What are you going to do about it?

Colbert Censored, the SAVE Act Explained, and AI Goes to War

Every story I’ve read this week has made me think, “The people in charge hold the rest of us in complete contempt.” That’s a theme you’ll hear throughout this episode: what do we think about each other? How do we respect each other? What do we owe each other? And what are the guideposts for us in a constantly changing world?

I hope this episode:

• Answers your questions about the SAVE Act

• Helps you consider your own agency in relation to AI

• Inspires you and reminds you that you aren’t alone

-Beth

¹

Topics Discussed

• The SAVE America Act

• Artificial Intelligence Overwhelm

• Outside of Politics: Astrology and Tarot

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

Episode Resources

• Something Big Is Happening (LinkedIn)

• Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books (The Washington Post)

• How The Times Is Digging Into Millions of Pages of Epstein Files (The New York Times)

• Hard Fork (Tech Podcast by The New York Times)

• What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Penguin Random House)

• Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

• Your Zodiac Sign Is 2,000 Years Out of Date (The New York Times)

Episode Transcript

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

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

Sarah [00:00:10] You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today we’re going to talk about two things. First, we’re going to talk about the Trump administration’s disdain for all of us as evidenced through the Save American Act that just recently passed the House of Representatives. And then we’re going to talk AI. It was a big week. There was a viral piece that freaked everybody out. There was the stock sell-off. There was a fight between Anthropic and the Department of Defense about war and mass surveillance of American citizens. So we’re feeling that anxiety and overwhelm when it comes to artificial intelligence and the ways in which it continues to show up in our lives and in the headlines. So we going to talk about that. Outside of politics, we’re going to answer a question from a listener about our thoughts on astrology.

Beth [00:00:57] Before we have those discussions, we want to let you know that we will be in Texas very soon. We’re going to the Memorial Drive United Methodist Church in Houston. We’ll be there on Sunday evening, March 1st at 5 p.m. If you’re in the Houston area, we would love to see you there and we love all opportunities to be with people in person in spaces that are all about good conversation and connection and the kind of things that we do here. So March 1st, 5 pm, Memorial Drive United Methodists Church in Houston.

Sarah [00:01:25] Up next, let’s talk about the Save America Act.

Beth [00:01:39] Sarah, I’m sure that you have seen the controversy surrounding James Talarico and Stephen Colbert.

Sarah [00:01:46] Yep, came right up in my Instagram feed this morning.

Beth [00:01:48] Yeah, I think it’s one of those things that’s just going to break through. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, Stephen Colbert intended to interview Texas Senate candidate, James Talarico, on his late night show. CBS, continuing its theme of sort of preemptively acquiescing to an unreasonable administration, decided that because FCC chair Brendan Carr has said he’s considering changing the way that rules about fair time have been enforced historically to include talk shows that Stephen Colbert could not under any circumstances have James Talarico on the show. The FCC has also opened an investigation into the view about having James Talarico on. So we see, I think, a pattern emerging here of this White House being really concerned about the midterm elections. I think President Trump is very aware that these elections are going to be a statement about how America’s feeling about him and the numbers aren’t looking great so far. And because of that, through a bunch of different actions, this being kind of a small example, a significant example, but just one example, they’re trying to cast doubt on the upcoming elections to make it harder to vote in the upcoming election, and to sort of reactivate that part of the American consciousness that says, well, if President Trump doesn’t win, then it wasn’t fair.

Sarah [00:03:17] To me, this is just a fundamental miscalculation. In many ways, I think they’re miscalculating the election and how to cheat. I’m just going to call it what it is. They’re trying to cheat. They know they’re going to lose. They’re trying cheat. I just think it’s fair play? With the Colbert, I just don’t think Americans like censorship. It’s not their jam. We’re really loud-mouthed. We don’t like to be told what to listen to, what to say, how to respond, what we can and cannot see. We really I think lean towards a just-give-it-all-to-us-and-let-us-decide. And so the you can’t be trusted. We’re not going to let you decide. And where we do have power broadcast we’re going to exercise it and then tell you can just go to YouTube. To me, that is the biggest, clearest red flag. Well, we only can control broadcast. So if he wants to put it on YouTube, he can and he did. Stephen Colbert did put the full interview on YouTube with James Talarico. And so to me it is such an obvious tell that we’re just going to use political power where we have it to exert our will and the president’s will and what are you going to do about it? And I don’t know how many more ways they can look at the American public and say what are going to do it about it?

[00:04:35] Because I think what the American Public is saying very clearly is well we’re going to send a very clear message in the midterm. That’s what we’re going to do about it. We don’t like what happened in Minnesota. We don’t like what’s happening with ICE enforcement. We don’t like-- put a little pin in this and a little preview of our next conversation-- we don’t like what’s going on with AI, with the economy, with Bitcoin, with gold. I just could keep going. With education, with technology and our kids. Like I could just keep going. And the only thing they’re working on is just at every moment giving a big middle finger to the American public and saying, well, we don’t care. We’re going to do what we want to do anyway. I mean, in the midst of all these, right now there’s all this reporting that prices are going to rise. It’s the new year; corporations have swallowed as much as they’re going to swallow and they’re going to start raising prices. I saw Levi a spice company prices are going to go up. And what are they out here passing legislation about? Making it harder to vote? Guys, does this seem like the biggest problem to you? It doesn’t seem like the biggest problems to me.

Beth [00:05:44] I thought it was really smart of Colbert to invoke Bill Clinton playing his saxophone and talking about this because everybody remembers that. Everybody remembers that, yeah, we’ve seen people on late night shows who are running for office forever. And that’s a part of our culture and it’s part of how we get to know the candidates. And if you really want more people voting in elections, you need people in popular places, reaching people in a huge variety of formats.

Sarah [00:06:07] It’s also so hypocritical when their strategy was to put him on all these podcasts that didn’t hold both candidates. So you won because you went on Joe Rogan and Kamala Harris didn’t and you’re out here crowing about equal time. You don’t have to be a high level news consumer to spot the holes in this argument. You just don’t.

Beth [00:06:29] So let’s talk about the Save America Act, because I think that it does continue that pattern of just utter disdain for the American people, the way that it’s being pushed through and talked about. I also worry a little bit about how Democrats are responding to it. I think there’s a lot to discuss here. So SAVE is an acronym for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility. This is legislation that Republicans tried to pass last year. They just passed it again through the House. Only two 18 to two 13, one Democrat, Henry Cuellar of Texas, voted with Republicans.

Sarah [00:07:01] Recently pardoned.

Beth [00:07:03] Recently pardoned representative. That’s probably a good qualifier to put in front of this. This act requires that you present proof of citizenship to register to vote. So when you go register to vote you need more than a driver’s license. You need something like a real ID, you need something a birth certificate, social security identification card, passports. It would eliminate mail only registrations. You would have to go to a place when you register to vote, which sounds like not a big deal unless you live in a rural place where you got to drive a long way. And remember, voting registration happens state by state. And so some states have lots of places where you can go conduct this kind of business and others do not. It’s a lot about the resources that the state has and how much of a priority the state makes it to make it easier to register to vote. It would require a photo ID in every state every time you vote. Most states already require that, so that wouldn’t be new. And it would require states to take new steps. And this is the part that honestly concerns me the most, Sarah, to take new steps to proactively remove non-citizens from voter rolls. In a process that would depend on matching state roles with a Department of Homeland Security database that was not built for voting, it was built for immigration work. And where when states use that now, they get an awful lot of false positives that they have to go back and clean up. So there’s a lot going on in this act. People talk about it, Republicans talk about in the press like it’s just common sense. And when you ask should you be required to present proof of citizenship, it’s very popular, Americans say yes. I think once we start talking about the logistics of doing it, it’s going to become very unpopular.

Sarah [00:08:52] Yeah. There’s been a lot of reporting and particularly around female voters, women who changed their name once they got married, because this proof of citizenship, their legal name would not match their birth certificate. Mine wouldn’t. And so that’s gotten a lot of play. Naturalized citizens who may not have a birth certificate, that’s a concern. Young college students, elderly voters, spouses of military service members who vote from abroad, adopted voters. Like, there’s just a big group of people that this is not an easy answer to. And I think to me the way to talk about this is to say, is this what Americans are saying they are very concerned about? I’m not saying if Americans think, sure, we should have to produce citizenship. That’s not the question to me. The question is on the top 10 list of things Congress should be passing legislation for, is voter fraud on that list for you? Because it’s not for me. Voter fraud is not a top concern. Now, I believe that there is a percentage of the population, percentage of the MAGA political movement because of the concerted, organized effort to make election rigging a boogeyman to that subset of the population by the right-wing media. Sure, they might answer it’s in the top 10, but I don’t think that’s a majority of Americans.

Beth [00:10:19] I think this also falls in the bucket of like my state does it great, I’m worried about those other states. Because most of us want our elections governed by our state officials and our county officials. I think most of believe that in our state, because we go through the process of showing our ID, we go through the process of registering to vote, I think that most of us believe it works fine here. And this is another divisive thing to like turn against other states that you think you don’t like the way they vote in the electoral college, so they must be doing voter registration wrong. Again, it’s not a priority and it’s just bad for us. It’s bad for to look at other states and say, I don’t trust you. We do it right here but you can’t be doing it right over there.

Sarah [00:11:05] Well, I think it is just a broader strategy that I hope, pray, and honestly believe is going to bite them in the ass. I even think from the top down, the way they have emboldened and empowered election deniers, both at the federal level and in state parties and at state official levels. It’s a different thing when you’re a fringe maniac who can get clicks and likes and views with your conspiracy theories and when you’re actually having to run the process yourself and you see that there isn’t actually this great problem with the process that you’re trying to enforce. So I think that’s the first thing that’s going to bite them in the ass. I wonder how many like Marjorie Taylor Greenes will get on the other side of this and go, wait, I think I was scammed. I’m not putting all my hopes on that. Let me be clear about that. But I do think that they are overplaying their hand from the very top down. I think the gerrymandering is not going to play out the way they want it to. I think this act, should it pass the Senate--- which it better not pass the senate. It better not. Like I don’t think it’s filibuster proof. And John Thune has said it’s not. That he doesn’t see a lot of desire to blow up the filibuster in pursuit of the SAVE Act. I will be calling my senators. I don’t know about all of you to say I am vehemently opposed to this legislation. So I think that, but even if it passes, I think this could even bite them in the ass. There are so many fundamental flaws in their reasoning when it comes to election and their understanding of America. I think so much of what they’re doing is it’s like you can’t even say this is built on their success in 2024. That doesn’t really make any sense. It’s this weird amalgamation of both their continued frustration. And by ‘they’ I mean his continued frustration over losing in 2020 and it’s like that’s been empowered by the 2024 win to do whatever he-- but not in response to the 2024 win. You know what I’m saying? It’s like the 2024 when is the energy for the plane built in 2020, even though that’s not how elections work, dude. Like you take the data from the last election. You don’t take the momentum from the last election to fuel your beef with two elections ago and assume that the reality is still the same eight years later.

Beth [00:13:40] I think you do if you only care about yourself and you’re not trying to serve voters, which is the constant message from this administration. Here’s what I really have been thinking a lot about with the SAVE Act. I think it’s a bad strategy politically to go to the American public and say this thing that polls really high, this idea that you need to show proof of citizenship to vote is wrong. I think that’s not a good strategy. I think it’s a particularly bad strategy to talk about it as like new Jim Crow. I think it’s disrespectful to what voters have experienced in the past, and I think it’s just not going to meet a lot of people where they are today. What I would like to have a discussion about somewhere is the fact that if you want to tighten up the requirements to register to vote, then the federal government ought to spend some money and make acquiring all these documents easier and more accessible to everybody. This puts the whole burden on the citizen instead of on the government. Especially doing it in an election year. I mean, part of the reason I oppose this so vehemently right now, is because people are going to start voting in primaries next month. Next month. We’re going to let everybody know of this new requirement? They’re not going to be able to register this time. What are we going to say? Like, you just can’t vote then if you thought you were registered but not the right way?

Sarah [00:14:58] I mean, I do believe that is their plan. Yes.

Beth [00:14:59] Is that the plan? We’re going to retrain election officials. We’re go trust that every single county election official is ready to safeguard the information that they will now receive that maybe they hadn’t received before. We’re going to believe that the Department of Homeland Security is up for the task that it would be assigned under this legislation in less than a month when it seems like they’re pretty distracted by things like firing pilots over failing to get Kristi Noem’s blanket transferred to a new plane for her. So I just think it is outrageous to try to do this for the upcoming elections on a whole bunch of pragmatic levels. But I would love to talk about the federal government making it easier to get a passport. Maybe everybody gets a passport at birth. It’s just part of what we do here in the United States. I would love to talk about the cost and the time that it requires to get copy of your birth certificate, to change your name. When I got my real ID, I had to make two different trips to the office because my social security card had my maiden name on it. And even though I showed up with my birth certificate, my social security card, and my marriage certificate, and my passport, they still wanted me to get a new social security card with my married name on it before they would issue the real ID to me. That is a burden on the citizen that a lot of people do not have time for. They don’t have the skillset to follow. They don’t have the money to order. And even if you can track that whole process, you can afford it and you put the work in, you are at the complete mercy of a variety of different offices in terms of how long it will take to get anything back to you. So if we want to have a real conversation about upholding the integrity of our identity in this country, there are lots of improvements the government should make and it should make them before it puts that burden back on us to then show it correctly.

Sarah [00:16:53] Well, the Department of Homeland Security is shut down right now. So they’re definitely not going to be up for the challenge. And I anticipate that they will be shut down for a while. So they are not going to get a lead, a jumpstart on any of this work, I don’t think, should this pass. And I think all of that is the point. They don’t want a real conversation. They don’t want to make it easy to vote. They want to make it hard to vote and they absolutely want people, particularly in democratic states, to show up or I think in particular in democratic cities in high side red states to show up and not be able to vote. That’s the goal. It’s so obvious to me that they want to sow as much chaos as humanly possible so that they can pursue their policy goals. And I think I don’t trust this administration to manage the data surrounding our identities at all. I think that we are already getting glimpses of how they’ve mismanaged that information since DOGE. And the reporting on that, the fault of that will only get worse. And to think that they would have some sort of long-term strategy to make this better. Like, yeah, I want to hear the next administration maybe talk about this, but I don’t trust this administration as far as I can throw it to manage our data or identity, which is probably a good segue to our next conversation about artificial intelligence and the conflict this administration is having with regards to our data and surveillance.

[00:18:33] Before we get into the conflict between the DOD and Anthropic and the management of the data of the citizens of the United States, let’s begin with the piece I got texted to me several times over the last several days, Beth. Matt Schumer, Something Big Is Happening. It got 80 plus million views across all the platforms. It was an essay that he wrote. He owns his own AI company. And he wrote it after OpenAI and Anthropic both dropped major new models on the same day. And basically Matt Schumer’s claim as a coder himself is that coders are the canary in the coal mine. That every knowledge worker in law, finance, medicine, consulting, writing are going to begin experiencing what he’s experiencing, which is that I’m barely managing these platforms. I give them a task, I walk back, they’ve done it. They’re not helpers, they’re finishers. They’re doing the work for me. And he analogized it to February, 2020, when people were saying COVID was overblown and then it turned out to be this life-altering, era-shifting moment. And he feels like that is the moment we’re in when it comes to AI right now.

Beth [00:19:56] I read this essay. I read a lot of rebuttals and responses to this essay. I think it’s useful to ask ourselves whether we’re in moments like that. I think that it’s impossible to know whether we are or not at a given time, because we just don’t have the benefit of hindsight. It’s a struggle for me that the people who have the most to say about AI are the people who have most invested in AI. I’m really looking for more academic research and more kind of disinterested as much as you can be perspectives on AI. The trouble is it’s hard to get that because it’s moving so fast. You can do a study on AI and they’ve changed the model before the study is complete. So it’s just really difficult to get your arms around right now.

Sarah [00:20:43] Well, and there’s a lot of incoming. It wasn’t just this viral piece. We also had a massive sell-off in the stock market where investors were dumping software stocks. So this is like business to business, business solution software, Salesforce, QuickBooks. And the question is basically, well, if I can just ask Claude, which is Anthropic model, to build an app or do my accounting, why would I pay a lot of money. I mean, these softwares, we use several, they’re very expensive. And so if I can just ask Claude to do this work, what does that mean for the software companies? And there’s this inherent paradox because you have the data from the people working with these tools, particularly in coding. Okay, then you have data from the stock market, which is both selling off software companies and saying it’s going to be existential for this industry, but also really struggling with concerns about a bubble. So it’s like there’s this sort of back and forth that they’re terrified it’s going to destroy everything and also skeptical that maybe it’s a bubble that will pop, right? And I think both are probably true. And I think as I look at all these additional news stories and essays, and I think back to about a month ago, we never got around to talking about the Anthropic CEO’s warnings about all of this, it keeps coming and it’s coming very fast. I think one of the big things to take away, which is directly relevant to this story that’s coming out of the DOD-- which I refuse to call the Department of War. I’m not going to do it and you can’t make me.

Beth [00:22:28] I’m not trying. I promise.

Sarah [00:22:29] Thank you, I appreciate it.

Beth [00:22:30] I’ll never ask that of you.

Sarah [00:22:31] Thank you so much. Is that Anthropic and their model, Claude, to me is gaining more and more market share. I feel like OpenAI dominated and Claude has been sort of the quiet champion here, especially with businesses. It seems like the businesses themselves are using Claude more and apparently, so is the Department of Defense.

Beth [00:23:00] Claude has been the AI tool that I have used most from the beginning because I am a faithful listener to the Hard Fork podcast. And from really the beginning of all of the AI hype, they have talked about Claude as a better product and a product that’s being managed more carefully where there is more of an emphasis on safety. There is more thought going into what should this tool be allowed to do? That’s what I’m looking for, honestly, right now in AI leadership, just a sense of agency. I do not like pieces that talk about AI as though it’s a living organism. It’s still being programmed by people. There are still decisions to upgrade these models. I understand that they don’t fully understand what they’re creating. They can slow down and figure it out. You don’t have to keep following that trail, you know? I really hate the way that I feel like we’re much like CBS just surrendering in advance to something without needing to do that. So I have appreciated that Anthropic has tried to have a sense of agency and that’s what you see in this conflict with the Department of Defense. Sounds like the Department of Defense used Claude in its planning for the Venezuela operation where the United States went into Venezuela and captured Nicolas Maduro without congressional authorization or discussion or other respect for the rule of law.

[00:24:25] Anthropic had some questions about how it was used. And what has made it to the press-- and I try to be mindful that there’s so much that we can’t know about this. What’s made it to the press is a sense that the Department of Defense wants to be able to use Anthropic and other artificial intelligence models however it wants to, and it says in any manner consistent with applicable law, but that’s pretty hard to swallow when most of what the Department of Defense has done over the last year has not been consistent with the applicable law. And Anthropic wants some assurances. One, that Claude will not be used to control a weapon that doesn’t have a human being involved. And two, that the Claude will not used to spy on American citizens. And apparently those bars are too high for the current Department of Defense leadership.

Sarah [00:25:17] Not surprising at all. And here’s the thing. So they’re trying to label Anthropic-- well, they’re threatening to label Anthropic because this is the only way that this administration manages any sort of conflict is to threaten and insult. Just a fun little side quest. Go see Pam Bondi try to answer questions or not about Jeffrey Epstein in front of Congress. Just the insult and threat is the only way they know to manage any sort of crisis. That’s why it was such a disaster when Trump was in charge during COVID because he couldn’t insult and threaten a virus. So they’re trying to label Anthropic a supply chain risk, which is like never have you seen something like this against an American company? And it’s a tell, because if you were mad at Anthropic-- listen, and look, I also use Anthropic because I find it the most ethical companies. Now, did I love the story about it buying millions and millions of books, stripping the spines off them and feeding them into the machine. I did not love that story. But I like this one a lot more because Google and Open AI and all these other companies are like we’ll do whatever you want. But they haven’t switched. And why haven’t they switched? They could switch. It’s easy to dump a contractor through processing and just go to a new one. They could do that, but they won’t because clearly Claude is the better product. Like they’ve used it in such a way and it’s not even just the planning of that mission. It sounds like they used it in the execution of the mission.

[00:26:48] And it’s not spying, which I feel like everybody’s kind of giving up on. Sure, they spy on us all the time. It’s that the level at which they can analyze, because I think that is not illogically what Americans think. Well, sure they take it all in, but there’s so much of it. And yes, that was true when humans were analyzing it. But Claude can take in all that data and process it in a way-- I thought there was this great quote from the New York Times, which did a really fair analysis or transparent reflection on how it’s reporting on the Epstein files. And the fact that it’s so many, so many files and they’re not going to just share anything they find. And one of the things they said is they’re building an AI model to help, but they were like AI is industrious, but it is not always intelligent. And I thought that was such an insightful way to put it. And I think that when you think about that with regards to mass surveillance and really the analysis of mass surveillance data and weapons, then I’m really happy that Anthropic is saying, no, we have to draw the line somewhere, but I am disturbed that it is a corporation drawing these lines around military ethics and not the Department of Defense that represents the American people.

Beth [00:28:13] I think that it is completely consistent with this administration’s disdain for people to label Anthropic a supply chain risk because it is the same as labeling Renee Goode and Alex Preti domestic terrorists. Anybody who lodges any level of objection is now a national security problem and all bets are off; all rules cease to apply. That’s how this administration operates. We have already seen the disdain for speech this administration has through the lens of the use of technology to identify critics of the administration. Think about Marco Rubio’s State Department revoking visas of students based on social media posts. And that’s what we’ve created now. We can’t go back and change this, but people my age have for 20 years lived our lives online. Pictures of our kids, political statements, thoughts about business, thoughts about spirituality, our whole existence just out there for the taking. And we started doing that stuff without ever thinking about what it cost in terms of electricity, what the storage of that would mean, who would use that for what purposes. And now we are in a situation where our government can sort and filter and make that data mean whatever it wants to. And companies like Google and OpenAI, of course, are saying, yes, consistent with applicable law is a good enough line for us because they know good and well that applicable law is so far behind the tools that they’re creating that that means no regulation. That effectively means nothing. Congress has not kept up with the developments in this space. This is totally related to the Save Act conversation too. That interest in our own data, that integrity around our own identity would naturally prompt a conversation about confidentiality and privacy and what we’re entitled to put in public without having it be used against us by our own government. We have got to get our arms around these things. And it is it’s so frightening to me that the first context where this seems to really be coming to a head is around war. That tells you we’re even further behind than it felt like we were.

Sarah [00:30:44] Well, first of all, if you like to process difficult questions like this through the lens of fiction, I have an incredible book called What We Can Know by Ian McEwen that everyone should read because it gets exactly at what you’re talking about. Like what can we put together about people through all this data that exists about us? And the answer is not always the truth. So it’s a beautiful novel. It’s a historian like 100 years in the future going back to our time now and putting together a story based on emails and text messages and social media posts. And it’s incredible. And it will leave you realizing that it’s not that simple. And I hope as everyone’s seen with the rise of this authoritarian administration, like it doesn’t, well, I didn’t do anything wrong, so I won’t be in trouble. That’s not how this works. They decide if you’re an enemy. You don’t decide if you’re an enemy. And once they place that label on you, I mean, I’m so disturbed by this trial against all the protesters at the facility in Texas where the police officer was shot as being labeled as Antifa because they showed up for a protest where someone else decided to fire a weapon and they’re being labeled as a part of some sort of organized terroristic effort. I mean the way this administration uses this power to suppress speech, be it Stephen Colbert’s or protestors, and to manipulate data to control people and to threaten them should disturb all of us. And I don’t want AI in their hands. Now, so the bigger question of what we started this conversation with is something big is happening. I am getting more and more comfortable, and I’m curious if you feel this way as well. I’m feeling less anxiety around the unknown because even with the story at the Department of Defense, this is wholly and completely predictable. This application and this concern doesn’t surprise me. I am feeling like I’m starting to understand the changes that are coming our way.

[00:32:57] I don’t feel existential anxiety, but I am clear-eyed about the level of change that this will cause and the pace at which it will happen. You know, especially when we talk about just industries themselves, I mean, the sell off of software makes sense to me. I don’t think that’s a bad assessment of what AI could do. I think that the clear and most present danger to jobs is entry level knowledge hires. Like if you are exiting college and trying to get an entry-level job in IT or finance or customer service, then you need to be concerned. Like this is going to be really difficult. I think also media; I think graphic design. I mean, over the other big sort of AI thing that happened was this 15 second clip of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on a rooftop about the Jeffrey Epstein files and it’s convincing. It looks good and Hollywood is in a panic because if a two sentence prompt from the-- this is Chinese AI too, this was the AI that comes out of the company that owns ByteDance. But if that can do that, then what can it not do? And so I think some of these anxieties are well-placed and, but I think that I keep remembering and trying to put in front of me and remind myself that like this level of disruption has happened before when you stand in front of Notre Dame and remember they built it without electricity, like things changed dramatically. Electricity upended things, the internet upended, things industries and corporations and entire job sectors ceased to exist. And did we really ever think we were going to come to the end of the road on that? That we wouldn’t continue to innovate and change and business models would be upended. And so I think I’m starting to think, okay, I’m not encountering information around AI that catches me completely off guard. I’m staring to see the patterns I guess is what I’m saying.

Beth [00:35:15] I feel a little bit of that. I noticed that in a lot of the reporting the word unprepared comes up frequently, and that is starting to grate on me because of that relationship to agency. So as much as industries change and business changes, we also have made a lot of decisions to protect industries, to protect jobs. I think about things like legislation around auto dealerships. It took a long time for used cars to be easy to buy outside of a dealership. And that’s because of a whole lot of decisions made to use laws to protect dealerships and to protect the dealerships in a really specific form. If you look at regulations in the state where we live, there are regulations about like having a drawer with three file cabinets involved. I haven’t looked at this in a long time, but there are some really specific things where you can see somebody lobbied to protect what this is and they did it successfully and legislators decided this was a priority for the people of the state and they made it a law and they held it back a little bit. My concern about agency is twofold. One, that we aren’t exercising enough on the front end. And two, that we might have a backlash that overcorrects on the other side. I think about things like Salesforce or software as a solution in any format. Yes, Claude can build that now. And also there’s a lot of maintenance with that kind of data. There are privacy requirements. For a small team like ours, there are probably a lot of things that we could do ourselves with this technology. But we also have to think about what kind of sensitive information do we want to hold ourselves? What kind of sensitivity information would we want to feed into an AI product, not fully understanding what it will do with it? How is it maintained? If we made a Pantsuit Politics app, how do we make sure that app stays updated for every kind of device that it’s being used on? I mean, there are just a lot of places where it’s easy to be razzle dazzled by what AI can create on the front end, but we’re not thinking about the long-term implications of that and all of the value added by companies that do this well today. And what kinds of legislation will be coming down the pike about protecting this stuff. I’m afraid we’re going to be in a really reactive posture instead of a proactive one, and I hate that. But I do think that there’s a lot of short-term, look at the magic of this thinking, where the bigger story is how over the long-term we decide to use and restrict this tool, and in what context it bears out as a long-term sustainable project for us.

Sarah [00:38:10] Some of these products deserve to die. Some of them suck.

Beth [00:38:15] Sure.

Sarah [00:38:15] You know what I mean? And so there’s a part of me that’s like if this makes stuff more efficient, if this makes it more effective, if somebody can create an AI tool that keeps my phone from ringing off the hook with spam calls 15 to 20 times a day, then I’m all for it. So I think that there is real efficiencies and real improvements. Do I hate the idea of an agent dealing with all my email for me, so I don’t have to check email again? I do not hate that idea. I don’t hate the information being out there and AI reading it instead of all of us especially small businesses spending millions of dollars on fancy websites you hope somebody will go to as opposed to a web where like the information is just code that the robots read it to us and we get the answers we need. So I can kind of glimpse a future with this that I’m not enthralled by it and understand that it will have its own problems, but I’m not opposed to it either. Like we didn’t reach max efficiency with the internet. We won’t reach maximum efficiency with AI either. So there’s some of this that I’m like, okay, yeah, let’s iterate, let’s find a better version of this. And I think the adaptability is going to be key because it’s going to happen faster than any of these other technological innovations happened. It’s already is, and that is the warning in his piece. Some people think his timeline is too fast, who knows, but there’s always going to people. There was this fascinating report where they asked the AI, which I couldn’t click this fast enough because I’ve actually thought about doing this. They basically asked the AI what’s the impact of AI. And it was what you’d expect? Entry level hires, IT finance, knowledge workers, entire business models are going to be upended, which I think is all right. And they talked about like empathy, care professions, nurses, teachers, things that require manual dexterity are pretty safe, strategic leadership, unique artists, which I put us in the category of that I think that those are protected to a certain extent.

[00:40:29] So I think there are things like individually I think a lot about this. My anxiety is mostly, I think, caught up in my boys and what will this look like? What does this mean for college and what they should pursue? What does it mean for their career? So I pay a lot of attention to like that level of the AI analysis. But as far as the regulation, this is not a regulatory rich environment we’re in right now. That’s the other source of anxiety is we don’t have any leadership around this. Like there’s no articulation of what this should look like. I thought one of the hard forks, best analysis was, yeah, people hate it and we only have like 2% unemployment. What do you think is going to happen if unemployment continues to rise? How are people going to react? And I don’t want to protect industries with some of those regulations. I don’t think that’s necessarily the best approach. I think it does create these like weird environments where people are punished for stupid stuff. Got to sound like a Republican. But I think that because there’s such a lack of leadership, there will be some chaos. I hope that companies like Anthropic can put their hand on the scale, but I hate that we’re dependent on them. I think people are trying. I read about infectious disease experts putting together this call that’s like we cannot let this data set onto the open web. Once it’s out there with all these particulars and genetic codes of all these infectious disease, the AI’s capacity and the wrong actor’s hands of building a biological weapon are extraordinarily high. So I think we are trying, but I think the idea that we’ll avoid all chaotic consequences particularly because no one’s hands on the damn wheel in the White House is extraordinarily high, be it with regards to weapons or infrastructure or specific industries. And I think that, again, if you sort the wisdom of the American people, that’s why the popularity of this technology is low. I think people sense that.

Beth [00:42:34] Yeah, and I just want to say that I do hate the idea of an agent that reads all my email for me because if an agent can do that, then what’s the point of the message? I hope that this technology helps us ask a lot of what’s point of these questions and maybe some of the busy work that AI is capable of doing can just be eliminated altogether. I hope it points us in the direction of greater relationship of cultivating our capacity for intuition. The first wave of people who aren’t needed for entry-level jobs will be an economic problem, but the second, third, fourth, fifth waves of that make me question how we get people with experience to do jobs, how we unique artists. If we think that what we do has enough value to survive this, then I think about how does the next person get to do this? Because a lot of what I bring to this show comes from the years that I was grinding it out as a law firm associate, doing stuff that AI absolutely can do now, and can maybe do better than I could in some of those circumstances. Certainly could do cheaper than I could, but there was a lot that I learned from those experiences that you integrate in ways that you can’t draw direct lines around and like simulate for someone. So I hope that we come to value our inefficiency and experiences more because of this, not less. We’re just going to need a lot of moral guidance. I was having a conversation with one of my friends about church and what we hope to get from church. And we were talking about how I just need more like grace on the ground guidance right now. I need to talk about what kind of art do I want to take in and is it moral to fire a human being and use a technology instead? And under what circumstances is that moral? And what do we owe each other during a transition like this? We’ve had enough transitions like this now that I hope our wisdom traditions can help steer us through since it seems like our government is definitely not going to.

Sarah [00:44:55] We thought it would be an excellent opportunity on Outside of Politics to discuss Kara’s question from our Ask Us Anything episode that we didn’t have time to get to. How do each of you feel about astrology or other woo-woo things? I know you had your tarot cards read by a Pantsy Politics listener and would love to know what takeaways you had from that experience.

Beth [00:45:15] I love woo-woo things. I would say I’m not a true believer in much of anything, but I am very open-hearted about pretty much everything. So I loved having my tarot cards read. I experienced that very much like being given journal prompts. I think there’s something visually stunning in those cards and something that’s clearly resonant on a deep emotional level for them to have lasted so long and to be used in such a variety of contexts. And I just thought it was a powerful way to sort of open up my consciousness and figure out what’s there around the topics that we chose to discuss. And I kind of feel that way about a lot of things, astrology, like herbs and saging a space or whatever, I’m just open-minded about it. I don’t think anything is necessarily magic, but I do think that different parts of our brains connect differently and can hook on to some of these instruments and practices. And I love that.

Sarah [00:46:22] Yeah, I think a lot about this woo-woo area as personality tools. I do not believe astrology is real. I’m so sorry. I think the best indication about astrology specific is that New York Times piece they did like a year ago. They were like, hey, guys, the stars have shifted. And so when you were born might not be the sign you think you are. And you tell people that and they have total meltdowns. I look like a Leo, I act like a Leo, except according to the new star chart, I’m not in fact a Leo. I’m a Cancer. And I told my best friend who’s a Leo and she will not take it in. She’s like, no, really else let it go. So I think like that’s like the best indication of, oh, come on, we don’t actually think the actual physical stars are changing things. But I do think like it’s just another personality tool to kind of try to understand yourself. I feel that way about personality tests and the Enneagram and tarot card readings. I just think it’s all sort of I think journal prompt is a great way to put it. It’s input. It’s a way to think about yourself. It’s a way to think about your strengths and weaknesses and traps you might fall in. And so I think that’s a really healthy way to thinking about them. I don’t like it when people use them like predictively. Like, well, this is how I am because I’m a Gemini. I don’t think that helpful or productive. I think they can become boxes. I think that’s always the worry, right? Is you’re not using the tarot cards as a way to think about things. You’re using the Tarot cards as a way to decide or as a way to see yourself and others definitively. So I think there’s the spectrum here where it can be fun and help you think about yourself and where it be really destructive and I mean arguably a little silly as far as like clinging tightly to the idea that like whatever’s rising or falling means you should break up with someone or go on a vacation or not.

Beth [00:48:26] And I try to stay humble about this because I recognize that like almost every religion sounds a little silly depending on how you state it and how tightly you cling to it and how literally you interpret it. And so I don’t want to be dismissive of things that fall outside of the major religious traditions when you could just as easily have that conversation about things that are really important in my life that I practice all the time. I try and practice them with this kind of lightness too, though, that I just don’t have all the answers, nobody does, but there’s a lot for me to take from it and a lot to learn from here. And there’s reason that it has endured and captured the imaginations of so many people over time. So I think I just feel like all of it’s worth paying attention to, but holding kind of loosely.

Sarah [00:49:13] Yeah. The stars are a huge piece of the ways in which we’ve tried to understand ourselves since we’ve existed. I’m reading Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid and she just does such a beautiful job of like articulating, first of all, that space really is about time and history. And so human beings have been trying to make sense of that and work it out in all the ways for so long, including astrology. And I think there is something really important there. I just hope it doesn’t end there. Like I think the way she sort of pushes past astrology into astronomy is very productive and powerful. Because I think you can hear people they don’t hold it lightly. They shut down if they hear any countervailing evidence about astronomy or energetic things like I think I’ve talked about this before, my husband’s pet peeve is the full moon causes more behavioral incidences or causes more births. And that’s just a thing that can count very easily and you know that it’s not in fact true. I always worry about the pieces of this that shut off the critical thinking we need so badly right now where people are like, but it feels true to me and that’s all that matters. I had a conversation with my dad where I’m like illegal immigrants commit less crime. And he’s like, come on, you can’t believe that. I’m like they can count. They know how many crimes they charge and they know the immigration status of the people being charged. This is just counting. And when we get so locked in on like the woo-woo view of the world, the idea that our perceptions, our intuitions, our feelings are the primary lens in which we should view things, it can be really dangerous. Like it’s really problematic. And I worry sometimes that these are like gateway drugs to that.

Beth [00:51:19] And similarly, I’m not interested in data being a God. Maggie just sent me last week this report from Claude looking at listenership of More to Say the podcast that I make for our premium members and just trying to identify trends and let me learn what I can learn from what people listen to and engage with there. And she did such a great job presenting this information to me because she said, here’s what Claude said and here’s what I agree with and disagree with in this perception. And I thought, this is how you should use it. It’s a great prompt. It’s great prompt and data can take you so far, but not all the way. And intuition can take so far but not all the way. And your just emotional guess about things can take it so far but not at all the way. And I think that just continuing to kind of develop that critical thinking lens is what I’m looking for especially with my kids but in myself too as we kind of are in this weird space of the data becoming everything in our economy and the countervalence of that, which is like me wanting to lean into that intuition and mysticism and the other layers of our existence more.

Sarah [00:52:32] Yeah, it’s so interesting though. I don’t think the appeal of AI is more data. I think the appealing of AI is the ability to analyze what we all feel like is a deluge of data. And I think that’s what astrology and so many of these things have offered. You feel overwhelmed by what’s above your head. Let me offer you a framework with which to analyze it. You feel overwhelming by life. Let me offer you this framework through philosophy or theology or religion through which to make sense of it all. And I think that’s what we’re all trying to do, is just make sense it all. And when they align with what you’re feeling, that’s the power. Like Laura Tremaine shared that we’re coming out of the year of the snake, which is like a shedding and we’re moving into the year of the horse, which is action and change. How appealing is that in the face of all this chaotic energy and all this terrible oppression and violence? Like the idea that like, okay, we have to shake this off and find a path forward. And so when they align with what you’re feeling, it is so powerful. And I think that’s the capacity of the human spirit is to find that alignment, to find a way to make sense, to use these frameworks to make sense of what can feel overwhelming. And look, I hope that Pantsuit Politics is one of those frameworks for people. I hope we can help take all of this overwhelming because I was very overwhelmed reading a lot of the ASF for a while. I got in a space where I was like I can’t take in any more of this. And I think the challenge of this moment will be to face that tension, the tension of so much change so quickly of that feeling of overwhelm. And be like the horse and take action and move forward. We hope this conversation helped you do that. And if it did, we hope you will share it with those in your life. Word of mouth is still the number one source of Pantsuit Politics listeners. So share the show if it helped you. We’ll be back in your ears on Friday. 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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