The Ghost Economy

Are AI and Crypto the Economy of the Future or an apparition?

Happy Halloween! Our version of celebrating is telling you that we’re spooked by this economy. You’re…welcome?

In this episode, we talk about frights like a booming stock market and a depressed labor market, putting all of our eggs in the AI basket, and thinking of cryptocurrency as the path to stability.

It’s weird out here. We’re trying to see it and put our arms around as much as possible, even though we feel pretty powerless to change anything.

If you’re feeling anxious, we don’t have answers, but hopefully it helps to hear that you aren’t alone. -Beth

Topics Discussed

• The AI Economy

• Crypto Speculation

• Outside of Politics: Steven King and Louise Penny

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

• If you have questions about Substack, feel free to email us at hello@pantsuitpoliticsshow.com. We really want you to have the best substack experience available.

• Join our Referral Contest - the listener with the most referrals by Thanksgiving will get a special care package of treats from Sarah and Beth

AI, Bitcoin, and our Circular Economy

• GENIUS Act of 2025 (Congress.gov)

• What are stablecoins, and how are they regulated? (The Brookings Institute)

• Stablecoin surge: Reserve-backed cryptocurrencies are on the rise (World Economic Forum)

• Gold, Bitcoin Surge on Concerns Over Global Debt Pile (Bloomberg)

• The 10 jobs least and most threatened by AI (Axios)

• Is A.I. Investment Getting Too Circular? (The New York Times)

• Trump slaps 10% extra tariff on Canada over Reagan trade ad (CNBC)

• AI Recruiting Startup Mercor Rockets to $2 Billion Valuation (The Wall Street Journal)

• Google Revenue Soars to Record as AI Boom Lifts Cloud Business (The Wall Street Journal)

• AI Data Center Boom Threatens Trump’s Manufacturing Revival (Bloomberg)

• America is now one big bet on AI (Financial Times)

• The Rules of Investing Are Being Loosened. Could It Lead to the Next 1929? (The New York Times)

Some of our Substack Favorites

• The Argument

• Slow Boring

• Derek Thompson

• Cy Canterel

• Laura Tremaine

• Parent of Adults

• Emily Ley

• Footnotes and Tangents

• Courtney Rowland

Sneak Peek to 2026

• Slow Read The Stand by Steven King in 2026 with Sarah and Laura Tremaine

• Louise Penny Pilgrimage with Beth and Common Ground Pilgrimages

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. Today, we’re going to talk about the economy. We’re going to talk about the American economy, the global economy. Why is the stock market soaring, but no one can get a job? Is the AI bubble about to burst? Are crypto billionaires trying to get their hands on your 401k? We’re going to talk about all of that today and more. And Outside of Politics, we have two very exciting announcements that you’re definitely going to want to stay tuned for. Beth, in this segment of the show, we spend a lot of time talking about Substack. And sometimes I worry we’ve never actually explained what Substack is.

Beth [00:00:46] I think of Substack as a mall because I am an elder millennial and malls are formative for me. And so, to me, Substack is a mall where we have a store, but we exist among lots of other stores. We love some of those stores. We don’t frequent some of the stores, but we have the store in the Substack mall. And what’s really nice is that you can come and just go to our store. You could just go to parts of our store. Just one department within it. You could just get our email newsletter if that’s all you want to do. Or you could really go all in and tour the whole place and spend some time and hang out with other people who were there. You can also walk around and see what other people are doing. And I really think that Substack does an interesting job of putting work in front of me that I will enjoy and that will make me think. Sometimes it’s work that really challenges my viewpoints. I don’t feel like I’m in an echo chamber on Substack, which is one thing that I like about it. I like that this mall has a lot of different stores and a lot different people in them. And so, for me, it’s just been a very nice, transparent, smooth place to offer all of our work that doesn’t go in the free feed every week.

Sarah [00:02:01] Yeah, Substack started as very newsletter driven. And you can still do that. You can still join Substack and get our newsletter and other content delivered directly to your email box. You never have to go to the app. You never have to go the website. I go to the app and website a lot. I think of it as like very writerly. Now, this might be my Substack algorithm because I do a lot of reading Substacks, but it’s like very writerly, it’s very earnest social media platform where people can share their thoughts on the publishing industry or politics or the latest internet controversy. So there’s like an opinion page aspect of Substack, but then there’s also just a more in depth, very, like I said, writerly intellectual approach to what people are sharing on notes. There’s like a note section that’s sort of like a status. People are sharing their status.

[00:03:08] Though, it more intellectually expressive than it is like just share a link, share meme, share a link. That’s what I like about it. People are really writing beautiful things in the note sections, at least on my Substack homepage and what I’m getting fed. And I really like that part. And there’s so many thinkers I really respect: Matt Iglesias, Jerusalem Demsas, Derek Thompson, that I just check what they’re talking about every day. I want to know what they are thinking. I want to what they talking about. I want to be in conversation with the internet in that way. And that’s what I really liked about Substack. I think it’s a good fit for the content we produce.

Beth [00:03:49] As you learn how to use it, for me it feels like I’ve almost created my own magazine. I have a lot of political content, a lot of essays about philosophy. I am obsessed with Cy Cantrell, who writes a lot about philosophy and the way that we use visual cues in politics. But then I also love reading Courtney Rowland’s Neighborhood Food newsletter. I get a lot of recipes and party ideas from her. Emily Ley is in there with parenting advice and I have her Christmas gift list recommendations waiting to read right now. So it’s just a really nice mix of things that I chose. And I like being able to choose and then organize them. Now some people find some of the flexibility of Substack confusing and I totally understand why.

[00:04:36] Luckily, we have the nicest Substack experts to work with both at Substack and on our team. Maggie and Alise have hopped on the phone with many people to help them set up their Substack the way that they want to use it and to walk them through and show them exactly how to get everything from us that they want. You are not bothering us. We want you to reach out and be happy with the experience that you’re having there, especially in our little store in the big Substack mall. So please just send an email to Hello@pantsuitpoliticshow.com if you are having any trouble whatsoever getting started.

Sarah [00:05:11] All right, next up, let’s talk about the economy. Beth, in this economy some people are making an enormous amount of money. Should we start there?

Beth [00:05:37] A few people are, yes.

Sarah [00:05:39] The stock market is on fire, up 70% in the last three years. It just keeps going up, up, up.

Beth [00:05:51] The reasons it’s going up, up, and up have gotten really different over the past couple of years than they were before that. It is a smaller and smaller number of companies propelling that graph up and to the right. And, to me, all is feeling a little precarious, but it is accelerating. And you do have to start with the basic fact; the stock market looks really good right now.

Sarah [00:06:17] Yeah. By one estimate, 80% of U.S. Stock gains this year came from AI companies. That’s a lot.

Beth [00:06:27] Eighty percent.

Sarah [00:06:28] Eighty percent. Seven tech companies account for more than a third of the value of the S&P 500 and trade at prices 70 times higher than their earnings on average. So these companies, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Amazon. Meta, they’re on spending sprees. Meta is saying that they will expend at least 70 billion this year on AI infrastructure. Alphabet, a record $100 billion in revenue last quarter is forecasting spending of $91 billion. Microsoft also going to continue to increase their investments. So they’re pouring all this money into infrastructure, data centers. And it is having a larger economic impact. You have companies like Caterpillar who are providing the building materials, technology to invest in this infrastructure they’re growing too. But then you also have companies that are AI driven that have shown no capacity to produce a profit. There’s one that got written up in the Wall Street Journal. It’s a startup called Mercor that takes thousands of white collar professionals to train the AI models to basically one day replace them. It has a $10 billion valuation and has shown no capacity to produce a profit.

[00:08:07] Open AI is not producing a profit. So the investors see this massive spending on infrastructure and assume it’s going to produce a profit. So they’re investing in these companies, investing in these companies. But this is a different kind of infrastructure. I mean, this is what open AI is telling people. Like we are building the infrastructure of tomorrow. That’s what all this money is being spent on. Basically this is a sure bet in infrastructure, but it’s not like they’re burying cables in the ground, right? They are building a type of infrastructure to me that has a different and more precarious, to use your word, lifespan than what we saw with the internet revolution. Also, not for nothing, that was also a bubble that burst at one point. I don’t know. It all makes me extraordinarily nervous.

Beth [00:09:02] It makes me nervous too. Ordinary people invest in the stock market, whether they do it directly or through 401Ks that are managed by someone else, retirement pension systems. You invest in a stock market for the purpose of diversifying. If 80% of the stock is being driven by one sector, that seems to be at odds with the whole philosophy of investment and growing something to live on later in life that we’ve had for a number of years. It also concerns me that while these companies are touting all of this spending, they are using some accounting tricks to make their books look a little bit different than they would if they were just showing the cash outright. So a lot of them are using special purpose vehicles, which are just legal entities made up to spend money less transparently than if it were within the company’s big picture to do a lot of this construction. And I am happy for the Caterpillars and the industrial air conditioning companies and on all of the places that are benefiting from this.

[00:10:08] It does have some wider effects than just these companies, but it has a lot of costs outside of just these companies too that I think the public is only starting to become aware of as more communities start to see data centers popping up, taking up so much farmland. Taking up so much electricity, seeing that electricity costs get spread among the local population because of how deals were structured to attract these companies to build in those communities in the first place. The water usage is enormous. And I just fundamentally think it is not a great thing to have so much of our economy concentrated in this sector where the average person doesn’t understand what it’s even talking about. Do you think most people know what a GPU is? GPUs are what our economy is built on right now, and most of us have no idea. And I just think that’s really different from where we’ve been before too.

Sarah [00:11:05] We just had a conversation with Jerusalem Demsas on a Substack Live, and she was making the case that we don’t want to prevent the growth, we want to figure out how to have these communities shouldering the burdens of this infrastructure expansion, also getting a cut of the benefit. And that’s what I’m worried about. It seems like job growth, which you usually see as a benefit of this level of stock market profit is decoupling. You have the stock market going up to the right and the job market going down to the right which is not something you usually see historically. You see jobs growing with the stock market. And, look, I think this is even deeper than the sector dominance of AI in this moment. I’m very concerned with that. But for a long time the way most of us invest in the stock market is through index funds. And I’ve always thought this is sort of this Meta, very weird thing that’s happening. To me, this is why the stock market even before the AI industry dominance got weird is we’re not investing in individual companies. We’re just indexing it, pouring massive amounts of money into the stock market, generally, not, oh, well, I want to invest in GE because I think the future is plastics, or whatever the case may be.

[00:12:48] And I’m not saying every ordinary Americans were investing their retirement that way, but there were retirement funds, there were investment funds that were making that level of decision-making, and now everybody’s just in an index fund, which it’s weird. So who owns pieces of these companies? You have these activist investors out there asserting a worldview occasionally, but it has to be activist investors because most of the investors are like the Russian nesting dolls. It’s the index fund, and then you unlock the index funds, and it’s the 401Ks, and then you unlock the 401K or the pension funds, and then it’s the individual Americans. But that’s so many levels removed. It doesn’t surprise me that the stock market is becoming more and more removed from any indicator in the average Americans existence.

Beth [00:13:44] It’s all very incestuous. And I think, especially as you look at the big companies that are spending all this money right now, OpenAI and Nvidia and Meta have their fortunes tied together in so many ways. If any of those companies starts to crack, the whole thing really begins to struggle. I think that’s less true with Amazon, because Amazon is in so many different spaces. But we do have a lot going on here that is like a set of dominoes. And I am concerned about it not because I have some objections to the way that AI is being used right now, I do. But I understand that AI has enormous potential and I want it to do the good that it can do and I understand there are trade-offs for that. If I want AI to help cure diseases and reduce medical risk and risk of medical error and things like that, there’s a trade-off. We have to have big data centers. They have to use a lot of resources. Some of this is hard. And I’m not trying to be naive about any of it, but I do feel like this is just a bender. And that enough people are profiting from the bender right now. That no one’s really minding the store and saying, is this how we want our economy to run? Is this just layers and layers of opacity where fewer people can understand what’s going on and everybody is crossing their fingers and hoping it works out? I don’t love that.

Sarah [00:15:19] Yeah, that to me feels like what’s happening. We’re already experiencing the wave of layoffs. Big news this week was Amazon announcing 14,000 layoffs. You’ve got Paramount Skydance announcing layoffs. Target announcing layoffs. And in much the same way that all their projections are speculative, all this investment is speculative that AI will become the new internet basically that operates and creates all this wealth and productivity, these layoffs are also just anticipation of that. They’re not actually replacing people with AI agents or AI workers. They’re just trying to thin the herd. And honestly, I think free up more money to pour into this bender. I don’t know where this ends. Add on top of all of that, we have this black hole of data because the Trump administration has, first of all, shut down the government. So none of the data is being collected through the regular forms of bureaucracy. Plus, even when it was open, they were stemming the tide of this information because it wasn’t saying what they wanted it to say with the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. So it just feels like a situation rife for exploitation, corruption, speculation in a way that hurts not only the overall economy, but absolutely individual Americans.

Beth [00:17:04] I don’t hear a vision from here. I would think the deeper that we get into this, the clearer the vision was going to be. We’ve lived now for over a year in AI is the future. AI is going to change everything. AI is going to make everything different, greater, better, faster, more efficient, more powerful. And I don’t have a clear understanding of what good AI does for society than I did a year ago. I might have less of one, honestly. And as you watch these layoffs roll out, whether you can attribute them mostly to AI or not, I’m not hearing anyone say, well, here’s what the jobs of the future are going to be. Here’s what this is going to open up for people. Building all these data centers, temporary, right? And every vision that you hear Sam Altman and others talking about seems to involve fewer and fewer people. I’d like to hear someone make the case for the pain or and the potential pain that is being inflicted on everyone right now, so that at least we know what it’s for. And I am not comfortable saying, well, I just trust these guys.

Sarah [00:18:13] Yeah, the creative destruction is real. That’s the economic principle we discussed with Jerusalem that some people recently won a Nobel Prize for. And I’m listening to this; at the same time I’m listen to this continued analysis of the democratic party’s abandonment of working class Americans and this idea that people don’t just want government support when industries change or communities are deindustrialized or whatever. They want a job. They want the status that comes from work. What is going to hold status in a future where people aren’t working, which seems to be the future that they are articulating, that just people won’t need to work? Well, especially among the young, you can see in some countries recently when Gen Z feels like the economy, the government is not producing a future they’re excited about, things get a little wild in the streets and otherwise.

[00:19:21] This idea of like let’s just tear it all apart; we don’t really have a vision for what comes next, doesn’t play well especially with young people and who can blame them? It’s scary. It’s a scary thing to think about wiping out white collar jobs. And it has been something that we’ve been talking about for a long time. We did shows 10 years ago on universal basic income and what happens if we don’t need truck drivers anymore. And I don’t think there’s a place where we pause the economy and everything stays the same, but the pace of this change is dramatically faster than even the internet revolution, which means the risks and rewards are also higher. The stakes are higher because it’s coming so quickly. And you can definitely tell who thinks the case for reward is really high and they’re pouring money into it. But beyond a couple of people at Anthropic who are trying to ring the warning bells and saying this could upend everything and we don’t have a plan, I don’t hear a lot of articulation about what comes next.

Beth [00:20:35] Or what even the goal is. I just feel like there’s a lot of we want to do it to show that we can.

Sarah [00:20:41] We want to do it because China’s going to do it. We want do it because everybody’s doing it. It’s an arms race among countries. It’s arms race amongst these companies. And look, a lot of breakthroughs in human history have come just from a competition that is basically can we, right? That’s not new. Can we? Let’s see if we can. And especially a sort of arms race among nations when it came to space travel and competition among companies when you talk about medical breakthroughs. I do think the promise of AI is real when it comes to so many-- particularly areas of human life like health. I don’t think that they have articulated how that’s going to make money. And at this point, it’s going to have to make a lot of money. It’s going to have to a lot money off who? The people who aren’t going to have any jobs? Like, who’s going to be paying the usage fee for these AI agents? I guess corporations. But the fallout of a huge percentage of the American population not being able to find work, where is all the money coming from to make these investments profitable?

Beth [00:21:59] And it feels like these companies think about the profitability through the lens of like, well, people won’t have to work, which will free them up to spend more time spending money on leisure and pleasure and entertainment, I guess. But where does that money come from? And also, aren’t we already reaching the end of leisure and entertainment? We all seem not well, and we seem to be coming to consensus about why we’re not well. And it is spending too much time on these platforms that are chasing more and more and more. And so, again, my mind is open if someone can say, here’s where we’re going and here’s how human beings still have dignity and purpose in that future. But I’m not just hearing anybody make that case.

Sarah [00:22:55] Well, let’s talk about what’s happening globally because it does feel-- first of all, we’re not the only country experiencing an AI boom. That’s absolutely happening globally, but there’s another type of decoupling happening on the global stage that I think’s really interesting as well. So a few weeks ago, Beth, I was reading John Ellis’s News Items on Substack and he was talking about how the currencies are weakening. The yen is down. The dollar is down 30%. That there’s this what they call a debasement trend and investors were flocking to the, and I quote, “Perceived safety of Bitcoin”. So it feels like not only do we have a domestic trend that is breaking the traditional economic rules of the stock market goes up, the job market goes out. Now you have a trend globally where the safe investment is not currencies and nations, but crypto and digital investing in a way that is really bending my mind.

Beth [00:24:17] In some ways it all feels like a vote of no confidence in our ability to govern ourselves. And the future belongs to the biggest companies.

Sarah [00:24:27] The richest people.

Beth [00:24:29] And the richest people and the way to get rich is not to participate in something that benefits everyone to some degree as even like treasury investments do, but to go it alone, make it big. Get well the getting is good and try to isolate any downside that would be shared with anyone else.

Sarah [00:24:52] Well, here’s the thing though. The transparency of where’s the money coming from, where you actually going to get the money from, is a little clearer when it comes to global investing and particularly the growth of crypto and these digital assets. Because for the last 50 years, the way you got really, really rich was getting in on the private companies before they went public, right? These angel investors they got rich because they got to invest before the rest of us could when these companies were private. And so you see the New York Times has this really interesting piece comparing the 1920s before the crash. This is what was happening. They were trying to make it easier for the everyday man to invest. Like we want to make it easy for you to get in on the stock market. What does that mean? That means we want access to your money. We want your money. And we’re seeing this same trend. And I don’t even think it’s a trend. I think it is a historical shift in the world economy and the role of investing that we want to make it super easy for you to give us your money in a whole new way. So you have BlackRock who’s launching a Bitcoin exchange traded fund.

[00:26:15] Then you have companies like Strategy where he, the founder of this company, describes cash as a melting ice cube. Basically, the argument is these global currencies, the dollar, the yen, they’re just going to continue to lose value in the face of inflation. And so, the company, in theory, is like a software company, but really what this dude has done is leverage a ton of capital to buy as much Bitcoin as possible. And so when you’re investing in that company, you’re basically just investing in Bitcoin. Robinhood the investing app is trying to do private company tokens where you can invest before a company goes public. Something like AI, of course AI came out and it was like you’re not investing in OpenAI. that’s not what’s happening. But they’re just trying to get access not only to the individual dollar, but what you really see is they’re trying to get access to the 401ks, the pension fund, because there’s an enormous amount of money at play there. And so that’s where you start to see the stable coin. So, okay, well, if people are still worried a little bit about the speculative nature of Bitcoin, we’ll link it to a stable value like the US dollar. You have to hold the same amount in the US Dollar that you hold in Bitcoin, but it seems like that’s ultimately just a way to push the transition to cryptocurrency that we also have been talking about for a while, but it seemed like they’re really making a play for, especially with the crypto president, Donald Trump.

Beth [00:27:38] I’m just thinking about the logic of that. You can’t rely on global currencies except by reference to them in stable coin. It all feels very much like a pyramid scheme to me. The way that cryptocurrency works at all feels exactly like you said with people getting in early with angel investors and private companies. Cryptocurrency, it has money for people who mine the most earliest on and create this ecosystem around that particular type of crypto that give it any value whatsoever. It’s not wholly different from baseball cards or anything else that you trade. So I just think it’s wild that the pitch is you can’t believe in global currencies, but if you’re nervous about this, don’t worry. We’ll tie it to the stability of global currencies.

Sarah [00:28:35] Again, the word seems to be speculative. For a long time people didn’t take Bitcoin seriously because it was so speculative, but now the legitimization of cryptocurrency, of the AI industry, it still feels like it rests on a giant bed of speculation to me. It still feels like-- I do think we’re sort of inevitably in this phase of transition, that we’re going somewhere new. The global financial system is in a real transitional moment. Like we are shifting to something new. That’s what this feels like to me, especially because there’s no concern for the cost of this because people are making so much money and greed is a blinder and because of who we have as a president. And history to me says, well, this will go until it breaks and then we’ll have to pick up the pieces. And who do we think is actually going to bear the brunt of the breaking? It’s not going to be Mark Andreessen; I can tell you that much.

Beth [00:29:50] Well, as we’re talking on Thursday, October 30th, the stories coming out of Jamaica are so heartbreaking. And I can understand why the global economy has to be in transition when we are seeing the fury of natural disasters increase, the fury and the frequency, and insurance seems to be collapsing everywhere. It’s just not up for what that kind of disaster creates. We have the same kind of issue with the displacement of people because of conflicts, because of strained resources, because of war. I understand that we need some new systems because we have a lot of new challenges. I am very skeptical of cryptocurrency as the answer to that question, because as you said, that system is not being built to help us facilitate a transition into a new economy. It’s being built right now on people’s fears about that new economy so that a handful of people can get very, very wealthy in the process.

Sarah [00:30:54] Yeah, I think it’s not just speculation, but another red flag that we’ve seen before- 2008 wasn’t that long ago. It’s just there’s like an enormous amount of leverage. Like it’s just debt piled upon debt, piled up on debt. There are these new companies that are extending private credit. I don’t know about you, Beth, but as a small business owner, we get calls constantly. Spam calls. Like, do you want this amount of credit? Do you want to this amount of credit? And they’re not all coming from banks. They’re coming from some of these private companies. And the leveraging of debt in the midst of this financial transition, again, on top of the fact that you have nations saddled with so much debt-- it’s not just the United States, it’s France, it’s Germany, it is England. Not to mention some of the countries in South America, where the working class can’t shoulder a lot more taxes, tax burden at this point because everything has gotten so expensive and you can’t get a new job.

[00:32:13] We’ve been talking so high level about the people making money off this. We haven’t even got to the cost of this. So I don’t really know where the debt crisis that is here-- I mean it’s here, right? It’s not something we’re speculating about, it’s here in the United States and other countries. So, you have a government that can’t get out from the burden of debt. You’re going to have, I think, increasingly amounts of privately held debt as the cost and the expense of just living an average life gets higher and higher and higher. You have these companies with an enormous amount of leverage, some of which is being bought and sold. And the answer to all this is the speculation of cryptocurrency and the growing AI industry? I don’t know. Again, I feel like I’ve seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending.

Beth [00:33:09] And we’re talking about this against the backdrop of a government shutdown. When you think about what is supposed to hold steady despite the changes of industry, despite the change of commerce, despite trends in technology, our Congress is not passing a budget. And if they do reopen the government, it is most likely to be on some kind of basis that feels very contingent, that is like a big package instead of looking program by program, committee by committee doing their work. It’s no wonder that this has all gotten away from us. But that’s what it feels like to me right now. This has just all gotten away from us and there’s no us in it now. And I am a capitalist and somebody who believes in free markets and I want people to be able to live extraordinary lives.

[00:34:04] I want there to be opportunity for people to become wealthy. But I just feel like we’re at this point where the goal is no longer to become wealthy, it’s to become a very particular type of uber wealthy. When we were traveling, Chad and I ended up in a little train car with this young couple on a honeymoon and they were talking to each other about investments and what sounded like meme stocks. They were like we should get on this right now. This is the ground floor. Do you think we should post it? Like it was just this speculative financial influence that is becoming like more and more people’s dream job because that’s what they believe the economy is going to be built on. And we were both really sad listening to that and realizing they’re probably not wrong to think that this is one of their better opportunities right now, but that’s unsustainable for most people for the long term.

Sarah [00:35:10] It’s not even just the shutdown and the Congress’s inability to function. There is a huge Trump component to this of just tearing apart all the stability that was built into the global financial system, particularly coming from the United States. Even though he’s going to do all this and we’re going to be back where we started. He’s going tout this Chinese tariff deal, this trade deal, as some big success. And it’s going to be basically what we started with because China also has leverage, also has the ability to assert itself. And there’s just not a lot of stability to be found anymore in the currencies, in the bond market. Again, I think that’s why they’re all like sharks circling the $45 trillion in retirement savings. Because where are you going to find money that’s not leveraged, speculative, an accounting trick?

[00:36:05] I was listening last night at my church they had a live broadcast of Jon Meacham interviewing Cory Booker at the National Cathedral. And he was talking about civic virtue and how it played out in corporate spaces. And he was like there was some survey and it was like 85% of CFOs said they basically cook the books to improve their quarterly earnings reports. And Cory Booker said a CEO told him, well, the 15% is lying because everybody’s done it. It just feels like a hall of mirrors. Even down to the Trump crypto industry, what is he actually selling except for corruption and access to him? And when are people going to demand a return on their money? When are they going to want cash in hand? If there’s some sort of moment where everybody goes, “No, I want my money,” what’s going to happen?

Beth [00:37:07] Yeah, what does a run on the bank look like when everybody’s in Bitcoin?

Sarah [00:37:09] Yeah. Who’s going to pay out? You can’t pay your mortgage with Bitcoin. And I don’t know if this is a painful transition. If this is ultimately going to be a bus. I do think things are fundamentally changing and shifting. We’re not going to go back to the 90s. But I just don’t know how painful this transition will ultimately be because there is just, again, so much money on paper, so much speculation, so much leverage and debt and corruption, and everybody else is out there just trying to figure out why turkeys are 40% more this Thanksgiving. Something’s got to give.

Beth [00:38:02] It makes me anxious in a way that a lot of things don’t. I mean, I try to stay pretty calm and level-headed and open to change, but all of this makes me anxious because I feel like the politics of the last 10 years at least have been driven by anger that people did, everything they thought they were supposed to do and it did not turn out the way people promised that it would turn out. And I just think we keep upping the ante on that sentiment. And if you have multiple generations who have saved for retirement and invested the way that everyone has advised us to invest, being in those index funds, being the S&P 500, being tied to the performance of this system called the stock market, as we were talking about at the beginning, and that doesn’t turn out the way that we all expected it to, it’s just going to be even more gasoline on this this burning fire.

[00:39:00] And when that’s happening for governments too. I mean, you’re right, the debt crisis is here. The amount of interest payment the United States government is having to make now is enormous. It is impossible to ignore. And people paying their taxes and filling out all the forms the right way and trying to live right someday, having to meet the business end of that, it is just a real powder keg. And I can’t help but worry about it personally too. I have to say this felt different to me in my 30s than it does in my 40s. And I’m sure it will feel different to me in my 50s and 60s, right? Because you do rely on having some understanding of how the economy works to try to plan for your future and your family’s future.

Sarah [00:39:47] I have enormous anxiety based on the responses that I get in the news brief whenever we talk about this. Our listeners have an enormous anxiety. People are 100% experiencing the increase in costs from health insurance, home insurance. We just talk about insurance alone, much less grocery store spending, the cost of the tariffs are starting to finally be felt across industries. So beyond just the increased expense, the fear that this could all blow up and we’ll all be left holding the bag is real for me. My husband and I have had multiple conversations about it. I think it’s really concerning. I don’t know how you look at the money sloshing around, again, like paper money, not real money, as far as I can tell. And the rising expense in the job market, everybody’s hugging their job and aren’t concerned. It’s concerning. And it feels so far beyond our control as just sort of even upper middle class, people with a lot of money in the stock market. And the good adjustable rate mortgage that I have from COVID. Like it is anxiety producing. And we just wanted to speak to that today and say you’re not alone. We are feeling it too. All right, but let’s lighten it all the way up Outside of Politics.

Beth [00:41:38] Yes, please.

Sarah [00:41:39] Yes, please. We have two exciting individual projects that we’re going to announce today. You go first.

Beth [00:41:50] Well, my project is in partnership with Common Ground Pilgrimages. Once again, we have really enjoyed working with Common Ground Pilgrimage. They do a great job over there. They run an excellent trip. And what I have found from both our events over the last year and our cooperation with Common Ground is that I just really love being in person with people. I love spending concentrated time discussing interesting things in interesting places with people in my skin, not just digitally. So I’m really excited that I’m going to be doing another Common Ground Pilgrimage next year. We’re going to go to Quebec and talk about the Three Pines series, my favorite cozy mysteries from Louise Penny. And I get to do this not on my own. Alise, our very own managing director here at Pantsuit Politics, who also loves Louise Penny books, will be with me as faculty for this trip. It’s going to be October 5th through the 9th. There are pretty limited spots for it. So we will put the link in. I would say, decide quickly if you think that this might be calling your name. But it’s a perfect week to think about it because the latest in the Three Pines series just came out this week. So Alise and I are frantically reading the Black Wolf and getting ready for this trip.

Sarah [00:43:12] It’s a good time of year too. That’s a lot of people’s fall break, so people will have time off school and abilities to get away. I’m very excited for you. I’ve always wanted to go to Quebec. I think that sounds amazing. All right. As you know, Beth, I love a reading project. Would some call it a compulsion? Some might. Some might call my obsession with reading projects a compulsion. And I have been partaking in two slow read projects through the Substack, Footnotes and Tangents, the Cromwell trilogy and War and Peace. And I love a slow read, but I’ve been doing a lot of classics, like old school, old books. I’m spending a lot time like the 1700s, 1500s. And I thought, you know what I’d like? I’d a more modern slow read. And I have always wanted to read more Stephen King. So I phoned a friend and I phone Laura Tremaine who runs a Stephen King summer. And she talked me into reading Stephen King a long time ago. I read Carrie, loved it, thought it held up really well. I find her argument that Stephen King is basically our modern Shakespeare. Very convincing. And so I thought, okay, I want to slow read Stephen King. Do you want to do this with me, Laura? And she was an enthusiastic yes. So we are launching a slow read. It’s actually at slowread.substack.com. A slow read of Stephen King’s The Stand next year in 2026. It’s a big book. It’s your husband’s favorite book.

Beth [00:44:40] My husband loves The Stand. He loves Stephen King. He’d be with you on the Shakespeare, I think.

Sarah [00:44:46] See? And I’ve wanted to read more. This is going to be more because it’s like a thousand pages. We’re going to read it. We’ll have two podcast episodes a month recapping and unpacking and discussing all the battle of good and evil, the post-apocalyptic, the variety that Stephen King packs in every book. I’m so excited about this project. Again, do I have a compulsion when it comes to reading projects? Perhaps I do. But listen, if you’re going to have a compulsive behavior, I feel like slow reads is not a bad one to have. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to slow read The Stand. The first episode will come out I think January 2nd. We’re just going to tackle the preface in two parts. Because did you know this about The Stand? He wrote it in 1978, but they cut like 400 pages. And then once he was big and famous and could do what he wanted, he released an uncut, unabridged version like 1994.

Beth [00:45:45] It’s his All Too Well. I got you.

Sarah [00:45:46] It is. It is his All Too Well, Beth. That’s right. It’s All Too Well. So, that’s right, don’t be intimidated. Buy scary books. Laura makes a pretty strong case that women should read horror. She’s convinced me. I’m excited. The link to slowread.substack.com will be in the show notes if you want to sign up to tackle Stephen King’s The Stand with me and Laura Tremaine in 2026.

Beth [00:46:17] That’s so fun. I like Laura a lot. I’m excited to see what you all do together. And I’m really excited about our trip. And I think it’s fun that we’re both diving into something that’s like a totally different form of fiction with a little murder element. Yours is much more horror than mine is, but what I love about these--

Sarah [00:46:37] Bad things happen.

Beth [00:46:38] Bad things happen. And what I love in these Louise Penny books, which I think Chad would make the case is present in The Stand too, is people coping with bad things in really interesting and rich ways, and sometimes in ways that are really positive, and sometimes in ways that are a really, really negative and destructive. And so, it just seems like an appropriate year, 2026, to be with all that.

Sarah [00:47:04] Beth, why ever would that be appealing to us in the year of our Lord 2026?

Beth [00:47:08] I don’t know.

Sarah [00:47:08] I can’t even imagine. For reasons. Like the reasons we just spent 45 minutes discussing in the top half of the show.

Beth [00:47:17] But truly, I do need these projects more than I ever have. I feel myself just reaching for, one, things that are real. So that’s why I like the books and the in-person and the let’s talk about big ideas.

Sarah [00:47:32] Slowing down.

Beth [00:47:33] Yeah, just very much calls my name. And two, I feel like fiction is a place where you can walk in and say, all right, I can face it all here in this container. And this container gives me a way to work some things out that I can pull outside the container when I’m ready, but I don’t have to until I’m ready. And I really value that.

Sarah [00:47:58] So you can check out the show note for links to both of these exciting projects. Head to Pantsuitpoliticsshow.com to subscribe to our Substack and join the referral contest. The top five by Thanksgiving are going to receive some treats. Who doesn’t love some treats? All right, we will be back in your ears on Tuesday. And until then, keep it nuanced, y’all.

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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