that move. That was financially/politically motivated. So I’ve witnessed all of that. That’s not exactly directly Gavin himself, but like there’s just not been like a ton of rah-rah.

[00:06:54] Sarah: He’s been governor for so long, I think it’s hard not to link him to these sort of, I would say, middle-ish trends. Not like short-term trends, not long-term trends, but trends post-COVID, and because he’s been governor during that time period, I think he’s going to get linked to some of that,.

[00:07:11] Laura Tremaine: And mixed feelings around the COVID thing, too. So he’s definitely the face of California liberalism, and so there’s like a lot of mixed feelings around that. And then it changed. It changed a little bit. I wouldn’t say it changed completely. But in the last... how long has it been since he started trolling Trump? I guess since 2024, like in the last year and a half. I felt like finally some Democrats were fighting fire with fire. And I would not have been for that eight years ago even. Like in terms of when they go low, we go high. Like let’s keep some integrity here. Why would I want the same thing, but on the left as what we have on the right? I don’t. However, seeing some of the online trolling, and then actually the policy response in Prop 50, which was about redistricting here, which was a direct response to what was happening in Texas and other states. I was like, “All right. At least finally we’re doing something.” At least finally there is a true response to the current administration, which I just feel like there has not been a true response on the left, or not an effective one.

[00:08:31] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:08:32] Laura Tremaine: And so I felt like at least it was being effective. I’m not super rah-rah of him for the presidential nominee at all. I do think maybe he finally wrote a bit of a playbook for others to follow just to get some, I don’t know, reaction, attention.

[00:08:52] Sarah: Yeah, I think there’s two parts to this. I absolutely think people are hungry for fighters. I don’t really think there’s any debate about that. I think that’s why Andy Beshear is out there going on and on about the disappearance of Mitch McConnell. Because he can read the room, too, and people want that sort of in-your-face response to the bombastic, spectacle that is the Trump administration. And so you can see everybody trying that on, and I think Gavin, for a lot of reasons, I’m not sure... It never read to me as him just trying it on. It read to me as him actually doing something. He does do a lot of the social media trolling, but I think you’re right. I think the gerrymandering and the proposition was, like, him going, “No, I will put my money where my mouth is on Twitter. I will show up, and I will try to get results.” And people are so hungry for that because we don’t have a leader of the Democratic Party right now, and I don’t think that’s because of some massive failure. It’s just how it goes when you lose a presidency. You’re in the wilderness for a while, like that’s how it has to be. That’s baked into the process, and because we don’t have this national figure, then it falls to some of these supporting players. I think Gavin is a bigger name than most because of the size of California, because he’s been governor for so long, because of a lot of reasons. It’s interesting to me after him being the pro-Biden guy that he was able to take on this new role and say, “No, I want to fight back,” and I think people are so hungry for that. That’s why it hit. What I’m so interested in when it comes to Gavin is that he’s doing that at the same time he’s out here launching a podcast where his first guest is Charlie Kirk.

[00:10:32] Laura Tremaine: God.

[00:10:32] Sarah: That’s wild to me that he has been able to split that baby and be a fighter and also be like, “I am willing to talk to people. I’m not scared of them.” I guess if you squint, you can see that ever so slightly turn. “I’m willing to fight them because I’m not scared of them, and I will also debate them.” I think you can see it, but it is fascinating to me that he’s been able to talk to these guys and not get the, “How dare you,” Let’s not be silly. There was lots of “How dare you” on the internet when he had Republicans on his podcast. But you rolled your eyes when I said the podcast.

[00:11:02] Laura Tremaine: Yeah, I didn’t love that.

[00:11:04] Sarah: Okay, interesting.

[00:11:05] Laura Tremaine: Personally.

[00:11:06] Sarah: Did you listen to any episodes, in fairness?

[00:11:09] Laura Tremaine: I did not, but that wasn’t like in protest or anything.

[00:11:12] Sarah: I listened to the Charlie Kirk one, I listened to the Steve Bannon. I listened to a couple of them.

[00:11:18] Laura Tremaine: And?

[00:11:19] Sarah: I thought they were good. People are unhappy because they want him to go on-- if you’re going to have him on, then people want him to have people on his show and say, “You’re a fascist Nazi and I hope you rot in hell.” Okay. First of all, that’s not very interesting content. Second of all it’s easy to say that. It’s a lot harder when you’re behind the mic. I’m sure you’ve felt this at times when you’re like, “I want to push this person,” but it’s hard, it’s awkward. You don’t want to be rude when somebody’s coming to your space. But I thought he did a pretty good job of like clapping back and arguing and pushing them in places and defending himself. So I wouldn’t give it like a rave review, but I thought he did a good job.

[00:11:58] Laura Tremaine: Look, I think Gavin has a few things going for him that is unique in that he, as opposed to some of the other big stars of the Democratic Party right now, is more moderate and he is more willing to have those conversations. I will give him that.

[00:12:17] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:12:17] Laura Tremaine: And I’m not a lifelong Democrat. I was a registered Republican until 2016, which I came on this very show to discuss with Beth that I was a Republican in California until the golden stairways.

[00:12:35] Sarah: We will put that show in the link if you would like to listen to Laura’s journey.

[00:12:39] Laura Tremaine: I have changed a lot. But I was a moderate Republican then, I’m a moderate liberal now. I feel like I can see that Gavin has some things going for him. So I can’t totally articulate why I’m still like, eh.

[00:12:59] Sarah: I don’t think anybody can. I just think it’s like personality. I think there’s just a little bit of him that people still are like I don’t know. You want it too bad. But I don’t think Pete suffers from that, which is interesting, because Pete wants it so bad.

[00:13:11] Laura Tremaine: No, you don’t think he suffers from like the cringe?

[00:13:16] Sarah: I don’t feel it from the same group of people that hate Gavin, let’s put it that way. But yeah, definitely on the internet. He gets the meritocracy eye roll for sure, I think.

[00:13:24] Laura Tremaine: Yeah, at least Gavin has experience.

[00:13:27] Sarah: I think that’s definitely Pete’s toughest situation right now is that-- cabinet secretary’s not nothing, but that will have been four years ago and I think that’s a tough one. But I told somebody this weekend, I said, “If I had to vote right now as who, as far as if you’re asking me who I think would do the best actual job as president, whether I think they can win, whether I think they’d run the best campaign, putting all that aside, who do I think would get in the Oval Office and do the best actual job? It’s Pete Buttigieg.”

[00:13:54] Laura Tremaine: Oh, without question. Yeah.

[00:13:56] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:13:57] Laura Tremaine: But you can’t eliminate all of those questions about  electability.

[00:14:00] Sarah: I know, that’s the thing, and I think people want the fighter, and there are people are so concerned about who can win and are people ready for a gay man? And what I’ve been telling people because I feel the glimmerings of like we can’t run a woman ever again, which really pisses me off. Anybody who’s not going to vote for Pete Buttigieg because he’s gay isn’t going to vote for a Democrat anyway. It don’t matter. They a lost cause. You know what I’m saying?

[00:14:25] Laura Tremaine: Yeah, that’s definitely an evolving Question. Yeah, I think that has really changed in the heart of America, truly.

[00:14:34] Sarah: Yeah, and I don’t know if it’s in the heart of America or if it’s just a fear response from Democrats. I think Democrats are so afraid of picking the wrong person, even though it’s such a paradox, right? You get people saying in conversations everywhere, “America’s not ready for a woman. America’s not ready for a gay man for president.” And then in these midterms right now, you have people saying, “It’s time for socialism,” that’s what America wants and needs is Democratic socialists. So it’s so schizophrenic, and I think that’s reflective of the fact that there’s no real party leader, and there won’t be till we pick a nominee. You see that schizophrenia in your governor’s race. It was all over the map, and your Los Angeles mayor race. The schizophrenia is showing up in California politics.

[00:15:16] Laura Tremaine: No, I do not like the candidates for LA mayor or California governor. I am going to have to hold my nose in both of those races. I’m super annoyed at what we are choosing between out here. I know there have got to be better options. This is the biggest state.

[00:15:33] Sarah: This is what’s frustrating because I feel that in the rush for the presidency, you have people not doing what I would say is the right thing. I think Kamala should run for governor. She should run for governor. She would’ve won, and she would’ve been good. Don’t you think?

[00:15:50] Laura Tremaine: I don’t know. I was surprised by how many people even here, or especially here maybe, that voted for Kamala, but reluctantly.

[00:16:01] Sarah: She’s going to run for president again. Believe that.

[00:16:04] Laura Tremaine: Maybe, but I don’t have high hopes there.

[00:16:07] Sarah: No. She’s polling the highest, but that doesn’t mean anything right now. And I think in the California governor’s race, and you see it in the Los Angeles mayor race, and people bitch about the establishment and they bitch about Chuck Schumer, and there were mistakes made in these Senate recruiting elections for sure, Graham Plattner being one of them, although that wasn’t Chuck Schumer. He went to Mary Peltola, and he went to Roy Cooper and said, “Do the right thing for your country, man. We need good candidates.” And I think there’s just other places, like Kentucky, where I would’ve liked to seen Andy Beshear run for Mitch McConnell’s Senate seat, where people didn’t do that because of ambition or whatever. And for all of the talk of Gavin Newsom’s ambition, like at least he didn’t do that. There’s nowhere else for him to go but president.

[00:16:52] Laura Tremaine: Yeah.

[00:16:53] Sarah: There’s a lot of other places for these people to go, and it is surprising to me that with the Los Angeles mayor race, particularly with the governor’s race, I guess you had Swalwell who would’ve fit this bill, but it’s not like the murmurings about the problems and the sexual assault allegations and the sexual harassment allegations were like so secret. They weren’t. Enough people knew. But I guess I’m saying all this now. I’m saying maybe we could put all this back at the feet of Gavin Newsom because he’s the head of the California Democratic Party, right? Shouldn’t he have been recruiting?

[00:17:27] Laura Tremaine: I do think personally that a governor is best suited for the presidency in general because they have actually governed in the way.

[00:17:36] Sarah: Especially a state like California.

[00:17:37] Laura Tremaine: That’s what I mean. I feel like I’m talking myself into Gavin Newsom in this conversation. Which was not where I started. I just feel like it mimics the most closely what actually governing is. A lot of these loons get up there and don’t know what they’re doing. They haven’t really governed.

[00:17:57] Sarah: I guess I’m not opposed to Gavin Newsom. He has persuaded me. I’ve watched him. I thought and still think that he’s made smart choices. I don’t think he can help his face or his hair. I am not opposed. I do not have an automatic ugh reaction to Gavin Newsom. I really don’t. I do think that with Gavin Newsom, with Andy Beshear, with-- actually I think Pritzker has the strongest argument when it comes to Illinois, the Illinois Democratic Party, and the strength of the candidates there. There does need to be some responsibility. This is always the critique of Obama. He was awesome, but the party was decimated. We need to start holding politicians, especially if they want to move up the ladder, responsible for the bench building and recruiting and strength of the party they leave in their wake. I really think that there needs to be some connective tissue between that.

[00:18:48] Laura Tremaine: And adjacent to that is what everyone’s saying, so this isn’t an original thought here, but there is no identity in the Democratic Party. There is a messaging problem and has been for such a long time. What is effective about MAGA is clear.

[00:19:03] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:19:04] Laura Tremaine: You want to be part of a movement. People want to be part of a movement that they think is bettering in the direction that they prefer, and the Democrats have never had anything even close to that in the last  several decades.

[00:19:19] Sarah: I think Obama was definitely close. I think Bernie has a movement behind him, and had a movement behind him. But I think the MAGA movement is also incredibly fragile because it’s so linked to Donald Trump. What are they going to do next? Interestingly enough, this weekend in Kentucky we have a political picnic called Fancy Farm. It is very famous. It is this Catholic church in this tiny town in Western Kentucky, and they have this big picnic with bingo and barbecue and all the things you’d expect, but they’ve always had a political program, and all the Kentucky state politicians come to Fancy Farm.

[00:19:53] Laura Tremaine: Now, I had not heard of Fancy Farm until Mitch McConnell’s statement, his written statement last week saying, “I’m so sorry. I cannot be at Fancy Farm.”

[00:20:01] Sarah: Okay, so I went to Fancy Farm. I heard from Rand Paul talking about ringing the same old bell about out here screaming about the mutilation of children. I’m like, for real? In the big 2026? Okay. We’re going to ring that bell again. Cool. I heard from Jamie Comer, and I heard from Andy Barr, who’s running for the Senate seat against Charles Booker, the Democrat. Fascinatingly enough, the only person who said Trump’s name was Jamie Comer, and I think he said it once. So it was super interesting. There was not a lot of Trump presence. A couple T-shirts, one or two signs, but compared to previous years there was not a lot of rah-rah Donald Trump at Fancy Farm, which I thought was, like, indicative, I think, of the path they’re all trying to figure out, which is what we do next. And I think we are talking about Donald Trump capturing the Republican Party, but I think the problem with the Democratic Party, and the problem with all these candidates is he captured them, too, and people are trying to figure out what do I talk about? What am I standing for if it’s not just anti-Trump?”

[00:21:12] Laura Tremaine: Yeah.

[00:21:12] Sarah: And I think the reason Democratic socialists are doing better than expected is because they have an answer. For better or for worse, whether you like it or not, they do have an answer, and it’s not just Donald Trump is the devil. Also, the way that Donald Trump captured the Republican Party exposed the hollowness of the party system generally, and that is true on the Democratic Party side. I’m calling on these governors and stuff to recruit, but I’m not really sure how that would look. I’m not really sure how much control they have over the state parties. They’re the de facto leaders, but as far as process, the parties themselves have been so hollowed out as far as being present in the community and people understanding. It’s been so nationalized, and I think of course you’re going to see that in a state like California that’s so big, that’s so diverse. Exactly how should the California Democratic Party function in a state as giant as California?

[00:22:00] Laura Tremaine: And it’s fractured here. I guess that’s what you’re saying. It’s fractured even among some of our big-- right now the California Democratic Party came out in favor of the billionaire tax. Gavin Newsom is not in favor of that, and he’s the governor, a Democratic governor. So we have a lot happening here directly that is also reflective of what’s happening across the whole country in terms of there not being a unified message or a blanket policy that people are even moving towards, honestly.

[00:22:31] Sarah: Yeah. California is always the testing ground, not just for legislative policy, but also for state and party politics. So we’re going to keep an eye on it, for sure. It’ll only get more complex. Gavin Newsom will still have the same face and the same hair. So that part won’t change, everybody. Just make your peace with it. Poor Gav.

[00:22:51] Laura Tremaine: Poor Gav.

[00:22:52] Sarah: It’s just not his fault, okay? Can’t help that he’s pretty. But we will, I’m sure, continue to talk about Gavin Newsom. Up next, we’re going to talk about slow reading. Laura, last year I messaged you and I said, “Do you want to slow read a Stephen King book with me?” And you said, “Absolutely. What’s slow reading?”

[00:23:32] Laura Tremaine: Yeah, that’s right.

[00:23:35] Sarah: I had been a big fan of slow reading. I slow read with Footnotes and Tangents, another fantastic Substack hosted by Simon Heisel, with the War and Peace. I’d done War and Peace. I had done the Wolf Hall trilogy. I’d slow read on my own, which I don’t think is as fun as slow reading in a group with some a little support behind you. I’d slow read Don Quixote and The Brothers Karamazov. But we decided to do a slow read together. You are a Stephen King devotee, and so you said, “I know just the book we should do.”

[00:24:08] Laura Tremaine: Purposely I knew what book we should do because you were the one doing the asking. I chose The Stand because it has political themes throughout. It’s also a post-pandemic novel, which I thought we were ready for to finally read a fictionalized version after our own trauma. I also was super intrigued by the idea of the slow read as you explained it to me because one of the things that I’ve talked about online as a long time sort of Bookstagrammer, book club leader online, that I’ve had for a long time these book clubs, it has gotten so increasingly competitive to read. It drives me nuts that people are constantly like, “I read 72 books this month. I listen to my audiobooks at four times speed.” Like, all of these things that I feel I don’t care how other people read if you want to zoom through everything. But I do feel like it changes the conversation. It has definitely changed the online conversation to feel like we are reading in place of hoarding or something. We are reading to see how many books we can--

[00:25:13] Sarah: Performatively.

[00:25:14] Laura Tremaine: I guess this is also performative, but just to show how smart you are, how dedicated you are, or how much better you are at reading. It drives me nuts. And so when you described slow reading, I who do not read multiple books at once, I do not read multiple fiction books at once, and slow reading some I guess doesn’t require it, but if you’re a reader you’re you might be. Just the whole idea of it intrigued me, and so I was happy to jump into that project with you.

[00:25:44] Sarah: I think it’s so many things. One, just the word slow is appealing because everything is moving so fast. The news moves fast. Social media moves fast. Change is coming very fast, especially with artificial intelligence. And so I think just the word slow and this sort of attaching it to an analog process like reading. You took it all the way analog. You read the book out loud which is wild to me.

[00:26:07] Laura Tremaine:  I did. It was a reread. I’ve read The Stand multiple times, and so I felt like this would be another way for me to engage with it with myself, to keep myself interested was to read it out loud. I also feel like some of the best books of all time are really long. And like The Stand is 1,200 pages. So to let yourself read them slowly, to give yourself permission to read them slowly, because the other thing, back to competitive reading, I’ve had my book club members or even friends tell me that they don’t want to spend a month or more reading a long book because it doesn’t let them meet their reading goals.

[00:26:44] Sarah: Yep.

[00:26:45] Laura Tremaine: Stop. That annoys me, but fine.

[00:26:48] Sarah: It makes a lot of sense to me though. So I think the slow is appealing generally. But I think what you’re talking about, the performative reading, since I opened Meander, my bookshop in Paducah the beginning of the summer, and I’ve now I have this Instagram account that’s like all books and I see all this book content. It makes sense to me that this was inevitably where this was heading because social media, algorithmic media is so hungry. It wants new content all the time. If your niche is books, what’s the best way to produce more and more content? To read more books. So to constantly be churning out reviews and stacks and TBRs and all this stuff, so that makes perfect sense to me that this fed this kind of like hungriness to read. I read a lot, and I read very fast, and I find myself getting faster and faster. And so slow reading is really important to me because it forces me to slow down and not gulp. I will gulp down a book so quick I’ll forgot I’ve read it. In a year or two I’ll sit down to read a book and be like, “Oh, I’ve definitely already read this.” Sometimes it even takes me a while to get into the book before I realize I’ve already read it. That’s a huge part of it for me.

[00:27:58] Laura Tremaine: Okay, but wait. So when I’m talking about slow reading, I’m just talking about forcing myself to have the discipline to stop at the 50 pages a week the pace we’re reading, right? But it sounds a little bit like you’re talking about literally physically reading it slower. So are you reading the words slower?

[00:28:18] Sarah: Absolutely. I read slower with the slow read because I read fast because either I want to find out what happens, I’m trying to get the book finished because I want to get to the next book. I also read multiple books at a time. So there is like a pace of my reading that definitely slows down. Especially when we were doing slow read for the podcast, I have to read really carefully for the conversation and for the book club and for everything. So definitely not only do I read the book slower, but my actual words per minute slow down when I’m slow reading a book, for sure.

[00:28:50] Laura Tremaine: Interesting. Reading it aloud, which is what I did for The Stand, also forces you to go slower because, when you’re not reading it aloud, which most of the time we never are you skim.

[00:28:59] Sarah: Yeah. You’re skipping words.

[00:29:00] Laura Tremaine: You’re skipping words. Your brain is doing its thing, and when you’re reading it out loud, I definitely, because again, this was a reread for me, was catching things, pieces of dialogue or details or whatever that I couldn’t skip that I hadn’t ever paid attention to before. So that was a different way to take it in.

[00:29:19] Sarah: And as far as like sort of an anecdote to like fast news and fast politics and all that, even with a political book like The Stand, which this most certainly is, when you slow down and you’re like in this space, like you’re hanging out. You’re hanging out in Boulder. I did War and Peace. I felt like I like half lived in Russia for the whole year. It is fascinating how the book will form connective tissue with like what’s going on in your life. It’s like an anchor. Like we would get to certain points in the book with The Stand, especially with the Walking Man and the sort of primary villain that felt really relevant to the news we were living at the time. That happened to me. Simon says he gets this feedback all the time with War and Peace. It was wild. When I was reading War and Peace in 2025, this chapter with a political assassination happened the week of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

[00:30:17] Laura Tremaine: Oh, wow.

[00:30:17] Sarah: And he’s like, “That’s happened before.” He’s like, “There will be wildfires and there will be a fire in the book.” Or if you’re reading quickly, it doesn’t give the book space and time to connect with whatever’s going on in your life. And to me, it is always so helpful. I know that what we do at Pantsuit Politics is so fed by the other parts of our lives, by our reading lives, by mothering, by our communities, and so it’s anchoring to me. It’s grounding to me to encounter something in my reading life that helps me make sense of something happening like in news and politics. Like especially with a book like War and Peace or even The Stand-- he was writing this in the ‘70s-- it’s like a reminder like, okay, there’s nothing new under the sun. People have been trying to make sense of their nation states or war or politics for hundreds of years. Novels is one of the ways they do that, and it is profoundly comforting to me.

[00:31:11] Laura Tremaine: The biggest benefit to me that I found in slow reading was I used my own brain to think about it. So I have realized that in reading, in social media algorithms, in all the things, I am spoon-fed how to think about it or what comes next or a take. And obviously, you resonate more with one thought than another. You’re curating how you think about it. But slow reading forced me, like in the shower, when I’m falling asleep, to really think about it all week until I got to the new pages. Whereas, when I’m reading other books, I’m just reading. I’m letting the book tell me what happens next. I’m letting the book explain things to me, and then maybe I think about it after, of course. But when you’re slow reading, to think about it and break it down, and then on our episodes together to talk through why this part bugged me or why I loved this part, it was forcing me to articulate it.

[00:32:06] Sarah: Yep.

[00:32:07] Laura Tremaine: That is an entirely different reading experience than letting the story be told to you completely and telling you how to think about it in a lot of ways. Or what I’m finding in my life every single day because I went on vacation last week and took a social media break. And I realized how much is being spoon-fed to me all the time about how to think about things or what to think about or whatever, and it’s just more and more information and takes and jokes and all of the things. When I took a break from it, I actually changed the way I thought about a couple of things because I was letting myself think for myself.

[00:32:43] Sarah: Yep. No, I totally agree. I think the power of slow reading that contributes to that exact sort of experience, is we’re just not reading the new hot thing. Those don’t really contribute to a slow read. They don’t really give themselves over to a slow read. You kind of want a book that’s been around a while. You want a book that has a lot of heft. People, first of all, aren’t writing really long books right now. Every once in a while.

[00:33:10] Laura Tremaine: A book that’s proven itself over time.

[00:33:10] Sarah: Yeah. A book that’s proven itself over time. And so I think that sort of is a part of that, too. You know this is a book that has a lot to say because people have been talking about it for 100 years or several decades or whatever the case may be. So I think that sort of contributes to it, too. That’s what I like slow read. Is it’s a backlist, right? It’s not a trending, of-the-moment BookTok kind of book.

[00:33:30] Laura Tremaine: Yeah. Me too. I loved that.

[00:33:33] Sarah: So I’m out here opening a bookshop.

[00:33:38] Laura Tremaine: Yes.

[00:33:38] Sarah: You are out here hosting Stephen King Summer. We have wrapped up slow read. We are in it. We are in it with the reading life. We are in it with slow reading and books. And then The Atlantic, this viral piece, The End of Reading Is Here, by Rose Horwich. It’s bleak. The stats she shares in this piece are bleak. People are reading technically, but they’re not reading books. They’re reading captions, or captioning on their short-form video. And the stats on who’s read a book in the last year, how many books they’ve read in the last year, it’s like I knew it intellectually, but to read it all laid out like that feels a little bleak.

[00:34:22] Laura Tremaine: I know when I saw the title of the piece, The End of Reading, which people have been like clanging that bell for a while, so I was very much prepared to go into reading this, not just defensively, but almost just I was skeptical of what the conclusions were going to be. Reading and books have survived a really long time, and I was like, “This is going to be doom and gloom. How annoying.” And then I didn’t necessarily love this piece, but some of the stats are, it’s scary. It’s scary. And I saw some of the things myself with-- I have two teenagers and I have seen even in their college prep type of school that they’re in, they don’t have to read as much as I did. And instead of having to read the whole book, sometimes they’re just reading sections of books or selections of work, and I’m just like, “Oh, no, this is real.”

[00:35:16] Sarah: Yeah. Derek Thompson did a thing about this a couple, probably months ago, where he talked about like we were verbal, like a verbal society, storytelling around the fire, like it was all about like the verbal way information was conveyed. Then we shifted into a written society with the printing press, and it became all about the written text and the written word, and his argument was like we are shifting back to a verbal society. Even within the reading community, audiobooks are huge. Just huge. So many people “read” by listening to an audiobook. We’re not going to get into that debate here today. We don’t have enough time. But I think that with video and phones, I do think there is absolutely a shift away from the written text and reading. Now, shout-out to Paducah Public Schools. My kids still read whole books. My kids are readers. Interestingly enough, my oldest son, my 17-year-old son, Griffin, who I would describe as absolutely the most online of the three of my children, it’s like he reached the end of the internet and was like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” And was like a big video gamer, and he was like, “ if I like narrative, like why don’t I just read a book?” Cause he liked narrative video games. And I do see with this young generation, and I’ve seen it in the bookshop because my bookshop is inside a coffee shop, so there are a lot of very young baristas, watching their habits and watching the way they talk about reading. I do think there’s this growing trend, but I think it’s just a trend, and it’s very small, of people being like I don’t want a smartphone, I don’t want social media, I want to go back. And I think books are at the vanguard of that, and I feel that in the bookshop. So I think it’s not all doom and gloom because I think there is a growing sense of “I don’t want this.” But it’s also so easy to look at the trends and find a kind of niche reaction, niche community, and the coverage in The New York Times about the Luddite Festival or whatever, and convince yourself we’re okay.

[00:37:16] But I think for now we’re not okay. The civic culture suffers when people are uneducated and they’re not reading, and reading is a part of educating yourself. And I don’t mean conspiracy theories on the internet. That’s not what I mean. Because for me, particularly reading fiction-- I read a quote recently, I’m probably going to mangle it, that was like the important part of reading fiction is you get in someone else’s head and you experience someone else’s life and you understand that you’re not the end-all be-all of experiences. How you feel, how you think, what you’ve lived, that’s not all there is. And I think reading is such a huge part of that. For me, it’s a huge part of why I all but force my children to read, and have made readers through the forcing to read. So it just makes me sad because I do think something is lost, particularly civically, when people don’t read.

[00:38:08] Laura Tremaine: I agree, and also I don’t think it was total doom and gloom or that all is lost because one of the things that stood out to me from the piece and from thinking about it and observing my own teenagers and husband, who’s a decade older than me, so we really span some real generations in our household. I don’t think storytelling is lost. I think people still crave storytelling.

[00:38:32] Sarah: Yes, that’s so true.

[00:38:34] Laura Tremaine: And we’re going to talk about movies in a second, and so I think TV shows, movies, that type of content, people are still really loving that, and I think that matters and can move a cultural needle as books can. I prefer books, I love books, but I don’t think that part of the brain and heart and spirit is lost. I also do think that there is-- what you were describing about learning about another culture, another way of thinking by being in a fiction book, there is that itch being scratched a little bit on TikTok. I know this is a popular thing to say because we’re supposed to be anti-TikTok. But my teens, one teen just got TikTok in the last few months, but the other one, my 17-year-old, she’s had it for a few years, and she is being exposed to some different types of thoughts by people sharing their life and experience and stories and whatever on TikTok, which is the thing we didn’t have. So we found outside life experiences in books or that’s where I found it. They’re just getting these messages and these cultural shifts in a really different way. And so I don’t want to be totally like, “Get off my lawn” about how culture is shifting and how we take in people’s stories and how we change hearts and minds and all of that. I love books. I’m sad to see books fall out of favor a little bit. Although book buying is up than from what it was 10 years ago. But IQ levels are statistically down.

[00:40:07] Sarah: Here’s what I’m worried about, and this is what I mean civically. So there is something that happens in your brain when you pull a story through like the emotional side of your brain over and you have to intellectualize it to read it or write it, right? You’re a big journaler. That’s why journaling is so powerful psychologically because to pull it over to the other side of your brain and then express it in a written word is really powerful, and it happens in reading, too. Versus just watching a video that only taps the emotional side of your brain. You know what I mean? That is tapping all your emotions. And it’s like that’s what’s happening. If you talk to people who, like-- Now I work in retail, I guess technically now with my bookshop, but it’s a little different retail clientele, you know what I’m saying? But my massage therapist who works at our farmers market and sells mushroom tinctures, she was like, “The amount of people that come up to me and are like, ‘Do you have a mushroom that fixes the vaccine injury from shaking someone’s hand who had the COVID vaccine?’” She’s like, “It would make you weep.” It’s rough out there. It’s rough out there, and I don’t think, especially with TikTok and Instagram, there’s like niche trends within that, this sort of educate yourself, improve yourself and that can happen through reading. It can happen in lots of different ways. We had Ezra Klein on the show for America’s 250, and he talked about like freedom to our Founding Fathers was self-mastery. This idea of like we reduce our vices, we increase our virtues, we pursue mastery of our emotions, of our reactions, and reading is a huge part of that for me. And I don’t just mean reading fiction; I mean reading nonfiction, reading newspapers, and that’s just a different psychological way to gather information versus algorithmic media and video that really is playing on your emotions.

[00:41:54] Laura Tremaine: I know, but I don’t want to get so mired in the way that it has worked is the way that it has to continue working. So like in that piece, she mentions that Socrates, for example, was very concerned as printing started to become a thing where you could print stories and write stories down and recreate them by printing them over and over. He was very concerned that we were going to lose verbal abilities because at that point, storytelling, verbal storytelling and conversation and everything ruled.

[00:42:22] Sarah: But he was like worried we would lose memorization, and you know what? He was right. Back in the day they would like memorize entire Shakespeare poems or entire epic... We’ll get into epic poems. They’re making a comeback. But it does change you. I think you’re right, like we’re not going to turn off TikTok. We can’t do get off my lawn and we don’t want to do that anymore. But I think we should also like not run from the fact that it will change things, and some of them will be negative.

[00:42:48] Laura Tremaine: Agreed. I just think, sure, we don’t memorize stuff as much as they did in Socrates’ days, but we can mass produce works for people to read that they never would have before. Printing is essential to evolution. Now whatever we’re doing that’s coming after it, the post literacy might be essential to human evolution as well. I just want to be open to it. I don’t want to be so dug in on there being one way for the human spirit to continue to better itself.

[00:43:25] Sarah: Here’s the thing, though. Here’s the other whole side of this conversation, because we’re doing what we always do when we talk about cultural trends, and we talk about the individual consumer, but there’s a huge industry, a huge publishing industry, not to mention the influence and the sort of I would call it a crisis of artificial intelligence rolling into the publishing industry that I think is a huge component of this. I think the publishing industry is a mess.

[00:43:52] Laura Tremaine: Yes.

[00:43:53] Sarah: It is one merger after the other. It’s these giant conglomerates that don’t pursue, to me in a lot of ways, like interesting, important works. There’s just a lot of like churning out. I think there’s an argument to be made we publish too many books. I think that there’s a lot of slop. I think that the idea you start talking about this, and it’s like the slop’s only on TikTok. It’s not. That’s not true. There’s like a lot of slop books out there, and I think that the publishing industry as far as chasing trends and not understanding how to let diversity, like this could lead into our conversation in the movies. If your kid goes to school with Jenna and she picks your book for your book club, you’re good. But if not, the path to actually make cultural impact with your novel or your nonfiction book, like they’re just getting smaller and smaller. I think that’s true for all media, and I think that’s bad for us. I think it’s bad in podcasting, I think it’s bad in publishing, I think it’s bad in movies, and I think that it’s not the individual consumer’s fault that all of these companies get bigger and bigger, and the profit-driven decisions they’re making are hurting the way that culture is consumed. Do you know what I mean?

[00:45:05] Laura Tremaine: Do you not think that there’s also a level playing field that wasn’t there before in terms of like anybody can podcast, anybody can publish a book now. In fact, both you and I are both published authors with Big Five publishers. And if I went to sell a book deal today, and I hope I do write more books, from the moment it sold to the moment it came out would be two years. Two years is archaic when I could go do this myself. That’s kind of a whole different conversation, but not really. Because why would a lot of people do that when anybody can do this now? So there used to be gatekeepers. I see that sometimes we maybe need some more gatekeepers, but I also as an individual creator love that everybody gets to have a voice now. But it has no doubt saturated everything.

[00:45:54] Sarah: Yeah. You can start a podcast. The chances that it will find an audience are smaller and smaller, and I think that’s true for self-publishing with books. It’s like the democratization of media through internet paradoxically created this situation in which true success or true cultural impact gets harder and harder to get and to find. Because it’s saturated because the media companies have gotten so large. If you’re a celebrity and you want to start a podcast, yeah, go for it. But if you’re anybody else, good luck. I was talking to Jamie Golden. She said somebody asked her how do I find an audience like you did?” And she’s like, “Get a time machine. Go back to when I started our podcast 10 years or 11 years ago,. So I think that’s true in publishing, too. I saw that piece in The New York Times several months ago about I think it was David Brooks, and he was just talking about we used to have authors who were hugely important to the cultural conversation, and it wasn’t just because the people who read The New York Times read their books. Everybody read their books. In the ‘70s and the ‘80s, you had Updike, you had these people, these authors who it wasn’t this sort of sorting. I think that’s what the media is getting sorted, right? So it’s like this sort of elite participation and then everybody else, and maybe you can get in where everybody else is, but to break through gets harder and harder. And I think it creates that resentment, and that’s certainly bad for our civic culture as well as our culture.

[00:47:21] Laura Tremaine: Yeah, there’s just so many layers to this because I don’t know what the medium is between when there were gatekeepers, there were a lot of important voices that never got heard. Between now everybody has a voice. There’s too many everybody’s.  I don’t know the solution.

[00:47:38] Sarah: And when everybody has a voice, but the same book’s getting written, man. That’s the weird paradox, too. Yeah, everybody gets a voice, but the big media companies are like that’s successful, so let’s make 25 of them. That’s the problem, too, and I think it just becomes this mess of sorting it out and or diving into algorithmic social media to be spoon-fed what you should be paying attention to, like you were talking to. And again, just to wrap this up, this is why we love Slow Read, and we are going to continue to do it. I particularly like to do it with older books. Should we tell everyone at Pantsuit Politics what our next book is going to be?

[00:48:14] Laura Tremaine: You please do the honors, Sarah.

[00:48:16] Sarah: Sarah. I forced her

[00:48:17] Laura Tremaine: Yes. This is driven by you.

[00:48:19] Sarah: Because I made Laura do this. Let’s be honest. Laura didn’t want to, and I said, “No, I really think this should be our next book.” Because we are reading Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander.

[00:48:31] Laura Tremaine: Dun-dun- dun.

[00:48:34] Sarah: Because for several reasons. We didn’t want to do any more Stephen King. That’s the first reason. We wanted to move on from Stephen King.

[00:48:43] Laura Tremaine: I will never move on from Stephen King. To be fair.

[00:48:46] Sarah: No, that’s the right. Reason we’re not moving on from Stephen King is Laura has fully occupied that real estate with her Stephen King summer and devotion to Stephen King as our current Shakespeare. I love that sweatshirt you sell. So that’s the first reason. And we didn’t want to do a classic, because I think there’s a lot of people out there that do the older classics really well, Footnotes and Tangents being one of those spaces. So we wanted to do a more contemporary novel. Romance is absolutely one of the most popular genres, not Laura’s favorite genre.

[00:49:20] Laura Tremaine: But I am on board.

[00:49:21] Sarah: Because she’s genre bending. It’s not just a romance. Outlander is not just a romance. So is that what helped convince you?

[00:49:28] Laura Tremaine: No. A little bit maybe. I probably wouldn’t have done straight romance. You’re probably right there. But I really hold it as a value to read outside of your own box.

[00:49:41] Sarah: Yes.

[00:49:42] Laura Tremaine: I think you should stretch your reading. Now, I don’t say that to every single person. If you’re barely reading, then read what you want. You know what I mean? I’m just for reading. But if you’re a regular reader, I do think every, I don’t know, quarter, every three or four books or something you should stretch yourself.

[00:50:01] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:50:01] Laura Tremaine: Maybe you read something older, maybe you read something buzzy if you never do that, maybe you read outside of your preferred genre. I think that’s really important for regular readers to do. And so I am pushing myself by reading Outlander. I am.

[00:50:16] Sarah: That’s very exciting. Now listen, this is different from The Stand because neither of us have read Outlander before. So this will be a first read for both of us, which is very exciting. It’s also why we have put this second book on Slow Read behind the paywall. One, because we’re scared of the Outlander fandom, because they’re very intense, especially around the TV show, and we’re a little frightened of them, and so we want a little bit of a walled garden.

[00:50:42] Laura Tremaine: And two, because Outlander is R rated. We need to be able to talk about it in all its glory.

[00:50:48] Sarah: That’s right. That’s true. Violence and sex. So we will be reading Outlander. We released the reading schedule yesterday, so you can go see the schedule. We’re going to read it over the course of the fall. We will have Zoom book clubs. It’s going to be really fun. We had so much fun with the community at Slow Read with The Stand, so I’m very excited about Outlander. If you would like to join Laura and I slow reading Outlander, there will be a link in the show notes. Up next, we’re going to talk about movies. Laura, your husband, Jeff, had a movie come out this summer, so you were all up in the summer movie experience.

[00:51:40] Laura Tremaine: Listen, we were part of a bit of a movie renaissance this summer that we’re grateful for. Hollywood has needed a little bit of a boost. Now, I don’t know how much of a boost this is actually going to be because we’re in a lot of trouble here in Hollywood. Industry-wide, there’s a lot of struggles here after the pandemic, after three different strikes.

[00:52:05] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:52:05] Laura Tremaine: We are really struggling. Also, just with medium changing, streaming.

[00:52:10] Sarah: Yep.

[00:52:11] Laura Tremaine: We’re in a lot of trouble out here, so I’m not saying that this summer has revived us, but it certainly has been a nice little boost. My husband, Jeff, he created the Jackass franchise. They released their--

[00:52:25] Sarah: Can we just talk about the amazing balance of us just having this big conversation about books and culture and how important it is, and you’re like, “Yes, and my husband does the Jackass series.” Amazing. I know. It Never gets old.

[00:52:37] Laura Tremaine: I know.

[00:52:37] Sarah: Just never gets old for me, I’m just going to be honest with you.

[00:52:41] Laura Tremaine: It is a lesson in contrast I feel like. Although, Jeff is not much of a reader, but he creates things that are actually cultural phenomenons. And it’s not too much of a stretch that we do talk about storytelling a lot in our household, and Jackass released their final movie in June. Jackass 5. It was the fifth movie in the franchise. Jeff and I actually met on the set of the first Jackass movie in 2002. We had a lot to celebrate this summer, and all the fun things that come along with that. Red carpets, premieres in London, New York, LA.

[00:53:19] Sarah: So fun.

[00:53:20] Laura Tremaine: We had a really big celebratory time. But the real thing to talk about here is the movies breaking records left and right this weekend.

[00:53:30] Sarah: Yeah. So I pulled up the numbers for the summer. So you got Toy Story 5, another fifth in a series. How about that? How about that synchronicity? $457.1 million. We went and saw it.

[00:53:41] Laura Tremaine: Did you?

[00:53:42] Sarah: Yeah. Now, my 17-year-old was like, “I’m out, I’m not going to Toy Story 5.” But the 15-year-old and the 11-year-old, we went and saw Toy Story 5. Of course, on our two-week-long RV trip, literally the day before we flew home when we were all like, “Baby Jesus, will this trip ever end, this journey? This is going to kill us.” We went to see The Odyssey in Bozeman, Montana. $911 million worldwide.

[00:54:13] Laura Tremaine: Yes.

[00:54:14] Sarah: Just dominating the conversation. And then this weekend, Spider-Man did $927 million in one weekend, one of the history’s biggest debuts. And I will be going to see that at the drive-in this weekend.

[00:54:27] Laura Tremaine: Second only in history-making records, second only to Avengers: Endgame. That’s wild. Tom Holland is--

[00:54:33] Sarah: I guess people are ready for superheroes again. First of all, everybody loves Tom Holland and Zendaya. They’re just devoted to him. He was also in The Odyssey. He is having a really great summer. And she was, too. Shit, they both were. Damn. When do these people sleep?

[00:54:48] Laura Tremaine: Nobody feels sorry for them. They’re doing just fine.

[00:54:49] Sarah: They’re doing great. They’re in love. They’re beautiful. They’re rich and famous.

[00:54:53] Laura Tremaine: Listen, Spider-Man, less of a surprise. Those types of movies do very well. I’m heartened at how well it did, but they always do well. More heartening is The Odyssey.

[00:55:04] Sarah: Agreed.

[00:55:05] Laura Tremaine: Based on a old-ass poem that is complicated. Like the story itself is hard. It’s an epic battle. I can see why it’s appealing, but it could have gone either way. People could have been like, “This sounds boring. This sounds like homework.”

[00:55:23] Sarah: I think there’s a lot going on with Odyssey. Let me just say that. First, I think Christopher Nolan has established himself. If Stephen King is our new Shakespeare, I think Christopher Nolan might be our new Spielberg. I went and saw Disclosure Day two, not for nothing, really liked it. But I think Nolan now at this point... when everybody was like waiting in line to see Oppenheimer, I was like I guess everybody’s going to go see whatever Christopher Nolan makes. Which is great. I love monoculture. I love a moment everybody’s talking about. I think it is important and bonding and like emotionally, psychologically important for us as a culture. Anyway, so I think at this point everybody’s just going to go see whatever Christopher Nolan does. I also think Matt Damon is beloved. Not just Tom Holland and Zendaya, but Matt Damon.

[00:56:01] Laura Tremaine: Is he?  I don’t know.

[00:56:03] Sarah: Yes. What are you talking about? To our generation he is beloved.

[00:56:08] Laura Tremaine: Our generation maybe. My kids did not know who that was.

[00:56:11] Sarah: No, but to the millennials... I even watched that dumb Netflix movie him and Ben Affleck made. If Ben Affleck and Matt Damon make a thing, I’m going to see it. They’re like my cousins. I just feel like I need to support them no matter what. So I think for the millennials, that was a big thing. And do you feel like people knew enough that he didn’t use any like CGI, AI? I think there was something about, in this moment, where people are like reacting so strongly. The fact that it’s like an ancient text and he uses like old school techniques. I think, at least online, that felt like a real draw to people.

[00:56:46] Laura Tremaine: That was more of a draw to my teenagers and my filmmaking husband. I didn’t care about that. And obviously there’s CGI in the Marvel movies and the Spider-Man movies.

[00:56:57] Sarah: That’s true. That’s a good point.

[00:56:58] Laura Tremaine: So maybe that’s an interesting tidbit. I don’t think that’s what brought them to the box office. I don’t.

[00:57:03] Sarah: Do you think that ancient text was appealing to people? Do you think there’s something, or do people not even know and they just don’t care? I don’t know. I think it’s hard to figure out like why is everybody going to see these weird topics Christopher Nolan picks like Oppenheimer and The Odyssey?

[00:57:18] Laura Tremaine: I think it makes people feel smart.

[00:57:20] Sarah: Yes. Okay, I agree with that.

[00:57:22] Laura Tremaine: But also, it isn’t hard. You see the trailer for it and it looks pretty rad.

[00:57:27] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:57:27] Laura Tremaine: So you can go see this very entertaining movie and feel smart. This is so many wins.

[00:57:31] Sarah: It’s an ancient text that holds up and people interpret over and over again for a reason. Wanting to get home, battling the fallout of a war, falling for the siren song, being addicted to something that lets you numb out. These are eternal issues.

[00:57:47] Laura Tremaine: And it was stories that you loosely knew. Even my teenager knew what an odyssey was. They didn’t know Odysseus the man, but they knew what an odyssey was, they knew the Trojan Horse story. There’s parts of it that you are vaguely familiar with and you want to see how it comes together. I saw it with my whole family, and afterwards we had a whole big talk about all the different... Odysseus’s journey is just one small story in amongst all these other stories. You had Agamemnon, you had Ariadne, which I just read an excellent book about her last year. Helen of Troy. I was trying to tell them that the movie The Odyssey is just one small piece of all these different stories that come together that interact and overlap. And that was a fun conversation to have. They’re not going to go see a million movies about it, but it just was intellectually stimulating. Now, I don’t think it being intellectually stimulating is the number one reason people go to the box office, but as word of mouth, I think that’s what’s kept it three weekends in.

[00:58:42] Sarah: Yeah. And I’d wonder if Spider-Man came in on the tails. Like everybody’s going to the movies, everybody’s enjoying that we all went to the movie and saw this, reminded them like, yeah, it is kind of nice to go to an actual damn movie theater, sit with a bucket of popcorn and have an experience. Because that’s what happened with Barbie and Oppenheimer, right? It was this sort of like everybody’s talking about it, everybody’s going back to the movies. It feeds this vibe. And so Spider-Man kind of is there to fill the void if you’ve already seen The Odyssey and don’t want to go sit through three hours again.

[00:59:13] Laura Tremaine: It is a similar pairing, not as marketable, but to Oppenheimer, Barbie, and like one’s really fun, one’s really smart and epic. You get to do both. I also feel like there’s a mentality of wanting to be part of the culture thing in the moment. So like The Eras Tour, for example, Taylor Swift’s tour was always going to be popular. But then when it became a thing of “I don’t want to have missed seeing this live.”

[00:59:39] Sarah: Yep.

[00:59:40] Laura Tremaine: The same thing was happening with Oppenheimer, Barbie of “I don’t want to miss this cultural moment.” The same thing I think is happening particularly with The Odyssey a little bit more than Spider-Man, which is always going to be popular, of I don’t want to miss this moment in IMAX . Or just because it’s a thing everyone’s talking about. You just don’t always get that. Like Toy Story, that you already mentioned, did big numbers because it’s always going to have done big numbers, but people weren’t really talking about it.

[01:00:02] Sarah: No. I think what’s frustrating is I think-- because I grew up in the ‘90s, the reason I am so devoted to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon is because they came in on the like Good Will Hunting, these smaller pictures that had something to say, the sort of like more intellectual, independent films, even the rom-coms to a certain extent. But what’s so frustrating to me as a person who really does love movies and likes to go to the movies, is they don’t give any picture long enough in the damn theater to build those legs. If you don’t roll in like a monster and you’re not directed by Christopher Nolan-- like there’s so many movies this year where I was like, “I’d really like to see that,” and it’s in the theater for a week. Freaking ET was in the theater for 18 months or something bananas. They need to be in the theater longer. Like you have to give people time to talk about it. If you don’t go viral, which is we’re saying all this as if it was grassroots. Of course it wasn’t. Of course the company behind The Odyssey probably astroturfed and did all kinds of other shit. Elon Musk gave them a heads-up and a leg up by fighting about whether Lupita should be Helen of Troy, that kind of stuff. With algorithmic media there’s always this sense of everybody is discovering this at the same time. That’s never true. There’s always like the feed is fake, something’s feeding it. These are our commercials now. But so if you’re making something that is getting people talking, there’s just no time. There’s no time. You have to come in immediately.

[01:01:32] Laura Tremaine: Okay, but this goes back to where we started in the Hollywood conversation, which is streaming rights and the financials behind it. So this has really greatly affected how actors are being paid, how producers are being paid, et cetera, in that if a movie’s in the theater for a long time, which, like you said, doesn’t really happen anymore, they get paid back end. So they get paid a residual based on how the thing is performing in a certain manner. Now those rates and contracts and deals are very different when a movie goes to streaming. Even if it’s not free streaming, even if you have to pay for it or rent it on Apple TV, all of that is affecting... It’s so much business is being affected in how people are getting paid, what their contracts say. And so those decisions are made with that in mind, actually.

[01:02:24] Sarah: Interestingly enough, it’s not that something can’t build. It just can’t build at the theater. It’s got to build streaming, right? I read this really interesting piece that talked about the de-globalization of culture, and how Netflix is making more local products. I’m sure that’s where some of the business that used to be in LA has gone. They’ll film the Korean TV show in Korea. They’ll film the Norwegian crime drama in Norway, right? And they were saying sometimes if we make it for this country or this particular niche, it will grow, and they were talking about Adolescence. It’s a gritty British drama. It was made in Britain, written by Brits. It’s very British. But it went viral. It grew legs. More people watched it, and it grew over time. But it’s like streaming’s the only place that something like that can happen because they don’t pull it immediately. You can’t build in the theater like you used to. But even back then, that wasn’t the business model. There is that famous clip of Matt Damon talking about we made money on rentals. Those small movies that we all grew to love, it’s because people rented them and watched them at home, and then grew to love them and would watch them a million times. It’s not like they were big hits in the box office. It was they made their money on the VHSs.

[01:03:30] Laura Tremaine: Yeah, but it’s a really different calculation. And also some of these things don’t get made if they’re not made in a state or country that is friendly to production, that is giving a tax rebate. This is back to California politics where we started. There is a lot. Like you were saying about publishing, there is a lot of stuff being made but maybe not enough of the right stuff or not enough in the right location, or it’s so similar to what you’re saying about publishing. Obviously, there’s some obvious differences, but it’s really complicated. The business of it has changed enormously. And is certainly not centered in Los Angeles anymore, which changes our entire economy.

[01:04:10] Sarah: Yeah, I think that’s true of everything we’ve talked about. We’re in a time of transition. The Democratic Party’s transitioning. That’s why they’re struggling. Algorithmic media is transitioning. That’s the marketing that’s transitioning for everything, books, music, TV, movies. And those industries themselves and the way people consume and the way that they’re talked about or the way they make money, that’s all transitioning. It is overwhelming. And again, then you add in artificial intelligence on top of all that, accelerating the change, accelerating the changes to the business, to the marketing, to the consumption model. Crazy. For every piece we’ve talked about that I just read a piece that basically Google is dead. If you want to Google something It’s going to tell you the answer and you don’t have to visit the website. What is that? If I was Squarespace, I’d be terrified right now. Because why do I need a fancy website if the answer is just going to be served up by Gemini and no one’s going to click through to the website anymore? It’s like everything is changing so quickly, the business models, the marketing, the consumption model. It’s overwhelming.

[01:05:13] Laura Tremaine: It’s very overwhelming. And you and I are both authors. We’re podcasters. That falls into this. I’m married to a Hollywood director. That falls into this. It’s a weird time to be living through, and I can’t even keep up with, like, all the changes, and it’s happening rapidly, and also all of it is nuanced.

[01:05:34] Sarah: Yes. That’s why we love slow reading. That’s why I love that you came on here today to talk about all of this with me. As overwhelming as it is, you’re like, “Oh, my God. Are you sure? Are you sure we can tackle all this?” I’m like, “No, believe me, we can.”

[01:05:47] Laura Tremaine: We covered a lot of territory.

[01:05:49] Sarah: We really did. I think we fixed most everything. Everybody just slow down, slow read, and it’ll be okay. See?

[01:05:56] Laura Tremaine: That’s right.

[01:05:57] Sarah: We did it. Thank you. Thank you for joining me as my guest host here today on Pantsuit Politics, Laura Tremaine. You can find everything Laura does over at Secret Stuff on her Substack. We will link it in the show notes. You can follow her on Instagram to learn more about Stephen King Summer. You can’t join her reading retreat because it’s sold out, but I’m sure she’ll host another one. We didn’t even get into that, why people love these reading retreats, probably because they do want to slow down and just have some time. That’ll all be in the show notes. Before we end, I have a very special close. This episode is dedicated to the memory of our listener Amy Petrick. Amy’s husband Jeremy reached out to us and shared that Amy was a devoted listener of Pantsuit Politics, and that she recently passed away after a battle with brain cancer. She was a beloved member of this community. We are eternally grateful for her, and we wanted to dedicate our conversation today to Amy. So thanks, Jeremy, for sharing that sad news, but letting us know that a member of this community has lost so that we can all light a candle for Amy tonight.

[01:06:59] Laura Tremaine: Yeah.

[01:07:00] Sarah: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. I will be back in your ears on Friday with Lacey Bohling, the head of our local food bank here in Paducah. She was a big hit when she came on to talk with me and Beth earlier this year, so I’ve asked her to come back and co-host with me on Friday, so get excited for that episode. We’re going to talk about the data center coming to my hometown, speaking of artificial intelligence and the rapid rate of change facing all of us. Until then, keep it nuanced, y’all.

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